by Agnete Friis
I opened the little gate obediently and slid down onto the bench. I still had the rifle trained on her face, but it was an empty gesture, and she seemed to sense my desperate lack of alternatives.
I was so close I could’ve reached out and touched Alex’s feet, but I didn’t dare. I just wanted the world to stop turning, everything to slow down. I needed movements so slow they became imperceptible. I wanted time to stop, and wind slowly backwards. Back to when Alex and I stood on the yard in front of my grandmother’s house in waves of lyme grass. Back to us walking in the park in Hvidovre, a plastic Netto bag filled with cans dangling between us, enough loot for cupcakes from the bakery. Further back. To the time I destroyed my foster mother’s greenhouse and called her the fattest cow in the world. Further and still further back. To the dark, and the night the world went under.
“What have you done to him?”
She smiled, and all at once I could see the drug addict in the tired, unmade face of the woman before me. The teeth she had lost that had been replaced with a new set, white as chalk. The tear-drop tattoos on the insides of her elbows that were meant to disguise the pitiful state of her lacerated veins.
“Angel dust for my angel,” she whispered, turning to meet my gaze for the first time. She’d been crying. “A little for him, and a little for me. Just enough to blunt the edge. And a little to sleep on.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Barbara,” I hissed. “He’s eleven years old.”
She nodded. “I never wanted to hurt you or Alex. When I saw you on the beach that day, I was just . . . happy . . . hopeful.” She savored the words in her mouth, smacked her dry lips. “I had tried to find you before. I wanted to say I was sorry. I never meant things to end the way they did. That you should be left without a family. But you were such a slippery little devil, weren’t you? I never found you. Every time I thought I knew where you were, you moved to a different place, and you left nothing behind but broken glass and beaten up kids. I lost track of you after foster family number four.”
I could hear Thomas crawling through the broken window, yet another wave of shattered glass crashed to the floor, but I didn’t see him. All I saw was Alex and Barbara’s hands. The one gripping the knife, the other fondling his bangs.
“And then what, Barbara?” I said. “What happened?”
“I wanted to start over,” said Barbara. “I thought we could be a family, just like Helgi and I had wanted. You had lost your mother, and I had lost my children. But you kept holding onto the past. Kept digging yourself deeper down. There was no need to do that, was there? We could have had a good life together, you and I, if only you had been able to let it go. But now I don’t know if we can be saved anymore. I just don’t know, Ella.”
“Put down the knife, Barbara,” I rasped. I was having great difficulty keeping my voice steady. I pointed the rifle in her face once more.
“Can you remember me from that night, Ella? I thought you saw me, but perhaps I was mistaken.”
“What night?”
I couldn’t take my eyes off Alex. His breathing was deep, peaceful.
“The night your mother died. Did you see me?”
I looked at her and knew she was the kind of liar that lied not only to others but especially to herself. A woman who has lost her children on account of her own abuse must have formidable powers of self-deception to go on living with herself. Even so, I couldn’t let it be.
“Were you there?”
She nodded. “Yes, I was there. I heard her die, Ella, and it didn’t take long. It was painless, and for her, death was a salvation. In fact, I think it was the best thing that could have happened for Anna. But the circumstances were . . . unfortunate. You shouldn’t have been there, Ella. It was supposed to be different. Anna was supposed to sleep, drift away from it all.”
“You were friends, before you started seeing my father. Did he know? Did he know who you were?”
“No. I didn’t think it was necessary for him to know. It had nothing to do with us, with Helgi and me—and you. And your mother . . . I thought we were friends, once. But because of her, I lost my boys. She betrayed me to social services, to my ex-husband, to Jehovah’s fucking Witnesses, even though it had always been us against them. I asked her to come and help me with the boys—and she did come—but she took my boys away from me. I haven’t seen them since. Only from a distance. And in pictures. You never become quite human again, once you’ve lost your children. Your mother deserved what happened to her.”
