Cabin Fever

by Alex Dahl

  Your house wasn’t fancy, though, and that’s where I lucked out. I spent some time on Google and discovered that the row of semi-detached houses where you grew up were scheduled to be demolished by the council to allow the new E18 motorway extension to bypass Sandvika. Most of the residents had accepted this and taken the generous payoff, but a few refused to budge, delaying the expansion of the new road. Your mother was pictured on the cover of Bærum Budstikke with two neighbors, holding a poster reading ‘E18 over my dead body’. Passion and fury – great. I had my angle. All I had to do was call her and tell her the truth – that I was a journalist freelancing for several national newspapers interested in speaking with her. She may have mentioned it to you – I even succeeded in getting them some coverage.

  We got on well, your mother and I. So well that she quite happily chattered on about her family and her kids when I prompted her about what a fantastic place it must have been to raise a family. She told me of your father’s impressive career as a leading geologist and that it had been hard, sometimes, to be married to a man who is more interested in rocks than in sex and conversation. This made me laugh, genuinely, and it made me wish I could laugh with my own mother like that. Yours is very different from mine, though you’ve probably already concluded that a long time ago based on what I’ve told you in our sessions. Yours is funny, a little scatter-brained, full of energy and with tons of plans for the future. She’s trusting, too trusting, but I guess that is not so strange when you’ve been married to a man more interested in rocks than sex or conversation for over forty years. Everyone needs someone to talk to, and someone to feel close to.

  She told me all about your impressive and exhausted sister, both surgeon and supermom, fighting tirelessly on that battlefield of career and children. Then she told me about you.

  She is, in fact, practically a hero, said your mother. She lowered her voice when she spoke of the terrible trauma you’d endured in your late teens, and of how you’d turned your life around and become a highly respected psychotherapist who contributes to international research and has made a name for herself, specifically in the field of trauma. I gently encouraged her; I know how to make people talk. She made more coffee, reassured herself that I wouldn’t speak of this to anyone, and of course I reassured her – the empty promises of a stranger. She dropped her voice as though you were there somewhere in the house and might walk in to learn of your mother telling a stranger the things you don’t even talk to your friends about. Or your husband.

  Her hair dropped out, she said. Her skin broke out in scales. She lost her period and it never returned to normal. Personally, I believe that it was the trauma that robbed her of the chance to have children. I asked, carefully, about the trauma, and she told me that you and your two friends were held at gunpoint in Venezuela. She went there with her two best friends, Elisabeth Eliassen and Trine Rickard. This rang an instant bell and I felt exhilarated; it was the feeling of discovering a crucial piece of a puzzle. Rickard – it was one of the names on the doorbells of the building in Rosenborggata 11, where you go on Fridays after seeing me. And Elisabeth – the name in your diary. They thought they had to travel across the world to that dangerous country to find themselves. Only Elisabeth and Kristina came back, but they didn’t come back as themselves.

  She spoke for a long time; it was clear that she needed to get something off her chest.

  Everything she told me became part of the backdrop. I didn’t yet know what to do with it, or where I was going with any of it – I just wanted to be close to you. At that point, I was driven by needing to prove my illusion of you as perfect, because if it was possible for you, then it might be possible for me. I didn’t know, then, that it would be up to me to piece you back together.

  It was your mother who first told me about Elisabeth. She spoke of a sensitive and beautiful little girl with natural charisma and a love of the arts who’d lived just next door – she pointed to the left, and my eyes traveled through the windows into the gardens outside, yours and Elisabeth’s separated only by a low hedge, and it was almost like I could see two little girls out there, running through sprinklers, chasing a ball, playing hopscotch.

  She turned out badly, said your mother, her face grief-stricken.

  *

  After, I went home and hit Google, as one naturally would. It wasn’t hard to find the old articles about the three girls from Bærum who were held hostage in Venezuela back in 2003.

