More Bitter Than Death

by Camilla Grebe

  “Yes, yes, yes. He has been violent before, although not since he started coming to the Employment Center. I thought he was on the right track.” She pauses and then suddenly grabs ahold of the table, as if trying to steady herself. “Oh my God, what if he has her there, at his place? Maybe we should call the police? Or go over there? To Tobias’s house, I mean. He won’t be home; he’s in Göteborg on that field trip. If what you’re saying is true, then . . . we could just go over there and see if she’s there. I really hope you’re wrong. I’ve always thought of Tobias as harmless. A little odd, certainly, but innocuous. But if what you’re suggesting is true, then . . . then we have to try and help her, don’t we?”

  “How long will he be in Göteborg?”

  “They’re coming back tomorrow.”

  The snow is picking up outside the window. I see children rolling around in it down below, lying on their backs and making snow angels, throwing snowballs against the front of the library. The sight is almost physically painful. I nod at Kattis. “We’ll do what you suggested, we’ll go there. We can call the police on the way.”

  As we walk across Medborgarplatsen toward Kattis’s little car, I’m struck by the strange silence surrounding us. The snow muffles all the sounds. I can just make out traffic and people in the darkness ahead of me, but everything is so quiet. A bit of snow lands inside the collar of my coat, sneaks into my low-around-the-ankles, hopelessly worn, impractical boots. I tug at my scarf, pause to rest for a moment. Ever since I got pregnant, I get winded so easily. I get winded easily, I have to pee all the time, and I constantly feel like throwing up. There’s nothing blessed or romantic about pregnancy. It just feels like one long haul to the conventional family life that I have spent the last several years so desperately trying to avoid.

  Traffic is erratic on Götgatan. The cars have already turned the cottony, white blanket of snow into a brownish-gray mush.

  Kattis weaves among the cars, driving between lanes, honking angrily. “I really hope you turn out to be wrong. But if you’re not, then it’s all my fault. All of it.”

  She’s choking up and squeezing the wheel so hard her knuckles are turning white. We drive across the Skanstull Bridge. Eriksdalsbadet, the aquatics center, sleeps below us under its blanket of snow. At Gullmarsplan, Kattis seems to hesitate for a moment but then gets onto the E4.

  “You know him pretty well,” I say. “What do you think, could he have done it? Could he have taken Tilda?”

  Kattis squirms in her seat, zips up her thick, fur-trimmed down jacket despite the heat in the car, and looks at me with terror in her eyes. “I don’t know.”

  “But if you had to guess?”

  She squirms again and I can tell that she finds this discussion unsettling. Finally she says, “Maybe, maybe he might have done it. He is . . . naïve, disturbed enough. And like I said, he has been violent in the past. But I still didn’t think . . .”

  I lean forward and grope through the papers, coins, and chewing gum in my purse and find my cell phone. “I’m calling Markus.”

  She nods slowly. Doesn’t seem to have heard what I said.

  Markus’s phone goes straight to voicemail. I leave a message asking him to call me back.

  “So what do we do now?” I whisper.

  “We go to his house. If Tilda is there, then there’s no time to lose.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Out in the middle of nowhere, outside Gnesta, it’s about forty miles south of Stockholm. I have GPS.”

  * * *

  We sit in silence. Outside the little car, suburb after suburb passes us by in the darkness: Älvsjö, Fruängen, Sätra, Skärholmen, communities full of people like us, curled up on couches and in their beds, or outside trudging through the snow, carrying their groceries. Lonely souls in the dense Scandinavian winter darkness. All of them with their dreams and problems, their hopes and disappointments. And suddenly it’s just obvious: I know who the killer is.

  “Love messes you up,” I mumble.

  “Huh?” Kattis looks at me like I’m crazy. I laugh briefly to ease the tension.

  “It always comes down to love,” I say, without elaborating. I think about Patrik sitting there in my office chair: decimated, spurned, humiliated. And Sven, whose woman left him after thirty years. The vacant look in his eyes, his rank, alcoholic breath, those trembling hands. And Aina, the anguished, rigid look on her face when she told me that Carl-Johan was married, that he had a wife and kids and a house in Mälarhöjden.

