The Boy at the Door

by Alex Dahl

  11

  Johan drives, too fast for someone who’s just had half a bottle of champagne on an empty stomach. His jaw clenches and unclenches again. I call my mother twice on the way, but she doesn’t pick up. I tell myself that she’s tending to a fully conscious, slightly bruised Tobias, and that that’s why she isn’t answering, but I am overwhelmed by visions of her desperately performing CPR on that limp little body. He’s hurt, she said before the line went dead. What does that even mean – a paper cut? Or decapitation?

  Rounding a bend in the road, the car skids on ice and Johan has to pump the brakes hard to regain control.

  ‘Fuck,’ he whispers. An eerie mist is drifting out of the forest and across the road; not quite snow, nor rain, more like a carpet of tiny ice crystals.

  ‘Drive slow,’ I say and Johan stares at me like I’d just suggested something completely unreasonable. The tenderness between us as Johan gave me the ring is completely gone – I feel as though I’m in the car with a stranger. ‘I shouldn’t have trusted her,’ I say. ‘She’s so self-absorbed, it’s unbelievable! How could she let something happen to Tobias!’

  ‘Call again,’ he says, urging the Tesla fast along a straight stretch of road, crossing barren fields as we continue towards the southern tip of Vesterøya. I dial my mother’s number again, and this time she picks up.

  ‘Where are you?’ she shouts.

  ‘Five minutes away. We just passed Korsvik. How is he? Should I call an ambulance?’ My mother is breathing hard, and there is no sound of Tobias in the background.

  ‘Oh God. No. No ambulance. He’s... he’s fine. He’ll be fine. I... I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Please just tell me what’s happened!’ The car shudders over a speed bump and Johan swears loudly again. ‘Mum, tell me!’ She’s crying and trying to calm herself down with long, exaggerated breaths.

  ‘He... he’s burnt himself. It’s bad.’

  ‘But how? How could that even happen? For fuck’s sake, you’d think you’d be used to looking after little kids by now.’ Johan shoots me a glance. ‘I’m sorry. Please, just tell me how that happened. I think we need to call an ambulance.’

  ‘No! No ambulance, Cecilia. You need to hurry. He... he did it on purpose...’ My mother’s voice trails off in an anguished squawk and then she hangs up.

  *

  Tobias is on my mother’s bed, propped up by pillows, his eyes closed, slowly shaking his head back and forth, breathing in little puffs. He’s wearing nothing but his red Cars underpants, and looks about five years old. His ribs are clearly visible beneath his skin, which is dotted with sweat, and his hair is matted down and damp, sticking to his forehead. On his chest sits a huge ice pack, directly above his heart, and it rises and falls jerkily with his strange breathing. Underneath the ice pack I can make out what looks like a wet kitchen towel. I make my way over to him quickly, turn on the bedside lamp and gently sit down next to him. Tobias moans loudly when I touch his arm.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ says Johan. He has his arm around my mother, and it seems he practically has to hold her up; she is crying and breathing strangely fast like Tobias. I take her in; she’s wearing a frumpy black housedress, and her dusty blonde hair is in a low French chignon, half undone. Her face is scrunched up, anguished, and her liver-marked hands clutch at Johan’s arms. She suddenly seems ridiculously short, like she’s shrunk without me noticing. I feel the most intense repulsion for her – how could she have let something like this happen?

  Ever since my father walked out, I’ve regarded my mother with a kind of distant disdain; after all, she was the only woman on our street unable to hold on to her husband. She has always been the kind of woman whose ego really is quite astonishing – everything is simply all about her. She only ever talks about herself. If something bad happens to someone around her, she’ll talk about how badly it has affected her. Poor me, I’ve been so upset since Martha died of cancer, etc. When my father left, it didn’t occur to her that it might also have been difficult for me. Whenever I had a brief spat with the popular girls in school, she’d cry and beg me to fix it so it wouldn’t affect her social life with the other girls’ mothers. Even this she’s claiming for herself, as if the burnt boy is something terrible that happened to her – I have to look away from her pathetic display of self-pity or I’m afraid I’ll scream at her or even hit her for allowing this situation. This isn’t about her; this is about Tobias, my poor unexpected little boy.

