The Boy at the Door

by Alex Dahl

  At his house, which was a small one-bedroom basement flat on the outskirts of Gothenburg, he’d framed a photograph of me, smiling and eating an ice cream by the river Vistula. I don’t remember it being taken, but then, there are a lot of things I don’t remember. It looked like he’d gone to IKEA and indiscriminately picked all the cheapest furnishings, but everything was clean, if completely impersonal. Looking around, I couldn’t see a single object that I could remember having seen in the purple van. On the coffee table lay a well-thumbed Bible. On the kitchen counter was a stack of brochures that read ‘Guds ord’ – God’s word.

  ‘I hand them out,’ Krysz said, his voice startling me. ‘At the supermarket and things. For the church.’

  ‘But when... when did you become religious?’

  He shrugged. ‘I guess when I lost you, I realized there wasn’t anything left. And then, with everything with Magdalena, well – I just had to feel some warmth or love from somewhere, and the church was where I found it.’

  Krysz drank herbal tea and made me a vegan curry. He made no attempt to touch me or kiss me, but kept saying he would always be thankful that I gave him a chance to say how sorry he was. He slept on the sofa bed and gave me the freshly made bed in the bedroom, but I found it impossible to sleep, overwhelmed by the incredible strangeness of the situation, and this new Krysz. I felt the scars on my arms in the dark and watched roaming shadows from cars passing outside. I listened to the kitchen clock ticking so loudly I could hear it through the closed door. I tried to reconcile this new docile, God-fearing Krysz with the violent drug dealer who forced me into prostitution and repeatedly beat me unconscious, and while I couldn’t, I realized I was no longer afraid of him, nor angry. I was tired of running.

  Now we talk every day on the phone. For hours, and in a way we never used to before. Back then, it was all about getting high and getting money, but now, Krysz has returned to his interests from when he was younger. He is reading a lot, especially philosophy, and he is particularly interested in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards, he quoted to me recently, crying down the phone as he spoke. They are saying Magdalena doesn’t have long to live. Was I wrong for allowing this increased communication? Can it really be wrong to have faith in a person’s ability to change and emerge from awful situations stronger and saner? I can’t imagine the pain Krysz and Magdalena’s mother must be going through; how could it be wrong for me to be there for him at this time? I wish I could have met his little girl; her plight has also touched me very deeply, but you can’t introduce new people to a dying child.

  I made it back to the torp with Ellen and Josef and Sofia, though I’d never dared dream I would. I live alone now, in a council flat in a block where a district nurse is always on duty, but every now and again Ellen invites me to join them at the torp. Though I am clean, this time for longer than ever, everything was different. The water in the lake was murkier than I remembered, my annex felt claustrophobic and my fingers would no longer comply with the birch-root coiling. The food, which used to taste incredible in its fresh simplicity, now struck me as boring. The soothing peace I felt before, far away from mobile reception and computer screens, made me feel like I was itching within, desperate for the nightly phone call with Krysz. All these sudden reservations about spending time at the torp, which had once been my very definition of heaven, were of course to do with Krysz. Not only his reappearance in my life, but because I was in love and knew of something so much bigger than myself.

  Perhaps it also had to do with my baby; ever since I’d handed him out of my arms for the last time, I had felt a most profound emptiness. I wasn’t sad, exactly; rather, I was proud of having managed to do what I did for him. I had safely carried him into the world and ensured he would be raised in a loving, safe environment. Hopefully my flawed genes won’t cause him too much trouble, but maybe my shortcomings have little to do with my genes – after all, I came from my parents and there wasn’t anything wrong with them except that they didn’t manage to live for very long.

  Even Ellen doesn’t reach me in the way she used to before. Back then, it had been enough to just have her near, to know that I could call her if I needed to. I still love her as much as I always have, and Josef and Sofia, too, but they aren’t enough anymore. I need to have Krysz, too. Even if it kills me. Tomorrow I’m going with Ellen and the family to the torp, and I am going to find a way to tell her that I am going to go and stay with Krysz in Gothenburg. It will only be a couple of weeks at most, but he has begged me to be there for him just for a little while.

  I don’t know what will happen when the little girl dies. I don’t know how anyone can keep breathing when their baby stops. When he speaks of what is going to happen, Krysz says that Magdalena is going home to Jesus. He says he will never go back to what he was, because that would be to mock his little girl’s life, and that the only way he can do right by her is to become a good man.

