A CHILD MADE TO ORDER: gripping psychological suspense

by Piotr Ryczko

  Noon

  Viola wrenched her body into her car as she attempted to start the engine. For some unexplained reason, the brand-new leased Audi failed her miserably.

  Her hands shook as she hit the dashboard. As Viola’s inner frenzy flooded her body, her gaze stumbled upon Stine’s piercing eyes. The old woman moved towards her. Held out something in her hand.

  But Viola was done. Done thinking. Done talking. The last thing she needed was to stay here. And as everything in her screamed escape, she pummelled at the dashboard again. And, somehow, the engine finally started. Relief spread through her body, as the car spun out of Stine’s yard.

  As Viola drove away, she threw a glance at the old woman in the rear-view mirror. Was she holding something in her hand? Was that Viola’s purse Stine had been attempting to give her?

  No matter. She would deal with this when she got home.

  Chapter 9

  Evening

  When Ronny got home he found Viola sitting in the hallway. Perhaps sitting was the wrong word. She was somewhere halfway between taking off her shoes and her winter jacket. And her clothes still lay strewn all over the floor, nothing packed. It seemed as if Viola had forgotten she had arrived home. Or that she had stuff to do.

  When he slid closer to her, he noticed an emptiness about her. She just sat there. Transfixed.

  “What’s going on?” Her only answer was an even deeper silence.

  His questions were mostly met with an answer. A positive candour. Sometimes on a superficial level, when she was at her busiest, but he was prepared to forgive her for those occurrences. Especially since she had her ways to make him laugh, to engage his mind, and sometimes even to warm his heart.

  Yet this time, there was nothing but an impenetrable wall. A blankness he had never seen before.

  “Hon?”

  When she finally surfaced from some deep crevice, her eyes spoke volumes. A flash of pain resonated in his body as he glanced at her.

  Then, without a single word, she grabbed his hand and led him into her work room.

  * * *

  The video was blurry, recorded in a hurry and maybe even in great distress. It was caught through a phone that had been placed temporarily on the night table in some nondescript place. It could be a hospital, maybe a clinic. But in the background, the windows were covered with iron bars that resembled a prison more than a medical institution. The lighting was sparse. But maybe that was the whole point. It was probably done in secrecy, and maybe even at great risk.

  A woman’s hand stuffed her phone onto the night table and the lens immediately framed a child. The boy was about two years old, and with his barely open eyes and weary body, he struggled against being woken up at this late hour.

  “Puhleeeze stop. Sleep...” he mumbled. The woman hushed him into silence. She whipped her head around and checked if anyone was coming. When no one appeared, she sat down beside him.

  By now Viola had watched this video countless times. At first she was jolted with enthusiasm, but as she replayed the scene, time and time again, her mind began to batter her with questions.

  Was there something strangely artificial about the whole act? Or was she just imagining this? No. She should listen to her gut feeling. The whole thing felt a little awkward. Maybe even forced. As if it was staged. Made up for the camera. And, somehow, the kid sensed this as well.

  Viola had trouble deciding if this was due to the late hour, or maybe the inherent danger. But the woman had no time for niceties. She was way too preoccupied with the recording.

  “Who am I, hon?” she asked as she came up to the child’s face. It was a peculiar question.

  The kid began to weep silently. She tried to hush him, then she caressed him, not to soothe him but to coax him into silence. And the tenderness came off sounding tense and skewed in an imposed way.

  “Please, who am I? Hon?” This time it was more a request than anything. And the kid’s sobbing began to be clearly audible. The woman glanced around herself. She was panicked.

  “Please just say it, Pumpkin. Who am I? Please, hon!” she repeated, as if she was running out of time.

  “Mummy. You are Mummy. I want home.” The kid began to cry out loud. The woman kissed him and thanked him for the help.

  Then she turned her face towards the lens. Viola knew that this move was supposed to leave no doubt as to the woman’s identity. Reveal who she was for the world.

  When Viola saw this for the first time, she had felt a pang of recognition. This woman had a few more wrinkles, and her expression revealed she was terrified, but there was no doubt who she was.

  Marianne.

  But when Viola watched this stream, time and time again, at each consecutive pass, murky doubts crept into her mind.

  The space was dark and unlit. The woman’s face was barely visible. The video compression deteriorated the quality even further. Everything about the recording was questionable. And as she watched it now, Viola felt at a loss, not really sure of anything any longer.

  * * *

  Viola felt a mess brewing inside herself as she stopped the recording from her laptop.

  And Ronny just glanced at her.

  “I know what you are thinking, but don’t! You don’t want to go there. Okay?” He struggled with the words because she saw right through him. Even if Ronny didn’t know the whole truth about her, he knew about her breakdown, and that it was somehow connected to the woman they had just watched. What he didn’t know, Anne had probably filled in. His eyes told the whole story. He was afraid for her. Worried she would do something rash.

  Still, she couldn’t help it. Something inside her screamed she should stop this right now. But then another part pushed her in the opposite direction, a place where she would find answers. No matter the consequences. And at this point, even if this was semi-substantial proof at best, Viola had to convince Ronny to help her.