  I very gently lift the ice pack off of Tobias’s chest while making little shushing noises, but he lets out a wild, guttural scream at the sudden absence of the ice.

  ‘Shhh,’ I whisper. ‘Oh, darling, what’s happened to you?’ I run my finger very gently across his eyebrows and he opens his eyes briefly, then shuts them firmly again.

  ‘He needs an ambulance,’ says Johan, his deep voice slicing into the intense atmosphere.

  ‘No. We can’t,’ I say, very gently peeling back the kitchen towel, my other hand firm against Tobias’s forehead to keep him from struggling. ‘Look.’ A purple-blue triangle the size of an adult’s palm with raised, deep-red ridges is imprinted on Tobias’s chest. On the insides of the edges are several darker-colored splotches, and in places the skin has opened, leaving moist red flesh exposed.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Johan says again, turning away from the bed.

  ‘Tobias,’ I say. ‘I need you to listen to me. No, look at me, darling. That’s it. You’re going to be okay. Stay with me. I’m going to give you something that will make you feel better now, okay?’ I turn to my mother, whose eyes are moist and desperate.

  ‘What kind of painkillers do you have? Do you still have that OxyContin from your hip operation?’ She nods, wide-eyed.

  *

  Tobias is fast asleep, breathing calmly and deeply. I go back downstairs to where my mother and Johan are sitting in the conservatory, lost in separate thoughts and staring out at the frozen, moonlit garden. I take the brandy Johan hands me and down it in one. He refills my glass and I down that, too. I give him a tired smile, but he doesn’t return it, and his eyes are wide and afraid. I try to recall what it was like to be a child in this house, before my father left, and after, but my mind draws a blank. Only fragments come to me; sitting on my father’s knee in this conservatory, watching rain hit the glass panes, listening to his deep voice reading me a story, punctuated by the deep suck of his pipe, followed by the hazy blue smoke spiraling towards the domed glass above us. My mother shouting upstairs, the sound of glass smashing, my father’s averted eyes, like a dog’s. And later – my mother and me, moving silently about the house, listening out for each other, like animals in the wild, needing to avoid one another. Her voice drifting up the stairs to my room from where she’d sit in the hallway cooing into the phone to some man or other, none of whom she managed to keep.

  ‘We played Snakes and Ladders,’ my mother says, cutting the cold air, ‘and he was... just lovely. He’s so beautiful, isn’t he? Just... gorgeous. He didn’t say much, but seemed to enjoy the game and kept smiling up at me every time it went his way. I gave him a bowl of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sprinkles and marshmallows. After that, he watched a couple of Tom and Jerry cartoons while I got on with some of the ironing in the utility room. I could see him from there, and after a while I noticed his eyelids getting heavier, so I asked him if he wanted to go upstairs to bed. He did, and we went upstairs so I could show him the guest room, your old room. He looked around, touching the little ornaments you’d collected as a child and lined up on the window sill. He pointed out of the window and said, No moon. I told him I was just going to go to the bathroom, then I’d come back in a minute to read him a story. I didn’t hear a thing while I was in the bathroom, he must have tiptoed down the stairs, you know how they creak. It was just as I came back out that I heard it – the most indescribable howl. At first I thought it must have come from outside; it sounded like an animal caught in a trap. Then I heard a loud crash from the kitchen area downstair
s and I rushed there as fast as I could. I saw Tobias, face down on the floor in the utility room, clutching the iron, which was on the floor beside him, still plugged in.

  ‘I thought he must have come downstairs to look for me and touched it by mistake, but when I turned him over, it was clear to me that he must have done it intentionally. The iron had singed straight through his pajama top, and to do this kind of damage, he must have held it there awhile, not just a brief, accidental moment. I half dragged, half carried him into the bathtub and turned the cold water on him, because I’d read somewhere that that is what you’re supposed to do.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you didn’t call an ambulance. I still don’t understand why we’re not getting him a doctor,’ says Johan.

