“Morten’s sister picked her up, and Morten will be home in a few hours. There’s nothing to worry about.”
It was as if Magnus had guessed what she would be thinking and had already prepared an answer. Nina felt her short, labored breaths, and the machine started emitting a small, warning blip. Her pulse was on its way up again.
“Can I call her?”
Magnus looked away, a little too fast, and shook his head.
“She doesn’t want to talk to you. She’s waiting for Morten. But I was supposed to give you her best and tell you she hopes you get well soon.”
That last part was a lie, Nina thought dryly.
“Could I at least call Morten?”
Again Magnus’s eyes were strangely evasive.
“Nina, he’s probably sitting up on top of an oil rig, waiting for the next available helicopter. That kind of thing requires a man’s full attention. Give it a rest, and concentrate on getting better.”
Magnus’s voice was disturbingly light-hearted and devoid of swear words, but Nina was too exhausted to break through the Teflon surface of his concern. For the time being she was forced to let Morten handle it.
“And what else? Have you heard anything from the lab?”
Magnus nodded, visibly relieved at the change in topic.
“Some of the results came back, and they’re looking at them now. They’ll let you know as soon as possible, and apparently there’s also a team from the radiology department on its way up. I guess they’re not wild about the idea of moving you around right now.”
No, they didn’t want her potentially plague-inducing bacteria to contaminate the entire hospital. Nina knew the drill. They would X-Ray her thorax to assess the state of her lungs. Maybe there were signs of some kind of infection in the tests they had already done. “Have you seen my numbers?”
Nina tried to pull herself together as much as she could and give Magnus an authoritative look. The feeling of being cut off from the information that was available to her doctor made her fidgety.
“Your infection counts look a little suspect,” Magnus said, sitting down next to the bed. “They did a differential count, and your lymphocyte numbers look odd. They’re coming to ask you a few questions again in a half hour. I’m going to hang around until then.”
Nina sank back in the bed. A half hour didn’t give her enough time to sleep but was too long to stay awake. The nausea kept churning in her stomach, and small, flashing spots danced up over the white ceiling. And then it seemed she was, after all, able to fall asleep; the last thing she was aware of was Magnus’s heavy, dry bear paw on her forehead, cautiously stroking her hair.
SHE WOKE UP because someone was shouting. It was a woman, and her voice was high with surprise. Nina opened her eyes, her head still pounding, and looked at the clock over the door. 6:24 A.M. Everything was a little blurry. But it must still be morning, and there was a cluster of toxic-yellow gowns converging around her.
“Nina.”
Magnus’s voice sounded like he was standing on the other side of the room, but she saw him right beside her bed and moving in closer to bend over her.
“Nina. You’re going to have to wake up, sweetheart.”
She sat up too fast and felt a flood of vomit forcing its way up her throat. Someone held a basin for her, while Magnus patiently waited. When she was done, she looked up and met his eyes.
“There was a blip on the radiology nurse’s dosimeter.”
Nina shook her head. It was like Magnus was starting to slip out of focus again. What he was saying didn’t make any sense.
“You’ve been exposed to radiation, Nina. You have radiation sickness.”
HERE WAS FRENETIC activity in Nina’s room. At least three doctors, each with an entourage of medical students, had been by over the course of the morning, and they had all looked at her with a mixture of concern and professional excitement. The team from the Danish National Institute of Radiation Hygiene in particular had a hard time hiding their enthusiasm as they filled out their paperwork, consulted, and issued instructions for the rank-and-file staff. Nina saw it happening, but didn’t have the strength to get worked up over it. She recognized their response. Professionals were always fascinated to encounter in real life things they had only read about in books. She was probably one of the few patients—if any—with radiation sickness they had ever seen, and she could hear their whispered, animated discussions out in the corridor. If she hadn’t been feeling so dreadful, she would probably have been just as curious, but she had other things to worry about.
It was a relief to be able to see people’s faces again. The staff no longer wore face masks—you couldn’t catch radiation sickness through inhalation.
An investigator from the Danish Emergency Management Agency had already been there at 7:40 A.M. He was middle-aged, short, and balding and had smiled politely as he opened his bag and took out a pad of paper and a pen. Then, without warning, he had launched into his barrage of questions.
Where had she been, who had she talked to, what had she seen?
She answered as best she could. She had told the hospital staff about the repair shop right away, and the Emergency Management Agency was presumably already turning the place upside down. She had every possible reason to cooperate. The boy was receiving treatment now, but the rest of the residents from the Valby garage had potentially been exposed to amounts of radiation that were just as serious as her own exposure, and they would have to be examined. Beyond that, of course there were other and very obvious reasons the Emergency Management Agency had turned up less than half an hour after the radiology team’s dosimeter had started beeping. A source of radiation in central Copenhagen must be Nightmare Scenario Number One for the PET, the police, and the Emergency Management Agency.
The man’s ballpoint pen scribbled things down on paper at a furious pace as Nina responded to his questions. Beyond her own address, he also asked for Peter’s and that of the Coal-House Camp.
“As far as I can tell,” she said, “everyone who got sick was down in the inspection pit, either briefly or for perhaps as long as an hour at a time. Maybe that’s where it came from?”
