The Therapist

by Helene Flood

  “When did you get back here?”

  “Sunday afternoon. I stayed with Annika for a while, and then I came home.”

  “O.K.”

  Gundersen is still thinking, drumming his fingers against the kitchen worktop, and I sit there, look over at Annika, then turn back to face him.

  “Why do you ask?” I say.

  “Routine question,” he says. “And how about the telephone call, I mean, you told me that you called Sigurd?”

  “Yes. I called him again and again, right up until his mobile ran out of battery.”

  “O.K., and when was that?”

  “I called him on Saturday morning. While Julie was here. It went straight to the automatic message – you know, the person you have called is unavailable, something like that.”

  Gundersen nods.

  “You see, Sara,” he says, “we’ve found Sigurd’s mobile.”

  “Oh?”

  Annika and I stare at him.

  “Yes,” Gundersen says, calmly. “It was out in the garden.”

  “In the garden? Here?”

  “Yes. Fredly found it this afternoon.”

  Silence descends for a moment. I stare out into the fog, at the gathering twilight, and think of the last time I called Sigurd, from up in the bedroom, as Julie wandered around in the living room downstairs. Of the footsteps in the loft that night, the open front door.

  On Thursday evening Sigurd told me that he was going to try to get to Thomas’ by six-thirty the next morning, so they’d arrive early and get a full day on the slopes. I’ve returned to this little exchange so many times that the line between what he said and what I now think he said is starting to blur. Can I really know for certain that my memory of this conversation reflects its actual course, just as I’ve always been able to rely on my recollection of events? Is it not possible, for example, that he may have been talking about six-thirty in the evening instead? That I thought he was talking about six-thirty in the morning, and so have made this into the memory? Can I know that Sigurd undoubtedly, indisputably, said that he was going to pick up Thomas? Can I now be sure that I didn’t misunderstand? Or that I’m not muddling the details based on all I’ve learned since our conversation? By recalling the memory so often have I changed it from one occasion to the next, imperceptibly, but nevertheless enough to make it different over time? Have I ground it down, honed it into shape, without even realising that I was doing so?

  Without looking at Gundersen, I say:

  “How’s it going with the forensic report – when will that be available?”

  “Yes, that was the other thing,” Gundersen says. “It’s back. He was killed on Friday. The cause of death is a gunshot wound. The man who was found is indeed Sigurd, no doubt about it.”

  I think about that Friday, of his telephone ringing and ringing. Of the message: “Hi, love. We’re at the cabin.” The document tube, the curtains, the pans.

  “Can I see him?” I say.

  “The body?” Gundersen says.

  “Sigurd,” I say. “Can I see him?”

  “It’s been several days,” Gundersen says. “I’m not sure it would be advisable.”

  “But can I?”

  Gundersen shrugs.

  “Of course I can’t deny you,” he says. “But as I said, he’s been dead for a while. The decomposition process is rapid.”

  “I want to see him,” I say. “As soon as possible.”

  “Oh, Sara,” Annika says, but she doesn’t protest further.

  “In that case,” Gundersen says, “I’d recommend that we make arrangements for this evening.”

  *

  The basement of the Institute of Public Health is tiled. I follow a woman in green scrubs with a surgical mask pushed up onto her head in the way people push up their sunglasses. Annika has driven me here, but is waiting upstairs. She looked at me, her face pale and twisted, and said, “I don’t think I can come down there with you.” It’s O.K. I’m walking alone, following the woman in the green uniform.

  I’m not afraid. I’m not sure what I am – eager, perhaps. I feel awake. I’ve made a decision. I remember in detail the sight of Old Torp, know what happens to a body when it’s been left in a loft for three weeks. I also know that I need to know.

  Sigurd’s telephone was found lying in the garden. His doc-ument tube has turned up. Someone is walking around in my house. Yesterday, as I lay on the floor of my office, gripping the kitchen knife so hard that my knuckles became sore and bloodless, I thought, why don’t I call out to him? Sigurd?