  But she also knew that even before this argument had started, Ronny had already lost it. And it was not because she had a better plate of arguments, but simply because she was Viola.

  She never forced him into anything. But she knew she held an eerie power over him. If push came to shove, what were his limits? What would he do for her? These thoughts scared her; how easily he had assumed this role.

  Her shrink claimed that love could only exist if it was properly cultivated, and not dominated. He also claimed that her personal borders should be dynamic, changing according to the situation and the relationship at hand. She listened to him and appreciated his words for what they were.

  A simple delusion.

  Simply because she knew better.

  Her life had carved it into her, taught her that to be submissive was to be taken advantage of. And if she could prevent anything, it was exactly this kind of bullshit. She didn’t like the sound of the word compromise. It really never existed in her vocabulary. This was the good stuff, breastfed from year zero by her mother. And as the years went by, maybe she had grown a little bit softer and more malleable.

  But a front was still a front.

  Her shrink suggested in a subtle manner that this might be the root of her suffering. This unrelenting control she kept firmly draped over her true self. And maybe that was the reason she never knew what love was. Maybe it was time to let go. She nodded repeatedly and congratulated him on the precise dissection. But even before she left his office, the only words grinding away in her mind were, Screw you.

  Viola’s thoughts were whipped back to Ronny and the task at hand. And this time, she decided not to force herself on him. It was worth a try anyway, despite the obvious front.

  “This woman’s mitochondrial disease, and this boy, Ron. You realise that... it just can’t be...” She tried a soft argument with him. The most reasonable one.

  Ronny nodded. He knew all the facts about the disease. But she saw it in his face. This time, he was not going to give in that easily. And at first this grated her nerves. But then it hit her.

 
; She realised this sudden newfound stubbornness surfaced only because he cared for her. Didn’t she have enough proof of that from yesterday, when he offered to come with her to Syria?

  “But how can you even be sure this child is hers? Based on this video, it’s conjecture at best. Drop this!” He shook his head in dismay as he issued the outright order. She realised this was the first time he had ever done anything like that.

  Late evening

  “For God’s sake, Viol! That’s twenty years! You’ve worked your ass off to get that Middle East job. And you are gonna throw it all away?”

  The quarrel had blown way out of proportion. She expected resistance, but not all-out war. Not with a man who had been the epitome of compassionate silence for the last two years.

  However she tried to explain it to him, he turned it against her. If it had been at some other time, in some other context, she might have found it sexy. If there was something about him that ticked her off, it was his malleable nature. Way too plastic for her taste. But now, this newfound defiance just exhausted her.

  “It will wait,” she snapped back.

  “Wait? Anne wait? You kidding me? She will drag your ass through the mud. All in the name of the family’s reputation.”

  She fell silent. He couldn’t be more accurate in this assessment. Her mother would not only drag her ass through the mud, but would see to it that everybody knew about it. She didn’t need to go further than Silje to confirm her worst suspicions.

  But this was not the time to agree with her partner. She needed his understanding. No. She needed more. She needed his help, because a plan had already begun to form in her mind.

  Maybe diplomacy wasn’t the right way to go about this. This softness began to grate on her nerves anyway.

  “Ron! That’s enough. Look at her! It’s not a question of if! I simply have to.” She pointed at Marianne’s terrified face, then locked gazes with him.

  “So, what are you saying?” He leaned back. As if to ready himself for the coming impact.

  “I wasn’t asking for your permission.” There. She had said it. It certainly felt more right. More truthful to herself. She didn’t feel good about it.

  She knew there would be repercussions, or some other yada about how relationships weren’t built on this kind of communication, but all of this was just what her ex-shrink would have told her.

  It was her life to screw up, anyway.

  And the moment she uttered the words, all the power drained from Ronny. Well, almost.

  “Based on this thing... You will never find her.” He scrambled with the last attempt to stop her, as he pointed at the recording.

  Night

  Viola ached at the sight of Ronny’s exhausted face. Her brilliant idea had turned out to be mediocre.

  It was the middle of the night, and they had been up for six hours straight, trying to find any clues in the video material. Anything that would help them locate Marianne.

  The surroundings in the recording turned up nothing. There were no signs, text, clothes with logos, or any other clues that could give them any kind of hint where Marianne might actually be.

  She saw the inevitable doubt creeping into his face. Six hours ago, she had to force him to help her. Rarely had she been such a stubborn bitch. Yet, in spite of this, he didn’t air any of the hesitation he was feeling once they got started. Not even once.

  She had been through most of the material at highly magnified resolutions, but the recording had been compressed for Net streaming, turning it into a pixelated sea of ambivalence.

  She was so close to finding her. Viola let go of the trackpad and let out a crushing sigh.

  Ronny looked across at her. She knew he wanted her to succeed. He wanted her to find Marianne. Powerless to do any more, he came up behind her, kissed her cheek, and began to massage her neck. His hands felt great, and right in that moment she could have fallen over from exhaustion. But her mind churned, crunching away at a possible solution. This couldn’t be right. If this was Marianne, and it was a message, she was way too smart not to think about leaving a clue.