  ‘It would look like we’ve burned him, Johan,’ I say. ‘Nobody would believe that an eight-year-old would be capable of inflicting that kind of damage on himself. We’d go to prison. Seriously.’

  My mother and Johan both shake their heads slowly back and forth like Tobias had done, delirious with pain, when we arrived.

  ‘I thought he was doing okay,’ says my mother. ‘I’m just so... so upset and shocked.’

  ‘Was there anything that happened while he was here that could have triggered this? Something he saw on television? Something you might have said that seemed innocent to you but which could have triggered something in him?’ God knows she said a lot of weird stuff to me when I was younger. Oh, Cecilia, if only you were different, I remember as one of her favorite phrases.

  ‘No. No, I shouldn’t think so,’ says my mother, but then, self-awareness was never her forte.

  ‘How do we know a burn as bad as that won’t kill him?’ Johan asks.

  ‘As long as we can keep it from becoming infected, he will be fine,’ I say.

  ‘How could he do something like this?’ asks Johan, pressing his thumbs against the bridge of his nose, between his eyes.

  ‘You can’t be expected to look after someone with these kinds of problems, surely?’ says my mother, her trembling hands clutching the tumbler. ‘He could even be dangerous.’

  ‘Mum, did he say anything at all? When you found him, was he crying or shouting or anything?’

  ‘No, he was shaking and clutching his chest. He did say something when I put him in the bed.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said... he said mama a couple of times. The poor little thing. Maybe he can somehow remember something about the terrible mother who left him and briefly mistook me for her.’

  ‘Are you... are you sure that’s what he said?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely. That isn’t so strange in itself, is it? Most children would cry for their mothers in a situation like that.’

  I excuse myself, saying I’m going to check on Tobias. I sit awhile on the side of the bed, and watch his tiny body twitch in his deep, medicated sleep. He’s still sweating profusely, but he seems peaceful and pain-free for now. Thank the Lord for opiates.

  ‘Why, Tobias?’ I whisper and he lets out a long, shuddering breath as if in response. I need this boy. I take his hand in mine, but am struck by how cold and damp it feels. Again, I see Anni in my mind; those outstretched, icy hands reaching for me. I stand up and walk over to the window. The rain has let up, and the fog has evaporated, leaving behind a clear, cold winter night. A flush of stars climb towards a silver moon hanging low above white, frozen trees. I see myself out there, walking fast and silently through the birch forest until I reach the rocky beach at Vesterøya’s southern tip. I could wade into the water, crushing shards of ice forming in between the rocks in the shallows as I go, gasping at the shocking cold as the black water surges into my boots. I’d stop when it reaches my waist, then I’d tip my head all the way back to see the stars again. Then I’d keep leaning back until my hair reached the surface of the sea and the sea would rise up to meet me and I’d just let myself fall back into it, until it would close over me forever.

  I quietly step back onto the landing, and stand for a moment, listening to the faint murmur of Johan and Mother’s voices from downstairs. I cross the landing and step into my old room, the room which held the first nineteen years of my life. My mother has strangely kept it exactly as I’d left it, and I find that rather creepy – it stands like a shrine to a child who no longer exists. Along the window sill the little glass figurines I collected in my early teens are lined up, and I pick one up, a tiny elephant, and am slightly taken aback by how my fingertips remember every curve and hollow of its glass body. I put it back down and run my hand lightly across a couple of the others – these, too, are intensely familiar. No dust has settled on or around them, my mother must still dust as obsessively as she used to when I was a child. I turn back around to leave the room and my eyes briefly pass across the bookshelves above the bed. Then they stop. A small object, completely innocent to unknowing eyes, and yet unmistakable to Tobias. Now I know why he did it.

  12

  I shouldn’t have done it. It’s not normal to do things like cutting yourself or burning yourself, and I am normal, so I don’t know why I sometimes do those things. Back in the Poland-house, when I first had to live with Krysz and Anni, I used to pierce the skin on my heels with a little fork I’d taken from the kitchen. At first it was to play with the very hard skin that was there because I’d run barefoot at the farm all my life, but then I realized it felt good to push the fork deeper and harder, until drops of blood appeared and it hurt a lot. It made everything go away – even Krysz and Anni’s shouting and knowing that Moffa is dead, even if it only lasted a minute. Then I’d have to do it again, harder.

