The Therapist

by Helene Flood

  “What’s the deal with the police cars?” Sasha says as she lowers herself into her chair. She has taken off her coat and scarf; they’re now resting in her lap. Underneath she’s wearing a moss green jumper and a tight black skirt. She sits with her legs to one side, the very picture of femininity, as if she were a secretary from the ’60s.

  “Oh, just a boring incident that happened this weekend,” I say with a wave of my hand. I’m trying to give the impression of something trivial, a break-in perhaps, but see that her alarmed expression fails to evaporate.

  “How have things been since last time?” I say.

  I make myself comfortable in the chair, lean forward a little, and feel my body settle into position. Yes, I can do this. Auto-pilot takes over when necessary, carrying me into professional mode. It feels good. I fall into place. All the chaos in the house – the police officers, document holders, curtains, pizza boxes – they can be left to their own devices. Here in the office it’s just Sasha and me, and we have a job to do.

  “Well,” she says, splaying her fingers, “things are good. Yeah, they are.”

  I nod, narrowing my eyes in concentration. I’m the very image of a functioning psychologist.

  “It’s just,” she says, exasperated and exhaling up into her fringe, “oh, it’s so stupid, you’re going to laugh at me. I, well, I think I’ve met someone. Or, I mean, I’ve met him. Whether or not he’s met me is something else.”

  “You mean you’re unsure whether he returns your feelings?”

  “Yeah. Unsure is putting it mildly.”

  “Well, have you asked him?”

  She exhales again, in the way young people do, as if to say “yeah, right”.

  “He’s not the kind of guy who would fall for someone like me,” she says, then adds, her voice a little sour, “to put it bluntly.”

  “I assume that means that you haven’t asked him?”

  “You assume correctly.”

  “So when you say that he’s not the kind of guy who would fall for someone like you, that’s just an assumption?”

  Look at that – I’m doing fine. I’m challenging the conclusions Sasha has drawn. I’m doing my job.

  “Sort of,” Sasha says. “But oh, Sara, don’t say that you’re sure he’ll love me when he gets to know me, please. I don’t think I can take it.”

  I smile, which is not easy. I manage it, but it feels a bit stiff.

  “There is a hierarchy out there at school, y’know?” Sasha says. “Even though it’s tempting to believe that all that matters is that you’re nice and kind and honest about your feelings.”

  “And where in the hierarchy are you, Sasha?”

  “Not right at the bottom,” she says, “but I’m not exactly at the top, either.”

  “No, of course. And where in the hierarchy is he?”

  Sasha glances out of the window.

  “Sara,” she says, “another police car just arrived.”

  I follow Sasha’s gaze. A third vehicle is now in the driveway, but sort of across it, so that it blocks the house from the road. Two people are getting out of the car, a man in police uniform and one with a bushy moustache in plain clothes, wearing a shabby parka. They walk towards the house. As we look at them I try to remember the last question I asked.

  “Sara?” Sasha looks at me. “Is everything O.K.?”

  I so want to say yes, but that would be a lie, and I can’t lie, not here in my therapy room, not to her, and not on a day like today when just getting in and out of the chair is hard enough. To avoid saying too much, I say:

  “There’s been an incident. It doesn’t have anything to do with our work here, but I understand it may be frightening, or upsetting, to see the police cars.”

  “What’s happened?” Sasha says.

  “It’s about a disappearance,” I say.

  Of course it’s no longer a disappearance, but I can’t bring myself to say what it really is. If I repeat what I was told on the doorstep yesterday it will become real. If I say it out loud, I might never be the same again.

  “It’s just, well, it’s my husband. My husband has gone missing.”

  Sasha’s eyes widen, her thick lashes sticking out into the air. Her eyeballs look as if they’re about to pop out of her head.

  “Your husband has disappeared?”

  “Yes.”

  I look out of the window. The two men who just arrived have entered the house. They did ring the doorbell, but it seems to me that they went in without waiting. If only Old Torp could have seen this, I think. In the end, his house really was besieged by the powers that be.

  “Sara,” says the teenager sitting across from me, “I know that you’re the psychologist, not me, but don’t you think it would have been a good idea to take today off?”

  There’s no answer to that – she’s right. Someone should have told me, but who, now that I’m alone?

  “I wanted to work,” I say. “And we had an appointment.”

  She looks at me, her gaze so full of pity that it seems impos-sible we’ll ever re-establish a professional relationship.

  “It’s O.K.,” she says, her voice bright and slow, as if speaking to a child. “We can talk another day instead.”

  The man with the bushy moustache and parka is in the living room. The policewoman from yesterday is with him, as are a couple of other officers. Moustache is in the middle of saying something when I come into the room; I catch the end of his sentence.

  “. . . so we need to ensure that forensics give us their opinion on that.”

  He has a broad dialect from the east of Norway; he is probably from a small village. His voice is flat and toneless, but the others hang on his every word with such intensity that he doesn’t need to raise it for them to hear him. It’s obvious that he’s their boss.

