What Did I Do?

by Jessica Jarlvi

  It didn’t really matter. I didn’t even know how old I was any more. I had lost count of the days, months and possibly even years that had gone by. The stay at X’s apartment had only lasted a few months but once I had entered the house, without a phone or a calendar in sight, time had dragged out into eternity. Seeing my former boyfriend had reminded me of how much time must have passed. He looked older. I truly hoped he was happy and successful, but why had he looked for me? Was it possible that he still loved me?

  I promised myself then, that the next opportunity I got, no matter how small it was, I would run as fast as I could. Anywhere. If I was caught, at least I had tried. It was time to take charge and not let others dictate the terms of my life any more. If I had to live on the streets, then so be it. Surely it couldn’t be that bad?

  ‘There she is,’ Stanley said.

  Sofia was walking towards us, wearing black trousers and a crisp white shirt. She looked business like, which I hadn’t expected.

  ‘Hi,’ I said when she opened the car door.

  She barely even glanced at me.

  ‘You look nice,’ Stanley said.

  She didn’t respond to him either and we drove off in silence. I was on edge in the back seat. Was he going to take us somewhere we could talk?

  ‘How was your day?’ he asked her after a while.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Seen any good movies lately?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Any you can recommend?’

  ‘No.’

  He sighed, but finally brought me into the conversation: ‘Desire in the back wants to talk to you, Sofia.’

  ‘Really?’ she asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘Maybe in private, Stanley?’ I suggested.

  He peered at me over his shoulder. No tricks, he mouthed quietly.

  I promise, I mouthed back.

  We pulled into a strip mall where Stanley announced he would get a coffee.

  ‘You two talk,’ he said, before slamming the door.

  This was my chance.

  ‘Sofia,’ I said quickly. ‘He really likes you a lot and, you know, out of all the guys I have met recently, he’s by far the nicest. Maybe you should give him a chance. He might be worth it.’

  She turned around and looked at me.

  ‘I used to think so too,’ she said. Her voice was soft. ‘But he’s not a good person. He’s killed people. I don’t want him anywhere near me.’

  ‘Right.’ My anxiety doubled. ‘But maybe he really regrets it?’ I tried.

  ‘He enjoyed it,’ she said. ‘He seems sweet and innocent, but he…’ She looked as if she was searching for the right words. ‘He basically plays the good guy but he’s bad news. I don’t trust him.’

  ‘Okay, but I can tell that he’s in love with you,’ I still tried. ‘There’s love in every person, isn’t there?’

  I was desperate.

  ‘If I could get away from him… and this job, I would. But I can’t. Not right now.’

  ‘Oh, me too,’ I said. Shit, were we in the same boat? Then I had an idea. ‘Why don’t we leave right now? We can leave this car and run, together?’

  ‘He’s locked the car,’ she said. ‘The moment you try and open it the alarm will go off.’

  ‘Fine, but what do you suggest?’ I asked.

  ‘Write everything down,’ she said.

  Write what down?

  ‘He’s going to kill me if you don’t go out with him.’ I was crying now. ‘Please, help me!’

  She stretched a hand back into the car and took mine.

  ‘Write everything down,’ she repeated. ‘About your life, about what’s happened to you. I will find you and get the notes from you. That’s how I can help you.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand,’ I said. ‘He will literally kill me today if I don’t convince you to go out with him.’

  She turned back and stared out of the windscreen.

  ‘Okay,’ she said quietly. ‘One date. If you write everything down today.’

  ‘Anything,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  By the time Stanley arrived with a coffee, for himself only, I had regained some hope.

  ‘One date,’ she told him. ‘Tonight. Where are we dropping Desire off?’

  He smiled at her, then glared at me.

  ‘That’s none of your business, Sof. I’ll let you get changed while I take care of her.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘We’re going out now and we will drop Desire off somewhere on the way.’

  He banged his fist on the dashboard. ‘Fuck, why do you have to be so bloody difficult?’

  ‘Don’t go out with me, then,’ she said.

