You Disappear: A Novel (26 page)

I run down the wooded path toward the lakeshore. No sign of him on the small pier that extends from the woods out into the water.

Thorkild calls again. I tell him they should wait another hour before they come, but he says they’re already in the car and on their way.

I call the police. They haven’t heard anything.

Vibeke calls again from the car, and while I have my weeping mother-in-law on the phone, I hear the beep of another incoming call. I hang up and suddenly Laust is on the line. “Will you come and get your husband!”

“He’s at
your
place?”

“He just shoved his way in, and I can’t get him to leave.”

Relief. And then not, after all. What was it Ulla said? And everyone smiled. I’m relieved. I
am
relieved.

I picture Frederik standing erect and sobbing in Laust and Anja’s classy Copenhagen home, his thin body amid their vintage furniture of Swedish birch, with its lovely patinated stain. The moose in the forest.

“May I speak to him?” I ask.

He comes on the line, but he isn’t crying. “There’s nothing to say,” he says in a pinched voice before falling silent. He sounds like a lonesome hero in an old western.

“But you’re not going to leave?”

“No.”

“You have to. It’s Laust’s apartment.”

“It’s him who needs to talk to me. There are two of us. He’s being so unconstructive.”

“How did you get all the way over there?”

The receiver’s torn from his hand and Laust is back. “I’m calling the police if he isn’t out of here in two minutes.”

I try to convince Laust to wait and I run back to the house and car. Once I’m on the freeway I call Niklas and then Thorkild and Vibeke, who are headed toward me on the same road.

Frederik and I have been to lots of parties and dinners in Laust and Anja’s apartment, which lies a few hundred yards from Saxtorph. I know where everything is, in their rooms and kitchen cabinets. I know which photos of their kids hang by the door in the living room and which ones hang in their bedroom. I know the reflection of the window onto the long white dinner table, and the bookcases with Anja’s blue-grey folders
of teaching materials for her gymnasium English classes. And I know, from one of the few Saxtorph teachers who side with us, that Laust and Anja have to move. The board’s personally responsible for the school’s finances—something that nobody gave much thought to because the finances were always rock-solid, but now four of the board members have to sell their homes.

All my life, whenever I’ve encountered men who are grieving, I’ve observed a certain restlessness in my body. Unhappy women weep and talk and spew their sorrow over everything. Grieving men, on the other hand, shuffle dumbly about and seal up all the chinks in their houses until they’re ready to gas themselves or ignite some catastrophe for whoever happens to be nearby. They commit suicide and murder and monstrosity, while we only make sobbing attempts that aren’t really meant to succeed. The grief of men is a vast, silent world that’s never revealed itself to me.

And yet I may be starting to understand a little anyway. These last few days in bed, as I’ve finally begun to glimpse my new future, my eyes have been completely dry.

• • •

Laust opens the great carved oak door of his and Anja’s apartment. He looks just as I expected, his pale round head bleak and brooding. And Frederik, standing in the hall behind him, looks the same way. Not a peep. There’s nothing to suggest that they’ve been talking to each other at all.

I don’t know what to say to Laust, who until a few months ago was one of my best friends. Now I don’t even want to talk to Frederik in front of him. Lacking a better alternative, I decide to be like the men: I hold my tongue and look annoyed. The three of us proceed silently into the large corner living room, with its stucco ceiling and the view over Saint Thomas Square. Then we just stand there.

FOR SALE
signs block part of the windows. Several of the old paintings are gone; perhaps Laust and Anja had to sell them. The ceramic bowl I picked out for Anja’s fortieth, as a gift from us and some friends we had in common, is also gone from the dinner table, though probably not to be sold.

Why is Laust home in the middle of the day? Is he on sick leave?

At last Frederik speaks up. “You change your accounting methods the way I’ve told you; you sell the gym, and the other premises that we rent out after school hours, to an independent firm, and the school can lease them back during the school day.”

He speaks quickly and coolly, summarizing something he’s evidently already been arguing for.

“You contact the sixteen parents of former students whose names I wrote down on that list. You speak with Aksel at the bank about dealing directly with him and Jørgen—
not
with Anette on any account. And I’ll e-mail you the letter for the Friends of Saxtorph.”