  If people could live without love, if we could just be on our own, would we finally be free? Would there be less pain, no pain even? If people could live without love, would Hillevi have stayed with a man who beat her? Would Sirkka have spent her whole adult life taking care of a disgruntled man who took his anger out on her? Would Sofie’s mother have accepted that her new boyfriend beat her own daughter?

  I think about what Vijay said to me a few weeks ago, that it wasn’t about love, it was about power. And I think he was wrong—or at least that his explanation was incomplete, because love is what gives people power over each other, makes them accept the unacceptable, endure the unendurable.

  I close my eyes and picture Tobias, his dark, near-black hair, his deep-set eyes, the coin dancing over his knuckles. It seems that his love for Kattis is of the obsessive variety: engrossing, intense, bittersweet. She’s unattainable, impossible for him to really get close to. She’s his caseworker. Her relationship to him is the same as mine to my patients. Maybe he did it to get through to her, to prove himself worthy.

  And Stefan, always Stefan.

  Even though he’s dead, I can’t stop loving him. Goddamn love doesn’t loosen its grip on you, even from the grave. It makes its presence known like a crack in my soul, a wedge between reality and dreams, letting the past leak like sewage into my present reality.

  Suddenly I feel the nausea again, and my temples start to sweat. My coat collar feels tight around my neck. I struggle to get the buttons undone and turn to Kattis.

  “Can you pull over for a moment? I’m going to be—”

  “Here? On the highway?”

  “Please?”

  She seems to understand that I’m not feeling well, because she pulls over onto the shoulder, turns on her emergency blinkers.

  “Hurry up, this is not a good place to stop.”

  I fling open the car door and step out into the darkness, out into the heavy snowfall, the crisp cold. I trudge over to the drainage ditch and squat down, bury my hands in the snow. I vomit something unidentifiable, then rest for a moment, until my hands are aching from the cold. Then I grab a handful of new snow and rub my forehead and lips with it. Slowly I get up and walk back over to the little red car.

  When I sit down next to Kattis, the radio is on. Soul music fills the cramped space. She turns down the volume and gives me a worried look.

  “Are you okay?”

  No, I’m really not. My body is in revolt, I can’t seem to help myself or my patients anymore, and I should have put two and two together about Tobias sooner. I feel so guilty. If I’d figured it out sooner, Tilda might still be home safe with her dad right now.

  “I’m pregnant,” I finally say, so quietly that it’s almost inaudible, but Kattis hears me, genuine surprise in her eyes. She smiles, but her smile is stiff and forced, as if she were in pain.

  “Congratulations, that’s . . . fantastic. Is it that guy, the policeman?”

  I nod, and think about Markus. His warm hands, the creases on his cheeks in the morning, sleep lingering in the corners of his blue eyes. The way he holds my belly at night, trying to protect the baby, as if he actually thought he could protect it from all the evil in the world.

  “It wasn’t planned,” I say, and right away I regret the comment, because it feels like I’m betraying Markus by admitting that.

  Kattis slams on her brakes and we skid in the slush.

  “Shit!”

  Somewhere up ahead of us in the dark I
see blue lights and a long line of cars backed up on the hill heading down into Vårby. Kattis turns her windshield wipers all the way up. We still can’t see more than thirty feet ahead of us. She turns the music up again, as though she wants to make sure that we can’t talk to each other, and stares at the approaching blue lights.

  I study her profile in the darkness, watch the blue light sweep over her delicate cheekbone and carefully plucked eyebrow, wonder if I actually know her, know what’s going on inside her head, what she actually thinks of me and Aina, about what happened to Susanne and Hillevi, about Henrik and Tilda.

  Then we reach the accident site. An unscathed truck sits in the center lane, but as I pass it, I see the little passenger car crumpled in front of it: a ball of steel, like wadded-up aluminum foil. My stomach does a somersault.

  “Continue straight ahead,” says the GPS’s tinny, computerized voice.

  “Shit,” Kattis says. “I hope they made it out okay.”