  Oh, no. Please do go out with him.

  ‘Are you messing with me on purpose?’ he yelled at her. ‘Are you trying to get me fucking fired or what?’

  She remained quiet. I wasn’t sure what she was playing at either, so I could understand his frustration. Still, he wasn’t doing himself any favours, acting like an arse.

  ‘I can’t take her back,’ he said eventually. ‘She’s out, Sof.’

  Chapter 41

  Kristin

  Peter paid Ebba to be her friend? Does their father know he’s here? Are they co-operating? She doubts it. They have never seen eye to eye, so why follow her here? Does he despise her that much? The last time she saw her brother was in Chicago, shortly before Brandon died. He turned up at the trailer unannounced. She refused to open but he kept banging on the door.

  ‘I know you’re in there, goddammit. Talk to me! You owe me.’

  ‘What does she owe you?’

  Brandon was outside. Through the blinds, she could see his truck parked up front.

  ‘She ran away,’ Peter said.

  ‘Yeah? Well, it sounds to me like you ran first. Left her at home with nutcase parents while you had a career.’

  ‘I had to leave,’ Peter said.

  ‘You better go and don’t come back unless you’re invited.’

  Brandon’s voice was authoritative, his person not one to be messed with.

  ‘She fucking betrayed me,’ he said.

  ‘You betrayed her first.’

  There was no denying that it felt good to hear Brandon defend her.

  ‘You killed her, Sofia!’ Peter shouted. ‘I know what you did.’

  Peter is in Sweden. Why can’t they leave her alone and let her live her life? She’s not harming anyone here. She’s started over, turned a new leaf.

  ‘Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in’, she mutters to herself. The Godfather. She wants out. She’s always wanted out, but she’s not safe anywhere.

  A creepy silence fills the apartment. That’s when paranoia slithers into the brain, making her think and do things she doesn’t want to do. To feel safer, she opens the drawer in her bedroom and pulls out the cold, black gun. She decides to take it one step further by loading it. That feels even better.

  Back in the living room she slumps into one of the sheepskin-covered chairs, the cold metal of the gun resting against her palm. When will she be able to leave this apartment? She was supposed to start the new job.

  Maybe she should call Olof? Is that even possible? She gets up and dials his number, expecting an answering machine, only to be greeted by his warm voice.

  ‘Kristin?’ he says. ‘You caught me at a good time. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she says. I have somehow become a prisoner in my own home.

  ‘The last time you were here, we spoke about your husband,’ he says.

  ‘I remember,’ she says, twisting the Edblad steel ring she treated herself to one week into therapy. Olof told her to celebrate every achievement, no matter how small. She glances at the finger next to it, where her wedding ring used to be.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about calling Brandon’s mother,’ she says, only just realising that. I hope you rot in hell. ‘I want her to stop sending me emails. I guess she’s probably still upset with me.’

  �
��Why would that be?’

  She says I killed her son. Even though the investigation was dropped. ‘The burden of proof is not beyond reasonable doubt,’ the police stated.

  ‘She probably felt I should have been better at protecting him,’ she says.

  ‘Then why call her?’ Olof asks. ‘She will have her process and you will have yours.’ She doesn’t respond. ‘Kristin, it’s important not to change the memories,’ he says. ‘That makes it more difficult to process them. The true memories will keep appearing.’

  He’s wise. And aggressive. What happened to her being in control?

  ‘Are you saying that I’m not speaking the truth?’

  ‘Or that you distort reality.’

  She frowns. This is not the way she wants the conversation to go. Like an insolent child, she says, ‘Can we talk about something other than that, please?’

  ‘Of course. Anything in particular that you want to share?’

  She imagines Olof’s office, his desk: the stapler, six pens, telephone, lamp, five books, three magazines, scissors and the roll of tape. Is everything still there?

  ‘In the US,’ she says, ‘when I waited for the L and the train finally emerged, I would worry about jumping in front of it.’ Anxious about having said the words out loud, she quickly adds, ‘It’s not that I wanted to end my life, but what if I jumped anyway? What if I couldn’t stop myself?’

