by Viveca Sten
Anything was better than staying with the man who was breaking her down before Anna-Maria’s eyes.
“Are you OK?” Siri said, bringing Anna-Maria back to reality.
“Absolutely.” She blinked away the tears. “Something in my eye.”
She ought to be able to control her feelings after all these years, but sometimes it just wasn’t possible. They came over her like a tsunami, obliterating everything else.
She picked up her keys and locked the office door. “Is Mina eating properly?” she asked Siri over her shoulder. Either they didn’t eat at all, or they comfort ate the whole time. Moderation was hard when the abnormal had been normalized.
Siri shook her head. “Not really.”
“And the baby?”
“She seems to be looking after him well; he’s fine.”
That was a good sign. Sometimes, when things were really bad, the mothers sank into depression, leaving the child in even more of a mess.
Anna-Maria hesitated, then went along to Mina’s room. It had a lovely view over the water. The shelter was built on a raised foundation, so that even the rooms on the ground floor had a pleasant vista.
She knocked on the door, but no one answered. Could she hear sobbing from inside?
“Mina? It’s Anna-Maria. Are you awake? Can I come in?”
She waited for a few seconds, then opened the door. Mina was sitting on the bed with Lukas. Her eyes were swollen from weeping.
“Oh, sweetheart—how are you?”
Mina drew her son closer. “Not so good.”
Anna-Maria perched on the edge of the bed. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I can’t.”
“You can talk about anything here.”
Mina shook her head. “Not this.”
Anna-Maria gently patted her arm, and this time Mina didn’t recoil. There was something about Mina that reminded her of Malin. It wasn’t just the long blond hair and blue eyes; it was the trust that they both radiated.
In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, Malin had always believed that she could save Gustav from his inner demons if she just loved him enough. Anna-Maria had fought for her daughter and tried to get her to leave him, but when Malin became pregnant, Anna-Maria knew she’d lost the battle.
Malin had been so happy about the baby, totally convinced that everything would be all right when they finally became a family. Gustav would stop drinking and become a new man.
Anna-Maria clenched her fists and tried to push her grief aside. She had to take care of Mina now. “Sometimes getting things off your chest can make you feel better,” she said encouragingly. She took out a packet of tissues and passed two to Mina.
“Thank you,” she mumbled, and blew her nose.
Anna-Maria stroked her hair. “What’s happened?”
“My mom’s in the hospital.”
Poor kid. As if everything she was going through because of her husband wasn’t enough.
“It’s my fault.”
Had Anna-Maria heard correctly? “How can it be your fault?”
“Andreis went to my parents’ house. He threatened them, and my mom was so scared that she had a heart attack . . .”
The words were almost inaudible. Anna-Maria had encountered many violent men and was well acquainted with their patterns of behavior, but things rarely went this far. “We have to contact the police,” she said firmly.
“If we do that, he’ll kill them.” Mina’s voice broke. “Believe me, he’ll do as he says. He always has done. It will only make it worse if we go to the police. You can’t tell anyone.”
CHAPTER 38
Nora switched off the bedside lamp on her side. Jonas was reading a paperback he’d brought back from the US. He was much more of a night owl than she was, and often found it difficult to get to sleep early.
“Good-night, darling,” she said with a yawn. “Aren’t you tired?”
Jonas patted her shoulder. “Not yet,” he said, turning the page.
Nora was just dropping off when Jonas cleared his throat.
“I’ve been thinking about Thomas,” he said.
She’d told him she’d seen Thomas several times over the past few days, and that he’d seemed kind of lost.
“Do you know if he and Pernilla have sought help—counseling, or anything like that?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Sometimes it can be good to talk to an outsider.”
“Mmm.”
“It gives you a chance to dissect the relationship. There are lots of options if you need support; even local councils offer marital advice and talk therapy these days.”
Nora sighed and tucked one hand under the pillow to find a more comfortable position.
“I mean, if you keep irritating each other, it’s not easy to find your way back without help,” Jonas went on. He didn’t appear to have noticed that Nora was half asleep. “When all the things you loved become a constant source of annoyance, it can really wear you down.”
Nora found it difficult to imagine Thomas seeing a therapist; opening up to a complete stranger wasn’t exactly his thing. She wasn’t sure if it was her thing either, to be honest, but maybe she was just being old-fashioned?
“Good-night,” she murmured again.
When she and Henrik went their separate ways, neither of them had even considered therapy. Then again, nothing would have persuaded her to forgive Henrik or take him back. It had been years before she could even have a normal conversation with him without the anger welling up inside her. They’d never reached the stage of irritating each other on a daily basis, because his infidelity had gotten in the way.
Jonas put his book down. “One of my colleagues with the airline knows all about this kind of thing. Or rather his wife does. She specializes in couples counseling, and she has her own practice. We talked about it on the way back from LA yesterday.”
“I’m sorry?” Nora propped herself up on one elbow. Jonas had a sheepish look on his face.
