Playdate

by Alex Dahl

  16

  Elisa

  I hear his voice long before I’m able to extricate myself from the hazy clutches of medicated sleep. Something is in my hand: my phone, still. I open my eyes, but I can’t immediately identify my surroundings. White and beige striped curtains, rectangular shards of light scattered across the ceiling by a futuristic chandelier, piles of Lego magazines on a low table in front of me; this is my living room and I’m on the sofa. It’s light outside. My husband is talking.

  ‘Lucia,’ I whisper, my tongue thick with the aftereffects of the sleeping pills. This is the first time I’ve slept properly since they took my baby. ‘Lucia! Has something happened?’ I try to sit up and search Fredrik’s wild, bloodshot eyes.

  ‘There’s been a sighting! She was caught on CCTV on the morning of the 20th. They’ve only just uncovered the footage. In Sweden. She was with a man. We need to head down to the police station. Hans Gundersen and Haakon Kjeller are on their way down from Oslo.’

  I rush around the house getting ready while Fredrik fills me in.

  ‘It was taken at a Shell gas station near Karlskrona on the south coast. About eight hours’ drive from here. There’s a ferry that runs from there to Poland. The police believe she may have been taken across on that.’

  ‘What about the woman – was she with them? And Josephine?’

  ‘No. Lucia appears to have been on her own with the man.’

  My nails sink into the pale flesh of my palms. Who is the man, what has he done to my girl and why does he want her? She is seven years old and unaccounted for in the presence of a strange man. A seemingly normal mother has handed her over to this man, who could be taking her anywhere. But why?

  ‘Why?’ I scream, and I can’t stop screeching it, over and over, rushing from room to room like a wild animal. I pick up the heavy blue vase Fredrik’s mother gave us for a wedding anniversary and throw it across the living room. It shatters against the wall, leaving a dent in the wood paneling. I stand staring at it and this snaps me out of my desperation. I begin to pick up the shards, but Fredrik stops me and holds me so close I can’t move.

  ‘God help us,’ I say, into the warm crook of his neck.

  He pulls back slightly. ‘What?’ he says, body alert.

  I say nothing else, just focus on syncing my breath to his.

  *

  There is no mistaking her, though the images are grainy and taken from above. Lucia is pictured trying to run across the concourse from a white van towards the twenty-four-hour gas station. In the second image, the man, who was refueling, drops the fuel pump from his right hand and grabs Lucia with his left hand. In the third, he is seen holding her tight like a baby, his left hand sliding the door of the van back open. Lucia is wearing her navy pajama bottoms with white stars, and a fluffy red sweater I’ve never seen before. The man is wearing a baseball cap, but from the way he tilts his head it appears he is bald underneath it. He’s heavily built and has the short, thick neck of a boxer. A man that big could crush Lucia in his hands like a porcelain doll.

  ‘We’re running the plates across the system at the moment,’ says Gaute Svendsen. ‘And we’re running the images through a facial recognition system.’

  ‘What about the woman?’ I ask. ‘Line?’

  ‘There haven’t been any confirmed sightings of her yet. We’re now working on the assumption that she was used only in the initial stage of the abduction and is no longer with Lucia. She’s most likely known to the police if that is the case. She would have been recruited on the street or through criminal acquaintances, so when we’re done here we’re going to take you through to the database to look at a long list of previous convicts that fit the profile.’

  17

  Marcus

  He stands at the window, looking out. It’s just a normal window, though it doesn’t open from the inside. His room is pleasant but sparse, like a room at a Premier Inn on the outskirts of a commuter town, the kind of place he sometimes used to crash for one night after meetings before flying out again the next morning. He has his own no-frills bathroom with wall-mounted soap dispensers that are refilled weekly, and a mini fridge under his desk where he likes to keep a couple of Fantas and some chocolate from the tuck shop.

