Mother Dear

by Nova Lee Maier

  “Maybe he’s asleep?” The guy closed the door behind him and walked past Ralf, toward the staircase. The girl giggled.

  Ralf waited until they were out of sight, then fished his keys out of his pocket and opened the door.

  Brian’s room was small and packed with furniture. A double bed with a glossy black duvet, a wardrobe, a sideboard, a coffee table with a tinted glass top, and a few chairs. The dusky-pink curtains were drawn—Brian never opened the window. Next to the bed stood a half-full glass of Coke with a plastic bottle next to it. On the coffee table lay a crumpled Marlboro pack and an overflowing ashtray.

  Brian was nowhere to be seen.

  24

  Werner and Helen had once gone in together with some friends to buy bulk meat from a cow that had grazed on the field close to their house. The chest freezer had been specially acquired for that purpose. For months on end, there had been nothing but beef on the menu, until the whole family was sick of it. Helen had no idea what to do with all the extra meat and bones. “Make soup,” the farmer had said. But it was much quicker and easier to use bouillon cubes nowadays. Last year, Helen had regretfully thrown away the dried-out, ice-encrusted remnants, then cleaned and switched off the freezer.

  Now it was running once more at full capacity. All of the lights were on—green, yellow, and red—and every now and then, it made a quiet gurgling noise. Werner had set it to “quick freeze.” A few old cardboard boxes were piled on top of the lid, and a faded parasol leaned against it.

  Helen stood, looking at the freezer, arms folded. “This is insane,” she whispered.

  “It’s for the best,” said Werner softly. “If anyone finds out, the story will take on a life of its own. We’ll lose everything.”

  Helen turned her head and looked at him questioningly. He went on talking. From his demeanor and his movements, she could see he was trying to persuade her that this was the only choice, but his words didn’t really reach her. All she could think of was what he had said to her earlier that evening: We have three wonderful children who we can’t keep locked away in a golden cage.

  An eye for an eye.

  “What if I go mad?” she whispered.

  He put his arm around her and drew her to his chest. Kissed the top of her head. “You won’t. We’ll get through this. He’s OK in there for now, and I’ll come up with something.”

  “Mom, Dad?”

  Helen froze at the sound of Emma’s voice.

  “Yes?” called Werner.

  “Can I have a bag of potato chips?” Emma stood in the doorway at the top of the basement stairs.

  “Of course, honey,” Helen heard herself reply. “It’s the weekend.”

  “OK!” A moment’s silence. Then, hesitantly, “What are you doing down there, anyway?”

  “Cleaning up!” Werner yelled back.

  “Oh, right, have fun, then.”

  Once the footsteps had died away, Helen laid a trembling hand over her mouth.

  “It’s all right,” whispered Werner. He produced a half smile and drew her closer against him. “The kids are so self-absorbed these days, they won’t notice any of this. Nothing at all.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  Saturday

  1

  The patient was thirty-four, a mother of two. Her eyes shone. “I’m sorry, Nurse. I know it’ll all turn out fine like you say. I’m just scared.”

  Helen laid her hand on the woman’s arm. “Everybody gets a little bit scared just before an operation. That’s completely normal.” She hoped the smile that cost her so much effort came across as sincere.

  She had scarcely been able to control her nerves while opening the recovery room with her colleagues this morning. In the changing room, she had forgotten to put her phone and her rings in the locker, and shortly after that, she had run into the wall with a cart and dropped a basket of cannulas. “Rough night?” Paula, one of her older colleagues, had asked as she helped her pick up the needles from the floor.

  “I st—stayed up until the kids came home.”

  Paula understood. “The teenage years are all blood, sweat, and tears, aren’t they? I’m glad my kids have left home, for what it’s worth. Means I can sleep again at night.”

  “Nurse?”

  Helen awoke from her reverie with a start.

  “I guess it’s for the best,” said the patient.

  She had forgotten what operation the woman was due to undergo, and cast a quick glance at the monitor. Appendectomy, it said. “Oh yes, absolutely. It’ll relieve all your pain straightaway.”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Lex Melo approaching—one of the nurse anesthetists. Like everybody in the unit, he was wearing blue scrubs with short sleeves and plastic clogs.

  “Look, my colleague is here already,” said Helen. “He’ll take you through to the OR, and I’ll see you again very soon in the recovery room.” She leaned forward confidentially. “They’ve got a superb team working in there—the very best people we have.”

  “And if Helen says it, then it must be true.” Lex winked at Helen from behind the patient. “You haven’t had surgery before, if I understand correctly?”

  The woman looked a good deal more cheerful when he directed his attention toward her. No doubt because of his eyes, thought Helen—big and brown, the most beautiful eyes in the whole hospital. He had once told her that he’d inherited them from his Brazilian grandfather.

  “No, that’s right. This is my first time.”

  “We’re always extra careful when that’s the case,” he joked.

  Helen watched as he wheeled the bed toward the operating room. Lex was tall and not exactly slim; yet from the way he moved, you could see he was fit and comfortable in his own skin. When he’d joined the team three years ago, he had sent a lot of the female staff into a tizzy for weeks on end. Some of the men too, for that matter. Helen had been amused by all the commotion, as had Lex himself. They soon established that they shared a sense of humor and were irritated by the same things. Helen considered herself lucky that she could now regard him as a good friend, but she took care not to spend time with him outside work.