It sounded like a story she’d told many times before. The words fell into place like the lines of a poem she was reciting. My mother’s fault—not hers. I remembered the yellow rose I’d found in the dunes where my mother had died, and for the first time, I felt a stab of sympathy for Barbara, for no matter how many times she had come to the conclusion that my mother had deserved to die, there was still a part of her that succumbed to doubt. And doubt hurts.
Barbara smiled, leaned her head on the back of the pew, and gazed at the murals above.
“I was banished from the church because I was a drug addict,” she said. “It all started with morphine. I had dislocated my shoulder and was prescribed morphine for the pain. I became fond of it. Dependent. And then there were so many other options at my disposal, pills available from the same supplier. I have always believed that life is like walking on a tightrope suspended between birth and Judgment Day. You have to be so terribly careful not to stumble and fall into the abyss, and the faster you come to the other side, the better. I was a very talented tightrope walker, Ella. Always in control. But then came the morphine, and afterward, there was heroin and cocaine. I let go long enough to look at the world around me, and I realized that I had been wrong. I wasn’t balancing on a wire suspended over an abyss, I was walking along a line of chalk my parents had drawn in their backyard. It was . . .”
Barbara rotated her arms in the air above her head in a gesture of silent explosion.
“I tried to explain this to my husband. I wanted to get away, and I wanted to take my boys with me, of course. I was so completely, so vividly awake. My life was meant to be about passion and love, it was meant to be filled with beautiful things. I wanted to learn how to paint . . . And then I met your mother in that hopeless support group for people excluded from our church. The group itself was sickening, but your mother was wonderful. She became my first and only friend outside of the congregation. This is the part of her I miss once in a while.”
I heard the dull echo of Thomas’s steps coming down the aisle, the dust shimmered and danced in the tall pillars of light from the windows above the altar. A thought struck me, and it was so simple and so pure in its logic that I was amazed I hadn’t thought it before.
“Did you kill my mother?”
Barbara’s forefinger was resting on the edge of the knife, still without looking at me. “You really can’t remember anything at all from that night, can you?” she said, shaking her head. “Amazing. But then again, we all have our way of warding off the dark.”
She looked up and nodded at the Devil on the ceiling above, as if she were talking to him.
“I wasn’t the one who killed your mother, Ella.”
“You’re so full of shit, Barbara.”
She laughed drily. “I don’t know anyone who isn’t, but you, my girl, are right up there with the best of them in the bullshit-league. You just don’t know it, and that’s worse. Especially for you.”
She raised the knife, her knuckles white, the thin hand shook ever so slightly. I didn’t think. I cocked the barrel, leveled the gun, and pulled the trigger.
Rain. The rain is ice-cold, the smell of gun-powder is burning in my nostrils. My fingers hurt, my father is screaming into the dark like a wild animal. Like a wild animal gone mad.
The details flood in. A white glare, stark, and still.
My body remembers.
I remembered.
42
ELLA, 1994
Now it is completely quiet downstairs.
Mom has stopped screaming. The only thing I can hear is the television. Some music, someone singing. It sounds creepy, all those happy voices in the dark. Like a bunch of wicked trolls dancing and laughing in the living room. Gran knows all about trolls, and if they like to live in Iceland, then maybe they also like living here. I’ll sit quietly and wait for something to happen. Wait for Mom to call me, like she always does, tell me it’s just a game. That I don’t understand, that I’m dreaming. But I don’t usually dream with my eyes open, sitting on the steps. Nothing is happening. Where is she? Why doesn’t she come back?
I sneak barefoot down the stairs to take a look. There are marks on the wooden floors, and on the carpet in front of the sofa. It’s blood, it’s sticky under my feet. I try not to step in the puddle, but it’s so dark, and there’s so much of it. The door to the kitchen and the one out to the hallway are open, the door in the hall keeps banging against the wall in the wind.