  Viola jolted up. She magnified the captured QuickTime stream in her window. Then zoomed in on the image behind Marianne’s kid. She pointed behind the iron bars in the window.

  “See? There! The helix?” Her eyes lit up.

  Ronny sat up and leaned into the screen. He squinted his eye, then the other, but finally just shook his head.

  “Viol, there is nothing there. Just some stuff. Blurry stuff...” he whispered with all the reservation he could muster.

  “Stuff! That’s a sign. A helix sign. You know, like the DNA. Can’t you see that?” She was on the verge of screaming. But the words weren’t hostile or aggressive. For the first time in six hours, she was bursting with excitement.

  She realised one needed a bucket load of imagination to see it was a sign, but she smelt victory nonetheless. She disregarded his doubts with a smirk, then captured the screen. Zoomed in, sharpened, cropped. Then inspected the area behind the iron bars. After some fast Photoshop work, the image was beginning to show some potential.

  The helix sign materialised into an actual sign – sort of.

  Ronny straightened up. He was impressed.

  Meanwhile, she uploaded the image to Google’s image recognition software. Immediately, a myriad of images followed. The result of her search. Ronny’s eyes flashed up at the results.

  “God. This hurts my overgrown ego.”

  “What?” She was way too preoccupied with scanning the pictures to catch onto his meaning.

  “You being way smarter than me,” he finished with a groan. She chuckled, but then stopped abruptly.

  “Damn. Look at this!” she whispered and nodded Ronny to the screen.

  “A casual family selfie on the street. See what’s behind them?” She pointed to the building far behind the family members.

  And there it was. The same logo that was in Marianne’s video. A shiny symbol on a modernist building in the background.

  Viola inspected the metadata of the picture. Then threw the geo-location into Google maps. The result flashed up a small town named Gjøvik. Located about a hundred kilometres from Oslo, the city had about 20,000 inhabitants.

  When she zoomed in closer on the geo-location, she landed on the outskirts of the city. And there it was. A clinic. The medical facility appeared under the name InviNordica. And from the first glance at their web page, she learned their main business was treating infertility through in vitro.

  “Gotcha!” She scribbled down the address, then threw herself at Ronny and slobbered him with a slew of wet kisses.

  Before she knew it, the chair cracked under her excitement, and they found themselves on the floor. As her hands tugged at his shirt, her breath pulsed against his mouth. She couldn’t remember the last time she had wanted him this bad.

  Sex, to Viola, was mostly a necessary evil. It was done for him, because it was an item on the to-do list, most often the last one. Only because she had to, and rarely out of a genuine want. It served a purpose. A necessary glue for their relationship.

  And if anyone ever told her there was something wrong with her sex drive, she would tell this person to shove the twenty-years-of-infertility up where there was less light.

  Yet now, her body pulsed with lust. She felt electrified as she clawed at his chest. But then he held her back.

  “Hey. Do you really think I will let you anywhere near this place? Forget it. Not without some police protection.”

  She eyed him, considering whether she should take this argument further.

  Making her decision, she wrestled loose from his grip, and ripped open his shirt. As she swayed hard against his chest, she heard no more protests from him.

  Rene

  She had to be patient with him, she knew that all too well. But where there should have been progress, she was met with only hurdles. And where she had been promised great things, there was only disappointment. Rene had to lower
her expectations, lower the bar even more.

  Rene hunched even closer to Trond and stared into his eyes. She reminded herself that her proximity assured him he was safe. At least, that’s what the doctors said. And she had to listen to them. It was the only assurance she got.

  He was barely four, and although his face was full of bursting radiance, she had to push away that gnawing feeling she had inside herself. There was something inherently off about his face, something she attempted to forget each time he twinkled at her. Yet this time, as his grin widened, she was struck by the subtle misalignment of his features. The nose just a little bit too low, the eyes unevenly spaced, and the brows just a little too big. But she pushed away these facts and reminded herself that no one paid attention to these things. It was way too vague to be noticed, anyway. And the eeriness that prodded at her and reminded her that he was different, those were only her feelings betraying her.

  After all, he was her son.

  She slid even closer to him and looked over at his hand, which was scribbling away on a few paper sheets.

  “Concentrate, Pumpkin. Please, concentrate,” she whispered to him and glanced down at the drawing. On the paper were countless mathematical fractions, divisions, radians, and degrees.

  “But, Mum, can I play?” he pleaded with her, eager to get up. But Rene caught him by his collar and gently pressed him back onto the bench. Then she reminded herself one more time she had to be patient. She had to make it worth his time, motivate him, inspire him.

  “Oh, sweetie. Didn’t you want to be a mathematician when you grow up? Remember our goal? My... your dream?” she said and beamed at him as she shoved the paper back into his lap.

  Lately, he had learnt a new trick. He expressed enthusiasm where he had none, and as soon as she let him off the hook, he was gone, off to play somewhere else, or even worse, doing stuff that had nothing to do with their common dream.

  As she gazed into his eyes, she saw right through him. He was avoiding their homework. She felt a sting of impatience at the boy’s lack of involvement in this important matter. Why couldn’t he see what she was doing for him?