Playdate

by Alex Dahl

  ‘I know this is a lot to take in. But we have all the time in the world now. No one will ever find you here or take you away from me again.’

  I scream and scream, but she keeps talking.

  ‘Shhh, sweet girl. Stop screaming. No, stop it, you need to settle down or I will have to make you go to sleep. Shhh, that’s right. Shhh, just breathe. I don’t expect you to understand right away.’

  She places her hand over my heart, hard, pushing me into the bed. She is closing her eyes but tears are running down her face and I don’t want them to drip down onto me. My heart is beating very fast against her hand and she keeps saying, ‘Shhh, sweet girl, close your eyes and let your heart remember.’

  I try to scream more but my voice is used up so I grunt like the animals in the woods.

  31

  Elisa

  I know things now, things I could never have imagined I would ever come to know. I know that the body will keep going and going and going, breathing and doing its daily businesses, and resting, even, in spite of the heart thinking it isn’t possible. It’s been more than two months now. For every day that passes, we are less likely to ever see Lucia again. It’s the elephant in the room, the vast abyss between Fredrik and me, the painful, unavoidable truth. I’m not stupid, I’ve read the statistics. Gaute Svendsen at least has the decency to recognize this. He still calls every day at eleven. He still hasn’t brought any news. None. She is gone.

  I know now that there are people out there capable of doing evil things to other people and perhaps getting away with it. I know this better than most people. A twenty-one-year-old man from Oppegård had the idea of writing a ransom note to a family whose daughter had just been taken from them. Why? Who would do such a thing? Once in police custody, he said it was a joke. They let him go, saying he was unlikely to become a repeat offender. A woman posed as a fellow mother at my child’s school. She sat with me, told me little snippets from a fabricated life, and looked me in the eyes, all the while knowing that she would take my daughter from me. Why? It is all I ever think about – why?

  My own mother believes I deserve this living hell.

  A man, who, judging by what the police have managed to uncover, had a rough start in life as an orphan in Tallinn and grew up to become a drug dealer and gang member well known to the authorities in several Eastern European countries, helped to transport a child of seven across country borders to an unknown destination and destiny, only to disappear without a trace.

  Why? Why would someone do such things? And yet I know better than most people that most of us are capable of terrible things.

  I think a lot about the woman who called herself Line. I wish she really was dead and decomposing in the cold earth next to that wretched house in Mölleryd, her beautiful face turning sunken and waxy, then rotten, then unrecognizable. The police insist that the woman found in the ground there must be the same woman who took Lucia, but I know in my heart she isn’t. I refuse to believe that the woman I spoke to and spent time with was actually an Estonian criminal and drug addict just pretending to be a middle-class Norwegian mother. Her accent was flawless, and there was nothing about her demeanor that made me suspect for a single second that the polished house and sweet child weren’t hers. Their faces weren’t even similar, regardless of how good at disguising herself she might have been. ‘You’d be surprised,’ Gaute Svendsen said to me, shaking his head curtly. ‘They can be unbelievably cunning and sophisticated.’

  Besides, what about the little girl? I believe the little girl she referred to as ‘Josephine’ was that woman’s own child and not merely a decoy. She seemed like a normal little girl. A girl who was confident and secure, well taken care of. Mothered. But how could she be if her mother was a child-snatcher with connections to the kinds of networks responsible for taking Lucia?

  The partially decomposed body of Silwia Truja was found by police tracker dogs, buried in the garden. If the girl really was just a prop, she could have suffered the same fate in a different location, but I refuse to think about that because if there’s one little girl dead in the ground, then most likely there are two.

  In the weeks after they found the body, Fredrik and I were quietly and cautiously optimistic. Now that there’d been one breakthrough, surely another had to be right around the corner?

  But the days dragged past. One after the other. And today is 23 December and we’re facing Christmas without Lucia. The baby I wanted with every cell in my body, whom I carried in my womb, transfixed by the wonder of it all, whom I gave birth to and breastfed and swaddled and held and loved – so fiercely – is gone. She’s alive – I have to believe that, I will always believe that, and I can feel her still, though for every day that passes, the connection I sense between us feels increasingly fragile.