  I am writing this at my desk in my apartment. I have so much now, so many things I couldn’t have dreamed of. I have this home, filled with things either given to me, or chosen myself because I liked them, and a fridge full of food and a closet full of clothes. I’m not on the street, or slumped in a doorway somewhere, or underneath yet another stranger. I’m just me, right now, Annika, and I am steering the ship that is my life humbly and in awareness. My ocean has always been tumultuous, but miraculously I’ve found a safe harbor at the eleventh hour, over and over. It is clear to me now that the star I steer by is Krysz, and it always will be. Once it was my mother, and it might still have been, had she lived. Then it was Ellen. But the brightest star, the one I can’t seem to turn my gaze away from, the one I follow faithfully, even if I know it will lead me to destruction, is Krysz. I’m going to stop for tonight; it is a wonderfully warm evening and I’d like to sit on the balcony for a while, looking at the stars against their pink midsummer night sky.

  15

  I don’t know what this home represents anymore. I thought I did; all the years Johan and I have built a family and a life together, it was always to give Nicoline and Hermine what I didn’t have – a stable home life. When my father left, he said, I just can’t live with your mother anymore. What about me? I wanted to scream, but didn’t. What about me? It became the biggest rejection of my life, and I know I’ve been marked by it ever since. People felt sorry for me. I was no longer one of the girls I’d previously identified with – the good-looking, preppy girls with the big houses and seemingly happy parents; I was one of the others. I probably placed more weight on this fact than anyone else ever did, but I certainly developed an inferiority complex over my missing father, and the fact that my mother and I could no longer go on the kinds of holidays everyone else seemed to go on so that we could afford to keep the house. Perhaps that was why I was so determined to get Johan Wilborg in the first place, and why I’ve held on to him beyond what might be considered reasonable. I won’t have my façade shattered again. In Sandefjord, I finally enjoy the kind of social status I felt eluded me in my earlier life; I look how a lot of people would like to look, I’d imagine. I live in a huge, beautiful home. I work here and there, because I want to, not because I have to. I have two little girls who I will protect against the vicious, envious gossip and judgment this kind of little town can bring.

  I’ve told so many lies. Most of them I’ve told to save myself, to preserve the life Johan and I have built together. All I ever wanted was a normal family, the kind of family others may look to for inspiration. Does that make me bad? All my life, I’ve worked hard. Perhaps not so much in paid employment, but then again, I haven’t had to. I’ve worked hard at being the perfect wife and the perfect mother, though I could never have anticipated how difficult being a mother really is. Some people make it look easy. Like you’re always overwhelmed by intense love for your children, or like you wake up every day just gagging to see those little beaming faces. Even though I’ve found it difficult, to put
it mildly, I have worked hard to protect what I have. I suppose that is why it has felt violently unfair that one wrong decision should have set in motion such a devastating chain of events. I’ve done everything, I really have, to avoid placing my family in the current situation, but that was all before I realized that I love Tobias. It is a love I thought I’d been able to bury so deep it would never rise to the surface, but from the moment I realized who the little lost boy really was, it has fought its way into my heart, into my very bones. I thought his presence would be the end of this family, but I know now that it is the only outcome that can save it. I have to get him back, even if it means losing everything else. But first, I have to find a way to tell Johan.

  Laila Engebretsen called Inspector Ellefsen and I told them everything. Well, almost everything. I’m not sure they believed everything I said, but they agreed to arrange a DNA test of Tobias. Inspector Ellefsen warned me not to leave Vestfold County as I have most likely breached several counts of the law and an investigation will be launched. I assured him the only place I’m going is the psychiatric ward in Tønsberg for my counseling session this afternoon. He stared at me, clearly thinking I was making some kind of odd joke, but I stared back levelly, and eventually he looked away, shaking his head slightly.

  I was going to tell Johan last night, after my conversation with Laila. I didn’t manage it, and went to bed at seven o’clock with a hot water bottle and a tea mug full of red wine. I suppose Johan just concluded my meeting with social services didn’t go very well. I decided to save the conversation until we were in the car on the way to Tønsberg, because then, at least, he’d have to keep his eyes on the road and not on me.