  ‘The Trine Rickards Tragedy,’ read Aftenposten’s headline. ‘The nineteen-year-old aspiring vet was traveling around South America with close schoolfriends, Elisabeth Eliassen and Kristina Hellerud, when she was shot at point-blank at a private address on the outskirts of Carúpano on August 24th. It was, quite simply, an execution, says Jorge Aruelo, police chief in the Eastern Venezuelan region of Sucre. A local man with an already extensive criminal record, including several drug-charges as well as assault, Xavier Miguel Rodriguez, was apprehended at the scene and will face trial for first-degree murder.’

  ‘The murder of innocence,’ read VG, dated three days after the attack. ‘One life lost, another two shattered. The surviving girls of the Carúpano shooting, Elisabeth Eliassen and Kristina Hellerud, of Sandvika, Bærum, are receiving trauma therapy in Caracas after Thursday’s brutal attack. They are receiving support from the Norwegian foreign office in Venezuela, and are expected to return to Norway later this week.’

  I opened a third article, this one in Dagsavisen. ‘Rickards, who recently turned nineteen and was a graduate of Sandvika Gymnasium, had spent most of the summer working at 7-Eleven in Bekkestua to save money for the trip of a lifetime, traveling around South America for six months. Excitement turned to tragedy just two weeks into the trip, when the Norwegian trio decided to hitchhike in the notoriously dangerous northern Sucre region, after several scheduled buses failed to showed up. The girls were picked up by Rodriguez, who brought them to a house party at a private home near Carúpano. According to the witness statement of Elisabeth Eliassen, they stayed for several hours, taking drugs and drinking alcohol with Rodriguez, his brother and several others. At one point in the evening, Rodriguez, an unidentified second man and the three Norwegian girls retreated to a gazebo in the grounds of the house, bordering the surrounding jungle. It was here Rodriguez brought out the weapon and threatened the girls when they refused to perform a sexual act on himself and the other man. The girls tried to run, but Rodriguez fired the gun straight at Trine Rickards, who was killed instantly. Elisabeth Eliassen and Kristina Hellerud managed to run off into the jungle in the commotion that followed.

  ‘Hellerud was recovered several hours later, disorientated and dehydrated, a few miles away in the Macarapana area. She remains in hospital care and is said to suffer from cognitive impairment as a result of the incident. Elisabeth Eliassen managed to reach the main road and flagged down a vehicle. She was brought to the Hospital General de Carúpano, where she was reunited with Hellerud the following day, before being transferred to Caracas at the insistence of the Norwegian Consul General, Einar Johannessen.’

  I was so shocked to learn what you’d been through. It changed everything. I had to know more. I suppose I wanted to know how it had affected you and how you could have survived something like that and gone on to seem so whole. I pored over the images of teenage you and your two tragic friends. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Trine, tiny next to you and Elisabeth who are both so tall, smiling in every picture. Trine was obviously the goofy one, unable to resist a peace sign behind your head, or crossing her eyes, or sticking her tongue out.

  What kind of monster could point a gun at her head and pull the trigger?

  Elisabeth seemed more concerned with striking a pose; she was probably quite aware that she was the most physically striking out of the three of you. You seem insecure and more anonymous than your friends in the pictures, and in more than one, you were looking at Elisabeth in the moment the flash went off, as if to gauge how to pose, whether to smile.


  I spent a lot of time thinking about what your mother said, and what happened to you. I thought about it so much that it almost felt like I, too, was there and that I’d shared the experience with you. I could practically feel the fear you must have felt crashing through that terrifying forest, all alone, the sound of the gunshot reverberating in your head. I saw what you must have seen – the girl crumpling to the ground, a spray of blood lingering for a moment on the air that had held her, fragments of her skull landing on your skin. I could smell the sweet scent of rot on the air, the sulfur of the gunpowder, the cruel murderer’s rancid body odor. I built these images in my mind obsessively, not really understanding that my preoccupation with them was just another of my brain’s escape fantasies.

