When the baby is in front of me, helpless and pink and angry, weak with need and his endless demands, I cannot help myself. I pinch. I twist. A dark shadow over his small frame. He feels something and I stay numb. The blue bruises on his flesh are another set of eyes; they watch me and I watch them back. My life. My lies. My punishment. He smells of soured milk and tears. Everything is all wrong.
Elsa was saying something about the nature school down the road closing.
Not enough children.
Yes, Karl adds. Birth rates in the Scandinavian countries are notoriously low.
Catastrophically so, actually. We’re a dying breed.
I jiggle the baby. I hold a carrot to his mouth to suck on, to ease the soreness of the teething gums that keep him awake at night.
Well, of course, Karl continues. Women have much wider options these days than motherhood.
Yes, Elsa nods. She looks wounded by this fact.
Sam announces that the meat is ready, and we sit down around the table. Elsa eats even less than before. The bones of her tiny wrists look like they may snap at any moment. I have a sudden vision of Karl setting her alight. A punishment for her barrenness, perhaps.
Where is Freja today? I ask.
She is visiting her grandmother, Karl replies. In Katrineholm.
Frank, playing hostess, titters about passing food and topping up drinks. The potato salad is ruled a success. Karl asks Elsa to get the recipe.
Looks like you’re really part of the family, Elsa tells Frank.
She sure is, I smile, and the taste of her potatoes rises up in my throat.
In the kitchen, Frank and I stack the plates. She’s been strangely aloof from me the last few days, watching me closely but saying little. Perhaps she is confused too, by this topsy-turvy state of affairs. Tonight she seems in better spirits. Maybe it is all the applause.
I feel like a fifties housewife over here, she laughs. And you know something, I love it.
Are you wearing my dress? I ask. Now I see it’s one of the new dresses I bought in Stockholm. I haven’t worn it yet. In the places where it gaped on my body, it sits tightly across hers, as though her flesh has been poured in and stitched up, like stuffing in a doll.
Oh, she says. I’m all out of clean clothes. I didn’t think you’d mind.
I load the last few glasses into the dishwasher and lift the door shut.
Oh—Frank says, clicking her fingers. I totally forgot to mention it before.
Christopher, she says.
Who? I ask.
Christopher Atwood. You met him at that Christmas dinner I threw right before I moved to London.
I nod vaguely. Sure.
Funniest thing, she says. I bumped into him in the Starbucks line at Heathrow. I was heading here and he was on his way back to New York after a business trip.
I busy myself rinsing the blades of the food processor. What a coincidence, I say lightly.
Well, I told him I was off to see you in Sweden—he was very surprised to hear you’d moved. And had a baby.
We weren’t friends, I say. I just met him that one time.
Well, Frank smiles. Anyway, I promised to send him pictures of everything. He’s never been to Sweden.
In the sink, the water is suddenly stained red.
Merry, Frank cries, you’ve cut yourself.
Later, after everything’s been bandaged up and packed away, the baby on the living room floor rolls himself over onto his belly. He heaves himself up on all fours. He rocks back and forth, back and forth. Then he reaches out an arm and begins to crawl.
Sam jumps up from where he’s been sitting, Frank shrieks and applauds.
They hug each other. They cheer the baby as though he has taken mankind’s first steps on the moon.
Look, Frank cries, we did it.
The we, like most things these days, does not include me.
Frank
At the self-development retreat I attended a few years ago—you know, yoga and morning meditation and little shots of green juice—Krisha, the woman who ran the seminars, spoke to us about presence. The perfection in the now. You aren’t supposed to wish for anything beyond what you have and are, in any moment. Anything else, she warned, and you doom yourself to a fruitless search for a happiness you won’t find.
I can’t help but think of her now, and I can’t stop myself from wishing for everything she warned against.
I know it’s a ludicrous thought, the very idea of it—madness—and yet I can’t stop it. The idea that Merry doesn’t want her life; that I want it more than anything in the world. I have been playing house here, this I know. Playing as though this might be my house and my life, my husband and my child. Why not? It is easy and familiar, as though it has always been this way or ought to have been. Cooking dinner, playing with the baby, seeing Sam soak it all in.
And then Sam at night, almost every night, hand on my arm, eyes on my eyes, sometimes stealing a quick look down to my braless and beautiful breasts. Desire there, but something else, too. He sees it; I know he does. He sees that I should be the one.
Yes, madness, but also not.
Because it fits. It works.
It would set things right.
I could slip in and she could slip out, a trading of places so seamless and smooth, you wouldn’t even notice a ripple. Mine for hers. A simple switch. Surely stranger things have happened. And Merry—my poor Merry. How my heart aches for her. She is miserable. A prisoner of this life who longs for her freedom. Really, I have seen too much now to believe otherwise.
Every day since she’s recovered from her flu, Merry has gone out for a hike with Conor. They are always gone a long time. She always comes back smiling.