“I don’t mean I was gossiping about Thomas at work, but the topic came up, and there’s a lot of time to talk when you spend ten hours together in a cockpit above the Atlantic.”
“I see.” She didn’t feel sleepy anymore.
“Ingemar said his wife always begins with the same question: What made them fall for their partner in the first place? Why did they fall in love?”
He drew Nora close, and she rested her head on his chest.
“Apparently there are two ways of reacting, which immediately tells the therapist whether there’s any hope for the relationship or not. One category immediately remembers the reason why they chose their partner; their faces light up when they talk about happier times, which means the therapist knows there’s something to work with.”
The warmth of his body passed through Nora’s thin nightdress, and the smell of his aftershave enveloped her. “What about the other category?” she asked, even though she could guess at the answer.
“They’re so trapped inside their own bitterness that they can’t or won’t remember. They have no desire to talk about old times. They’re seeing a therapist to pick over perceived injustices, not to look for solutions.”
“What happens then?”
“Well, there’s not much hope, according to Ingemar’s wife. It’s about finding a way to separate without damaging the relationship even more, which is particularly important if there are children to consider.”
Nora adjusted her position so that she could look at her husband, his brown eyes and his light-brown hair, which was often just a little too long at the back of his neck. He hadn’t changed much over the ten years they’d been together.
She still knew exactly why she’d fallen in love with him.
They’d met only about six months after she and Henrik had separated. Jonas had rented her old house when she moved into the Brand villa on Sandhamn, and they’d had dinner together a few times at the local restaurant.
She’d been so unhappy back then, struggling
because she felt guilty about the split, in spite of the fact that it was Henrik who’d had an affair. Her self-esteem, both as a woman and a mother, was at rock bottom. She couldn’t imagine meeting someone new.
Then Jonas turned up, and everything was different.
Through his eyes she changed, became someone she liked much better than the person she’d been during the last few months with Henrik. For the first time in years, she’d felt appreciated. With Henrik she’d gotten stuck in tired, old gender roles, taking care of most of the housework even though they both had demanding careers.
Plus sex with Jonas had been fantastic.
“In that case I guess we belong to the first category,” she said, smiling up at him.
He returned her smile. “If Thomas and Pernilla are interested, I’ve got Ingemar’s wife’s phone number,” he said. “She’ll see them at short notice if they mention my name. He could call her tomorrow.” He nuzzled Nora’s neck.
“Let me think about it,” she said. She wasn’t sure she’d bring up the idea with Thomas. He might take offense, feel she was meddling. However, the situation between him and Pernilla could hardly be worse.
“It can’t do any harm,” Jonas murmured as his fingers set off on a journey of discovery over her collarbone and down inside her nightdress.
He seemed to have lost interest in his book, but Nora was definitely wide awake.
CHAPTER 39
A pale half moon was shining into Mina’s room. She wished she could sleep, but it was impossible to settle. The other women and children had gone to bed hours ago; it would soon be dawn. Lukas was snoring quietly in his crib, wearing a borrowed pale-blue sleep suit.
Mina longed for home, for her own bed and her own pillow. All the little things she took for granted, but were now out of reach. She wanted to dress Lukas in his own clothes, not the shabby items Anna-Maria had dug out for her. She wanted her own underwear.
Her eyes followed the shadows. The silvery landscape outside was beautiful, the sea was hardly moving, and the treetops looked like ink drawings against the sky.
It was all so peaceful, but she couldn’t relax. She pushed back the covers, got out of bed, and went over to the armchair by the window. She tried leaning her upper body against the armrest. It was hard to find a comfortable position; her broken ribs made their presence felt, whatever she did. Her body hurt, but that was nothing compared to the pain in her heart.
Mom.
Her father had called a few hours earlier to let her know that the situation was unchanged. Mom was still unconscious, and the doctors couldn’t give a prognosis.
If it weren’t for Lukas, Mina would happily have swapped places with her mother. Every night she prayed that she would go to sleep and never wake up again.
There had been a period when she loved the nights, when the darkness hadn’t been terrifying. The evenings had been her own special time with Andreis. She couldn’t wait to go to bed with him, to feel his strong, muscular body close to hers. He always slept naked, and she would fall asleep with his warm skin touching hers. Even when they were sleeping, they had proved that they belonged together, lying hand in hand.
She had felt so safe.
They would talk for hours. He had wanted to know everything about her, every detail of her life. He asked a thousand questions, almost as if he couldn’t quite believe that she’d chosen him. She’d never met anyone like Andreis, never been so deliriously in love, so certain that she’d met The One.
A cloud passed in front of the moon, and Mina shivered in the darkness. She shifted in the chair, but it didn’t help.
Gradually Andreis had started to talk about his childhood in Bosnia, before the war broke out and destroyed his life. He told her about the hens, scratching around in the yard. He’d had friends who lived in the same village. They’d climbed trees and swam in a small lake nearby, picked plums that were used to make the plum brandy everyone drank in the local area. She had tasted šljivovica on one of the rare occasions when they’d visited his mother in Nyköping.