  I spend my days lost in the dark recesses of my mind, turning that why? over and over and over. There are people in this world – millions of them, in fact – who believe that we get what we deserve, that the world is governed by a cosmic law of karma, as inescapable as it is true. These beliefs aren’t that far removed from what my mother holds to be true. You do something bad, and that thing will generate negative energy which will come back to find you, albeit in a different shape or form. Is losing Lucia karmic retribution for the bad things I have done? Though the thought tears me to pieces it also makes sense on some gruesome level. I know it will consume me until nothing remains, nothing but a bitter, dangerous core.

  *

  Downstairs, Lyder is watching a Spider-Man cartoon. His face is wan and pale in the flickering light from the TV. It’s late, almost bedtime. Fredrik has gone to his parents’ house to help them extend the table for tomorrow’s festivities. Growing up, my family never celebrated Christmas, and neither did Fredrik’s. Since leaving the church and becoming grandparents, his parents have started to embrace the tradition, and it’s been one of my favorite things about parenting – introducing such a beautiful tradition to my children. Fredrik’s two older sisters and their families will also be there with us tomorrow. We will eat roasted pork belly with hard, glazed crackling and listen to the sounds of the children playing with their new toys in the next room, but all I’ll be able to hear is the silence of the one child missing. We will try to follow the conversations around the table, and we will graciously accept the heartfelt wishes that Lucia be found soon. We will breathe and blink and talk and walk, we’ll unwrap presents and raise our glasses and drive home and unlock the door to the empty house, and we’ll lie awake all night beside each other, seeing different incarnations of Lucia in our minds.

  ‘Come on,’ I say to Lyder. ‘Let’s do the tree.’

  ‘We have to wait for Daddy!’

  ‘No, I think it would be nice to surprise him.’

  Lyder slides reluctantly off the sofa and follows me over to the terrace door. The big Christmas tree is out there, leaning against the side of the house, acclimatizing.

  ‘It’s ready to come inside, now,’ I say. ‘Why don’t you help me?’

  Lyder holds the door and I grab the trunk about halfway up the tree. Its pine needles sting my palm and I drag it through the door, a sprinkle of needles and snow landing on the floor. When I’ve placed it into its stand, helped by Lyder, I hand him the familiar baubles we’ve collected over the years, one by one. He is unusually quiet and seems to take the task of hanging the glass ornaments on the tree very seriously.

  ‘Is Lucia never coming home?’ he asks, keeping his eyes on a high branch, where he is attempting to place a knitted Santa Claus figure by standing on a chair, me supporting the bony small of his back as he stretches.

  ‘I don’t know, darling,’ I say. It’s the first time I’ve said this. My son has asked this question many, many times since 19 October, and I have always told him that of course his sister is coming home. Soon, I’ve always said. Soon.

  ‘What color is Lucia’s hair?’

  ‘Oh… Don’t you remember?’ I ask, my voice emerging in a weak whisper.
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  ‘No… Was it yellow?’

  ‘Yeah, kind of. Blonde. Almost gold.’ I can feel that soft, golden hair beneath my fingertips in this moment, like she’s here and I’m stroking her hair – I just can’t see her.

  ‘I think she’s dead.’ Lyder speaks in the casual way children do, but his words strike me with such force, I can’t move even a centimeter. I force myself to slowly remove my hand from his back. I lock my eyes on a purple glittery reindeer decoration sitting in its box, little black dot eyes staring back.

  ‘Please don’t say that,’ I whisper. I take several deep breaths, reminding myself that it was just a careless comment, not a statement of fact. Children say the most awful and strange things sometimes. I will myself out of my shocked state and stroke the back of Lyder’s head gently.

  He turns to look at me. His face has changed without me noticing. It’s thinner, like he’s only just now shrugged off the last of toddlerhood. His eyebrows have darkened, and his hair, which was almost as light as Lucia’s in the summer, is now chocolate brown with golden streaks. He is nothing like her, and exactly like her at the same time; although their features are entirely different, the ghost of her is there in his expression, and in his deep brown eyes. As I so often have, I look for something of Fredrik in him. In Lucia, it was there in the twinkle of her eye, the sweet, slightly crooked smile and the fine, silky blonde hair.