He can sound so persuasive. If anyone can rescue the school, it’s him of course.

I find myself blurting out, “Is this a plan, Frederik?” I turn toward Laust. “Is that what it is? A plan?”

“Naturally, we’ve tried everything like that,” he mumbles, not looking me in the eye. “We aren’t idiots.”

Frederik’s agitated, but it might not be just his illness, since he’s also dedicated his life to the school. “That’s not true!” he shouts. “I talked to Kim yesterday, and he hasn’t heard from you!”

Laust finally raises his voice too, and it’s as if I needed him to. “We’ve tried everything.
Everything!
To save us from all the shit you dumped on us! The party’s over, like I’ve told you a hundred times.”

“You haven’t talked to Kim! Have you talked to anyone else on the list I gave you? They’re precisely the people you should be talking to.”

Something now about how to position myself—body language and facial expression—I should show that I’m backing up my husband. Or should I? Should it be the opposite—should I show Laust that I know Frederik’s a nut the two of us have to appease?

Laust enters a short number on his phone, no doubt the police. “Your coming here didn’t do much good, eh Mia?”

Frederik continues, undeterred. “It has to be
them
. All sixteen.”

I don’t know if I should step toward Laust, or back, or … “Laust, will you let me talk to him alone? Two minutes?”

He doesn’t answer, just turns his back on me and puts his phone in his pocket. He’s giving me a chance.

After Laust has gone out in the hall to the kitchen, I slowly get Frederik
to sit down on the sofa, seated at my side. He’s still worked up; I hold his hand. “Frederik, what’s this plan?”

“I’ve figured out how we can rescue the school.”

Laust sticks his head back in the room. “Mia, I’m holding you responsible if he smashes anything.”

Then he’s gone again.

Assuming my gentlest voice, I ask, “Why didn’t you just ask to call Laust and suggest your plan on the phone? Wouldn’t that have been a lot easier?”

“I did call him. Often. But he hung up on me every time.”

Now I know he’s lying again. Shit. Only Niklas and I know the codes for the phones. Why do I keep having these moments where I believe him? They just wear me out.

Softly, I say, “Fine. Come along, Frederik, we’re leaving now.”

“I’m not going before Laust says he’ll save the school.”

“Yes you are. Come, we’re leaving.”

“No.”

I’m used to him fighting me tooth and nail until finally he does what I say anyway. I get up. “Come Frederik, we’re going now.”

“I won’t. I’m not leaving.”

“But you never called Laust, damn it. You can’t, after all.”

“I got permission to borrow Niklas’s phone, as long as I let him hear what I said.”

Right away I know he’s telling the truth. And the repercussions of what Niklas has done are enormous. “But we’re involved in a court case, God damn it! Neither of us is supposed to talk to Laust unless we’ve agreed with Bernard first about what we’re going to say.”

Frederik looks up at me. “Bernard? But he’s not our lawyer anymore.”

“No no, I know that. Not Bernard. The new … Neither of us is supposed to talk to Laust unless we’ve agreed with the new lawyer …”

It comes to me in a flash: the strong urge to be done with it all. As if it were unfolding before me, I see how I take quick long strides out to Laust and Anja’s kitchen without letting anything distract me. How I find Laust’s carving knife on the left side of the fourth drawer from the top. How I—before I myself or anyone else has a chance to think or feel a thing—draw it across my throat. Freedom. Joy. It’s over.

The silence, the sense of purpose, the knife.

One of Frederik’s psychiatrists told me that when she’s making a diagnosis, it’s important for her to listen to her own feelings. If a patient makes her nervous, it might be because the patient is afraid and can ease his fear by spreading it. Or if a patient makes her confused, perhaps it’s because he finds life chaotic.

Frederik sits at my side. He’s tensed like a boxer waiting for the fight bell to ring for the next round, but I have to take these suicidal impulses seriously. Only by listening to them will I be able to understand him.

And it comes to me that when we get out of here, we need to drive to the psychiatric emergency room at Hillerød Hospital. I’ll have to put up with sitting by myself again in some sad waiting room while he’s being examined—this time for life-threatening depression. But if he’s going to give me such vivid fantasies, I don’t dare shoulder the responsibility for him alone.