Life had been simple, without excess, but they’d had everything they needed. Now almost all of it was gone.
Andreis had never said much about what happened when the war broke out, but Mina knew he’d seen things no child should see, terrible atrocities that left deep scars.
Sometimes he was tormented by nightmares. He would talk in his sleep or cry out for help, either in Bosnian or in Swedish. Occasionally he would wake, terrified and drenched in sweat, eyes shining with tears, but those eyes would fill with hatred when he realized it had only been a bad dream, and that he was still alive when so many were dead.
She would know he’d been dreaming of the flight from Bosnia, and she would try to comfort him with her body, caressing him back to sleep and whispering gentle words in his ear to ease his pain.
She had loved him the most when he showed his vulnerability.
He couldn’t bring himself to mention the nightmares the following day, but Mina knew that the memories were always there, and would never leave him.
She would have liked to discuss it with her mother-in-law, but they met so rarely, and had never really gotten to know each other. Selma still lived in Nyköping, and it was hard to chat on the phone because her Swedish was very poor. Andreis didn’t like going back there, although he did call his mother almost every day. She was often depressed and missed her homeland, in spite of the terrible things she’d experienced there.
Selma had never really recovered from their flight.
If Mina tried to bring it up with Andreis, he told her to mind her own business. His mother had too many harrowing memories from the war; there was no point in digging it all up again. As long as she took her pills, she was fine.
Only Andreis’s brother, Emir, was in Stockholm. He was the member of the family Mina had seen most often since she got together with Andreis, and Emir didn’t like her. He never had, and he didn’t bother hiding his feelings. Mina was wary of criticizing him; Andreis would do anything for his kid brother. He would never take Mina’s side against his own flesh and blood.
Her ribs were hurting too much; she couldn’t stay in the chair. Laboriously she got to her feet and went in search of a painkiller.
Her phone was vibrating on the nightstand. She’d switched it to silent, but left it on in case her father called.
A message from Andreis. She didn’t want to read it, but she couldn’t help herself. She immediately recognized the building in the photograph: the Southern District Hospital. Where her mother was. He’d managed to find out where the ambulance had taken her.
It was impossible to escape from him; he would never let her go.
The image grew in front of her eyes until she felt dizzy. The phone vibrated again, the same message as before:
Come home.
Bosnia, January 1993
It was still dark outside when Andreis was woken by the noise, a loud rumbling as if a terrible thunderstorm were passing overhead. The room was illuminated by flashing lights that came and went.
Emir had also woken up and started yelling.
The door flew open and his mother rushed in. She picked up Emir and shouted to Andreis: “Quick, we have to take cover!”
She was still in her nightdress, and Andreis ran after her, barefoot in his pajamas. Dad didn’t seem to be home; Andreis couldn’t see him.
His mother opened the cellar hatch in the kitchen, where a narrow ladder led to a cramped space that was used to keep food cool in the summer. There were no lights down there. Andreis stared into the pitch-black hole.
“Go on!” His mother was still holding Emir.
“I’m scared!”
“Get down there!”
“Aren’t you coming with me?”
“There isn’t room for us as well—we’ll hide in the pantry. Move!” She sounded beside herself.
Andreis knew he would die if he clambered down that ladder without his mother. “I don’t want to, I want to stay with
you,” he whimpered.
The garden lit up, then there was a bang that made the whole house shake.
His mother slapped him across the face. “Get down there now!”
Andreis stared at her. She’d never hit him before; she’d never even grabbed him tightly by the arm.
Emir was yelling at the top of his voice, mouth wide open.
Light filled the kitchen, followed by an explosion. The roar was deafening, and it was accompanied by a loud whistling noise that hurt Andreis’s ears.
“Go!”
Andreis scrambled down the ladder, convinced that he would never see them again.
His mother replaced the hatch, leaving him in complete darkness. He curled up on the cold, damp earth floor. Something scuttled past his foot, and he tried to make himself even smaller.
“Please, Mom,” he whispered. “Please let me out.”
He couldn’t stop the tears from pouring down his cheeks, even though he was a big boy of six. He squeezed his eyes tight shut. There was a horrible musty smell; he tried to breathe through his mouth.
The dampness soon penetrated his thin pajamas, and he began to shiver. He wrapped his arms around his knees and rocked back and forth. He was breathing faster and faster, but somehow he couldn’t get enough air.
Panic spread through his body.
If the house were struck by a grenade, no one would find him. Mom and Emir might already be dead. Dad didn’t know he was down here.
He was buried alive in the darkness. He would never get out.
The noise above his head went on and on and on.
Andreis opened his mouth and screamed.
Monday
CHAPTER 40
Nora had just flopped down at her desk when Leila stuck her head around the door. They were due to set off for Runmarö shortly, as soon as Nora had had a cup of coffee and checked her emails. She’d rushed around getting Julia ready for school and making sure her daughter had everything she needed in her backpack, only to discover at the last minute that Julia was going on an excursion. Jonas had already left, of course.