“Yes,” he said, with a single quick nod. “That’s what our people at the site reported. The radiation level down there is significant, and they found small amounts of radioactive sand.”
She remembered the feeling of small, sharp grains of sand digging into her skin, and instinctively rubbed her palms on the sheet, as if to brush them off. Her hour-long hunt for a possible source of poisoning, the cleanup she had done with such determination—it had all been in vain. Radioactivity. While she had been removing plastic bags, moldy cardboard, and old oil drums, there had been an invisible, imperceptible enemy down there the whole time.
“Where did it come from?” she asked.
“The main source had been removed by the time we arrived,” he said. “We can only speculate.” Then he started cross-examining her about the residents of the garage. She patiently listed everyone she had spoken to, but that wasn’t that many, and she hadn’t taken their names or collected any other useful information while she’d been there. The man smiled at her with a trace of contempt.
“A lot of things would have been easier if you had informed the authorities about the outbreak of a suspicious illness right away,” he said and started packing up his things. “Sometimes you need to think with your brain instead of your heart.”
Nina didn’t answer but sank back in the bed, silently fuming. There hadn’t been anything particularly suspicious about the outbreak until she herself had fallen ill, and as for the Danish authorities’ response to a group of Roma in Valby, not much thinking was likely to have been involved—with their brains or their hearts. Their Pavlovian reaction would have sent the whole lot back across the border, to scatter themselves and their contaminated luggage across half of Europe. Still, he had touched a nerve. How much radiation had they been exposed to? And what about her?
&nbs
p; She threw up again, and there was no sign she was improving. They were treating her with a drug called ferric ferrocyanide, more commonly known as Prussian Blue, which was supposed to bind to any unabsorbed radioactive material inside her, which of course she was totally in favor of. The only snag was that it had to be administered through a thin, plastic tube that was inserted through one of her nostrils and then fed all the way down to her duodenum “to prevent any irritation of the stomach lining.” She could certainly have done without the effect the tube had on her already hypersensitive gag reflex.
The doctors said she was going to have to be patient. It was “unlikely” she had received a life-threatening dose, but “the course of the sickness could be extremely unpredictable.” She might feel better now or be sick for several days. After that she would recover quite quickly, they thought, but her fertility would be “problematic” and her immune system would be seriously compromised for a long time to come.
She believed them, especially on that last point.
She was so tired she could hardly feel her body anymore, and she desperately needed sleep, but the vomiting forced her to wake up several times an hour, and the traffic of people in and out of her room kept increasing. Unknown faces ebbing and flowing past the foot of her bed. Poking her, taking her blood pressure, pulling up her all-too-short hospital gown and letting their fingers run down over her ribs. Spreading her legs to look for any sign of a rash around her groin, on her buttocks, and on her back, as if she were a piece of meat on an autopsy table. As if she were dead.
And in the middle of all this, she missed Morten so much she couldn’t think straight. She imagined how he would enter the room and chase away all those toxic-yellow gowns. She would ask him to lie down on the bed next to her so she could bury her nose in his T-shirt and inhale the safe scent of North Sea winds and water and salt and Morten, instead of the smell of disinfectant soap and vomit. Maybe then her stomach would finally settle down a little.
The hospital had provided her with a phone next to her bed, but it remained silent. Morten hadn’t called, and he hadn’t answered his phone on either of the occasions she had tried calling him. On Ida’s voicemail she heard Ida’s soft, cheerful voice asking her to leave a message. It almost hurt to listen to that now, and Nina felt herself cringe inside as she contemplated a short message in a casual voice. “Hi, it’s Mom. Call me,” or “Hi, honey, just wanted to see how you were.”
She gave up, hanging up and setting the phone back down the nightstand. She didn’t want to leave a message. She shouldn’t have to. Her family knew exactly where she was, and a friendly nurse had made sure that Morten got a text message with her direct number.
Nina tried to breathe slowly and calmly. The sun colored the darkness a flickery red whenever she shut her eyes, but it helped. She would rest now, just a little. When she woke up again, Morten could come pick her up, and she could sort out this business with Ida and the break-in.
KOU-LARSEN WOKE UP slowly, disoriented. The TV was on, and the curtains in the living room were drawn. He was lying on the sofa with the crocheted blanket over him, but he couldn’t remember having put it there. His mouth and throat were dry, and he felt like he had been snoring.
He stared up at the wood paneling of the ceiling. Helle had had it whitewashed a few years earlier, it brightened things up so nicely, she said. He thought it looked strangely half-finished, as if someone had started painting and then hadn’t bothered to give it a second coat so it covered properly.
“Helle?” he called.
There was no response. Maybe she was out in the garden? No, probably not now, it must be dark outside. Or was it? He tried to focus on his Tissot watch with the nice, wide-linked watchband—a retirement gift from the office—and when he saw that it was a few minutes to eight, he was genuinely puzzled as to whether it was eight in the morning or eight at night.
But that was the local news on the TV, wasn’t it? So it must be evening. How long had he been lying on the sofa?