  I was even jealous of your trauma, Kristina. It’s true. I think what I mean by that is that I craved a tragic story of my own, something as big and shocking as the Carúpano shooting, that would explain why I have spent so much of my life feeling so empty, so ravaged by grief, so utterly alone. I had an absent father and a self-obsessed mother who doesn’t like me very much, and a failed marriage to a man who rejected me in myriad little ways every day, but those things aren’t exactly reasons to feel so broken. Or are they? You always made me feel like my feelings were valid, whatever they were. When I think back at how you used to make me feel, I miss you so intensely that it takes my breath away. I wish we could go back to that time when I’d sit across from you in our sessions and drink in your kind, attentive presence, when you were all I needed, and entirely mine for fifty minutes each week. I wish I hadn’t done what I’ve done.

  For a while, knowing about Carúpano made me even more obsessed with you. It was so moving and impressive that you’d moved on from a tragedy of such magnitude and built a good life for yourself, a life in which you managed to offer support to others who suffered trauma. I put two and two together and realized that you paid a weekly visit to Trine Rickards’ parents, presumably out of the kindness of your heart. It wasn’t hard to understand the conflicting emotions around those visits, and why you clearly sometimes couldn’t face going. I assumed that you’d be haunted by impressions and memories of that terrible night all those years ago, the images that came so easily and convincingly to my own mind when I thought about it.

  What I didn’t know back then was that I’d conjured up memories you yourself don’t have. Cognitive impairment, said Dagsavisen, but what did it mean?

  I’m getting ahead of myself. I was overwhelmed by sympathy for you and your plight; I couldn’t stop thinking about what your mother said. That your hair fell out, that you couldn’t have children, that you had basically hauled yourself out of the flames and soared into the sky like a phoenix, like a hero: those were her exact words. I also thought about the other survivor, charismatic and beautiful Elisabeth Eliassen, clearly the ringleader out of the three of you, and wondered what her life might be like now. She turned out badly, your mother said, and when I thought back to that conversation, her choice of words made me angry, because it was exactly the kind of thing my mother might have said about me. She turned out badly, meaning – she turned out different to me.

  I became curious about this woman who, like you, had survived unimaginable trauma but ‘turned out badly’. I made a mental note to find her.

  50

  Elisabeth, June

  The group has fallen silent without Elisabeth noticing. She’s been lost in thought, staring at the strange imagery of the painting in front of her. She realizes that Arne, Villa Vinternatt’s visual arts therapist, has stopped in front of her and has clearly asked a question.

  ‘What?’ she whispers.

  ‘Do you want to share something about your painting with the group?’

  ‘Um.’

  Arne watches her carefully. His face is kind and open, but when he turns to study her newest picture, done during the morning’s two-hour session in watercolor, his eyes change expression and he frowns.

  ‘What do you think this picture is trying to tell you?’ he asks.

  ‘Umm.’ She stands up, takes a couple of steps back and stands shoulder to shoulder with Arne, considering her work. She glances around the room, at her fellow residents craning their heads to get a clear view, and catches Joel’s eye. He raises an eyebrow slowly and gives her a little encouraging smile.

  ‘It seems to me that this picture is quite different from most of the images you’ve produced here in these sessions, Elisabeth,’ says Arne.

  ‘Different how?’

  ‘Does anyone else want to contribute? Does anyone have an idea why I believe this picture is a clear departure from Elisabeth’s general style?’

  ‘It’s certainly more explicit,’ says Gina, an older woman with scraggly black hair and teeth stained an impressive shade of yellow.

  ‘Continue,’ says Arne.

  ‘Well. In most of Elisabeth’s pictures, the themes seem to be pretty abstract. You might see bloodstains, I might see the inside of a jam jar, Joel might see something else entirely. But this… This is, like, obvious.’

  ‘What do you see, Gina?’

  ‘Well. A river. Of blood. A dark, busy forest. Uh. Lots of life somehow. Bugs, bats, those faces among the trees.’

  ‘Faces?’ Elisabeth blurts it out, her eyes returning to the painting, and only then does she see them: faces indeed, distinctly human, and ghoulishly twisted into terrifying grimaces that bleed into the dense foliage of the forest.