  I nod, unable to speak. Instead I stare, hypnotized, at the firemen and the police moving around the scene of the accident. Then there’s a knock on our window. The policeman outside waves us on, irritated: “A lot of rubberneckers out tonight!”

  Kattis steps on the gas so hard that the car lurches forward on the slick, snowy road.

  * * *

  I don’t know why, but I keep thinking about Kattis. She has talked a lot about her relationship with Henrik: about how they met and how the relationship went from intense and loving to destructive. But suddenly I realize how much I still don’t know about her and her life.

  “Did you date many guys before Henrik?” I ask.

  “Before Henrik?” She looks at me in surprise, her mouth open as if she wants to say something but can’t find the words.

  “Yeah, I’m sure you . . . ?”

  She smiles, and yet again I’m amazed by how beautiful she is when she smiles. “Quite a few.”

  I can’t help but smile back. Suddenly she reminds me of Aina. But the pain quickly returns to her face.

  “It’s always been a little hard for me not to flirt. Maybe you can figure out where that comes from, and why I can’t just knock it off. Maybe all this happened because I was too . . . too flirty with Tobias. I should have noticed sooner, should have backed away.”

  She looks out the windshield, her expression unreadable. Outside the snowfall has turned into a real blizzard. We’re driving down the E4 very slowly. The line of cars ahead of us winds southward, like a gigantic glowworm creeping along.

  I look out into the snowstorm; all I hear is the soul music and the swishing of the windshield wipers. Suddenly it feels like we’re alone in the world, Kattis and I. That the only thing that is real is this little red Golf gliding on the fresh snow. Markus feels far away, as do Aina and the office. Even the child I’m carrying feels like a distant dream. The snow that crept into my boots and in under my collar has long since melted into sticky layers.

  “This is going to take awhile,” Kattis mumbles without looking at me.

  When we turn off toward Gnesta and Mölnbo, I notice that there’s a car with a broken headlight behind us. It looks familiar and I wonder for a moment if I haven’t seen it earlier, at the scene of the accident in Vårberg.

  Maybe this is a bad idea, maybe this is all a product of my paranoid, overactive imagination. Maybe the pregnancy and all the hormones have compromised my judgment. Suddenly I have the urge to shout at Kattis to stop the car, to turn around and go back to Stockholm. But then I picture Tilda again and remember those weird questions that Tobias asked Kattis about breakfast cereal and toys.

  “At the next intersection, turn right,” the GPS instructs.

  We can no longer make out the houses we pass, only vague silhouettes of the tall evergreens flanking us on both sides. It’s totally dark; the snow swirls around us, reflecting the light from the headlights. The only sounds are coming from the music that’s playing and, from time to time, the robotic voice of the GPS system. Somewhere off to the left I think I can see buildings and streetlights like fireworks in the swirling snow, signaling that we’re entering a town.

  “Gnesta,” Kattis announces. We creep through the dark, deserted downtown, if you can even call it that, since it’s just a handful of shops at an intersection: a video store, a shawarma stand, a pizzeria. One lone sign sways in the wind outside the local diner, letting passersby know that a large beer costs thirty-nine kronor. This feels like a ghost town.

  Kattis turns onto a smaller street that seems to head straight into the woods, away from the other buildings in town. I turn around and look behind us, glimpse the faint headlights of a car somewhere behind us, observe that one headlight looks a little dimmer than the other, but the weather is way too bad for me to tell if it’s the same car I saw before.

  Kattis squints through the windshield. We can barely see out the window and the world around us seems to consist of nothing but swirling snow. The road gets bumpy and we’re forced to slow down. The car rocks back and forth. I hear something hard smack the bottom of the car, as if we’d driven over a large rock.

  “Almost there,” she whispers. “We’re almost there.”

  “At the next intersection, turn left.”

  Then she accelerates to make it up a small hill. The car flies over the crest and continues down the other side. Between the dark trees I can just make out a steep drop-off ahead of us and the road’s sharp veer to the right. Kattis brakes, but instead of obeying, the car skids, continuing straight ahead toward the wall of sturdy evergreens.

