Then, all of a sudden, it’s over.
Joanna’s lips jerk away from mine. Her hands drop to my chest and push me away from her.
“Jo,” I rasp, reluctant to loosen my arms, which are still around her waist.
She shakes her head and exhales heavily.
“That was wonderful. But…”
I don’t finish her sentence this time, but wait until she’s found the words she’s looking for. I’m still so worked up I can’t even guess at what might be going on inside her head.
Maybe the kiss stirred up a memory? Maybe she thinks it was a mistake? I don’t know.
“I’m so confused. And afraid.”
“Of me? Still?”
“No, Erik, not you, I’m afraid of myself.”
“I don’t understand.”
She looks at the floor and briefly touches her temple, the blueish bruise. “I don’t either. I get moments where I’m as much a stranger to myself as you are.”
“Still no memories? Not one?”
She shakes her head. “But now I can imagine having fallen in love with you.”
At least she isn’t rejecting me anymore. Maybe she can feel there’s something connecting us, that … All of a sudden she’s close to me again, and I feel her lips on mine. Not shy and playful this time, but the way we always kissed. Tender and passionate.
She’s smiling when she draws her head back again.
“It was still very nice, though.”
Sometimes, I reflect, you don’t need much at all to turn a feeling of anguish into relief. I don’t feel like I’m free from all my worries, but what I do feel all of a sudden is a sense of optimism. The hope that we’ll get to the bottom of this and that things will take a turn for the better.
“Yes,” I say, returning her smile. “It was wonderful.”
“I want to go outside, get some fresh air. Can we go for a walk?”
An image appears in my mind’s eye. Joanna and I, strolling through the small park all wrapped up in our jackets, in a tight embrace, heads tilted toward each other …
“I’d love to.”
Our walk ends up taking quite a long time. We don’t talk much, nor do we walk in a tight embrace, but our hands keep touching. Again and again they brush against each other, as if by accident, and a gentle shudder goes through my body every time.
Joanna suddenly stops and looks at me when we’ve almost reached the house again. “Would you give me your number?”
I’m confused for a second. “Yes of course, I … I thought you had it but … yes.”
“Not, not until now. But I should have it, right?”
A short while later we’re sitting in the living room, on the couch. The look Joanna is giving me no longer contains the suspicion of the past few days, when it seemed that she was trying to read me, decipher my thoughts.
“Tell me about us again, please?”
“Yes, I’d love to,” I say, and take her hand.
“What would you like to know?”
“Everything,” she answers. “I’d like to know everything.”
21
It’s already dark by the time we finish talking. Only now do I realize that I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast; my stomach is making itself heard, gently but insistently. “How about we cook something together?” I turn to Erik and trace the contours of his face with my finger. Foreign yet at the same time strangely familiar. And gradually becoming more and more so. “You wanted to, remember, yesterday.”
He smiles. “I still want to.”
The way he looks at me when I touch him. There’s so much emotion in it, and it’s increasingly spilling over to me. Is that a good thing? Is it careless?
The fact is, I no longer want to be asking myself these questions. Now that I no longer see Erik as an acute threat. I’ve become aware of how attractive he is, this man who I’m getting to know bit by bit. The man who is there for me night and day. Who hasn’t let my memory loss scare him away.
And who kisses like …
“Why are you laughing?” He takes my face between his hands, carefully, without touching the bruised parts.
“I’m not telling you.”
His mouth on mine again, his tongue, gentle at first, then enticing, then insistent. I playfully bite his lower lip. “I’m hungry.”
“I can see that.” He smiles, takes my hand, and pulls me into the kitchen. “Let’s see. We’d better leave the shrimp, but what would you say to turkey skewers? With that special tomato salad you make? We’ve got everything we need.”
Just the thought of it makes my hunger grow twofold. “Sounds wonderful.”
He takes all the ingredients out of the cupboard. “I’ll do the meat, you do the vegetables. That’s how we usually do it, do you remember?” I can see that he regrets the last three words even as he’s still saying them. I shake my head. “No. Unfortunately not. But that sounds like a good plan.”
His eyes are trained on the worktop; the fridge is still open behind him. “Usually,” he repeats. “Unless it was steak, you’re better at that.”
I can see how desperately he wants to be able to share these memories with me, but as hard as I try, the images just won’t come into my mind.
“Probably because I always made them on the barbecue with my father, since I was a young child,” I say. That memory is there, crystal clear. Daddy and his beloved, gigantic sirloin steaks.
“OK then.” Erik gets the skewers from the drawer and begins to cut the turkey fillet into even pieces.
I wash the tomatoes under hot water. Nothing tastes worse than ice-cold tomato salad.
Erik hums as he works, a melody which I don’t recognize at first. With a bit of imagination, though, it kind of sounds like “Strangers in the Night.” Singing along under my breath, I pull the knife out of the wooden block. I don’t need to exert much pressure, it glides through the tomatoes as though they were butter. Perfect, fine, wafer-thin slices. Red and juicy.