  He stops speaking when he catches sight of me, and the other officers turn and look at me, too.

  “Hello,” I say. “I was just going to get a cup of coffee.”

  The woman I don’t like shakes herself free from the moment, and says:

  “This is Sara Lathus. She was married to the deceased.”

  It sounds so peculiar – “married to the deceased”. A new status, I think. Not even next of kin. Married to the deceased. It sounds like a frightful position to be in. Moustache sets his body in motion and comes towards me with his hand outstretched. He stops just in front of me, but I don’t know what to do with his hand, it seems I’m no longer able to conduct myself in line with social norms. But he’s quick and efficient, I can see it in every step he takes, and it’s clear he doesn’t intend to be deflected by my listlessness. Without further ado he bends towards me, takes hold of my right hand from where it dangles loose at my side, squeezes it and says:

  “Gunnar Gundersen Dahle, but call me Gundersen. That’s what everyone ends up doing, sooner or later.”

  “Sara,” I mumble.

  He lets go of my hand. It hurts, I realise – he must have squeezed it hard. But at least I feel something.

  “So, Sara, I’d like to have a few words with you. Tell you a bit about what we know so far, and hear what you have to tell us.”

  I nod. So I’ll have to tell them what I know. That’s new to me. I’m not sure what kind of conversation I was expecting to have with him, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I would have to speak.

  “Is there somewhere we can go to talk?”

  “My office,” I say. “It’s above the garage.”

  “Excellent,” Gunnar Gundersen Dahle says. “Then we’ll go there right away.”

  Before we start our conversation I call Linnea, the patient I was supposed to see at eleven o’clock, and cancel our appointment. Gundersen Dahle and another officer, a red-haired woman in her late thirties, are in the room when I make the call. I don’t like it, feel under surveillance. I’ve never liked speaking on the telephone in front of others – not in front of anyone, not even Sigurd. I always went into the bedroom if I was going to speak to anyo
ne about anything but the most prosaic things. All conversations relating to my patients take place in this office. But Gundersen and his colleague showed no signs of leaving the room when I said I was going to call, and I don’t feel in a position to ask Gundersen for anything, so they’re standing here, listening.

  “Unfortunately I have to cancel today,” I say.

  “Oh, O.K.,” Linnea says.

  There’s a racket in the background, voices and laughter. She must still be at school. And there’s relief in her voice. This bothers me. It is much easier to cancel sessions with my patients than I thought.

  When I hang up, I see that a patient has called me and left a message on the answerphone. I play it back, pressing the receiver against my ear to prevent the police officers from hearing anything. Gundersen peers at a painting hanging above my filing cabinet, pretending not to listen.

  “Hi,” says a voice on the answering machine, “it’s Vera. I, I need to talk to you. Before Friday, I mean. There’s something I need to talk about. Can you call me? O.K.? Bye.”

  That’s strange, I think, Vera has never asked for an extra session before. I ask myself whether I’m curious, but feel nothing, only the void again, an empty gnawing from it.

  “Is this painting one of those tests you do on people?” Gundersen says. “Where you ask them what they see in it, and if they see their mother then it means, I don’t know, something or other?”

  “No,” I say. “It’s a Kandinsky print.”

  “I know nothing about art,” Gundersen says. “Do you, Fredly?”

  “No,” the red-haired officer says, and it seems to me that she’s suppressing a smile.

  “So, what’s happened?” I ask them.

  “We’ll get to that,” Gundersen says, turning his back to the painting, “but let’s start at the beginning.”

  He pulls out the chair from beneath my desk and sits down on it, slinging one leg on top of the other so the ankle balances against the opposite knee, his legs spread, as if making himself comfortable.

  I make a note of this. I ask a question, and he says that’s not where we’ll start. I also note that he’s the kind of person who chooses his own chair, and not even one of the two unoccupied ones that stand there, invitingly – no, he chooses a third chair, pulls it out from under the desk. We may be in my office, but he’s taken control of the conversation. I don’t know what that means. Maybe nothing. But I make a mental note of it.

  “Tell me about what Friday was like for you,” he says.

  I sit down in the left of the chairs I use in my sessions – I have no choice but to take one of them. Gundersen’s colleague leans against the door. I wonder whether this is a rank thing, that the subordinate remains standing.

  “It was an awful day,” I say.

  “Tell me about it,” Gundersen says.

  “Well,” I say, “Sigurd disappeared.”

  “No, no,” he says. “Tell me about the day. From the beginning.”

  I sigh, glance out of the window, through which I can see the police cars on my driveway. A week ago it was just another normal Monday in March. Gundersen says nothing. He’s said his part and now waits, confident that I’ll speak.

  “I woke up as Sigurd was leaving,” I say. “I don’t know what time it was, I was asleep, it must have been early. He kissed me on the forehead and said, ‘I’m going now, go back to sleep.’ So I went back to sleep. When I woke up he was gone.”

  Gundersen nods. Fredly leans against the door, scribbling on a notepad.