I see a glimpse of a shape disappearing down the path that splits down to the sea and Gran’s house. Mom! Somebody has hurt Mom. It was Dad. He had a strange look on his face when he put her in the bathtub. His eyes looked weird. He was so angry, he kept yelling at her. I touch my throbbing face. My eyebrow hurts.
But I like Dad. He’s nice to me. He’s not usually like that.
Once Mom read me a story, Ol’ Yeller, it was called. Ol’ Yeller is a dog, he is kind and friendly—actually, he’s really a very nice dog—but then one day, he gets bitten by a bear, and the bear gives him a sickness called rabies. People said Ol’ Yeller would bite, if he got any sicker. So they put Ol’ Yeller down, so he couldn’t bite anyone anymore.
Maybe Dad also got sick like that.
I stand by the door for a long time. I can’t decide what to wear. The rain is ice-cold against my face. I don’t like going out when it’s dark, but I don’t like being home on my own, either. And Mom is out there in the storm. What if something happens to her, something that I can’t fix again?
I stick my feet into my galoshes. It looks really dumb. Bare legs stuck into a pair of galoshes, my pink nightdress on top. Not the thing to wear in this weather. But I could zip my winter jacket over it. Yes, that ought to work. I step outside, carefully close the door behind me.
It is very, very dark, but I can see my galoshes, I can see my hands. And the tiles in the driveway. Dad’s red car is standing in the drive. But nobody is in the car. I feel like I’m going to cry, I hate being alone, all on my own.
I bite into my cheek. I’m not going to cry. Once I start bawling, I won’t be able to stop, I just know it. And if I’m bawling my head off, I’ll scare whatever is out there away, it will hear me coming a mile off.
I go to the car. It’s ice-cold and sopping wet. I open the door and crawl onto the back seat. I lean over the seat and reach into the trunk of the car, a black pit, but it’s still there, the gun. I saw it when I got back from Thomas’s place. It was zipped up in its bag, as always, but for some reason, Dad has forgotten to lock it into the big metal cupboard in the garage, as he usually does. I pull the gun-bag up onto the backseat and open it. The gun is heavy. It smells of iron and gunpowder, the barrel is all sticky with oil. I helped Dad oil the gun myself a couple of days ago. There’s a little box of cartridges in the bag as well.
I kick the car door wide open with one leg, then the light goes on. So I can see what I’m doing. It’s hard to cock the barrel, there’s a knob you have to push down, hard, at the same time; you have to fold the gun AND squeeze it under your arm. It hurts a little, but the rest is easy. You put the cartridges in the barrel and click everything into place, just like Dad showed me. I get out of the car and close the door behind me. With the door shut it’s absolutely black again, I’m a little scared now, but I feel better with the gun. A gun is not a stick or a knife or a stone. A little person with a gun can beat a big person with no gun.
I can take care of Mom.
I run down to the dunes; my bare knees are wet and so cold. The gun is banging against my shins. I fall down twice, I’m already so tired, and it’s hard to run in the sand when it’s so wet. But I keep going. I’m a big girl. Dad said so. I keep running. Looking out for Mom’s white nightdress, listening for her voice. Trying to be quiet, creeping through the dunes like a little brown toad. My throat is thick and it’s hard to breathe. The rain keeps getting in my eyes, I have to stop all the time and wipe them dry and my fingers are frozen stiff.
The light from Gran’s house is coming closer. I must be going the right way. And then I see her. Mom. She’s on her way up the dune just in front of me, her white nightdress shining pale in the dark, I’m so close now, I can see her blonde hair, and her shoulders. I try to run faster, but my legs don’t want to run anymore. She hasn’t seen me yet, but now I’m almost at the top of the dune, she’s standing there at the bottom, looking at something in front of her. It looks like she’s crying, but I can’t hear anything in the wind. But then there is something.
It’s a man, he’s screaming like a wild animal.
“Ill kill you.”
I hear the words quite clearly, I’m sure of it, even though the wind is howling. This is the dangerous part. I have to be really careful now. I sit on my knees and pull the lever back slowly. Now I’m ready to shoot.