  But why would I call out to him? He’s dead. I’m not superstitious: when you’re dead, you’re dead. I don’t believe it was an apparition’s footsteps creaking down the stairs, an apparition that ran away leaving the door wide open. But in a tiny, uncertain place at the very back of my mind, I thought, what if it is Sigurd? And today they found his mobile.

  So they found it at Nordberg. It doesn’t mean that Sigurd has been here. It’s the easiest thing in the world, to take a dead man’s phone and throw it into the bushes outside his house. Or if you’re running away in the middle of the night, you might even drop it.

  But it’s so hard for me to believe that Sigurd is gone. The answerphone message. The things I’ve learned about him since then, his lies. The woman who waited for him outside his office. Atkinson. Sigurd is dead, and I’ve only just learned that there’s so much I didn’t know about him. The staff at the Institute of Public Health – even they can make mistakes, can’t they? But I won’t be mistaken. If I see with my own eyes that it’s Sigurd, then it’s true. So that’s why I’m here. To be sure.

  The woman opens a door into a room. Contrary to what I had imagined, it’s quite pleasant here. It’s well lit. No dark, damp cellar, no deep cabinets full of bodies, no frightening, perverted doctors. The woman accompanying me is Annika’s age, she’s wearing gold earrings and is wide-hipped in the way that many women are after giving birth. The room contains a sink, some kitchen cabinets and a counter, in addition to a metal table on which something is lying, covered by a kind of sheet. Had it not been for this table, I think, we could be anywhere. Throw in a dining table and some chairs and it could be the canteen of an outpatient clinic.

  But the metal table is here.

  The woman hands me a surgical mask.

  “It can smell a bit,” she says.

  I put on the mask; the woman pulls hers down from her hair.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” I say, and only now do I realise that I’m nervous.

  This is the moment. Either it’s him, or it isn’t. The woman turns down the sheet.

  It’s indescribable. If anyone were ever to ask me about this moment, there’s little I’d want to say about it. He’s lying there with his eyes closed. He’s dead, has been for several days, and there’s no doubt, no doubt at all, that this is Sigurd. Looking at him this way, I remember the details I haven’t recalled, or wanted to think about, over the past few days. His brown eyelashes, light at the tips. The sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of his nose. How the dishevelled hair he never had properly cut curls at his fringe.

  There is no life in him. It doesn’t look as if he’s sleeping, as I’ve heard people say. It looks as if he’s dead. The blood has vanished from his face. As I look at him, a sob bursts out of me, surprising both me and the woman in green – it isn’t followed by tears, it simply hangs there, all alone. I already know that I’ll remember this for the rest of my life, how I stood here and saw Sigurd dead. I feel no sense of relief, no kind of closure or catharsis. Only the awareness of the situation’s severity. It will never be possible to forget what I have seen.

  Life potentially begins on the day a woman leans towards a man and whispers in his ear, shall we try? We’re sitting on the sofa. It’s a day like any other. We have just eaten fishcakes, are watching
T.V. An advert featuring a dolphin comes on.

  “I hate dolphins,” Sigurd says.

  “Nobody hates dolphins,” I say.

  “I do,” Sigurd says.

  “Why?”

  “They think they’re so cute,” he says, “swimming around as if everybody loves them. Look at me! Look at how cute I am!”

  I laugh. I kiss him.

  “I mean it,” Sigurd says. “You think I’m joking, but I mean it.”

  I put my arm around his neck. Lean towards him.

  “Sigurd,” I whisper into his ear, “shall we try?”

  Our first attempt takes place that night. As Sigurd tightens his embrace around me I think – this is it, now you’ll be made, my little one.

  The following month we have sex every night of the week in which there’s the possibility. Now, now, now. I work out when I can take the test, but the night before I discover a trace of blood. I stare at the stain, not understanding – surely it can’t be? We’ve done it so many times. Tried so hard.

  The month after that I manage to take the test before I see blood. The line in the test window is alone, blue and strict, like a prudish schoolmistress.

