by Sara Blaedel
“Did she have any money?” Camilla had noticed a newspaper on the pastor’s desk; the open page showed a photo of Sofie from when she had disappeared. Young, smiling, hair pinned up in a loose knot in back. “To get by on?”
The pastor nodded. “She was going to inherit a lot of money when her mother’s estate was settled. Her father had been very successful, he’d started a factory that manufactured valves for pumps used on the big oil platforms. He sold it all when he turned sixty and retired. The family was quite wealthy.”
Camilla had barely touched her tea. The doorbell rang, and Tåsing excused himself and walked out in the hallway. He returned shortly after, his expression serious, sad. “I have a visitor I’m going to have to receive.”
She stood up at once and gathered her things. A woman was crying, and Camilla picked up fragments of sentences. An accident at work, a fall. Died in the ambulance. Self-conscious now, she pulled her coat off the hook and thanked him for his time. He joined a young woman out in the kitchen; she sat with her back to Camilla, head buried in her hands.
“We can never know when death will arrive,” he spoke into her ear. “But it will come when God decides our time on Earth is over.”
Chills ran down Camilla’s spine as the door closed behind her.
17
February 1996
The voice thundered down at her. “You killed your own mother! You robbed her of life and made yourself the master over life and death.”
His anger with Sofie was like a hot cloud surrounding him. His eyes blazed with contempt.
“I didn’t kill her. I respected her wishes.” She pulled her legs up to her chest.
Sofie had just gotten out of bed and was holding a hot mug of tea where she sat on the corner of the sofa. An empty feeling lay heavily inside her after having cried most of the night. It had been the right decision, but the finality of it and the loss had made her deeply unhappy.
“I’m not asking you to understand,” she said. “Well, actually, yes, I am. Please, won’t you hold me?” Her voice was small. She felt like she was on the edge of a deep chasm; her sorrow had robbed her of the energy and will to defend herself. She just wanted to explain her actions, and for him to understand. Or at least see things from her side.
“I’ll report her to the police,” he continued. “I’ll report that damned doctor who thinks she can play God.”
“No you won’t!” Sofie said. “You’ll keep her out of this. If you’re going to report anybody, report me. I respect people’s rights to choose—”
“You have no right. We have no right to play God in our own or anyone else’s life. How could you do this to me? To us.”
“This isn’t about you.” Now Sofie was angry. How could she have been so naïve as to think he would understand? “You of all people should be able to show compassion. I believe in death with dignity, and I won’t stand for you judging me.”
For a second she thought he was going to kill her. He rushed over to the sofa, his dark eyes lit with rage, his voice icy. “You will never talk about this to anyone, ever. I will not accept your voicing an opinion so strongly against everything I stand for and what I preach in church. Jesus died on the cross for us. Was that a dignified or undignified death?”
He jammed one knee on the sofa, his face so close that droplets of spittle spattered her cheeks.
Though she was close to tears, Sofie stared back at him in defiance.
“I can’t have a wife who so openly defies God’s will,” he continued. “What could you possibly have been thinking?”
“I’m no longer your wife.” Her voice was flat, and even now, as she was cornered in the sofa and not reacting as she should, filled with defiance and anger and despair and sorrow. She wanted to talk to him about Christian charity and understanding. But she couldn’t. She didn’t have it in her. She felt as if she were falling. Over the edge of the abyss.
He kept raging at her, but she didn’t listen. She thought about her mother and the evening in her apartment when she had emptied her bottle of pills. Alone.
She thought about the suicide note. It was her handwriting, no doubt about that, yet it was different. A bit shaky, not as firm as usual.
To my beloved daughter.
I can’t go on any longer, I’m asking you to understand and accept and forgive my (selfish) way of saying good-bye to you.
Good night.
When the police had arrived to check the apartment, after her mother had been taken to the hospital, one of the officers wanted to take the note with him, but Sofie had objected. They took a photocopy of the letter and left the original with her.
“You’re my wife for better or worse,” he said, biting off his words, “and we agreed to love and honor each other till death do us part.” He stood by the window with his back turned defiantly to her.
She was about to say something about the capacity for understanding, but instead she quoted another part of the marriage ritual. “Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you have a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”
He whirled around and pointed an accusing finger at her. “Don’t you speak the words of God after what you’ve just done!”
Sofie tried to fight off her sobbing, but it rose out of her like a gusher. Grief from her mother’s death, his anger, her sense of being completely alone, but most of all the injustice of being attacked for keeping a promise.
She stood up. “You can’t refuse to officiate her funeral service. She lived in this town all her life, she was christened and confirmed in the church. My parents were married in our church. What kind of a person are you?”
“It’s no longer your church.”
The look he gave her was so cold that she felt her love for him collapse inside her. “You can’t do this to her,” she whispered. Her hands felt icy.
“You can’t do this to me.” His voice sounded completely flat, his words might as well have been spoken by a stranger. “Until you regain your senses, you will not set foot in my manse. You will leave, and you will not even try to put me in a situation where my congregation can doubt all that I stand for.”