  With Lyder it is different. As he grows older, shrugging off his bland, chubby babyhood, and his features sharpen, all I can see is him.

  My love.

  My hand, which was holding a beautiful jade bauble out to Lyder, begins to tremble and the bauble drops to the floor and shatters, spraying a vivid splash of glitter and glass across the parquet.

  32

  Selma

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ says Alf, her father, and ushers Selma inside, taking her cabin-sized suitcase from her hand.

  She kisses his hot, red cheek and kicks off her UGG boots before unzipping her down jacket and releasing Medusa onto the floor from her travel basket. The cat looks around before huddling against Selma’s legs. She picks the cat up and follows her father through to the open-plan sitting room with the kitchen at the far end. He has laid the table for three, like he always does. A plump Christmas tree with red and gold plastic baubles from the supermarket stands to the side of the balcony door. Selma pulls some presents from her handbag and puts them alongside the ones that are already under the tree. Medusa studies the tree carefully, as though she can’t compute that her humans have brought it into the house. Then she goes and sits by the balcony door, staring out at the snow and the dark night. Selma wonders if she remembers being a little kitten on the other side of this door, looking in.

  Her father hands her a glass of Prosecco and they stand smiling at each other for a long moment, neither knowing where to begin their conversation.

  ‘So,’ he says, before taking a big gulp from his glass, ‘did you have any trouble getting here?’

  ‘No. It was fine, really. Less than an hour from door to door. I got caught in a bit of traffic coming through Asker and Lier, but otherwise the drive was pretty smooth.’

  ‘I thought you might have come while it was still light,’ he says, and Selma feels a pang of guilt at the thought of him here alone, waiting for her, pottering about his little apartment, listening to Drammen’s many church bells ushering in Christmas.

  ‘It’s still only four, Dad. And I’m all yours until Thursday.’

  ‘Good,’ he says, refilling her still almost full glass, then his own, before turning up the soft flute music playing from the television. ‘I’m glad you’re home.’

  They sink into the deep beige leather sofa that has always stood facing the TV. When she was a child she used to do front flips on it when her parents weren’t looking and she still remembers how, once, her mother caught her at it and stood watching her with a stern expression, then couldn’t help but burst out laughing. She runs her hand up the soft leather behind her back. Her mother’s back must have pressed against it so many times; might it still hold something of her – a gentle slouch or impression?

  ‘How’s work going?’ says her father, jolting her from her thoughts.

  ‘Yeah, great,’ she says, then reconsiders. It’s her father, after all. They’re close. ‘Actually, it’s not that great. I don’t know, I just feel like I’ve really stagnated recently. There are more and more cuts – just the other day, they let Kai-Marius go. He’d only been there a couple of months less than me. Made me feel like I might be next, you know?’

  ‘They wouldn’t let you go, would they?’

  ‘I never used to think so. Olav has always seemed really happy with me, but you know what they say, you’re only as good as your last article. And this autumn I literally put everything into the kidnap case, Lucia Blix, but… nothing. We didn’t get anywhere with it at all. It’s like she just vanished. And people want news, new angles, exclusives and all that, and there just hasn’t been a thing.’

  Her father nods thoughtfully. He, like everyone else in Norway, must have his own theories about what happened to the little girl. ‘You know, with cases like that, it seems to me that they’re either solved pretty much straight away or never. Like Therese, for example.’ His gaze moves away from the TV screen, on which a long line of dancers dressed like candy canes are twirling and leaping to Tchaikovsky, and out through the window to the myriad glimmering lights of Drammen. He’s referring to Therese Johannessen, the nine-year-old who disappeared without a trace less than ten minutes’ walk from this apartment a few years before Selma was born. Everyone in Norway, and especially in Drammen, knows the images: the little girl’s mischievous, gap-toothed smile, the mop of dark hair, the grey block of flats dominating the hillside in the suburb of Fjell, where she lived, the grass-lined concrete pathway where she was last seen, skipping on her way home. Therese, like Lucia, dominated the national headlines for months after her disappearance, and is still occasionally featured now, so many years later. Will that be Lucia’s fate, too – will she become a fading photograph, a child frozen in time, always innocent and smiling, forever gone?