“Helle?” He slowly swung his legs out from under the blanket and sat up. How come he felt so weak and dizzy? And Helle still didn’t answer. Was she mad at him again? No. That wasn’t it. The house seemed empty; there weren’t any noises other than those of the house itself—the door upstairs that always banged if the bathroom window was open, a subtle gurgling from the water pipes every now and then, the lilac branches scraping against the windowpane in the office.
He felt abandoned. For a brief instant he had the absurd notion that maybe Helle had decided to leave him. Despite their age difference, it wasn’t a thought that had ever occurred to him before. After all, she was the one who needed him, not the other way around.
Or did she? As he had aged, had there not been a shift in the balance of power between them, so gradual and indiscernible that he had barely noticed it? She had begun to go out on her own lately. Had left the house and the garden without having him by her side, something that had always been hard for her. She had also learned how to use the computer Claus had given them, so she could send e-mails and be in touch with other people that way. He had taken it as a good sign, but perhaps it wasn’t.
Maybe that was how she had ended up buying that idiotic condo in Spain.
This new, unwelcome realization struck him with a burst of small, cold prickles. Of course that was why. She hadn’t been planning it as a surprise, as she had claimed. She had never intended for them to travel there together in the winter months to help his arthritis. She would never have told him about it if he hadn’t found the bank statement himself. Maybe he should count himself lucky that it had turned out to be a scam. If the condo had existed, she might have been down there already, on one of those ocean-front balconies they showed in the pictures in the brochure, enjoying a sangría while her swimsuit dried on the railing. Probably with.…
Who? This was where his foggy imagination faltered. He had a really, really hard time picturing Helle with another man. Not that she wasn’t still attractive in that classic Nordic way, with high cheekbones and silvery streaks in her sun-bleached hair. She had never been an aggressive sun-bather; she usually wore a hat in the garden so her skin wasn’t scorched and ravaged like so many other women of her generation. But she had never been an enthusiastic partner when it came to sex, and in recent years.…
Or was it just him? He had always been patient, considerate, carefully awaiting her response before proceding. Had that been a mistake?
He stood up. Even though he was aware that his actions were paranoid, he went straight to the bedroom and flung open the closet. Not to see if there was a young lover hiding inside, but to see if all her clothes were still there. She hadn’t packed anything. Their suitcases were sitting in their usual spot on top of the white cabinets, and as far as he could tell, nothing was missing.
He proceeded into the bathroom, dumped his toothbrush out of its glass and drank from it, even though the water tasted faintly of Colgate. His mouth was so dry that a cactus would feel at home. He filled the glass again and brought it back out to the living room. Some hairy-chested macho type with sideburns, someone who didn’t wait for permission. Was that the kind of man she had fallen for?
No. Not Helle. He smiled despite his general despondency. She was the last woman in the world who would do something like that.
SHE CAME HOME a little before 9 P.M., while he was waiting for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s evening news to start. She hung her cotton coat on in the hall and came in as if nothing had happened.
“Ah, you’re awake,” she said.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“At Holger and Lise’s, of course. True, we couldn’t play bridge without you, but we had a nice time anyway. Lise made Cordon Bleu. It’s a shame you missed it.”
Holger and Lise. Bridge. Now he remembered.
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“Darling, I tried. I did, but you were completely out. Do you think maybe you’ve got your pills mixed up agai
n?”
“Pills?”
“Yes. You do know that the Imovanes are the sleeping pills and Fortzaar is for your blood pressure, right?”
“Of course I know that,” he said. “I’ve been taking them for years. The blood pressure pills, anyway.” The Imovanes were relatively new; he had started taking those after complaining about insomnia and restless legs. Just a half pill, his doctor had said, and he had stuck to that.
“Maybe you should let me fill your pill case for you,” Helle suggested.
“I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself,” he snapped, picturing the plastic case he loaded his pills into every Sunday, labeled MORNING, NOON, EVENING, and NIGHT along one side and all the days of the week on the other, in clear, blue capital letters. “I’m not an idiot!”
But she wasn’t listening anymore. She was staring at the TV instead. Then she grabbed the remote control and turned up the volume.
“… officials believe that up to fifty people have been exposed to radioactive contamination, and they ask that anyone who has been in the proximity of this address within the past few weeks to report to the Danish National Institute of Radiation Hygiene for a screening. Further information can be found on our website.”
Radioactive contamination?
Skou-Larsen forgot all about the pill organizer, sideburns, and bridge games for a moment.
“There was something about that on the news at six, too,” Helle said. “But they haven’t figured out where it came from. Have you heard anything?”
“No,” he grunted, watching as an expert who looked more like a professional soccer player than a nuclear physicist explained about background radiation and radon, which was “the most common source of radioactive contamination in buildings.” A fence and a couple of gas pumps and two men in bright-yellow protective suits were visible, walking around holding devices he assumed were Geiger counters. And then of course they showed the footage from Chernobyl again, even though Skou-Larsen couldn’t see what that had to do with any of this. There was a world of difference between a nuclear reactor melting down and radon contamination, but as soon as anyone said the word “radioactivity,” the media always went into a frenzy.
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