  His room looks out at a solid wall of rain-lashed pines. Who needs fences with nature like this, he sometimes wonders, though of course the fences are there, beyond the trees, where he can’t see them. It’s true what they say: Norwegian prisons seek to evoke repentance by measures other than barbed wire, floodlights and concrete. Here, the guards, who call themselves guides, knock if they need him, and they pretend that Marcus can choose whether or not to unlock the door to his cell, which is always referred to as his ‘room’. He addresses the guides by their first names and they treat him more or less how a junior employee could expect to be treated in a company.

  A storm is moving in, heavy rainclouds blackening the sky above the forest, vicious winds flattening the tops of the trees. The prison nestles in forested hills that fringe the town and that further north swell into snow-capped mountains. Most of the rooms face directly onto the forest, but the canteen offers panoramic views of the valley, as though to purposefully show the inmates the freedom they’re missing and should be striving for.

  And yet, Marcus doesn’t miss the outside world the way he might have once imagined he would. He doesn’t constantly think about the restrictions, nor does he pine for the life he used to lead. When you’ve lost everything, what is there to miss? The one thing he does find himself craving is the feeling of tearing through a summer field in the dewy purple light of morning. That he could still have, outside. Everything else is lost.

  *

  On the way back to his room after breakfast, Marcus stops at the news stand. All four major national newspapers are running the same photograph on their front pages. A little girl, angelic-looking with a sweet gap-toothed smile and soulful brown puppy eyes.

  ‘Abducted!’; ‘Snatched!’; ‘The Playdate Tragedy!’; ‘Lucia (7) MISSING!’ read the headlines. Marcus grabs the closest newspaper, VG, and flicks to the second page, a sickening feeling spreading out in his gut.

  The shocking abduction of Lucia Blix (7) in Sandefjord has sparked an international manhunt for the perpetrators, believed to be connected to a notorious Eastern European trafficking network.

  He drops his gaze from the newspaper to the stripy moss-green carpet of the inmates’ recreation room, his heartbeat suddenly loud and fast in his ears, his hands shaking violently. Feeling the attention of one of the guides on him, he is careful to walk slowly over to a seating area, where he continues reading.

  Lucia Blix was taken by a woman posing as a mother with a child of a similar age on Friday 19 October. A major breakthrough in the case came recently when it was discovered that Lucia was captured on CCTV early on the morning of Saturday 20 October near Karlskrona, Sweden, in the company of a man identified today as notorious criminal Mikulasz (Mikko) Vrcesk Eilaanen of Ruisa, Estonia.

  Eilaanen has previously served time both in Finland and Sweden for crimes connected to the so-called Vicodius network, which is known for its involvement in numerous international offenses, including trafficking, drug dealing, sexual abuse, assaults and murder.

  Marcus forces his eyes away from the shocking article, and from the shy smile of the tragic little girl, to another picture on the opposite page, of the girl’s mother, Elisa Blix. The picture seems to have been taken at a press conference: she is clutching a photo of the child, her tear-lashed face contorted into a grimace of absolute horror. He moves his gaze to the last picture, a posed family portrait: mother and father, son and daughter. He stares at each face in turn, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, before closing the newspaper, his hands trembling uncontrollably.

  18

  Elisa

  Every day is the same as the last. And every day passes so slowly, like we’re suspended inside a bubble where time simply doesn’t exist. I don’t sleep much
at all. I lie in bed counting out the minutes of the night. In the morning, I don’t gently stroke Fredrik awake, the way I sometimes used to, letting my hand travel slowly across the familiar landscapes of his skin. I just get up and sit at the kitchen table drinking black coffee, staring at the darkness outside. I wake Lyder, feed him, try to listen to his uninterrupted chatter, then I drive him to nursery, slowly, because it has rained heavily all week and the roads are slick with icy water, and because my hands shake. I don’t walk him into the building like I used to, before. Instead, I pull up right in front of the gate and make my son, my sweet little five-year-old boy, walk to the door by himself while I watch from the car. He doesn’t seem to mind this, but even if he did, he’d have no choice – I can’t bear the questions, the gentle squeezes on my arm, the rounded, tear-brimmed eyes staring at me. I feel them anyway, even through my cocoon space: the stares of the other parents dropping their kids off.