I get up and start to run, the gun pointed at the bad guys just ahead. It’s hard to keep the gun up, it’s hard to keep running, even harder than it was before, but I’m a big girl.
And then I fall.
My fingers are stuck in the gun. It hurts when I try to pull them out. It sounds like an explosion, like a fat roll of thunder in my ears.
43
“ELLA!”
I was standing in front of the splintered pew with the rifle lying at my feet. There was a lot of blood and commotion on the bench and it took me a while to distinguish one body from another. Barbara’s body was rocking back and forth over Alex’s, and Thomas, who had jumped over a row of pews from behind, was holding Barbara under her arms, trying to lift her out of the pew without dragging Alex along with them. It looked like an awkward rendition of a dance macabre, everyone’s clothes dotted in bright red blood. Especially Barbara was covered in the stuff. She had pearls splattered on her face and hair as if she’d been caught in a blood shower, and when Thomas finally did manage to pull her off Alex, there was almost as much blood on him. His face was bathed in red and black drops.
Barbara was grunting like a wounded animal, lashing out at Thomas, but at least her body was untangled from Alex’s. His head lay dangling over the edge of the front pew.
“You take him, Ella! Get him onto the floor!” Thomas was yelling at me from his awkward position straddling the flailing Barbara on the floor. Fine droplets of blood sprayed over them every time she managed to fight an arm or a leg free. The kitchen knife stuck straight out of her left hand like a grotesque, modern body sculpture. Man and machine.
I bent over Alex, put an arm around his shoulders, and half-lifted, half-dragged him out of the narrow pew. Only a month ago, I had lifted his sprawling, living body into the air in the park in Hvidovre, but now it was limp and impossibly heavy. I battled to get him into a horizontal position.
My mind was blank, but for the first time in my life, I prayed to powers greater than myself—perhaps even to God, I couldn’t tell to whom or to what. I just mouthed the solemn words soundlessly as I bent over my son. I prayed to be given a chance. Just one more chance to make it up to him. But it was not just Alex. I prayed for a chance to do justice to that little girl who—till now—I had deserted in the dunes by the sea.
Alex wasn’t moving, but when I bent over his face I could feel his warm breath against my cheek, and the skin under his T-shirt was smooth, unbroken. I noted with relief that there was nothing amiss on his nec
k and head either. The blood was not his.
“The blood is Barbara’s, Ella,” called Thomas, throwing his mobile phone over to me. “You’d better call an ambulance.”
Afterward I sat with Alex’s head in my lap, exactly as Barbara had done before, hoping that he would open his eyes and look at me. The two fingers I had broken that night were throbbing painfully. I could still feel the weight of the trigger, the finely polished wood of the rifle against my cheek. My body remembered it better than I had. It had been with me all along.
Alex moved under my hands. Shifted a little in his sleep and moaned softly. I realized that I had also been injured. The shot had hit neither Alex nor Barbara. I had inadvertently turned the barrel off to the side, and shot directly into the back of the pew instead, exploding splinters of wood in all directions. Two large splinters had bored themselves into my forearm and I had a number of cuts on my neck and face, where my skin stung and burned, making me feel alive in a way I had never experienced before.
The world was new and fresh, pronounced in brilliant color.
A little group had gathered around us. First Aid officers who had piled out of the ambulances were now pulling Alex out of my arms, lifting him onto a stretcher. Two police officers had picked up the rifle and a doctor in a neon yellow coat and rubber gloves was bandaging Barbara’s hand. The knife was still stuck in her hand as she was rolled to a waiting ambulance. I registered this much, but apart from that, the scene didn’t interest me very much. In fact, I couldn’t have cared less about Barbara or what would happen to her. She did not belong to this bright new world of mine.
My father didn’t murder my mother. He took the blame . . . for me.
I guess that’s when curiosity begins to fade. When you have found what you were looking for.