• • •

It’s Sunday. For four days, Frederik’s been in the hospital, under observation for depression. I’ve lain in bed since Friday afternoon. The curtains are drawn. The blackbird outside the window lacerates my ears, and nothing’ll stop it.

In another hour and a half, the realtor’s coming by with three families to see the house. Everything’s a mess, and I need to wash my hair before going out. I can’t put it off any longer.

While I’m standing under the showerhead, I hear my cell phone ring. Could it be Bernard, wanting to take on our case and see me again? I run to the bedroom and find the phone on the dresser, but the display doesn’t show any calls. For a moment—perhaps longer—I sit naked on the edge of the bed, though it makes the mattress wet.

Back in the shower. It smells bad in here, I think. I need to air it out before the buyers come—better that it’s too cold than that it stinks. Now the cell’s ringing again. Or is it? There’s an echo of distant melody, my ringtone, but it might just be the shower water splashing on the floor and the crooked green tiles. The tones could be arising spontaneously.

I run back to the bedroom anyhow. Once more there haven’t been any calls, and once more I sit down on the bed.

This time I leave the cell on the table in the bathroom while I finish showering, and when I’ve dried my hair, I bring up his number. It’s something I’ve been doing often, each time with some convoluted new pretext in my head, and each time I stop myself before the decisive depression of the call button. The pretexts are all too transparent anyway.

Now I’ve found the simplest, most watertight excuse yet. I press the button, and when he answers I assume my most innocent voice.

“Hi Bernard, it’s Mia. Sorry I didn’t take your call, but I was in the shower.”

“What?”

“Yes. You called, but I was in the shower.”

“I didn’t call.”

“Well that’s weird. I must have been looking at a list of old calls … Well, uh, you’ll have to excuse me.”

It’s quiet for a bit.

His voice. “How are you doing?”

The voice is deep, it booms from my cell’s tiny speaker in a way that it doesn’t boom in person. I know both timbres so well. We actually don’t need to talk anymore. That was all, I just needed to hear his voice. Now I can relax, now everything’s better.

He asks again. “How are you, Mia?”

“Not that great.”

“What happened?”

“Frederik’s in the hospital. They think he might be suffering from depression.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it? Isn’t that a sign of progress?”

“Yes, it’s good. I don’t know …”

Then it’s quiet again.

“I don’t know,” I say once more. “What about you?”

“To be completely honest, things here aren’t going so well either.”

“What’s
wrong
?” I find myself shouting, as if he’s suffered some disaster.

“Well, it isn’t—”

“Yes?”

“No, it isn’t so … It’s just Lærke, she’s been struggling with some stupid sores she gets because she sits so much.”

I see vividly before me the spongy sores she might be getting from poor circulation in her buttocks.

And then without warning: he says it in the space of a second, and the tone of his voice is something I’ll replay again and again in my head. “I end up saying too much to you, Mia. It just slips out. I’m not cross, but you shouldn’t call me again. I need to hang up. I’m sorry.”

Hastened. From one moment to the next. And then a click. Then three short beeps, and quiet. I memorize the sound of his voice—and the click—and the three beeps. They all fuse into a single sound: the last I’ll ever hear from him.

A wan diffuse light lies upon the maze of small and rather deserted streets of low yellow row houses. Andrea lives here, and the support group is meeting at her place tonight. Three times I think I’ve found a parking spot, and each time it turns out to be reserved for disabled drivers. Perhaps the buildings here have been especially designed for wheelchair users? Petals from a cherry tree speckle the lime-green surface of the car in front of me, which has a handicapped sticker in the window.

As I maneuver my car into a tight space a little farther away, I catch sight of Kirsten; she stops and stands waiting for me. Two weeks ago, she told me on the phone that her husband had been admitted to the hospital again. The doctors say she might get him home in a couple of months, but it could also be that he’ll never return.

Together we walk over toward Andrea’s house, and on the way we meet Gerda and Anton. They’ve already heard from others in the group that Frederik was only in Hillerød for a few days, and that he’s been home again for a week now. Gerda tells us she’s finally gotten a new caseworker from the local authorities, but Merethe already told me.