  “I woke up again around seven-thirty,” I say. “My first session was at nine o’clock.”

  “What did you do immediately after waking up?” Gundersen interrupts. I understand – the information he needs is in the details.

  I feel suddenly like Trygve, like someone who speaks in general terms, always avoiding the concrete, the specific. I pull myself together.

  “I showered,” I say. “I got dressed in the bedroom. I went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table. I ate, I don’t remember what, and drank a cup of coffee. Then I came up here – my patient was waiting for me.”

  Gundersen clears his throat in approval, and I think: there’s a capable psychoanalyst somewhere in this man.

  “Yes, and then I had another patient, and then it was time for lunch.”

  “Wait a second,” Gundersen says. “How long were you with the first one?”

  “Fifty minutes.”

  “So until 9.50?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Something like that?”

  “Within a minute or two.”

  “And the name?”

  “The name?”

  “Of the patient?”

  Now it’s my turn to clear my throat.

  “That’s subject to confidentiality.”

  Fredly looks surprised, raised eyebrows and all. She steals a glance at Gundersen, as if curious to see how he’ll solve this. He holds my gaze, and says:

  “We’re the police. This is a criminal investigation. Nothing is confidential.”

  “I’m a psychologist,” I say. “Unless you can prove that you will be able to prevent serious harm by knowing the patient’s name, I have a duty to keep it confidential.”

  The room falls silent for a moment, so that it seems as if my voice reverberates back and forth between the walls. Gundersen considers me with his grey eyes. Eyes that have seen it all, I think. I don’t look away, concentrate on returning his gaze, even though I’m quivering inside. The discomfort of standing one’s ground. Especially against men – and especially against those who are older than me. I remember some discussions at home in Smestad when I was a teenager, the few times I raised my voice, Pappa looking at me calmly and saying, “Oh Sara,” and the sense of wavering, fighting the need to give in and say whatever my father wanted to hear. It was Annika and Pappa who fought most often – I would hide until it had blown over. But right now, I have to stand my ground. I may have lost my husband, but I still have my profession, and I’m clinging to it as if it were a lifebuoy.

  “Sara,” Gundersen says, his voice soft and friendly, like thick cream, “think now. Before you do something stupid.”

  “I have a duty of confidentiality in matters relating to my patients,” I say. “Take it up in court, if you must.”

  He gives a deep and dramatic sigh.

  “O.K.,” he says, “but you do understand that we’re investigating a murder here? Sigurd was found with his face in the mud and two bullets in his back. There’s no natural explanation for this. It’s murder. And you’re refusing to give us an alibi for the morning of the day he was killed.”

  I look out of the window again, at the police cars. I suddenly feel unspeakably tired. I want to close my eyes, lean my head back against the chair and fall asleep. Let Gundersen carry on however he wishes.

  “I understand,” I say in a low voice, out into the air, as I try to prevent my eyes from closing. Gundersen sighs again.

  “So it’s 9.50. What did you do then?”

  “I wrote up my notes.”

  “And they’re also confidential?”

  “Yes.”

  Gundersen and his minion exchange glances. She notes something on her pad.

  “And then the next patient?”

  “At ten o’clock.”

  “And you don’t want to give us the name?”

  “No. I saw him too for around fifty minutes.”

  They exchange glances again.

  “And then?” Gundersen says.

  “Lunch. A tuna sandwich. Oh, yes, he’d called – Sigurd. While I was with my first patient. He left me a voicemail message.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “That he had arrived at the cabin. He was supposed to be going to Norefjell with his friends for the weekend.”

  “To Norefjell?”

  “Yes. That’s why I reported him missing.”

  Gundersen looks directly at his colleague for the first time. She nods, but sa
ys nothing.

  “I reported him missing,” I say, my voice a little louder now, “because he called me and said that he was at Norefjell with the guys, and because the same friends called me that evening and said that he hadn’t arrived.”

  “I see,” Gundersen says, now stretching a long, thin hand towards his colleague. “Sheet.”

  She passes him something; he fishes a cheap ballpoint pen emblazoned with advertising from a breast pocket and writes something down on the sheet of paper, which he rests against his knee. Fredly scribbles more, even faster, as if Gundersen has rebuked her.

  “So Sigurd called and said that he was at the cabin at Norefjell? What time was this?”

  “Just after nine-thirty,” I say, and it dawns on me that they’re going to ask to hear the message. “He said it was good to be there, and that he had to go because Jan Erik was messing around with some firewood. Jan Erik is a friend of his, one of the two guys he was supposed to go up there with.”

  “One of the guys?”

  “Yes.”

  “O.K.,” Gundersen says, “and did Sigurd say anything else?”

  “No. Just that they had arrived.”

  “And did you call him back?”

  “No. I mean, yes, but not right there and then. I called him after my last patient.”

  “Fine. So after lunch you had another patient?”

  “Yes. At two o’clock.”

  “And you don’t want to give us the name of this patient, either?”