  Many couples try for a long time – the average is six months, I read online. There’s no need to panic until you’ve been trying for a year. I don’t tell anyone, only imagine what I’ll say when it’s a fact, when I’ve seen two lines crossing the window of the test. Imagine how I’ll tell Annika, as if in passing, oh by the way – cue the radiant smile – I have something to tell you. Wonder what I’ll say to Ronja.

  But not this. Not this nothing, this transitional stage. We’re trying – that’s not news. It’s nothing, an empty promise – and hardly even that.

  Three months pass. The summer holiday arrives. Margrethe travels to Italy with her friends and says to us, make sure you take care of Grandpa, go up there and see him once a week or so. We go up there on a hot, late-summer day and find him in the loft.

  By the time we move to Nordberg, we’ve been trying for six months – the average, as it happens. I read online that many couples try for longer. Involuntary childlessness isn’t a disease, roars an opinion piece in the newspaper, and I fold it and throw it out, can’t read it, don’t want to know how this needn’t be the end, how rich life without children can be, how I should be thankful for what I have. Sigurd is working like crazy on my office, and it’s in that week that I go out there to him. He’s standing there, in his overalls and safety glasses, holding his grinding machine. It takes a little while before he sees me, and I stand silently in the doorway, watching him, head bent as he sands the wood below the sloping roof, everything in him focused on the new floors. And I think, shall I do it now? Seduce him, in a way, tempt him – coax him up into the bedroom, is that what I’m going to do? Me in my jogging bottoms; he in his work clothes? He doesn’t know I’m here, doesn’t know that I’m watching him and thinking, isn’t it a miracle that it happens at all? That in between everything else, people find the time to make love to each other?

  Then he looks at me. He turns off the machine, lifts up his glasses and takes off his ear protection.

  “Yes?”

  He has dust from the floor in his fringe. His lips are split and chapped from sitting out here. He thinks I’ve come to give him a message, he’s waiting – yes, what is it? I stand there in my sweat-pants and seducing him suddenly feels like an impossible task.

  “Nothing,” I say. “I just wanted to say I’m going to bed.”

  “O.K. Goodnight.”

  Sigurd is doing all this for me – these floors, this office. I go upstairs, shower, get into bed. Lie awake for an hour, for two. It’s gone midnight. Still no Sigurd.

  My sleep is fitful. I keep waking with a start and listening – is someone here? I’ve dragged a chair in front of the door; in my hands I hold the kitchen knife. I hear a creak, a car driving down the road outside; at one point I hear a child crying. I fall asleep again, wake a little later. Drift in and out of sleep.

  Eight months have passed and still nothing. Our attempts during the past couple of months have been half-hearted. Sigurd is finished with the office, but there’s still so much more to do. The kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms. He’s busy at work, too. He gets home at around six o’clock, eats dinner in front of the T.V., and then starts hammering away in the kitchen. I’ve started my practice, but it’s slow-going. During the day I surf the Internet, seeking fertility advice. Eat fatty fish and citrus fruits. Avoid alcohol and coffee. Put a pillow under your bum after sex; try to do it in the morning.

  Our lives revolve around the house. I work and live here, almost never leave it. Sigurd disappears off to work every day, comes home again in the afternoon or evening, and then works late into the night. His face is tired; his skin grey.

  It’s the right time again, that golden week. Sigurd is scraping wallpaper off the walls of his study in the basement. I put on a nightgown – appropriately short, passably sexy – and shake my hair loose before I go down there. Strips of wallpaper are strewn across the floor, everything he’s been able to tear off with his hands. Now he’s scraping – the sound makes the hairs on my arms bristle, like the sound of cutlery against ceramic crockery.

  “Sigurd?”

  He turns. Glue in his hair, safety glasses on his nose.

  “Do you want to come upstairs with me?”

  “I thought I’d keep going with this for a bit.”

  “But it’s the right week,” I say in a small voice. “We have to do it now.”

  “Right.”