  She feels as if her life is like that right now: she’s standing on the platform of her life, waiting to see if she will jump or not.

  ‘I can understand that’s frightening,’ Olof says. ‘You’re worried about not being in control.’

  It sounds too simple.

  ‘You sound tense,’ Olof says. ‘Are you doing your stretches?’

  ‘No,’ she says. His unconventional technique of stretching the arms and legs out like an upside-down beetle is not working right now.

  ‘You should. It’s like arriving at Go in Monopoly – it recharges you. What about your exercises in front of the mirror?’

  She’s supposed to tell herself ‘I love you’. She forms the words inside her head and imagines saying them to herself, when her mind sparks another thought: do killers love themselves? She looks at the Zastava in her hand.

  ‘I have to go,’ she says.

  ‘No worries. I’ll see you next week.’

  Olof’s voice disappears, leaving a trail of tranquillity behind. Now it feels easier to keep going. Kristin slips onto the floor and crawls over to the wall by the slightly open window. She feels the draught and moves closer, comforted by the noise of the buzzing city. She draws in the smell of Sweden and forms the words ‘I love you’ in her head. It makes her think about her grandmother.

  Beata was supposed to be her only family.

  ‘I’m not giving my mother a penny,’ her mother told someone on the phone. ‘She better pay for that care home on her own.’

  That’s how Kristin knew she was still alive. After Brandon’s death and the possibility of a new life started to emerge, Kristin wanted nothing more than to get to know her grandmother, to hopefully understand where she came from. But she’s yet to reveal her real identity to the woman. If something has gone wrong between her mother and grandmother, she doesn’t want to end up in the middle. She wants family who appreciate her for who she is, without knowing what she’s done.

  That makes her think of Ursula. What does her friend actually know? Ursula is familiar with Stanley’s erratic behaviour and his obsession with her, but she doesn’t know who he really is. Maybe, deep down, she thinks he’s harmless? She wasn’t worried enough to dial Kristin’s number. But something is connecting her to those calls. Kristin opens her mailbox to see if Ursula has responded to her latest email. The inbox is full of messages from her former mother-in-law and an unknown sender called ‘The One’. She almost misses Ursula’s email in amongst the others, but, having found it, she eagerly opens it.

  I didn’t give your number to anyone, you know I wouldn’t do that, but I had it written down on a note at my parents’ house and they gave it to someone. I’m sorry, I only just found out. They said it had been an emergency or something? It wasn’t Stanley though. Apparently it was a woman who asked for it. Stanley also wanted your address but I swear I didn’t give it to him! Anyway, I have now blocked him on FB. I hope you’re okay. I do miss you and hope we can catch up properly soon.

  Love

  Ursula

  X

  A woman called Ursula’s parents? Was it a girlfriend of Stanley’s or did he make one of the ‘working’ women call? Kristin doesn’t blame Ursula’s parents. They are lovely people, the type of parents she wishes she’d had.

  She glances at the emails from Brandon’s mother, Olof’s words coming to mind: ‘she will have her process and you will have yours’. A sudden positive emotion runs through Kristin. What if her former mother-in-law has had a change of heart and is writing all these new emails to apologise? She clicks on one of the messages.

  You will get what you deserve. We have opened up a new investigation.

  Clearly, her mother-in-law’s process is not going in the direction Kristin would have liked. She quickly deletes the rest of the woman’s emails and moves onto the first one from ‘The One’. The subject line reads Where are you? She opens it.

  Sof, you haven’t responded to any of my emails? Hopefully this one will get through your judgmental screening system. Maybe you would be happier if I called you Kristin? I know you changed your name. I know you boarded a flight at O’Hare to Copenhagen at the end of last year. You probably caught a train across the bridge from Denmark to Sweden, to Malmö and up north to Helsingborg. That’s where your mother grew up. I knew you wouldn’t be able to start somewhere completely fresh, which left few options. See, I know you like no one else. We’re the same, you and I. We’re innocent victims.