I don’t know what it was that raised my suspicions. Maybe when I asked her if I could join and she balked at the suggestion. Maybe just a feeling in the gut, a wave of something not quite right. I have been on high alert since I first saw her hurting Conor. Well, she bundled him up this morning and the two of them left around nine. Sam was out for the day, off in Gothenburg for a meeting. I have introduced him to a few contacts I thought might be useful; this is one of them. Aren’t I a tremendous help? He is very grateful, he tells me. So very grateful. The least I can do, I reply.
I put on my sneakers and followed behind Merry. She moved quickly, pushing the stroller over the stones at a brisk pace. I hung back while she readjusted something in the stroller. Then she crossed over the path and made for the trail. I walked slowly behind, and hid a moment while she climbed the hill.
When enough time had passed, I climbed it myself. In the clearing at the top, I stopped. I looked at the sight before my eyes—a puzzling one for sure—and went behind a tree to observe. It was Conor’s stroller, abandoned in the middle of the trees. I could see the child inside, very still or possibly asleep, his blue blanket tucked into his lower half.
Merry was nowhere. Vanished. Conor had been left all alone in the woods.
I waited by the tree, assuming she was peeing behind a bush or, I don’t know, foraging for berries. I waited and waited, tried to rationalize the scene, but she did not return. Twenty minutes, then thirty passed. Eventually I went over to the stroller and peered inside. Conor was awake, watching alertly.
Oh, Conor, I cried. You’ve been left all alone!
My little lamb, those fat cheeks, that button of a nose planted in the center of his face—I touched a hand to him and felt his cold skin.
He was unperturbed, and I was struck with the idea that this might be nothing new for him. I picked him up and planted kisses all over his face, tickled under his arms—tried to show him that the world was not a cruel place. My heart sank, thinking of what I’d seen only a few days ago. And in between.
And what about this? Dear God, I thought, who knows how far she will go.
I kept him cradled safely in my arms, his plump cheeks pressed to mine. It was maybe an hour or so later when I heard the rustling of trees and the pounding of feet ove
r ground. I put Conor back down and crouched again behind the tree. Casual, easy, not a care in the world, Merry gave her son a brief glance and then wheeled him home.
I waited some minutes in the shade, stilling my heart, gathering my thoughts.
She does not deserve him. She does not even want him. This was confirmed.
I walked slowly back to the house, seeing it all in reverse now. Not beautiful. Not the place of longing. Just a set piece.
Merry appeared surprised when I came in the door behind her.
Where have you been? she asked.
Just took a little walk. Fresh air and all.
She looked at me sharply. Whereabouts did you go?
I waved my hand in the general direction of the woods. Around the trails. The lower one, I said, and watched her relax. She had removed Conor from the stroller. She had him awkwardly in her grip as he wriggled to get free.
Darling boy. How much cruelty can he be expected to endure?
We spent the rest of the day pottering about the house. Merry in the garden pulling up weeds and planting rows of broad beans, me playing on the lawn with Conor, trying to shower him with an abundance of love. God knows he needs it.
I helped Merry make his next batch of baby food, and later, a simple salad and grilled lemon chicken for our dinner, which we ate at the kitchen counter.
This really is the life, I said.
Yes, we’re very lucky.
You are happy here, aren’t you, Merry? I asked, hoping to coax something more truthful from her. To help her at least share her pain, if not solve it.
I’m your best friend, I said. You can tell me anything. I’m always here for you.
She only gave me that fixed smile. What’s not to be happy about? she said.
Well, all these other lives you’ve lived, I said. They couldn’t have been more different from this.
I didn’t know what I was looking for then. I didn’t know what fit.
And this?
This is it. This is me.
Right. I nodded. I had opened a bottle of wine and poured a single glass. Now Merry fetched one for herself from the cupboard.
Sorry, I said, I thought you were trying for a baby. I sipped my wine and watched her fill a generous glass.
She gave a sort of grimace. Oh, I’m not pregnant.
You can be so sure?
She laughed. Yes, Frank. It’s really quite simple.
Well then. I refilled my glass, and together we finished the bottle.
In the night, I heard the baby cry out. I slipped quietly back into his room and picked him up in my arms. I held him close and shushed him gently. Shhh, shhh, back to sleep, lullabies in the dark, a comforting rock in the big armchair. I inhaled his sleepy smell, milky and soapy and soft, the excruciating perfection of new life, like the best things achingly fragile and too easily lost. When he was in my arms, sleeping soundly, safe and happy, it was easy to forget that he was not mine.
Merry
Freja in our living room was playing with the baby, pulling him back by his legs when he crawled off toward danger. He is a permanent blur of motion now, gaining speed and agility by the day. Frank and Sam could not be more pleased. I have been told to be more vigilant with where I leave things.
I found one of your hairclips in his mouth the other day, Frank chastised me over dinner. And the day before, she said, I picked a button up from off the living room carpet.
You’ll need to be more careful, Sam said, irritated. These things are choking hazards.
Yes, hazards. Potentially fatal hazards. Tiny objects that can steal life away in a few seconds.
Freja is a sweet child, curious, polite. She has Karl’s piercing gaze, a little unnerving, a little too blue, like the children in those Hitler Youth propaganda posters. I offered her a cup of apple juice, which she drank carefully, using both hands. She is learning English at school, but she is shy to speak it in front of me. To the baby, she speaks in Swedish.
Frank was on a Skype call with some friends in Paris or Dubai or Hong Kong. Every so often, loud peals of laughter sounded from her room. I imagined she was entertaining her friends with tales of our provincial ways, stories of quaint Sigtuna relayed to the good people of the world’s more thrilling metropolises. I wonder how she acts around them, what kind of woman they imagine she is. Popular, successful, ambitious. Maybe. Maybe she is all of these things in the world. A woman to be admired. A woman who has achieved significant and impressive things. Made something of herself—that most curious of notions.
I don’t know this Frank.
I know only the woman who is no woman at all, but a girl. The girl who will always be outside looking in. Desperate. Ruthless. While she was in the other room, I snuck a peek at her phone. It was full of photos of freshly baked breakfast muffins and the views of the lake from the kitchen window, pictures with the baby, a few with Sam. Just the sort of photographs I used to send her. But I am in none of these pictures. It is as though I do not exist at all.
I enlarged one picture of Frank, Sam, and the baby. A dazzling sight—an overload of good looks and white-toothed smiles. You almost cannot look away.
My stomach lurched. Sam’s arm around her. Sam, who cannot keep his hands to himself.
It couldn’t be. She wouldn’t dare. But the way she drapes herself on the sofa. The way she looks at Sam, touches his arm, his hand, anything she can, any chance she gets. The way she picks up the baby and slings him onto her arm. Who loves you, my little Con? Who wants to gobble you all up?
Like it is all hers. Like the guest in this house is me.
And Sam. I see how he looks at her. How they sit and talk late into the night. So close. Almost touching. Sometimes touching (I have stood at the window some nights to watch, breathing into the folds of the curtains, trying to stay hidden from view). I see how they have private jokes and gestures. How they closet themselves in the studio to talk about his work—because isn’t Frank just full of ideas!
No. No. Anyone but her. I can take anything—I have taken plenty already. But I could not bear that. If Frank took what was mine.
If it ever came to be that Frank got what she wanted. No. Never. I would not survive it.
I looked at the photo one last time, zooming in on the baby’s smiling face. Brushing away the other thought, unwelcome and distracting.
Outside, it was raining again, a faint, damp drizzle. Already the weather is getting a little chillier, the days cool and prone to downpours. You can feel the seasons slowly changing, the light giving way to the inevitable and desperate darkness to come. A second winter here looms, black and cold; the elements conspiring with Sam to keep me locked away inside. The baby will soon be a year old, another milestone, another marker of time. One whole year.
We will need to throw a party. Sam will want to celebrate the occasion in fitting style; cake and candles. For my first birthday party, my mother hired a pony and a clown. My father did not attend. I cried the whole way through and stopped only when the last guest had left. My father is seven years dead and I cannot think of a single memory of him that is a fond one. Three weeks before my wedding, that’s when he chose to do it. There was no one to walk me down the aisle on the day. I gave myself away.
From the kitchen, I watched Freja playing with the baby. Elsa had come to the door this morning, looking terribly anxious. I thought it might have been something to do with the baby again, but since Frank has been here there is a lot less crying for her to complain about.
Merry, I need your help, she said. I am sorry to impose.
She had an urgent doctor’s appointment. She did not say what for. She had a little blue cooler box in her hands; she clutched it tightly. Her eyes were wild with panic.
Please say nothing to Karl. He mustn’t know.
Of course, I said.
He’ll only worry, she added, forcing a smile. That’s the only reason for it.
I nodded. I smiled. I touched a reassuring hand to her arm. She flinched and pull
ed the cooler out of my reach.
She waved Freja hurriedly over to our house and drove away in her silver sedan.
Well, Freja, I said. What do you want to do?
She pointed to the baby on his play mat.
Terrific, I said.
She went and sat down beside him on the floor.
Jag är din mamma nu, she told him. I am your mother now.
Where is Freja’s real mother, I wonder. Did she leave them? Did Karl send her away?
When we were little, any time Frank visited my house, she would go home with something of mine secreted away in her pockets. I’d notice the missing thing after she left—a Barbie handbag, a pretty pen with glitter stars inside that danced as you tilted it to write. The next time I was in her bedroom, I might even see the pilfered objects among her things.
That’s mine, I’d say, but she’d just look at me and smile.
Oh no it isn’t. It’s mine.
You stole it! I’d cry.
She’d laugh and shrug and say, No, Merry, you must be mistaken. I’ve always had that.
I checked the vegetables simmering on the stove, and tried to make out what Frank was saying over Skype. When she emerged from the bedroom, she was still laughing.
My friend Will, she said, he’s hilarious.
I poured her a glass of water, trying to be hospitable, trying to keep it all under control. Play nice. Wasn’t that what I was taught? Play nice, girls. Yes. That is how they want you.
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