  He pushes the glasses up onto his head; rubs his eyes. He stretches, then comes over to me. His steps are heavy. He stops, leans an arm against the door frame. Stands so close to me that I can see the tracks the glasses have left in the skin of his face, the red furrows, just like those left by the pillows on the mornings we woke together in Bergen.

  “I’ve been giving that some thought,” he says. “I was just wondering, how would you feel about putting it on hold for a while? The baby thing?”

  All the air seems suddenly sucked out of the room. I stand there trembling in my nightgown.

  “Put it on hold?”

  He swallows. He looks at me with his grey-blue eyes, the mole beneath the left.

  “We’re exhausted right now, Sara. We’ve both just started working for ourselves. And then there’s everything that needs doing on the house.”

  “But this room,” I say, feeling my voice thicken, the tears coming.

  Here I stand, in my short nightgown, my hair loose.

  “Just for a little while,” he says. “Just until we’re settled at work, and until the house is finished. Or at least more finished. Hmm?”

  He strokes his hand across my cheek. I swallow down my tears, am at least not going to stand here snivelling in my nightie.

  “I’m dead tired,” Sigurd says. “I’m running on empty. I just don’t have the energy right now.”

  “O.K.,” I say. “I understand. We can wait a while. But not too long.”

  “Of course not,” Sigurd says. “Just until we have our heads above water.”

  I sit on the edge of the bed, up on the second floor, and try to figure out whether I’m sad. It’s not as if I don’t feel a certain sense of relief, too. I’ll at least be spared all the dutiful fucking, the monthly defeats, the angry blue line. We can take it easy for a while. Make love when we want to. Get the house finished. And who knows – maybe it’ll happen without us even trying. That’s what all the blogs say. You try for years, and then suddenly, when you least expect it. I lean back, surprised. That would be good, too. To live in a newly renovated house as my belly grows bigger. Just wait a while, little one. You’ll be able to come soon, and when you do, everything will be ready for you.

  Wednesday, March 11: Empty surfaces

  Someone has been in the house again. I real
ise it the moment I come down the stairs – something is different. As I turn my gaze on the kitchen, I see what it is: it’s the fridge. Sigurd and I have pictures hanging there – some of us, some of Annika’s boys, a few postcards and a couple of menus for restaurants that deliver. Now they’re all gone. The fridge door is bare, clean and white, uninhabited. In addition, as if to emphasise that someone has been here, all the fridge magnets have been moved to the fridge’s top right corner. I stare at the fridge door for a second or two, the time it takes me to comprehend all this, and then I scream.

  I’ve reminded myself of it again and again – Sigurd has been killed – but I only really accept it now that I have seen him with my own eyes. Someone has moved the photographs on our fridge door during the night, and I know for certain that it wasn’t him. This means that it’s a stranger, but who could it be? Who else other than the person who shot Sigurd? A murderer has been in my house. Might still be here. So I scream, as loudly as I can. Then I turn, rush down the stairs, unlock the front door and run out.

  As I come out a police car pulls into the driveway. Fredly is at the wheel, and from the passenger door steps the policewoman who was here on Sunday to inform me of Sigurd’s death – the woman I thought looked like a typical bitch from the west side of the city. They’re carrying paper cups of coffee and are about to discuss something, I think, when they see me. They look shocked, both of them, which isn’t so strange considering that I come running towards them in my dressing gown, barefoot on the wet lawn still strewn with clumps of snow. But I see them and think only – salvation. I’m probably still screaming.

  It’s Fredly who comes to my rescue. She must see what’s about to happen as I come closer, or at least her instincts are sharp, because she drops the coffee cup – it hits the grass, milky coffee running out. I throw myself against her, and she holds me.

  “What’s happened?” she says.

  I am unable to speak. I sob, gasping for breath, almost crying but without tears, shaking with cold and fright and unable to put together a single sentence. I don’t look at the west-side bitch. I feel only Fredly’s shoulder against my cheek as I lean against her, shaking, letting her hold me until I calm down and say: