by S. J. Gazan
Johannes looked remorseful.
“I told the detective what you said last spring,” he said, at last. Anna was puzzled.
“What did I say last spring?”
“That you wanted to play pranks on Helland. I told the police that you didn’t like Helland all that much,” Johannes sighed.
Anna stared at him.
“But why?” she said.
Johannes shrugged.
“Because I’m an idiot. I’m sorry. I know you’re not involved.” Johannes looked shattered.
“I really—” Anna began. Then her cell rang for the second time. “Damn it,” she fumed and checked the display. It was Dr. Tybjerg again.
“Dr. Tybjerg?” she answered.
“Anna,” Tybjerg whispered. “Have you heard what’s happened?”
Anna gulped.
“Yes,” she replied.
“I have to cancel our meeting today. I can’t…” The signal was bad. “You’ll have to come some other time. Next week.”
“Next week?” Anna pushed her chair away from the desk. “You’re not serious? We have to meet, Dr. Tybjerg. I have my dissertation defense, and I want…” She took a deep breath and braced herself. “I have to have that defense, please,” she insisted. “It’s terrible what’s happened. But my defense has to go ahead, do you understand?”
“I can’t,” he said, and hung up.
Anna turned to Johannes. Her eyes filled with tears.
“Don’t worry,” she said in a thick voice. “You’re not the only who’s let me down.”
“Anna…” Johannes pleaded. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I said it. And that’s what I told the detective, Marhauge. I told him that you definitely had nothing to do with Helland’s death. I was beside myself.”
Anna got up.
“Where are you going?” Johannes whispered, as she headed for the door.
“To the museum to find Dr. Tybjerg.”
“Does it have to be right now? Can’t you stay for a while? I have to go soon, and I don’t want to leave… until we’ve made up.”
“That’s not my problem,” Anna said, icily.
She heard Johannes heave a sigh as she walked down the corridor to the museum.
Dr. Tybjerg could invariably be found in one of three locations: his basement office, the cafeteria, or at the desk below the window by the door to the Vertebrate Collection, measuring bones. She tried the collection first. No sign of Tybjerg. Then she tried the cafeteria. Still no Tybjerg. Some young scientists had gathered around a table. Anna could smell pipe tobacco. That left only his office.
Anna had been puzzled by Tybjerg’s office ever since she first saw it. Dr. Tybjerg was one of the world’s leading dinosaur experts, but his office was small and damp as though the faculty were trying to keep him out of sight. Two walls in the tiny room were filled with books from floor to ceiling, Tybjerg’s desk stood against the third wall, and at the fourth, below the basement windows, was a low display cabinet with dinosaur models and Tybjerg’s own publications. The door to his office was locked, and Anna peered through the window but it was empty and the light was off. She called him on her cell phone. No answer. Finally, she found some scrap paper in a trash can and wrote him a note: We need to talk. Please call me to arrange a new meeting. She stuck the note to the door.
At that moment the light in the corridor timed out and she realized just how dark it was. Outside, someone walked past the low basement windows, and she saw a pair of legs wearing red boots, heels slamming against the cobblestones. Her heart raced as she stumbled along the corridor. She found the switch near the door to the stairwell and turned on the light. It was empty and quiet.
Anna and Karen had been friends since they were children. They were in the same class at school and were always together in the village of Brænderup, where they grew up. One day, while roaming around Fødring Forest, they met Troels. A hurricane had raged recently and there were fallen trees everywhere, their roots ripped out of the earth like rotten teeth. The girls had been told not to play in the forest under any circumstances.
They were jumping on the slimy leaves and daring each other to leap into the craters because they had heard stories that the wind might cause the trees to swing back up and crush you. Karen was the braver; she stood right under the roots of a dying tree and clumps of earth sprinkled onto her shoulders as she reached out her hands toward the sky in triumph. They had strayed further and further into the forest, until they remembered a giant ladybug made from the stump of a tree that had been felled. They wondered what might have happened to it during the storm and decided to investigate; after all, they weren’t far away. What if the ladybird had been uprooted and was lying with her legs in the air?
They discovered Troels sitting on the ground, leaning against the ladybird. They didn’t notice him at first. They were busy chatting and patting the ladybird. It wasn’t until Anna climbed up on its wooden wings and had made herself comfortable that she spotted a tuft of hair sticking up on the other side. It belonged to a boy with freckles and a sad look on his face.
Anna said “hi” and tossed him a pine cone, which he caught. The next hour they were absorbed in their play. The darkness came suddenly, as if big buckets of ink had been poured between the trees. Troels grew anxious and said: “Shouldn’t we be going home now?” The girls nodded. Oh yes, they ought to. The three of them skipped through the forest and, as they reached the edge, the beam from a torch picked them out and they met Troels’s father for the first time.
Cecilie’s reaction would have been: “Where on earth have you been, you horrible little brats,” then she would have hugged them and pretended to be mad.
Troels’s father said nothing. He slowly pointed the torch from one face to the next.
“Sorry, Dad,” Troels whispered.
“See you later,” Anna said, taking Karen’s hand. If they cut across the field, they could be home in twenty minutes.
“Oh, no,” Troels’s father said. “You’re coming with me. You’ll walk to the parking lot, where my car is, like good girls, and I’ll give you a ride home. Is that clear?”
Anna had been told her whole life never to go with strangers. Never ever. The three children plodded down a gravel path in total silence, past dimly lit houses, in the opposite direction to where Anna lived.
When they reached the parking lot, she tried again: “We’ll be fine from here. Thanks for walking us…”
Troels’s father stopped and made a half turn. Anna couldn’t see his face very well.
“Get in,” he ordered them and opened the door to the back seat. Anna was about to protest, when she saw the look in Troels’s eyes. Just get in, they pleaded. The car smelled new, of chemicals, as though every fiber had been cleaned. She helped Karen put on her seatbelt. The car glided through the darkness, away from the forest and out onto the main road. Troels sat, small and dark, on the passenger seat next to his father.
Cecilie opened the door, a towel wrapped around her head. She was in the process of dyeing her hair; Anna could see tinfoil sticking out over her ears. Cecilie was wearing a faded robe. Music was coming from inside the house, and it smelled of mud.
“Hi, kids,” she said cheerfully. Then she noticed Troels’s father behind them. A deep furrow appeared on her brow.
“What’s happened?” Cecilie’s eyes widened. Had the man hit them in his car? Were they all right?
“Good evening, ma’am,” Troels’s father said. “In the future, I suggest you keep a closer eye on your children. I found them in the forest, playing under fallen trees.” He paused, then he clapped his massive palms together. “It’s a dangerous place to be.”
“Get inside, girls,” Cecilie said to Karen and Anna. Something Anna didn’t recognize flashed in her mother’s eyes.
“Thanks for your help,” she said in a monotone voice, and closed the door.
When the car had disappeared, Cecilie started pacing up and down in the kitchen, and she didn’t sto
p until Jens came home.
“What are you accusing him of?” Anna heard Jens say in a low voice. “Giving the girls a ride home and staring at your robe?”
After the summer break, Troels started in Anna and Karen’s class. It was five months since their meeting in the forest, but they hadn’t forgotten him. Their teacher introduced him, and Troels’s face lit up a little when he saw them. He had grown taller, but his expression was the same, and his eyes were still very dark.
During recess Karen asked him anxiously, “Did your dad get really angry last time?”
And Troels smiled broadly and said, “Oh, no, not at all.”
That afternoon Anna and Karen walked home together from school. The golden wheat swayed in the fields. At some point they stopped and decided Troels would be their friend.
A week passed. They spent every recess with him, walked home from school together, and one day, when they were about to say good-bye, Anna asked if Troels wanted to come to her house. He looked at his watch and smiled. Yes, please, he would like that very much. They played in the garden and when it started to rain, they went inside and made themselves sandwiches. The girls swapped stickers, and Troels handled the pictures very carefully and examined them closely. He, too, liked the ones with glitter babies and puppies the best.
Cecilie came home and Troels got up politely to shake her hand. The telephone rang at that moment, so Anna wasn’t sure if Cecilie had remembered who Troels was. When Troels went to the bathroom and Cecilie had sat down with a cup of tea, Anna whispered that he was the boy they had met in the forest last March. Cecilie paled.
“You can visit us anytime you like,” she said, when Troels came back. “Anytime you like.”
“Thank you very much,” Troels replied.
Cecilie bought a scrapbook and ten sheets of stickers for Troels. Anna felt so jealous she wanted to cry. Troels unwrapped his gift as though he had been entrusted with a blanket full of precious eggs. His face lit up, then he looked miserably at Cecilie.
“I can’t accept this,” he said and carefully pushed the present away. Anna picked up the scrapbook and admired the pictures. Big cherubs on clouds, glitter babies, animals, and baskets of flowers. If Troels didn’t want them, she certainly did.
“Of course you can,” Cecilie said warmly. “Now you can swap, can’t you? They’re a present.”
“No,” Troels said, still wretched. “I really can’t. I’m not allowed to accept presents.”
Cecilie narrowed her eyes and studied him.
“Hmm,” she said. “Well, you can’t take them home, obviously. They need to stay here.”
Anna stared at her mother.
“They’ll still be my stickers, you understand, but I’m not very good at swapping, so I would like you to do it for me. Extend my collection. Do you think you can do that?”
Troels nodded and opened the scrapbook with awe. With the same deference, he removed the wrapper and gazed at the stickers. Later that afternoon, when it was time for him to go home, he placed the scrapbook on the bookcase in the living room, where it remained until his next visit. The scrapbook lived there for years.
It was not until four months later that Anna and Karen visited Troels. It was at the start of December, and after school they caught the bus to his house, a huge, newly built bungalow a few miles outside the village. They sat on the floor in Troels’s room making Christmas decorations out of paper and were listening to music when Troels’s father came home from work. They heard him speak on the telephone in the hall in a loud voice, then he swore at something before he suddenly popped his head around the door.
“Hello, girls,” he said, showing no signs of recognizing them. Shortly afterward he came back and put a bowl of chips and three sodas on the floor.
“Troels’s mom wants to know if you would like to stay for dinner?”
Karen and Anna exchanged looks.
“Yes, please,” Anna said quickly.
Chips and sodas! For dinner they had pork tenderloin in a cream sauce and for dessert they had chocolate ice cream. Troels’s mother was a petite, elegant lady who worked as a real estate agent in Odense. Troels’s sister was fifteen years old and really pretty. She had very long hair, she wore lip gloss, and she said, “Pass the potatoes, please,” in a terribly grown-up way. Anna felt a pang of infatuation and glanced at Troels. He smiled at something his father had said, replied and laughed heartily when his father expanded on and repeated the punchline. Anna took it all in.
Troels’s father started telling vacation stories. On vacation in Sweden, Troels had fallen off a jetty when trying to measure the depth of the water with a stick, which was far too thin and had snapped under his weight. Troels had wailed like a banshee, he was so scared, but the water was less than three feet deep and rather muddy. The girls imagined Troels screaming and dirty, and they laughed. His father hosed him down in the garden behind the cabin. On the same vacation, Troels’s father recalled, they had visited a traveling fair where one of the stalls had a board with a man on it, and if you could hit a red disc with a ball, he would plunge into a tub of water. Troels’s father had persuaded the stallholder to replace the man on the board with Troels, who had been moaning all afternoon that he was too hot. Troels got dunked repeatedly and had duly cooled down. Anna and Karen laughed again.
“And then there was the time when Troels wouldn’t stop wetting his bed,” Troels’s father began. “Do you remember, girls?” he said to Troels’s mother and sister who had started clearing the table.
“Not that story, please,” Troels’s mother called out from the kitchen where she was scraping leftovers into the trash. “The girls won’t want to hear that.”
Troels’s father leaned toward Anna and Karen.
“Troels wet his bed until he was six,” he announced.
Anna looked uncomfortably at Karen who seemed to be mesmerized by Troels’s father.
“We were at our wits’ end, weren’t we, Troels?” his mother said, still at the kitchen table. “All of us, you included, isn’t that right, darling?”
Anna looked at Troels, and something inside her turned to ice. Troels made no reply, silent, as his half-eaten chocolate ice cream cone slowly melted in his hand.
His mother carried on while she dried a baking dish, “We tried everything. We tried bribing him with candy and toys, we gave him more allowance, we even made him wear his soaked pajamas all day, but it was no good. He just continued wetting his bed.”
Karen was still smiling, so Anna kicked her under the table.
“And do you want to know how it stopped?” Troels’s father asked, blithely.
“Ouch,” Karen exclaimed and sent Anna a furious look. Anna glared back at her. Finally, Karen noticed Troels.
“Tell the girls how you stopped wetting the bed, Troels,” his father ordered him. Troels whispered something.
“I can’t hear you,” his father said. “Speak up.”
“When I pooped my pants on my first day of school,” Troels said in a flat voice.
The girls looked at each other.
“And you can’t poop your pants at school, can you?” his father went on. “The other children will laugh at you. So you have to stop, don’t you? If you ever want to have any friends, that is.” His father gave Troels a friendly slap on the back and roared with laughter.
“Stop it!” Anna burst out. “Stop it!”
But his father had already got up to leave, the dishwasher had been loaded, his sister had disappeared, and his mother was folding clothes in the laundry room; they could see her through the open door.
“That was a lovely meal, thank you,” Anna muttered. “I have to be home by seven.”
When Anna and Karen had put on their shoes and coats and shouted “bye-e!” from the utility room, Troels was still sitting at the table with the melting ice cream cone in his hand.
“Bye, see you tomorrow,” he said and gave them a pale smile.
Cecilie called Troels’s parents one day
to tell them she could use some help around the garden and offered Troels fifteen kroner an hour to do the work. While Cecilie spoke to Troels’s father, Anna was in the kitchen, listening to her mother’s high-pitched chirping. Cecilie slammed down the telephone at the end of the conversation and when she joined Anna in the kitchen, she smiled stiffly and smoothed her dress.
“Done,” she said. “Five hours a week. Thank God.” She flopped down on the kitchen bench next to Anna.
“Phew,” she exhaled and smoothed her dress again.
One evening, when Anna was twelve years old, she overheard her parents talking about Troels. It was the late 1980s, and by now Jens had officially moved to Copenhagen but he visited them constantly. They had just said goodnight to her, but before she fell asleep Anna remembered she had forgotten to give her mother a letter from school and got out of bed.
Halfway down the stairs, she heard Jens ask: “What makes you think he hits him? You have to be able to prove it, Cecilie. It’s a serious charge.”
A pause followed. Then Anna heard Cecilie cry.
“I want to help, but I can’t!” she sobbed. “That beautiful, fragile boy. Look at him! He’s suffering, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.”
Jens said something that Anna couldn’t hear, and Cecilie replied: “I know, Jens.” She sounded irritated now. “I’m aware of that. You’ve told me a thousand times. I just can’t bear it that he has to live like that.”
Cecilie blew her nose. Anna was getting cold on the stairs and hoped that one of her parents would notice her. That they would carry her to the living room and let her fall asleep under a blanket while their voices grew muffled, just like when she was little. Silent tears rolled down her cheeks. Right now she hated Troels. Her parents seemed to prefer him to her. She felt alone in the world. They started discussing Jens’s job. Eventually Anna went back to bed.
One summer day Troels dropped by unexpectedly. He seemed happy. His parents had gone to Ebeltoft to pick up a new car and wouldn’t be back until the evening. Cecilie and Jens were entertaining old college friends, and the lawn was teeming with children. The sun was shining, there was iced tea and sandwiches, and swallows were dive-bombing the garden. Troels watched the chaos, rather intimidated; he hadn’t been expecting this. Two boys, Troels’s age, were playing football, but Troels didn’t want to join in. He sipped tea and Cecilie introduced him to everyone.