  ‘What do you think happened to her?’ asks Selma, watching her father’s broad, open face.

  ‘Therese?’

  ‘No, Lucia Blix.’

  ‘Aren’t they fairly certain she was taken by that Eastern European network?’

  ‘It seems like she was, yes. But the question remains – why? Why her?’

  ‘It just doesn’t bear thinking about. What they might do to a little girl like that, what she must have experienced. It almost makes you hope they just killed her straight away. Any other fate could be worse than death. Much worse.’

  ‘I’m totally certain she’s alive,’ says Selma. ‘And that’s what makes this case hard to give up on, even though Olav won’t let me spend much time on it any more. I’m convinced she’s alive and that someone somewhere knows something. People don’t actually disappear without a trace. It’s just that the traces are well hidden.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Alf, stroking his silvery beard. ‘I guess it must be really hard to accept that a case most likely won’t be solved when you’ve been working so intensely on it.’

  Selma nods and finds to her annoyance that her eyes are stinging with tears.

  ‘She was only seven,’ she says after a long moment. ‘Seven. I know how it feels to be separated from your mother at that age… I really thought I could help her somehow. That I’d see patterns that other people can’t, that a revelation would suddenly appear to me. I know it sounds ridiculous when I put it like that, but it’s true – I believed it. There’s something that doesn’t add up, Dad. Something strange, but I just can’t quite put my finger to it.’

  ‘Selma, it isn’t your job to solve the case. It’s your job to report on the progress of the people whose job that is.’

  ‘I know that! But you know how I see and feel things and connections that other people often can’t or wo
n’t see. You know that. But this time I just can’t seem to come up with anything that could shed new light on it. Nothing.’

  Her father knows her well enough not to bother with any meaningless phrases intended to make her feel better about the Blix case. Instead, he tops up her now empty glass and they sit in silence for a long while, lost in separate thoughts, watching the dancers on TV. Eventually Selma feels the tension and stress of the last two months beginning to melt away. She is relieved and comforted to be here, in her childhood home, with her father and Medusa, about to celebrate Christmas, her father’s legendary pinnekjøtt steaming on the stove, the mutton bones filling the apartment with their deliciously distinctive salty smell.

  *

  They take their time with the meal, stopping occasionally to raise a shot glass of aquavit before knocking it back and erupting into laughter. After the last of the pinnekjøtt bones have been sucked dry, Alf lifts his wine glass.

  ‘To Ingrid,’ he says, looking solemnly at the empty space set for his wife at the head of the table.

  Selma imagines all the other homes missing a loved one tonight. She raises her glass and swallows hard before taking a sip. Losing her mother when she was seven changed something in her, she is well aware of that. But at least she knows where her mother is; she is comforted by the notion that Ingrid’s physical being has fused back into the earth, that elements of her have become parts of other living beings. She visits her grave in the summer and sits by her headstone, reading books and looking across the gentle downward slope of the graveyard to the wide, sluggish river further down. Imagine not knowing where she was. What must it be like to go day after day, year after year, having no idea where the person you loved most was?

  Her thoughts return to Lucia Blix. Where is she tonight, on Christmas Eve? Selma can bring the child’s features to mind easily enough – she’s spent hours staring at her beautiful, haunting face, but when she tries to imagine her where she is in this exact moment, her mind draws a blank. She can picture Lucia’s family, though, stumbling through their first Christmas without their daughter. How they’ll probably be putting on a show of normalcy for the sake of the younger brother; how, in spite of everything, they’ll have to smile, and eat, and talk. They’ll watch their little boy tearing open his presents, they’ll help him slot batteries into toys, and they’ll watch him play with them, Fredrik and Elisa Blix avoiding each other’s eyes – Selma can picture them clearly in her mind.