  I’m not sad that Brandon is dead. We both know he wasn’t good for you. Anyway, if you’ve read this far it’s because you do care. Give me another chance please. Write to me and we can do this on your terms.

  Love you,

  Stanley

  He knows too much about her movements. How? Did someone implant a tracker under her skin? She surveys the arms, red from picking. Does everyone know where she is? Is her body a red flashing dot on someone’s computer screen?

  She starts to feel every surface of her skin, picking furiously but there is nothing. Nowhere. Not even the mirror in the hallway can reveal anything on her back. She reads Stanley’s email again. His tone is different. There are elements that remind her of when she first met him, back when she thought that he really did understand her. Then she slaps herself, physically, the soaring pain on her cheek prompting her to recall how his gentle ways changed. This email is a trap. Write to me and we can do this on your terms. What if she doesn’t write back? Then it’s on his terms? The thoughts snake through her brain as if it’s a maze where they occasionally hit a dead end. This is one of those cul-de-sacs.

  That’s when it starts to ring in her head. She tries to block the noise out with her hands, pressing the palms against her earlobes. She needs to get rid of the gun. Quickly. Or she will kill someone. Now she’s convinced of it.

  She drops the gun into the bin in the kitchen, the only place she can think of. She’s so focused on making sure it’s covered with other rubbish that it takes her a while to recognise that the ringing she hears is in her apartment, not her head.

  She dazedly walks into the hallway and looks at the intercom. Its aggressive signals hurt her ears. Get a hammer and break it, Kristin. But reason returns. Niklas will ask her why it’s been destroyed. She needs to walk away and ignore it. Somehow.

  A few minutes later, or maybe it’s an hour? Seconds? Someone knocks on the door. She’s in the living room, leaning against a wall, her bottom on the cool floor.

  ‘Sofia Anderson?’

  A voice she doesn’t recognise shouts her old name through the letter box.

  ‘
It says Jönsson on the door,’ someone else says.

  ‘That’s her boyfriend’s name.’ Her father? ‘She’s called Anderson.’

  Smith. I’m called Smith. Kristin Smith.

  ‘Sofia Anderson? Are you there?’

  She closes her eyes, only to be back in her parents’ basement, and wraps her arms around her knees, rocking back and forth; blocking everyone out.

  ‘Sofia Anderson,’ says the voice again. ‘We’re from the police and we want to make sure you’re okay.’

  The police? That gets her attention. Something isn’t right. Her family never calls the police. That’s not how it works. What is he thinking? What’s the plan? Her thoughts travel to the gun in her bin. That’s why she has it! She’s been set up. Shit, shit, shit.

  Is that his plan? They bring her in, he posts bail and takes her home? Why did she keep that gun? She’s so stupid! Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  ‘Sofia Anderson. Are you there?’

  She makes herself invisible through her silence, shutting out their voices, but she can still hear them whispering outside the door.

  ‘What do we do if she doesn’t open?’ a man says.

  ‘You have to do something,’ her father exclaims.

  ‘If we believe she’s in danger, we can use an emergency clause to break in.’

  It’s quiet for a while before they once again call out her name.

  ‘Sofia?’

  Sofia. Sofia. Sofia. The voice repeats the name over and over until it dissolves and becomes unintelligible letters floating in space. She doesn’t want to be called Sofia. A numbing blanket settles over her. It feels as if she’s participating in a movie. Soon, the director will call ‘cut’ and she can go home. ‘Hasta la vista, baby.’

  ‘Sofia?’

  The voice is closer now. Someone touches her shoulder. A brief visual of a blue uniform.

  ‘Kristin,’ she whispers.

  ‘She’s alive,’ his voice booms.

  A pair of arms wrap around her; she’s pushed against his chest, feeling the suffocating smell of heavy cologne.

  ‘Your dad’s been worried about you,’ says a police officer next to them. ‘We had to make sure you were alive.’