  ‘Elisabeth?’ says Arne. ‘You sound surprised.’

  ‘No. No, just I didn’t realize that they were so obvious, that’s all.’

  ‘Can you tell me about this?’ Arne points his finger to the top right-hand side of the picture, where a little brown bird, painted meticulously and in more sophisticated detail than the rest of the scene, flies in between deliberately childishly drawn, yellow five-point stars.

  ‘Um… No.’ She has rarely felt this tongue-tied in a group therapy session; usually Arne’s art sessions are her favorites, but today she feels strangely discombobulated and dissociated, entirely unable to decipher any meaning in her own imagery. The task they were given was to ‘paint yourself in nature’.

  ‘Would I be correct in assuming the bird represents you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, maybe.’

  ‘It looks like a happy bird.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And yet, the scene it flies over is very disturbing.’

  ‘Yeah. Yes, I guess it is.’

  ‘A blood-red river, threatening faces among dense trees, a real sense of danger.’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘But the bird is free.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Elisabeth, blinking at sudden tears in her eyes.

  51

  Kristina

  I shiver lightly at her words. My mother. I can’t believe Leah has really gone that far, seeking out people in my life and striking up contact with them, but she clearly has. The problem is, Leah is certainly mistaken if she thinks that she could uncover some deep, dark secrets about me by speaking to my mother. There are no deep, dark secrets to uncover. It’s all right there, on the internet, like Leah herself says.

  Could she really have gotten to Elisabeth, too? I can’t imagine it would be possible; Elisabeth spent the last eighteen months of her life in a rehabilitation facility with limited visitor access. I think she would have mentioned it to me if someone had come around asking about me, no doubt about that. But what if she didn’t?

  Leah was clearly completely destabilized, and I have truly failed at picking up the signs of how disturbed she really was, but how much damage has she managed to do? Leah speaks of missing pieces of puzzles, of unlocking the doors to the past, as if my life was some fucking story to be reconstructed for her twisted entertainment. I hate her smug, misinformed voice and find it impossible to reconcile with the Leah Iverson I thought I knew. The reality of what she has done is shocking: she sought out my mother, who, like Leah said, likes the sound of her own voice, and possibly poor El
isabeth too. It explains a lot. Everything, in fact.

  I don’t know why Leah became obsessed with what happened to us in Carúpano, but I think she’s right about the preoccupation with someone else’s tragic experience being a way for the mind to escape its own reality. I see it sometimes in clients who become unusually preoccupied with events that ultimately have nothing to do with them, such as a plane crash or a terrorist attack.

  What happened to us in Venezuela was a terrible tragedy, one that has defined my life in many ways, but still, I have built a life beyond it. I committed to my own healing and I was able to move on past trauma by accepting its presence and integrating it into my experience. It’s true that I was more fortunate than Elisabeth in the way my mind and body processed the attack – I haven’t been forced to endlessly relive what happened or been haunted day and night by what that man did to us.

  Why is Leah hell-bent on dragging this back out into the light? I feel sick at the thought of her seeking out Elisabeth; she was a very vulnerable woman, and especially in the last months of her life. She would have been easily won over by someone as devious and convincing as Leah. She might have told her things that were untrue, or irrelevant, or dangerous, or all of those.

  Elisabeth was confused and unreliable in the months before she died in August. More than once, she relapsed with both alcohol and marijuana, and I had to use my professional relationship with Villa Vinternatt’s founder for leverage to allow her to stay on the program after breaking the strict policy on total sobriety. She also showed worrying signs of distorted memory and reality perception. She’d ruminate over her relationship with Andreas and make it sound like it was the greatest love story in the history of the world, when in reality it was a disastrous five-year descent into hell, defined by an endless cycle of co-dependency, addiction and chaos. She’d paint and draw obsessively, and her incredible talent was clear for everyone to see, but her art gave an insight into the turbulence of her mind – she’d paint blood and violence and that jungle she wasn’t ever able to leave behind.