He left the room, and a while later, after Sofie pulled herself together and walked into the kitchen, he was gone.
18
She’s the person I’m closest to,” Melvin said, pointing to Louise from his hospital bed.
Something tugged at her deep inside. She had spent most of the weekend at the hospital with Jonas, until he had to return to boarding school Sunday evening. To her great relief, her ex-boyfriend Kim had offered to take care of Dina when he heard that Melvin was in the hospital. Kim had given them the dog, and he and Jonas still kept in close touch. He lived in a beautiful half-timbered house on the outskirts of Holbæk, so he had suggested that she drop Dina off on the way to the boarding school in Odsherred.
The drive to Holbæk the previous evening had been long and dark, but she enjoyed spending time with Jonas in the car, just the two of them. And it was good to see Kim. He had a pot of coffee waiting when they arrived. It had felt so nice, so familiar to sit in the low-ceilinged living room, listening to Jonas and Kim talk about dogs, school, and a sea kayak jaunt that Kim was trying to convince her son to go on.
“It’s up in Sweden, and we’ll be gone only a few days,” Kim had said. Louise smiled and sank farther down into the sofa when Jonas said it was a long time until Easter, you can’t plan that kind of stuff so early. What if he got a gig or something? Kim nodded in acknowledgment and asked if Jonas had something going on.
Without Louise really understanding how it happened, Jonas had made a name for himself in the dance music scene. It had begun with some remixes he’d uploaded on YouTube. In no time his music had been shared an incredible number of times, and it hadn’t gone unnoticed. His artist name was JoeH, and his first success, “Back to Normal,” had been on the Top 100 DJ rankings for a few weeks—something Louise knew only because Camilla’s son, Markus, had
bombarded Facebook with the news. Jonas would never mention something like that himself, but last year he had been asked to perform on the Apollo stage in the days leading up to the Roskilde Festival. That entire week he had been difficult to bring down to earth. She hadn’t even tried, because she was so proud of this young, introverted guy who so early in life had lost his parents, and yet he kicked ass, so much that he was known even outside the country. An online music magazine had recently compared him to the world-famous Swedish DJ Avicii, but Jonas had forced Markus to take the quote off Facebook. It was too braggy.
While sitting in Kim’s cozy living room, Louise had almost been able to set aside her anger at Eik. And she had accepted Kim’s offer to drive Jonas the rest of the way to Odsherred, which freed her up to return to Copenhagen.
She stepped over to Melvin’s bed and took his hand.
He’d been unconscious most of the time in the hospital, but early that morning he had started to come out of it.
Earlier, before anyone really knew how badly Melvin was doing, the neurologist had told Jonas to pat himself on the back, that Melvin Pehrson wouldn’t be alive if he hadn’t reacted so quickly.
Louise’s heart had swollen to twice its size. Her son had just turned sixteen, and he’d saved someone’s life. Melvin’s life! She had practically crushed Jonas with a hug.
A nurse stood at the foot of Melvin’s bed, marking off a checklist in his medical file. “Do you want to be resuscitated in case of cardiac arrest? It happens once in a while during treatment, so you two will have to decide.”
Louise couldn’t speak for a moment as they looked at Melvin. The left side of his face still drooped from an earlier stroke. Suddenly he looked tiny in the white hospital bed. And old, Louise thought. He was seventy-eight, and he’d already made it clear that he hoped to God he didn’t get too old to take care of himself. He so much wanted to keep living in his apartment, to not have to go to a nursing home.
Melvin took her hand. He tried but failed to turn his head.
“Louise’s son is the reason I know how to answer that.” Melvin’s voice was weak, and it trembled somewhat. But his eyes were smiling. “If he hadn’t found me, I wouldn’t be here today. That would’ve been that. But now I know how happy I am to still be around, so I want everything possible done to keep me around if the ticker goes out again. I’d thought I’d done it all, but I’m not ready to check out yet.”
The nurse made a mark without looking up. “Do you have any allergies?” she asked.
Louise had to step back. For a moment she feared the years were turning her into a weepy old aunt, but then she thought about all the levels of emotional pressure she’d been under lately. The broken relationship with Eik. And now Melvin in the hospital. Louise hadn’t had time to process it all.
Someone knocked quietly on the door. A gray-haired woman cautiously stuck her head in the room. Her face was pale and serious as she peered at the bed and then recognized the patient.
“Well, I’ll be!” Melvin seemed truly surprised and a bit self-conscious as the woman approached his bed. “You’re here?”
Mrs. Milling took off her gloves. “You gave us quite a turn. Don’t do it again.”
Melvin smiled at her and nodded. “I’ll try not to.” Grete Milling clearly wasn’t going to be doing any light bantering. Even though the immediate danger had passed, her face still showed signs of shock. She shook her head and stroked his cheek.
“Thank you for calling,” she said to Louise. She unbuttoned her long wool coat. They had spoken several times that weekend, and Louise had promised to call her the moment Melvin woke up. The senior lady seemed a bit confused and uncertain, so Louise brought a chair over to Melvin’s bed and took her coat for her.