  By the time I get back home, Fredrik has gone to work. He had a week off and we agreed at the end of it that it would perhaps be best for everyone that he went back to the office. Every day, I sit on the sofa staring at the black TV screen or the bare trees outside, or the news on my phone, the seconds trickling past impossibly slowly, until eleven o’clock when the police call. It is always Gaute Svendsen who rings. Today, it’s almost ten past eleven when he calls, and the ten minutes I’m left waiting are like a long, painful life.

  ‘Hi, Elisa, it’s Gaute.’

  ‘Any news?’ I ask this before even saying hello, though I know that they would have called me already, eleven or not, if there were any news at all.

  ‘We’re still trying to establish whether there might be any CCTV evidence of Line. It seems impossible that she should have evaded every camera. We’re looking at airports and ferry ports and gas stations in the days leading up to 19 October as we believe she only arrived in the area on the Tuesday, as you know. Unfortunately, unless there’s an incident within forty-eight hours, these tapes are generally taped over. Also, it’s problematic that we have absolutely no leads as to where she came from.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. I just want to put the phone down so Gaute can spend his time looking for Lucia, not updating me on non-existent progress.

  ‘How are you holding up?’ He always asks this, though I imagine the answer must be pretty obvious.

  ‘Fredrik went back to work on Monday. I… What am I supposed to do?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything you can do but wait. I can’t imagine how hard that waiting must be, Elisa. Just know that we are putting everything we can into finding Lucia.’

  I lie on the sofa, just staring at the last few orange leaves clinging to the black, rain-lashed branches outside.

  After a long while, I get up and stand by the window. The rain has let up but the street is wet and covered in rotting, trampled leaves. The little square windows of the other houses on our road are dark: everyone is at work. I wish I was up high, in an airplane or at the very least in a tall building, then there’d be a chance that I could be looking at wherever Lucia is now, without knowing it. The police believe she’s in Poland or further east, where the network they think is holding my child operates.

  I’m not sure I believe it. I feel her, close. It’s the one thing that gives me some comfort – as though in her absence a new channel of communication has been established between my child and myself. I can actually feel her. For that reason, I know that she’s alive. And for that reason, I can hardly sleep; I need to be feeling for her every minute to know that she is still out there. If I go to sleep I risk waking up and not feeling her at all, and I would know then that she has been taken forever. Of course, I do occasionally pass out, falling into a brief doze on the sofa, or losing count of the minutes deep in the night when Fredrik sleeps fitfully beside me, or closing my eyes for a moment too long when I read Lyder his bedtime story.

  I move away from the window and walk into the kitchen. It’s a mess and I could use this waiting time to clean it up. It would give me something to do, a few minutes filled. I pick up a sponge and stare at it. It’s cold and wet. My throat constricts and I know I should let myself cry. But I don’t. I put the sponge down and wipe my hand on my jeans. I stand still, expecting tears to come, but they don’t. Instead, my throat feels tighter and tighter and I have to bend forward to draw a breath of air. For so many years, I’ve suffered from anxiety. I’ve spent so many nights awake, frozen by the terrors in my own mind; so many days barely functioning or cushioned by diazepam. I’ve had moments when I would have done anything to escape the sheer hell of being me, and this makes me want to both scream and laugh out loud, because all of that was merely a dress rehearsal for what I am living through now.

  I have done bad things – I can’t escape that fact. I’ve hurt people. I’ve made choices incompatible with being a decent person. Perhaps I deserve bad things in return. But my child does not.

  I am slow, sluggish, separated from the churn of the world, but on the inside I’m on fire. I’m in a suspended state of blind, black panic, a cruel filter through which everything must be experienced, so that even the most mundane of tasks, like wringing out a sponge, seems an impossible undertaking. I am held as if underwater in an iron grip, snatching the smallest bubbles of air, tearing at the cold darkness surrounding me.