  There were limits to what a friendship between a man and a woman could bear, especially when the attraction wasn’t exclusively platonic.

  2

  “Still in bed?”

  Ralf woke with a start, blinking in the bright sunlight. His mother was standing by his bed, hands on her hips. Her short, bleached hair was dark at the roots.

  “Mom, it’s Saturday.”

  “It’s two in the afternoon. You’ll sleep your life away at this rate.” She grabbed the covers and pulled them back.

  Ralf sat up, avoiding her eyes. He could draw them from memory by now—those piercing, light-blue eyes that had regarded him with nothing but reproach for the last few years.

  “Look at this mess. Really, Ralf, you need to . . .”

  She continued ranting at him. Any second now, she’d start going on about his future, telling him he needed to find work. A Saturday job, at the very least—though more than anything, she’d like to see him finish his education so she could pack him off for a full workweek at some boring company with a bunch of even more boring colleagues. Her idea of a bright future. She wouldn’t rest until she’d achieved it. He didn’t dare imagine how she would react if she found out he’d stopped going to school weeks ago.

  “I don’t understand how you can sleep in here,” she continued, picking up dirty clothing from the carpet and dumping it at the foot of his bed. “It stinks. Your father and I—”

  “Give it a rest, Mom.”

  “Don’t you take that tone with me!”

  “Oh, fuck off, would you?” Ralf leapt out of bed, strode past his mother to the bathroom, slammed the door behind him, and locked it.

  He took off his T-shirt and boxer shorts and stood under the shower.

  As the warm water flowed over him, he thought back to when he was s
till in elementary school. Whenever he had a problem or felt sad, he would crawl onto his mother’s lap, and she would stroke his hair and hug him, tell him that everything would be OK and that she was proud of him.

  She hadn’t been proud of him for a long time.

  His eyes prickled with tears.

  A hand pounded on the bathroom door. “Ralf? Don’t spend too long in the shower! Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know. And make sure you clean up your room!”

  3

  Helen sat at the large, round table in the break room with Lex and Anouk, a younger colleague from the recovery room. The team members never took their breaks all at the same time. There always had to be nurses available to monitor the patients. The first few hours after surgery were critical, especially for patients who were already weak before their operations—those who had heart and lung problems, for example.

  “Have you guys ever noticed how often we use the word ‘just’ over the course of a workday?” asked Anouk. Her sturdy legs were crossed, and she was dangling one of her plastic clogs from her toe.

  “How do you mean?” replied Helen.

  Anouk stirred her coffee. “Could I ‘just’ borrow the doctor for a moment? I’ll ‘just’ put in a drip . . .”

  “I’ve never thought about it before,” murmured Helen.

  Lex’s chair teetered on two legs. He was preoccupied with his cell phone and didn’t join in on the conversation. He’d probably decided that Anouk’s “we” didn’t include him. His work as an anesthesiologist’s assistant was highly technical, and he had much less frequent and briefer contact with patients than the recovery nurses did.

  “You’ll be shocked when you start looking out for it,” continued Anouk. “It’s a real filler word, that ‘just.’”

  A colleague entered the room, placed a cup under the coffee machine, and pushed the On button. “Maybe it’s because we’re always being told to ‘just get it done.’ You end up rushing from one patient to the next.”

  “It’s not as bad as all that on our ward, though, is it?” replied Anouk, turning to face the newcomer.

  Helen retreated gratefully into her cocoon and began playing a game on her phone. She wanted to get back to work as quickly as possible. There was nobody to watch her when she was with patients, and she could simply ask her standard questions and administer her standard treatments. That was already complicated enough.

  She wished she could turn back the clock. In her mind’s eye, she had already pictured herself running out of the house and down the street with the gun a hundred times, screaming bloody murder and shooting in the air. In that version of events, the robber stayed alive and wound up in a jail cell—where he belonged.

  “What did you get up to last night?”

  Helen looked up in alarm, straight into Anouk’s big green eyes. The question was aimed squarely at her. “Er—why do you ask?”

  Anouk grinned. “Jeez, Helen, the way you reacted. Is there something you aren’t allowed to tell us?”

  The other colleague chimed in. “You’re blushing!”

  Lex looked up from his phone.

  “I didn’t do anything at all,” she said, and got up from her seat. “I’m going back to work.”

  The chair fell to the floor with a bang.

  4

  The black duvet still lay rumpled in the same position at the foot of Brian’s bed, and the half-full glass of Coke still stood on the floor with the plastic bottle next to it. Ralf picked up a car magazine and flipped through the pages without really looking at them. He took a bottle from the sideboard, set it upright, and examined himself in the mirror. A charging cable lay on the shelf by the sink. He uncoiled it, found the socket by the bed, and plugged in Brian’s phone.