“Sit,” she said. “I’ll see if I can find a doctor who can tell us what’s going to happen now.”
* * *
It had gone better than Camilla had expected on Monday morning, when she presented her idea for an article on a Swiss suicide clinic to Terkel Høyer.
She sat in the retro-blue chair across from her boss and told him what had happened in Jutland. “Assisted suicide. Sofie and the family’s doctor helped her mother kill herself.”
Høyer seemed interested. “Did you talk to the family doctor?”
Camilla shook her head. “She left after Sofie disappeared. The pastor made it difficult for her to practice in town after his mother-in-law died. He didn’t even try to hide his contempt for what she’d done, either.”
“Did he report her to the police?” Høyer pulled his chair closer to Camilla. Earlier she had laid a stack of printouts on his desk, information on assisted suicide, and before their meeting he’d had time to skim the papers.
“No, she was never charged, he couldn’t prove anything. But he definitely made things hot for her.”
On the drive home, Camilla had realized it wasn’t so much Sofie’s story that interested her as the dilemma surrounding a person’s right to decide when he or she would die. Several years earlier, her own father had been the victim of an ugly assault and had suffered serious brain damage. If his rehabilitation hadn’t been successful, he would likely have ended up a vegetable in a hospital bed—how much personal dignity is there in such a life?
“It’s so enormously interesting, whether it’s okay to help another person die.” She was caught up in an enthusiasm she’d thought had disappeared years ago. “There are all the ethical questions, and then there’s the problem of being able to judge yourself if it’s time to go. I understand the pastor, too. Suicide is wrong. A person committing suicide can cause terrible suffering for the people left behind. It’s not permitted to actively be involved in death. But damn it, we are involved!”
Høyer tipped his chair back and nodded thoughtfully. “When we help the sick or terminally ill, we’re involved in deciding whether someone lives or dies. But the purpose in that is to extend life. When children are prematurely born, we intervene.” This was something he knew about; his youngest child, Josefine, was born two months early, and it had been a struggle to keep her alive. “On the other hand, we’ve chosen limitations on abortion, which you can agree or disagree with. And we can switch off life support.”
“Exactly. We’re involved already. When we extend lives, it’s okay to play God, but when someone suffers and lives in pain, and everyone knows it’s not going to change, when this person can be released, our right to play God stops, we condemn it. Or at least we think the ethical questions are too difficult.”
She sank in her chair and swept her straight blond hair behind her ears. “It’s so interesting.”
“Where do you stand? What’s your opinion?”
Camilla thought a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t know. I’d like to think I could help somebody I loved very much, but I’m afraid I’d be too egotistical. I’d be thinking about my own loss. I don’t know if I’m brave enough, either.”
She shrugged. “There’s a recent case of a woman, a mother of two, who went to Switzerland to commit suicide. The family knew about it, and everybody accepted it. She had a fatal illness that would slowly take her life. She didn’t want a painful, undignified death. I understand that. And I have great sympathy for it. And I can imagine you don’t want your relatives and loved ones to see everything you go through.”
They both sat for a moment, staring straight ahead in silence.
“But you can’t forbid people to take their own lives,” Høyer said thoughtfully. “They do it, no matter if God forbids it, or a clergyman condemns their choice. It happens every single day.”
“But suicides often put the people around them, their loved ones, in the position of discovering them,” Camilla said. “I’m sure that’s something a lot of people could do without.” She began framing a number of scenarios that would be interesting to include in her article. “Surely many people involved would prefer a suicide in a peaceful and well-controlled environment, not done in loneliness and desperation and maybe eve
n shame. And surely someone wanting to die would like to have his or her loved ones there when it happens? It could be less dramatic, less traumatic, maybe even a good farewell, plus there are those who commit suicide because they’re unhappy, not physically ill. Desperate people who feel shame or some sort of inner chaos jump in front of a train, hop out of a skyscraper, hang themselves in a park—”
Høyer raised a hand to stop her. “That’s something else. Those are desperate people, unhappy, mentally ill people who don’t have a fatal illness. Should these people be able to order a suicide? Bullying, a broken love affair. Where are the limits?” He raised an eyebrow at her.
“I don’t know, really I don’t. But I could try to find out by going to Switzerland and talking to them. I thought I went to Jutland to track down Sofie Bygmann’s past, but this is the story. So if you want to send Ole Kvist to England to cover the killing, go ahead. I’m going to switch directions and concentrate on what might have been the reason for her disappearance. Of course I can’t claim that the doctor assisted with the mother’s death, not in an article, but I can get into the general subject.”
As she was about to leave, he asked, “Which way are the winds blowing politically here regarding assisted suicide?”
“It’s not being considered. It’s the same with euthanasia. But I’ll find out what the arguments are. There’s also something shameful about how only those who can afford to travel to Switzerland can commit suicide in peaceful surroundings. Is assisted suicide only for the rich? That doesn’t sound right at all.” Her head was swimming with angles for her story.