  I’m better now but I’m still not allowed in school. Maybe tomorrow, says the mother in the house every day. I shouldn’t have done it, but it was like for a moment somebody that wasn’t me decided what I should do, and just did it. I’m afraid and I think maybe I’m angry, but they feel quite alike so I can’t be sure. Because I burned myself, the family follow me everywhere. In the daytime, when the girls are at school, I’m not allowed to stay in my room, I have to be in the living room so Luelle can watch over me, or the mother, if she’s home. Luelle comes from The Fipines and she’s quite nice, but I think she likes cleaning more than children, even though she’s not very good at it. Her name is Lu-Elle but the mother in this house calls her Luel as if it rhymes with fuel. When Luelle came to live here just after me, I asked the mother if Luelle was her sister. This made her laugh very loudly, the kind of laughing that is angry. She got a red splotch on her neck and a vein stood out on her forehead, that’s how angry she was. I didn’t know why it was a stupid question – in my school there’s a girl from Norway and her little sister was adopted from Korea, but she’s still the sister. Families don’t have to look the same. Later, Nicoline came into my room and her face looked excited and a bit naughty, and she said, Way to go. You really pissed off my mother when you asked if the servant was her sister. She held her hand up in a high five. I said I didn’t know Luelle was a servant and Nicoline laughed and said, Same-same.

  I think Luelle likes me more than the girls, maybe because I pick up things and say hello to her and things like that. Or maybe it’s because I’m brown, too, and not really in this family either. This morning when I was drawing in the living room and she was clearing up after breakfast, she stopped what she was doing for a minute and I noticed that she was looking at me. She left the room and then, after a moment, she came back and handed me a Toblerone chocolate bar. On the table in front of me she put a photograph. My boy, she said in English and I know quite a lot of English from TV so I knew what it meant. The photograph was of a bare-chested boy standing underneath a palm tree, holding a white kitten. The kitten was very white against his brown skin. He looked like he was my age, or maybe a little bit younger, and when he smiled, his front teeth were both missing. Nice, I said. Luelle nodded, and in her eyes were tears. In Fipines, she said, two years, and I think she was very sad to be here when her boy is there.

  My body doesn’t hur
t as much now. It was very terrible for two or three days. The mother and the father in this house had fights about it and I know this because I could hear them in the night when they thought I was sleeping. He needs to see someone, said the father, many times. No, said the mother. She gave me pills to take the pain away. Some of them made me feel like I was dreaming. On the first day after I did it, she sat beside my bed the whole day after we came back to the house from the old lady’s house. I tried to say something to her, but my mouth wouldn’t say anything. It felt like everything, including me, had turned to a mushy jelly. It wasn’t bad, more strange. The worst was that every day the mother would change the bandage on my chest. It hurt so bad that the first time, I pushed her off me and screamed and Luelle had to come and help her hold me down. She put a salve on it to stop it being infected. If it’s infected, I can die, Nicoline told me. The mother had said it to her. On the third day, when she changed the bandage, she looked even more worried. It’s weeping, she whispered.

  A woman came. She said her name was Coco and that she’s a nurse. The mother in the house looked very worried. She walked around and around in a little circle as Coco gently removed my bandage. When the burn was uncovered, she drew a sharp little breath and said, Cecilia... The mother in the house said, Please, just do something. Coco and the mother stared at each other for a long while and I think they were angry. Please, said the mother. Maybe Coco didn’t want to do what the mother wanted her to, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Coco took my temperature and sighed heavily, like it was my fault if I was too hot or too cold. After a while, Coco left, and I lay very still on the bed and listened to the sound of her car’s tires crunching on the driveway. The mother sat on the side of the bed and asked if I needed anything. I shook my head and wanted to turn towards the wall, but it hurt too much to move that way so I just stared at the ceiling. Then, the door opened again and Coco was back, carrying a funny little white box. I’m going to try to make you better, she said.