by Nina Siegal
The thick GRACE AND PIETER HOOGENDIJK file she had in her hands now must have been started when Martijn met Pieter, a few years earlier. It certainly looked like a relic of another era, yellow and aged to the point that it seemed like someone had used a lighter to singe its edges. She opened it out of sheer curiosity, not expecting to find anything more surprising than bank statements, notarial deeds, and ancient tax forms.
The first thing that fell out, though, right into her lap, was a photograph of the two of them, her and Pieter, when they were much younger, in South Africa, many years ago. That was funny. What was a photograph from that era doing in Martijn’s bookkeeping? She pulled the picture closer to her face to try to figure out what image this was and when it had been taken.
This was an old one, shot long before Karin was born, when they had only just met. Funny—it wasn’t one of her photographs, definitely not one of his. They didn’t seem to be posing for it, but you could see both their faces pretty clearly, in spite of the wild hair they both had then. This wasn’t one of the photos contained in any of their family albums, of that she was sure. Who had taken it?
It was clearly Cape Town, because she recognized the palm trees and the colorful cabins on Muizenberg Beach in the background. She did know exactly where it was taken—not far from one of their favorite bars, actually the place they’d met, a real dive called the Black Swan. Her best guess was that it was taken around that time, 1996. Back then, she’d been twenty-four and met this unruly thirty-six-year-old Dutch photojournalist who spoke with a funny accent and had a million crazy stories, at a bar where she’d gone to listen to jazz.
She recognized her younger self in that picture—what, nearly a quarter of a century ago now?—her hair cropped into a curly bob, with bangs falling into her face. Pieter with his long hair, looking like skin and bones under a T-shirt that hung off him like a tent. Ha. When she’d met him she’d immediately insulted him by saying, “I thought Dutch people were supposed to be tall,” to which he’d laughed and explained that stereotypes always had exceptions. He was just barely as tall as she, five foot nine.
But he loomed over her in so many other ways. Pieter was already a veteran war photographer by then, having covered the Iran-Iraq War, the Lebanese Civil War, the bombing of Libya. He’d launched into photojournalism right out of secondary school in Amsterdam, not even nineteen, never gave a thought to university, even though he’d aced all his exams. He’d just gone off with a Leica to Syria during the first Islamist uprising there, on his own. “That was seriously stupid,” he confessed to her, twining his fingers with hers at that jazz bar, maybe boldly and too soon. “I almost got killed the first day.”
He still had the scar on his belly to prove how stupid he’d been, he told her. Did she want to see it? Yes, he’d been one of those cowboy gonzo photojournalists of the 1980s, fearless, reckless, and ultimately insanely lucky to have made it out alive. How sexy was all of that to her at the time! He talked a mile a minute about war and competing tribes and CIA informants and weapons traders and government complicity and human rights and aid organizations and who was doing what to endanger or save humanity, and to her, back then, everything he said was genuinely, truly fascinating.
Pieter was thirty-eight when they married, two years later, quite a lot older than Grace, and that seemed hard to her at the time. But the years passed, and suddenly she herself was thirty-eight, and she realized that if she wasn’t going to have kids with this wild man, she wasn’t going to have kids.
Pieter claimed by then that he had mellowed, and he regretted his youthful bravado, even if he still loved to show off the puncture wounds in his left hip, where he’d gotten grazed by bullets in Libya, or the scar just below his collarbone where he’d been whacked with a Rwandan rebel’s machete. She, too, counted herself lucky that he was alive.
And then, after all that, when Karin was ten, he wasn’t anymore. All the bad luck he’d managed to sidestep for all those years finally caught him. She’d had Pieter for twenty-two years, and Karin had had him for ten. Those were the numbers.
She looked again at the picture of the two of them from so many years ago. How strange that she’d never seen it before. Who had taken it? And from where? It was blurry, slightly overexposed, and taken from very far away, like someone had photographed them from a moving car across the street. It was grainy, suggesting it had been shot using a long zoom lens. Like someone had been watching them, snapping shots to indicate their whereabouts, locate them. Why would Martijn have this picture?
Chapter 9
Red Deer
It was dark now, but more like a deep-sea blue than black. They could see stuff, but more like the outlines of things, and all kinds of crisscrossing shadows that made the forest feel more strange, or maybe magical. It was a bit creepy with the weird gnarled trees that looked just a little like swimmers doing a sidestroke, or swimmers drowning.
Lotte, who was walking ahead of Karin, always started to talk a whole lot when she got nervous, and now was one of those moments. “Where are you going for winter break?” she asked, and said without waiting for an answer, “We’re going to Thailand. My parents have been telling me all about it. They’ve already been there four times. They say we can swim all day long. They have this place that’s just a hut with, like, the walls completely open, and they say it gets hot enough that you never want to close the doors or anything.”
Karin’s family hadn’t made any plans for the winter break. Everything was too scrambled at home. She didn’t even know if they’d be living in the same house in a week or two, the way it was between her mom and Martijn. “We rented a place in the South of France,” Karin lied, remembering a holiday she took with her mom and dad when she was younger. “They got a cottage there, and we can go hiking nearby. My parents like to go wine tasting, and they let me have a few sips. It’s really pretty all around there.”