It’s easy and fun. In just a short time I’ve already cut five tomatoes into slices and pushed them into the salad bowl, without the white fleshy part with the seeds breaking away.
The bottles of olive oil and white balsamic vinegar are standing there at the ready, but … the onions are missing. I hope I still have some in the fridge, at least one; one would be enough. All I need to do is get it, but I can’t pull my eyes away from the tomatoes in the bowl. From that red color.
I feel so light, inside. I feel like humming and singing and almost like dancing. All the pressure from the past few days is gone; it’s faded away. No more worries. No more thoughts.
And then, suddenly, there’s a silvery arc, so beautiful, like a curved bolt of lightning shooting up into the sky, one I’ve created with a single, smooth movement.
There’s a pause, for the duration of half a breath. And then … falling, plummeting, jabbing. Like I was a falcon swooping down, with a clear target, one I don’t want to miss at any cost.
The spot on his back, not far from the spine, beneath the shoulder blade. At last.
Time slows, almost standing still. I see the knife going downward, looking at it both with joy, the like of which I’ve rarely felt before, and with a fear which almost makes me lose my mind.
Part of me wants to stop the movement, but the rest of me is stronger. It wants to see the knife plunging into Erik’s back, not just once, but again and again.
At that moment Erik turns his head; his eyes widen, he moves his body to the side and the knife catches his right upper arm, raised in self-defense.
Red. Glistening, flowing red.
For a few seconds I stare in fascination at the stain which starts to spread on the sleeve of Erik’s shirt; only then do I begin to understand what just happened.
What I did.
No, please no, please …
It is me who screams, not him. I let the knife fall on the worktop, this knife which has been haunting my thoughts for days, the knife which I just used to stab
Erik. Just like that.
“My God … I’m so—I’m so sorry!” I take a step toward him, but he flinches away. With an expression that I’ve never seen in his eyes before. Full of disbelief, horror, and disappointment which pains me all the way to my soul.
Then, in just a few seconds, all of that is gone. It turns into the opposite. I try to go over to him again.
“Stay where you are.” His voice, so full of emotion just moments ago, is now like ice. And it’s no wonder, I understand it, understand him, but …
The first thing I can get my hands on, that seems to make sense, is a roll of paper towels. I move forward to press it onto his upper arm to make a dressing, but this time he yells at me. “I said, stay where you are! Come any closer to me, and I won’t be held responsible for my actions!”
The blood has already seeped through his sleeve and is now dripping to the floor. Erik presses a hand over the wound, and it seems as though the pain is now kicking in.
“I’m so sorry,” I repeat, and hate myself for the fact that I also start to cry. For the fact that I seem incapable of uttering anything but this laughable, completely worthless apology. As if my words could make up for what I just did. As if anything could ever make up for it.
And I don’t understand. I don’t understand myself. There was no reason to do that, everything was going well between us …
“You’re completely insane.” Erik shakes his head in emphasis to every word he says. “Insane and dangerous. No, don’t come any closer.” The iciness in his tone has been joined by something else. Disgust?
I could understand that, of course. If I say what’s on the tip of my tongue right now, which is that I have no idea why I did this, because I was actually in the process of falling in love with him, it would only make things worse.
Insane and dangerous.
He’s right. It’s now glaringly obvious, if it wasn’t before, that I have to get myself admitted to a clinic. As quickly as possible.
But first Erik needs help. “I’ll get the first-aid kit. We have to make sure that we stop the bleeding and—”
“We don’t need to do anything at all, not anymore.” He fixes his gaze on me. “You were going to stab me right through the back with that knife, weren’t you? If I hadn’t turned around, I’d be dead now. You would have … stabbed me in cold blood.”
Everything he says is true, despairingly true. And, at the very least, he has the right to know it. I nod.
“Why, Jo?” Now, for the first time, I see something resembling grief in his eyes. Grief for how things once were, maybe, even if I can’t remember. Grief for what we could still have had.
“I don’t know.” My sobs swallow my words. “I really don’t know,” I repeat. “It just happened. I barely knew what was happening myself, and I know how that sounds. Even to me. But that’s how it was. Like I was outside of my own body, watching myself doing it. I never wanted to harm you and yet I almost killed you. You’re right. I am crazy.”
He doesn’t disagree, but he doesn’t say anything to reaffirm it either. My attention goes back to his arm; the bleeding has slowed now, but not stopped.
I gesture hesitantly toward the kitchen roll, then walk past Erik, out into the hall and up the stairs. My legs are shaking so hard that I can barely manage the steps.
In the bathroom, the first thing I see is the boiler, the cover of which hasn’t been replaced yet. Yes, so I guess that was me too. It must have been, if there was any logic at all behind the past few days.
If he hadn’t turned around, then—
Then I would be sitting over his dead body right now, covered in even more blood, the knife sticky in my hand. Without the slightest idea how it came to that.
The image squeezes the air from my lungs. I squat down on the floor until the black spots in front of my eyes gradually clear.
Close. So close.
With clammy fingers, I get the first-aid kit from the cupboard, find the disinfectant spray and sterile swabs. I bring everything downstairs.