  It felt strange to be poking around in Brian’s stuff when he wasn’t around. Brian had such a strong personality that he imbued everything around him with a strange charge. In his absence, the room actually felt rather mundane. Shabby, almost. For somebody who was so successful, Brian didn’t have many nice things. Apart from his clothes and his Golf GTI, anyway. Though the car was currently gathering dust at a garage until Brian got his license back.

  Ralf opened a few cupboards, peered inside, and closed the doors again. He spotted a bag of potato chips and tore it open. Began devouring them where he stood. He hadn’t had any breakfast that morning; immediately after showering, he’d jumped in his car and driven away.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Ralf spun round in alarm. Potato chips crunched between his teeth, and crumbs fell to the floor.

  5

  Helen guided a cannula into the vein of a twenty-two-year-old motorcyclist. The man had been brought in by ambulance. He had internal injuries in addition to several visible wounds that had caused a good deal of blood loss. His body was covered in bruises and hematomas. She taped down the cannula and pulled back the covers to apply stickers to his chest. A large gray tattoo revealed itself, depicting two hands holding a rosary. Guess it didn’t protect you, she thought cynically. She worked swiftly.

  Seeing the tattoo, she was suddenly reminded of Sara. Were she and Jackie currently getting tattoos of their own in Antwerp? Or had Werner gotten hold of her in time? They hadn’t discussed it any further. It had completely slipped her mind. Sara’s plan suddenly seemed so insignificant compared to everything that had happened.

  6

  Ralf knew the guy. He was called Mikey, though Ralf didn’t know whether that was his real name.

  He strutted into the room and nudged a whiskey bottle to one side with his Air Jordan. Ralf recognized the model and color. A limited edition that cost four hundred dollars. Mikey also wore a red cap that looked just as exclusive as his shoes, but otherwise, Brian’s dealer was dressed unobtrusively in a dark pair of chinos and a shirt in a similar color.

  Mikey stopped in the center of the room. “Where’s Brian?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mikey looked at him, sizing him up. Said nothing.

  “Hey, buddy, I’m looking for him too, you know. He—he isn’t answering his phone.”

  “I’m not your buddy,” replied Mikey. “He was supposed to come around yesterday and pay back some money he borrowed from me.”

  “Well, that’s got nothing to do with me.”

  Mikey walked forward, stopping within arm’s length of Ralf. Stared at him aggressively.

  Ralf shifted uneasily. Brian’s dealer had unhealthily pale skin, and his eyes sat close together and were slightly crossed. The combination gave him a bit of an alien appearance. Ralf had thought Mikey was a creep from the very first time Brian took him to Mikey’s room. He was a wackjob. Someone to steer clear of, instead of living in the same house and buying drugs from him on a regular basis, as Brian did.

  “I’ll give him one more day,” said Mikey. “If he doesn’t pay by tomorrow night, then I’m charging one hundred percent interest. If he thinks he can take me for a ride, he’s wrong. You tell him that.”

  Ralf opened his mouth to repeat that he didn’t know where Brian was, but Mikey had already spun on his heel and left the room.

  7

  The sun shone pale as Helen left through the staff exit. A thin veil of clouds was drifting high in the sky.

  “You seemed a little off today.” Lex appeared beside her and tried to make eye contact.

  Helen focused on the fork in the footpath up ahead; the bike shed was on the right, while Lex would have to turn left toward the parking lot.

  “I didn’t sleep well,” she said tersely.

  “Is something wrong with the kids, or with Werner?”

  Just eight steps to go.

  “Helen?”

  She wanted to say something so badly, but it was impossible.

  She couldn’t tell him anything.

  Out of the question.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” She went to follow the path to the right, but he put a hand on her arm to hold her back.

  He did it ve
ry gently, not too insistently.

  His eyes locked with hers. “Helen . . .”

  “Thank you” was all she said. She looked down at the ground and hurried to the bike shed.

  8

  It was six o’clock. Ralf had called a few of Brian’s friends, but nobody had had any contact with him since yesterday afternoon. There was no one home at his mother’s house. He’d tried Naomi too; like everyone else, she had no idea where Brian was. She said he hadn’t replied to her messages. That wasn’t unusual—Brian wasn’t exactly the type to bombard his girlfriend with declarations of love, or to provide her with any information at all, for that matter.

  Brian worked for a transportation company on a casual basis. Sometimes on the weekend, sometimes during the week. Ralf looked up the number, then thought better of it. Would he call Brian’s workplace if he couldn’t get ahold of him under normal circumstances? No way. So why should he do it now? His friends had all been surprised to hear Ralf on the line, and rightly so. It wasn’t the first time Brian had gone AWOL for a day. Or longer.

  Ralf thought carefully. What would he do in this situation if there was nothing wrong? Certainly not start a manhunt.

  But there definitely was something wrong.

  Ralf put his phone away and started his car. He wanted to go back—to the place where he’d seen Brian for the last time.

  9

  “I’m going to bury him,” murmured Werner. Shouts emanated from the living room—Thom was playing video games with a friend.

  Helen pushed her empty coffee cup back and forth on the table. “Where?”

  “Maybe some remote spot in Limburg or the Veluwe. Not around here, anyway.”

  Through the kitchen window, Helen could see Emma wandering in the yard with a plastic bag, gathering leaves for a biology project at school.