Lotte didn’t seem to be very interested in this lie, or maybe she just needed to talk. “In Thailand, they have these places where you can go and take care of elephants. You wash them with a hose and feed them with buckets, and if you’re lucky, my mom says, you can even ride on one.”
Karin remembered the elephants she had seen with her mom and dad at Kruger Park when they’d gone to South Africa that one time together. She’d been really young then, like eight. They’d had to get shots for that trip, and Karin never forgot how much it hurt. But it had been worth it. How giant and graceful the elephants were. So gentle, even though they had so much power; Karin respected that. “My mom went by herself last year, just to see what it was like, and if it was okay for me to go,” continued Lotte. “And she said there are a lot of kids who live in the village, and they really like foreigners, like to take them around and show them all the amazing plants and places to swim, and I don’t have to be with my parents the whole time, like here…”
The trail here was half paved with asphalt but mostly covered with sandy dirt and overgrown with tufts of grass that sprouted up through cracks. While Lotte talked, Karin tried to convince herself not to be frightened of the coming darkness. She’d been here at night before, and she had never been scared then. But of course that was with her dad, and being with her dad had always made everything okay. He’d let her go off on her own a bit and collect kindling; he even had let her light the campfire and poke it with a branch. The Veluwe had never seemed scary before. But now, with just the two of them, just her and Lotte?
Karin pictured her father here, guiding them, the straps of all his camera bags crisscrossing his broad chest like some kind of special armor. She saw his face, his pale blue eyes, always smiling when he saw her, and his nose, wide and sturdy, and his salt-and-pepper stubble, not thick enough to be called a beard, really. He had on a sort of padded vest with lots of pockets, and that black-and-white-checkered scarf he always wore, which he sometimes used to clean his lenses in a pinch.
“Just a little farther,” he had told her, looking back and giving her a wink. “
It’s just over this ridge.”
The first time they’d come here together hadn’t been that long after the trip to South Africa. She’d begged to go back to Kruger Park, but her parents said they’d have to save up for another trip. It cost, like, thousands of euros. Her dad said they should start exploring local nature, their own national forests. He was going to learn how to shoot nature photographs because it was safe—safer than Africa. No vaccinations needed!
“Come on, darling,” he’d said. “See that big boulder there? That’s where we’ll stop.”
She’d followed him, up over the dune-like hills to a place where there was a rock just big enough to hide them. He dropped his camera bags off his shoulders and sat beside the rock, motioning for Karin to do the same. She slouched over and sat next to him, resting her back against the rock.
“What now?” she asked.
“Now we wait,” he said. “We wait for the deer to come.”
“When are they coming?” she asked, naturally.
He laughed and put his arm around her shoulders. “They’re on the two forty train,” he said.
Karin didn’t get the joke at first and tried to find the train tracks nearby. “Ha ha, very funny. How long?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” he said. “The deer are in charge. We’re on their schedule now.”
“Hm.” Karin wasn’t sure how she felt about this. Maybe it would be more interesting to be at home, where they had a comfortable couch, and Nickelodeon. Where her mom could make them popcorn while they were waiting. “Can’t we put out treats for them or something? I have yogurt bars.”
Her father laughed, his eyes flashing with pride. “I guess I’ve raised a city girl,” he said. “But we can still fix that.”
Karin didn’t like the sound of this. She opened her sequin-covered backpack and took out her journal, to start writing in it.
“That’s a good thing to do,” said her dad, “but first I want to teach you how to breathe while we’re waiting.”
“Um, Dad, I already know how to breathe.”
“Of course you do, but I’m going to show you how to breathe a special way, so you don’t scare the deer away,” he said, adding, “so they’ll come faster.”
Karin put down her journal and pen. “If you think it’ll help.”
Breathing for deer meant mostly breathing through your nose, really slow and really deep, it turned out. Like what they had to do in yoga classes with her mom. She found it kind of hard. Her dad kept saying, “Even slower.” Until she felt like she might actually stop breathing if she slowed down any more. After a while, he told her she’d “mastered it!” So they sat as still as possible and breathed for a while like they didn’t exist at all.
They sat there for almost an hour like that. Hidden by the rock, glancing over into a clearing, waiting for the deer and making no sound. But then her legs started to cramp up and she felt like telling her father that she was bored, she wanted to go home. Karin started wiping the dirt off her legs and was getting ready to stand up.
And just as she very nearly revealed herself and ruined everything, she saw it, there in the distance, a single red deer. She crouched back down and tapped her father, who was already snapping away. “That’s a hind,” whispered her father. “A female. She won’t travel alone. There will be more.” He added, “If we keep still.”
He was right: a few minutes later, another hind came out from the wooded area, and then another and another. “Now, wait for the stag,” he said. “He’s got to herd his harem.”
Karin had to stifle a laugh. “Harem?”
“Shhhhh,” her father said gently.
That was also true. There were six or seven hinds grazing around the edge of the clearing when the stag came—a really big deer with a set of giant antlers like a tree on his head. He seemed like a king there. All the hinds glanced up. The antlers were crazy big—like almost bigger than his body—and covered with a soft kind of downy felt that Karin wished she could touch.