Erik is now sitting on one of the barstools. He’s taken his shirt off and is pressing it against his arm. His face is pale. I place the first-aid kit down on the bar and move to tend to the wound, but he shakes his head. “Don’t even think of touching me.”
“But you can’t do it by yourself—”
“Yes I can.” He jerks his chin, silently telling me to back away, then begins to clean the wound.
A deep, gaping cut; blood is still seeping out of it. It needs stitches.
Struggling a little, Erik puts a dressing over the wound and tries to wrap an elastic bandage around it, but it’s practically impossible with only one hand.
“Let me help you. Please.”
He doesn’t answer; instead he intensifies his efforts.
As I step closer to him and take the roll of bandage from his hand, he finally relents. He holds the dressing as I secure it.
“Please let me drive you to the hospital.”
He laughs. “Not a chance.”
“But you have to get stitches.”
Erik moves his hand over the bandage, checking it. For now, it’s holding. “Yes, I know. But the last thing I’m going to do is get in a car that you’re driving.”
He glances over at the torn, blood-soaked shirt on the floor. “I’ll change clothes, and then I’ll go. Alone.”
When he stands up, he teeters a little, but then regains his balance.
I step into his path. “Let me come with you.”
“No.”
“In the passenger seat. Please. I can’t let you drive like this.” I’m fully aware of how ironic my concern must seem in light of the situation. But I want to do something; I’d undo everything that happened if I could, but as that’s not possible then I at least want to … be of help.
“I’m going by myself. I don’t want to have you next to me and constantly be afraid that you’ll grab the steering well and drive us into a wall. Or pull another knife out of your sleeve. Or off yourself in front of my eyes, jump out of the car while we’re doing a hundred or something like that.” He looks at me. “It’s over, Joanna. I hope you get help, for your own sake. But there’s no way I can be with someone who I can’t turn my back on without having to worry they might stab me.”
He slowly makes his way over to the stairs. “I’ll come by in the morning and pick up my things. The little that’s left of them, anyway.”
I follow him, and try to take his hand, but he pulls it away. “I mean it,” he says sharply. “Don’t touch me. Stay away.”
And so I let him go. I retreat back into the far corner of the hall, wondering why this good-bye feels so painful. No chance of an answer, though. And I should probably hand the task of figuring out the inner workings of my mind over to the experts as soon as possible.
Five minutes later, Erik comes back downstairs. The new shirt he’s put on is already beginning to turn red above the stab wound.
I say nothing else.
He says nothing else.
He leaves the house without turning around even once.
22
I sit down carefully in the car. Waves of white-hot pain are surging through my entire upper body from the wound on my arm.
What’s just as painful, perhaps even more, is the bitter disappointment, the crushing realization that Joanna’s lost her mind once and for all. That she’s beyond recovery. And that there’s nothing she, or I, can do.
She wanted to kill me.
The mixture of physical and mental agony is starting to dull my senses. I blink several times, shake my head, and wrench my eyes open. Don’t faint, not now. No, I can’t let myself escape into that merciful darkness right now. I have to go get the wound treated.
I start the car and take a final look over at the front door. It’s closed. Who knows what Joanna’s doing in there right now. Maybe she’s attempting to take her own life again for a change. Insanely enough, when that thought crosses my mind I feel the urge to get out of th
e car and check, but soon shake my head in disbelief. I can’t really be that stupid, can I?
The house seems like it’s swaying as I reverse the car down the driveway. This surreal kind of image is something I usually only see in bad dreams. But this isn’t a dream. There’s no hellish pain in dreams.
Scratching sounds. A voice from some recess of my mind tells me I just clipped the hedge that separates our property from the street. I don’t care.
I don’t care about anything.
Turn the wheel, shift gear, drive.
What am I going to tell the people at the hospital? The truth? The piercing sound of a car horn tears me from my thoughts. I just cut somebody off. I think.
Focus, Erik. Damn it.
I have to go left. What was I just thinking about? Oh yeah, the hospital. So what am I going to tell them? The truth? What is the truth?
Joanna tried to kill me. She really did. With full intent. She wasn’t just trying to hurt me. She actually wanted to end my life.
Damn it, I can’t see anything anymore. Everything’s turning blurry. I step on the brake, turn the steering wheel to the right. There’s a rumbling sound, then the car comes to a stop. More car horns blare, several times in a row.
I wipe the tears out of my eyes, groan because I jerked my arm up to do so. This fucking pain’s just about driving me out of my mind.
By now, most of my sleeve is stained red. Hospital. Stitches. I have to keep going.
I even remember to check the rearview mirror before driving down off the sidewalk and back onto the street. Good. Pay attention. Don’t cause any accidents now.
Joanna. I hate you. I love you. I …
Where am I? What’s the way to the hospital again? I think I have to go left here, leave our neighborhood. Yes, that’s it; that should be the right way.
This dizziness isn’t good. Not at all. I need to keep myself alert, need to think. If the mind’s busy, it’ll stay awake.
Strangers Page 14