  “Shit!” she yells.

  We skid straight into an enormous spruce tree. The crash is deafening. There is the sound of breaking glass and crumpling metal, and then silence. The only sound to be heard is the swishing of the one windshield wiper that’s still going, like the leg of a dying insect, twitching spastically in front of me.

  Snow swirls into the car. I brush some glass off my knee and turn to look at Kattis, whose forehead is leaning against the steering wheel.

  “Are you okay?” I say, touching her shoulder, but she doesn’t respond, just whimpers a little. I grab her shoulder, shake her harder. “Say something.”

  “My leg,” she hisses.

  “Continue straight ahead,” the robotic voice says, as if nothing has happened.

  I lean toward Kattis and shut off the engine. I see where her leg disappears under the dashboard, but something looks wrong. It’s like her whole seat has slid forward so that her legs don’t really have room anymore, or as if the front of the car has been folded in like an accordion, pinning her legs.

  “Hang on, I’ll help you,” I say. I button up my coat and wrap my scarf around my head and neck, open the car door, and sink into the fresh snow, which is unexpectedly deep. Once again my boots are filled with the downy snow.

  My naked fingers fumble along the body of the car as I stumble toward the hood, only to find that we’re stuck halfway down a deep ditch. I carefully climb down into the ditch, and hear a sound like glass shattering as my foot breaks through some thin ice. I feel my boot fill with ice-cold water. I turn around, blinded by the one headlight that’s still on.

  The tree trunk seems unscathed, but the whole front left side of the car is wrapped around the tree. I climb out of the ditch, squinting into the headlight with the snow flying around me. There’s no way we’ll be able to drive anywhere. All I can do is try to get Kattis out so we can walk the last little bit by foot.

  I go around to Kattis’s side and see that even the door is crushed. She screams when I try the handle. What if she’s really hurt, seriously hurt?

  Then I wrap my scarf around my hand and punch away the remaining bits of glass that are left in the driver’s side window so that I can see what’s going on. I carefully pull her torso up and prop her against the seat back so I can take a look at her legs. She whimpers.

  It’s not easy to see anything in the faint light that seeps in, but once my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see that her
leg is trapped under the metal. Blood is trickling out just above her knee and a dark stain is spreading on her jeans.

  “Can you move your leg?”

  “No,” she answers immediately, loudly. Suddenly she seems completely present. “No, and don’t touch it, okay?”

  I hear the panic in her voice and nod, place my hand on her shoulder.

  I call 911 and am surprised to be put on hold. The situation seems absurd. I drum my fingers on the phone impatiently and scan the dark woods. How can anyone live here, in the middle of nowhere?

  Suddenly I hear a voice on the line and I surprise myself by starting to cry. I struggle to get out my words and have to keep repeating myself but finally manage to say that we were in a car accident and that my friend is injured. The woman on the other end asks about Kattis’s breathing and the extent of her bleeding. She asks if Kattis is responsive and if she seems like she’s in shock. I give the woman the GPS coordinates so they can find us and the woman explains that the storm has caused a lot of accidents. She says an ambulance is coming but that it might take awhile. She explains that I need to make sure to keep Kattis warm and keep an eye on how she’s acting. After I hang up I turn to Kattis and say, “They want me to stay here with you.”

  She licks her pale lips and looks at me. “Siri, my legs are stuck, I didn’t have a heart attack. It’s okay. I feel okay.”

  I take off my coat, lean in through the broken window, and spread it over her like a blanket.

  “Go look for her,” Kattis says. “I’ll be sitting right here. According to the GPS, the house is just right down there.”

  I’m wary, but Kattis looks calm.

  “Hey, I have a cell phone,” she says. “I’ll just call you if I need to. It’s cool.”

  * * *

  I trudge through the silent woods. All I hear is the wind, which has picked up speed, the creaking of the snow under my thin soles, and my own breathing. The tall, dense evergreen trees all around me stretch toward the night sky. My feet aren’t even cold anymore, they’re numb, and I can’t feel the ground.