“Just wait,” her father told her, ever so quietly. Suddenly another stag appeared. He was larger than the first one, but he had only one antler, on the left side of his head. “Drama,” her dad whispered as he very slowly put down one camera and picked up another. Karin tried to remember how to breathe, but she found herself gasping.
The second stag let out a roar, like a real roar, like a lion. Karin didn’t even know they could do that. Then it kind of jolted up onto its hind legs, to standing, like a man. The first stag jumped up on his back legs too. It was so crazy, like playing chicken. They both used their front legs to whack, to try to knock the other over. They got closer and then locked horns. The first stag, the one all the girls liked, just smashed into the second, the one with the single antler, and knocked him down. He found his footing and got up quickly and started to run off, but his remaining antler just toppled off his head like a fallen crown. Then he disappeared into the woods.
Karin’s heart was beating fast. That was nuts, what she’d just seen. She couldn’t believe it. In spite of herself, and everything she had been taught, she let out a whooping yell, like her team had won a football match. “Whoaah!” she cried. And of course all the deer looked at her, in a split second, and then instantly, like in a puff of smoke, ran off.
“Karin!” her father had said in a tone of serious disappointment. “You had to?”
Karin’s father faded and disappeared in the bushes as she realized that she hadn’t heard Lotte’s voice in a while. “Lotte?” she called out, looking around and seeing that it was suddenly dark, suddenly really nighttime. That was odd. “Lotte? Lotte don’t go too far ahead of me!”
But there was no answer. “Huh?” Karin said out loud, but to herself. Because nobody else was there. “Okay, Lotte, this really isn’t funny. It’s kind of scary out here. I’m not really feeling like playing games.”
Still no answer. The trail ahead was empty, the side-stroking trees around her just as creepy. Behind her, no sign of movement. “Lotte, this is seriously not cool!”
Dead silence.
Why would Lotte run off ahead of her? Or could she have fallen behind? How did Karin lose track of her—just because she drifted off into memories? Where could Lotte have gone? It just didn’t make any sense.
There was a curve in the path, and a hill not far from where she was walking. She decide to climb up the slope so that she could get a better vantage. “Lotte? Are you there?” she called out, stepping up a sandy embankment. No answer at all.
She hadn’t been going that slow. At the top of the hill, she looked out over the landscape, the mounds of earth that looked like sand dunes, the patches of dry grass, the stumpy trees now looking like they were making fists with their fingers. Mean trees. Angry trees in the darkness.
“Looottttaaaaaa?” she cried out. “Helllloooooo???” she shouted, her voice singsong, and waited, this time hearing faint reverberations, as if she were calling out inside a cave.
Just like that, she thought. And just like that, so fast, I’m alone?
Chapter 10
File Folders
Grace had held on to Martijn’s ACCOUNTING card through Pieter’s memorial reception for no particular reason, except that it was something to clutch in her hand so she wouldn’t reach for a cigarette. She’d given up smoking when she was pregnant, for good. She’d kept the card in her pocket until she’d arrived at the sad little storefront in a blocky modernist office building to meet Martijn van Roosendaal like a woman in search of a soothsayer.
She had barely noticed the midcentury furniture positioned like building blocks on the slate-gray carpeting or the mousy brunette with the near-bouffant who tried to block her way into Martijn’s office. He recognized her immediately, and came out into the hallway to welcome her into his chambers.
“My father founded this accounting firm with his twin brother,” Martijn explained once he’d seated her and settled himself again behind a wide oak desk, appearing far more ordinary, and handsome
, with his beard shaved off, and not at all like the wise man in colorful silks she’d imagined in her hallucinatory anguish. “I’ve expanded it into some other areas,” he continued, then added more pointedly, leaning forward and looking right into Grace’s eyes, “with your husband’s help.”
Grace felt her heart muscle squeeze and knew a wave of sadness was coming in, like seagulls sensing a storm. “My husband’s help,” she repeated, but it didn’t make sense to her. What help could Pieter possibly have given to an accounting firm?
“I’m sorry, late husband,” said Martijn, as if that was the area of confusion. “I want you to know that Pieter was not only a client to me but someone I counted as a dear friend.”
Grace didn’t know what to do with this information. Pieter had never mentioned a Martijn van Roosendaal to her, and she was sure she’d met all his friends. None of them, as far as she knew, worked in polished faux-vintage offices with glass walls and persnickety receptionists out front. Not a one of them seemed anywhere near so established.
What came out through the subsequent discussion, however, confused her even more—Pieter had accumulated a great deal of wealth in the last year or two, working with Martijn, apparently, and this left Grace and Karin, as Martijn put it, “in a very strong position financially.” Martijn was methodical in laying it all out for her, explaining that she only had to sign some papers, here and here, to be able to move the income into her own accounts.
Yes, that was how she’d met Martijn, over financial paperwork, and somehow, over time, they’d fallen in love. Probably a lot of it had to do with his looks, his charm, his apparent eagerness to support the grieving widow, as well as her own desire to make life easier and safer and more, well, normal.