I took my morning coffee outside, sat gazing at the garden. Everything is succumbing to our neglect. Vegetables dying on their stems, branches fallen, grass overgrown, weeds everywhere, pushing their way in.
All of it rotting.
Bugs, tiny white flecks on the leaves, hustling their way through the green. Snails with their houses waterlogged, hiding under leaves. Collapsed produce, given up on life. Much of it already surrendered to the cold.
Decay is taking over.
Still, the birds are leaving for the south. The rest of the animals are preparing for their months underground. Nothing has stopped: time or season, growth or its opposite. It’s just us, paused like a broken clock in the eternal moment of our doom.
In the chair, I felt the stiffness of my body. I bent over and stretched my arms, heard the hardened parts of me click and resist. I looked out toward the forest. The familiar trail. I’d not been back since that day. I finished the coffee and slipped inside to change into my running clothes.
I started walking toward the woods, still not entirely sure why. I walked and stopped. Walked and stopped.
I’m a free woman, I told myself, but I felt only guilt.
At the start of the trail, I looked back toward the houses.
Elsa and Karl on the left. Sam and I on the right. Two wooden homes, framed in view. Two vantage points from which to watch the goings-on of the reserve.
I walked on. I looked behind me. I couldn’t shake the strangeness of the feeling, of doing this without the stroller. Without the baby. Never again with the baby.
As I approached the clearing, I felt it all come back. The terror of that day. The sickening realization that he was gone. That I would be found out. And I was found out, wasn’t I? I suppose I had it coming.
Perhaps there is more. Perhaps this is only the beginning.
The blue and white police tape cordoning off the area has been broken and discarded. Some parts remained stuck to the entrance of the cabin. I walked up to it and tried the door. It opened. I went inside. It was tiny, dusty, and mostly empty. A wooden bench that probably served as a bed, a table, a shelf with some tinned food and an enamel bowl and plate. Not much of a love nest for the teenagers.
I stood at the window and looked out. The clearing, the trees. The rock on the right-hand side, the big tree on the left; perfect for hiding behind. For watching, for waiting. Someone was there. Someone had followed me. I felt my stomach turn into a knot. And you left him all alone.
Crimes like this, Detective Bergstrom had said, they tend to be personal. Intimate. Someone in the family. Someone wanting to frame me.
To take what was mine.
To punish me.
Friends. Sisters. Two parts of the same whole.
I looked out at the place where the baby would have died. Smothered. His own blanket, held to his mouth, held until he could no longer breathe. Blue, the color of the little fish printed on the cloth. The color of his face when I found him.
His head would have been swaddled tightly inside. Swaddling. That’s what the maternity nurses teach you to do at the hospital. So that the child feels safe. So that the child knows there’s nothing to fear from the post-womb world. Only love. Only love.
But you wanted him dead. You wished he’d never existed at all.
His face, always looking back at you, always threatening to spill another secret. I was going to make it right.
I know, Christopher had written. Not I need you, like every time before. This is why he wanted Frank to send him a photograph. He saw what I never did. What I never wanted to believe.
But I had a plan. I was going to reply, just this once. He’s not yours. I’d pretend to be certain, imply I’d had tests done, irrefutable proof.
Perhaps I’d threaten him with something shameful if he ever contacted me again.
Who is Christopher? the detective had asked. We found over two hundred deleted emails from him on your laptop.
I’d swallowed. An old friend. He’s not well, I said. Mentally unstable.
Seems a little obsessed with you, she said. Is there a reason for that?
I shook my head. He’s not well, I repeated.
It was true. He wasn’t well when I met him and I’d only made it worse. Pretending that the intoxicating love he felt was reciprocated. Pretending to be just like him.
It’s like we’re the only two people on the planet who get what it all means, he told me.
Yes, I’d enthused, just you and I.
He was an engineer by day, all numbers and measurements; by night, a manic poet yearning for a muse. I loved how he looked at me. I loved how vivid I felt, reflected through his eyes.
I need you, I’d said. I love you, I’d promised.
I never did. Maybe I never do.
It was only ever a salve to something else. A taste of a life less small. A way to be anyone else.
And then it was a curse.
There was a rustling outside, a sudden intrusion upon the silence, a pounding of shoes over ground. A woman emerged from the trees, her back to the cabin. She wore a cap covering her hair. She stopped, out of breath, in the middle of the clearing. The very place. She looked up, into the sky, into the invisible tops of the pines. She looked around, held her hands over her face and let out a cry, loud and sudden and shrill.
The sound of pain, deep and dark, familiar to me in its guttural pitch.
She spun around. She turned on the spot, the cry shifting, becoming a low wail. She clasped at her middle, and retched onto the ground. Then she collapsed, a crumpled heap with her head in her lap.
When she looked up, I recognized the face.
Elsa.
It was Elsa.
Sam
In the barn, I have Biscuit with me. Biscuit and whiskey. Neither is any use.
The fog in my head just gets darker, heavier. I feel myself unraveling, everything beneath me giving way. Can’t bear to look at Merry, and yet. I need to know she’ll suffer for what she’s done. I don’t yet know how.
From the barn, I heard tires on the gravel drive. I opened the door and watched as two cars pulled up and two sets of police officers emerged. Detective Bergstrom. I recognized her from the police station.
What now, I thought, but she did not come to our door. It was Karl’s bell she rang.
Someone answered and let her and the other officer inside. The other pair walked around the property, peering into the garage and the barns. They came out holding something wrapped in plastic.
The front door opened and Elsa emerged, wild-eyed and in her tan house shoes. Detective Bergstrom put her in one of the cars and they drove away.
From the doorway, Freja stood and watched. I waved to her, but she looked away from me and shut the door.
One of the other officers walked across the field. He held up the plastic bag for me to see.
Does this belong to your son? he asked.
It was one of Conor’s blankets. Blue. They had come in a set of two, the same pattern with the colors inverted.
I nodded. Yes. What is this, where did you find—
Thank you, sir, he said, and he was gone.
This is the reality. Everything around us turned to a deformed version of itself. Child dead. Wife sadistic. Neighbors…what? Baby killers.
They teach you that human beings perceive only a small fraction of what is around us, that our sense of sight and hearing is far inferior to that of most other species: bees with their infrared vision, dolphins and bats with their sonic navigation, horses and dogs with a sense of smell heightened enough to detect emotion. Fear, happiness, they can grasp it all.
But us, we miss more than we’ll ever see, whole chunks of information lost to the ether, things happening right under our noses. Easily fooled. Willfully ignorant.
I went inside the house. It smelled of rotting waste, of all things foul. I heard the sound of the shower running. Merry, or maybe Frank. I went back out, sat down inside the studio, surveyed the equipment I’
d bought. Tools of the trade. I thought of better days.
Associate professor. Acclaim for my work. Adoration, even. That was stolen from me too. Another betrayal. Another treacherous bitch.
There was a knock on the door. Merry.
What do you want?
Sam, she said. Detective Bergstrom called. They’ve taken Elsa in for questioning.
I saw, I said. I watched them earlier.
She shook her head. Apparently they have reason to believe she may be unstable. There was evidence brought to their attention. This is what the detective said. That Elsa might have—I don’t know—had some kind of breakdown. She was pregnant, she miscarried just a day or so before Conor was—
She stopped herself.
Jesus, I said. Elsa.
It doesn’t make sense, does it?
She thinks I care now. She thinks it matters to me. But what do I feel for another man’s dead son?
The thing is, she said, I saw her. In the clearing. In the place he—right in the place where it happened. She was crying. Hysterical, really…I don’t know. Unhinged. Like, guilty. Shamed.
I rubbed my eyes. That woman looks like she wouldn’t trample on an ant.
Merry held her arms tightly. I know. I think so too. But they found one of Conor’s blankets in their barn. His blue blanket. They’re testing it, trying to see if there’s any trace evidence to connect her to…
Her voice trailed off. She shook her head. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you, she said. So you know what’s going on.
I looked at her in the doorway of the studio. Shadow of a woman. Shadow of a wife. Nothing left but an empty shell. She looks worn out and faded, like an old shirt. Unrested, unwashed. Too thin. Bones under her clothes poking through, eyes hollowed out like the ones on the wall; look into them and there’s only a void. She has a new smell, too, dank and sweet, like overripe fruit. Part woman, part something else.
I am still wearing my wedding band.
Take me there, I said suddenly. Where it happened. I want you to take me there. I want to see.
She hesitated a moment, and then nodded her consent.
Frank
I watched them from the window as they walked off toward the woods. Would they both be coming back? I wondered. Well, perhaps now that Elsa is a suspect, Sam’s rage toward his wife will be a little less murderous.
Truth be told, they are both frightening. Unpredictable and wild-eyed, as though all bets are off.
I’m reminded of my father, the way he’d look after a long run of bad luck. A man with nothing is a man with nothing to lose. I caught him once in the bathroom of my grandmother’s apartment, trousers down, stepping into what looked like a giant diaper. Incontinence pads. Took me years to figure it out. His determination not to leave the slot machines until he had gotten what he came for.
He took me along to the casino once, one afternoon when I was five or six years old. My mother was out of town, helping my grandmother pack up the big farmhouse in Arkansas after it was sold to developers.
My father had promised to take me to the aquarium to see the penguins. Instead, we drove to the casino, pulled into the dull gray concrete parking lot, and went in. There was a children’s play area near the entrance.
You wait here, he said. It’ll be fun, Frances.
There were toys, dolls with missing limbs and a big bucket of plastic building blocks; a TV screen played the cartoon channel, and there was a low plastic table full of colored crayons and large sheets of blank white paper.
I won’t be very long, my father said. It’ll be fun, he repeated.
There were a few other children inside the room, most of them younger than I was. A baby in a stroller, sleeping, holding in her hand one of those books made of plastic.
In the corner, a girl sat in a wheelchair. She could have been anything from eight to eighteen, her body small and awkward, her limbs all twisted in the wrong directions. Her head was turned to the side, her mouth hanging open. Her teeth looked very large. The babysitter had been trying to get her to drink from a straw, but she kept letting the juice spill out. Her blouse was spattered with red, like blood.
I picked up a crayon and drew a picture of a bird.
That’s good, sweetheart, the sitter said. Later, she gave me an apple cut into slices and a bag of mini cheddar crackers.
They never remember to bring lunch, do they? she said.
It was dark outside by the time we left. I had fallen asleep on the floor. My father crouched down to wake me up. His watch and his wedding ring were missing.
Are we going? I asked.
Yes, he said.
I’m never coming back here again, I said crossly.
Neither am I, Frances, he said, but even then I knew that was a lie.
I watched from the window of the spare room this morning as they carted Elsa off.
Desperate people do desperate things.
And it isn’t difficult to believe. Despair, the feeling that the world is conspiring against you, that you and you alone are suffering and wretched and punished beyond any fairness. You cannot see straight. You cannot think straight. There is only the hurt, urgent and fiery within.
Oh, I know it all too well. The longing for something you cannot have.
How my mother tried to root it out of me. We have more than most, dear. A roof over our heads, food on the table.
She had such narrow horizons, my mother. Such low expectations. I doubt it ever occurred to her that she might have hoped for more. I despised her for it. Resented her plainness, her blind acquiescence to whatever she was dealt.
How could I not want more, when it was every day flaunted in my face? Everything the other children had. Everything I had to do without.
It was Maureen who got me into the same private school as Merry. My mother wept with gratitude—as though she’d done it for her. Really, it was so Merry and I would have coordinated schedules. That way my mother could do it all. Mother to me, mother to Merry.
We’ve always been sisters, haven’t we? Interchangeable parts. You bleed, I bleed. What you love, I love too. What you need, I must give you.
This is love. This is how it goes.
Alone in the house, I was aware of my immense boredom. Trees, walls, dull damp sky. It really could make one crazy, being quarantined here in this place.
Perhaps this is what happened to Elsa. Perhaps this is what happens to all the women around here.
Sam
There was an urgent knocking at the door. It was Karl.
Sam, Sam. They took Elsa yesterday. Why would they? What did you say to make them think she could have anything to do with Conor’s death?
Jesus, Karl, I said, I don’t know. I haven’t got a clue. I didn’t say a word.
Frank had walked into the room. He looked at her and grabbed her suddenly by the throat with one hand. The other hand he used to hold her wrists together. Bound, she was, like an animal.
You bitch, he said. It was you, wasn’t it?
He spat in her face. She squirmed and protested. I did not move to get him off her. I just stood and watched.
You’re a dangerous woman, aren’t you? A liar, a troublemaker.
Karl, she said, what’s wrong with you?
You were the only one who knew about the miscarriage, he said. No one else.
He looked down at her terrified face and pushed her away before storming out of the house.
I watched Frank, holding her wrists, rubbing at the red marks he’d left behind.
What did you do? What’s he talking about?
She shook her head. She could not speak. No wonder. Karl is a giant of a man. A minute more and he might have finished her off.
Oh, I said. Slowly it dawned on me.
You were fucking him, weren’t you?
She grabbed her coat from the hook. You’re awful people, she said. You know that. Awful.
She opened the door and slammed it behind her. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed Merry hovering
silently in the wings. The pair of them. Two savages.
She’s a real piece of work, that friend of yours, I said.
Merry nodded. Yes, she said. Don’t I know.
Frank
I walked in my rage to Sigtuna. An hour in the rain, another miserable gray Swedish day, trapped in the middle of nowhere, cut off from life, from all the action of the real world. To go from consulting millionaires about their share portfolios to this! Boiling vegetables and cleaning house.
This godforsaken place, the dull Swedes and this bland existence in the woods. Trees and sky, green and blue. Every day a repeat of the one before. It will be good to leave. It will be good to get far, far away.
In the village, I found a small café at the end of the dismal stretch of shops and restaurants, all five of them. I sat with my phone and searched for flights. I did it. Booked a one-way ticket for Sunday. I decided on Indonesia. A week at a yoga retreat in Bali, then on to Hong Kong. Nicolai it is. I sent him an email and he replied almost immediately, full of ideas for day trips and dirty weekends.
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