  I get in the car, like I sometimes do, and drive around the neighborhood as if I’m looking for someone, which is of course precisely what I am doing. My foot feels heavy on the gas pedal. I drive slowly down our road, keeping my eyes on the brown, wet tarmac, avoiding the decorations I know are there in all the windows: skeletons strung from curtain rails, electric skull tea lights, clumsily carved pumpkin faces. This evening, all the lights will be lit, the sound of children’s rhymes and laughter will fill the street, and our doorstep will be busy with little ghosts and wide-eyed vampires clutching plastic buckets full of sugar. In Lucia’s room, on the back of her door, hangs a new costume, a pretty pink and green dress torn to shreds and splattered with fake blood. It came with a white lace-veiled hat with a plastic knife handle protruding from the middle as if the child wearing it has been stabbed right through the head.

  *

  The rest of the day drags on. I take a diazepam to combat the flashes of pure panic and the desperation and terror of the last twelve days. Now is not the time for sobriety.

  I collect Lyder and place him in front of the TV screen with a bowl of macaroni, peas and ketchup. It’s just after four o’clock and it’s getting dark; Fredrik will be arriving home soon. I will open several party-size bags of Haribo candy and empty them into the bowl that’s shaped like a giant claw, picked out by Lucia from Nille’s homeware department the day before she was taken. I will help Lyder into his mummy costume. I will splash cold water on my face and take another diazepam. I will stand at the door with Fredrik and Lyder, waiting for the doorbell to ring – this area is so full of families with children that there’s little point sitting down in between the groups of trick-or-treaters. I will obsessively run my hand across my back pocket where my phone is, ringtone always set to loud, imagining the moment when it finally rings unexpectedly and Gaute Svendsen’s booming, excited voice fills my ear and he says the words I need to hear: We’ve found her – she’s here! Lucia’s been found! Hurry! Hurry!

  *

  Lyder reluctantly steps into his mummy costume. Fredrik drinks a beer, then another, straight down, standing at the kitchen counter, scrolling through his phone. I take a diazepam, and a third of a Klonopin too. My arms feel so numb and leaden I can’t tear open the candy bags and have to use scissors. We wait for the doorbell-ringing to begin, drifting aimlessly from room to room. But it doesn’t. Nobody comes because everybody knows what’s happened to the Blix family. Fury burns white hot in my stomach. Lyder starts to eat the candy and neither Fredrik nor I stop him.

  ‘Come on,’ I say, bundling my little mummy boy into his down jacket. I can tell he doesn’t want to go outside – he, too, is
struggling with how different and broken everything is, but he lets me lead him by the hand without protest. We walk down the shingle path and onto the main road. There are many families out: moms and dads chaperoning sugar-crazed kids. I turn back towards our house and see Fredrik standing with his back to the window, probably still drinking and scrolling. Lyder and I start walking behind a group of children and their parents. Suddenly I catch sight of a little girl with long blonde hair holding the hand of a heavyset man and I stop in my tracks. Lyder tugs at my arm and says something but I can’t move even a centimeter. I’m rooted to the spot and all I can see is the girl, getting smaller and smaller, merging with the night, led away by the man. I scream.

  19

  Selma

  Selma’s eyes hurt after so many unbroken hours in front of the screen at work. She lies back on her bed, stroking Medusa and looking up at the unblemished grey ceiling. She could head over to the boxing club or go for a quick run – it’s a particularly cold evening for October, but she could do with the fresh air.

  She gets up and stands a while at the window, looking down onto Ullevålsveien and St Hanshaugen Park behind it. The sidewalks are unusually busy, and Selma remembers that it’s Halloween. Tiny ghouls and witches rush around shrieking and laughing, swinging bucketloads of sweets, held back from the crawling traffic by mothers and fathers with blinking devil horns and half-heartedly painted faces. When she was a child, Halloween wasn’t yet celebrated in Norway; it wasn’t until her late teens that she started seeing jack-o’-lanterns and kids trick-or-treating. She’s glad it wasn’t a thing when she was little; after losing her mother, she became preoccupied with death and for years she had nightmares about skeletons and ghosts. At night in her dreams, a bleeding, sinewy, skeletal hand would emerge from the ground, or from a book or a wall, throttling her, and she’d wake, thrashing and shrieking, held tight by her father. She’s in no doubt that she would have had panic attacks if people dressed as monsters from the underworld had rung the doorbell every Halloween.