  Now I’m at home, looking around at all the familiar things one last time before Johan comes home on his lunch break to pick me up and drive me to Tønsberg. I’ve taken my pills and my head feels heavy and muddled, which is unfortunate. I’m sitting by the window, looking out at the empty harbor. It is a beautiful winter day, cold and crisp, the kind when you want to go cross-country skiing in the forest, listening to the silence. Tonight, everything will be different. This house will no longer be a safe haven for my children. Johan will leave me – fact. Perhaps Nicoline and Hermine can live with him and Luelle here full-time, and I’ll get a small apartment nearby – that way their lives won’t change so much. I guess I never was much of a mother.

  I imagine Johan in this exact moment, getting up from his desk at the Skandinaviske Forretningsbank, walking down the stairs and outside to his car, turning his open, kind face to the weak rays of the sun. On the way home, he’ll fiddle with the radio, his mind blank and calm. He may be slightly nervous about my hospital appointment, and upset about Tobias and the way I reacted yesterday when I found out they’d taken him away. But he will be completely unable to even imagine the bomb I’m about to drop on him. I’m going to run through them again, the moments that set all of these current events in motion. I thought I’d got away with it, I really did. But maybe my mama was right, after all. She always used to say that whatever you create will come back and give you the attention it deserves.

  *

  The blazing sun on my pale winter skin felt better than anything I’d ever felt before, especially after my pregnancy and the diabetes. I’d spent close to a year on the sofa with my feet up, becoming bigger and angrier by the day. All I’d wanted was to get the kid out so I could get my life back. Now she was out, but it was beginning to dawn on me that I’d never get my life back. I loved Nicoline and the feel of her sweet, dense little body against mine, but not a day went past that I didn’t intensely regret motherhood. How could we have done something like this to our perfect lives? I’d sob to Johan. During my pregnancy, I’d developed gestational diabetes and prenatal depression, and after Nicoline was born, I didn’t get any better, as I’d assumed – I got much worse. Johan had to take several months off work because I was so fragile I wasn’t able to take care of the baby by myself. I cried all day, most days, and so did Nicoline. She had colic, and writhed in pain much of the time, while I stared emptily into the air and Johan did his best to take care of us both.

  I felt ugly, fat and old, and every attempt from Johan to come close to me was instantly rebuffed. Our relationship, which had been mostly happy, became fraught with all the things that weren’t said, and strained by my intense unhappiness. I became convinced Johan would leave me; after all, why would someone as attractive and successful as Johan Wilborg stay with someone as utterly vile as me? Looking back, it is clear to me that I’d always thought like that, and that’s most likely why I did what I did. Ever since the beginning of our relationship, when I was still infatuated with the man I’d always wanted and we started to build a life together, there were others. Many others. One man just couldn’t give me all the attention and reassurance I craved. The year we lived in France before we went to university, I used to go home with random men at the end of a night out with my girlfriends. At university, it was easy to meet men for sex. And later, when we’d married and settled back down in Sandefjord, I’d find them on the Internet and meet them in various anonymous hotels on the outskirts of Oslo or Drammen. It didn’t mean anything, and I’m hardly the first person who’s allowed herself a few indiscretions outside of the boundaries of matrimony. Perhaps Johan has as well, I wouldn’t know, and frankly, I couldn’t care less as long as he stays with me. That has always been my number-one priority, and why I did what I did when I realized that my indiscretion in Uruguay would have permanent consequences. And it’s not like I didn’t learn my lesson – I have never again risked my marriage in any way – I’m faithful in body and mostly in spirit, and I really have tried unbelievably hard to be the perfect, best wife in every way.

  Back to Uruguay. We went to Punta del Este when Nicoline was four months old, on an extended family holiday and paternity leave. The thought behind it was that perhaps getting some winter sun would lift my mood and fix our family situation. The very thought makes me want to laugh now. At first, it seemed like a good idea. The sun’s rays on my skin were amazing, and even the baby seemed to cheer up in the warm sea breeze. She didn’t scream all the time, and I managed not to cry all of the time. Unlike Sandefjord in early spring, in Uruguay there were so many colors everywhere; the incredible blues of the ocean, the verdant trees, the golden sunlight everywhere. I began to breathe properly again.

  One night, Johan stayed with Nicoline at our rental villa, while I went to a beach party with some Swedish girls I’d met. It was the first time since I became pregnant over a year before that I’d felt like anything that vaguely resembled myself. I drank one cocktail after the other, danced in the sand under a huge moon to the set of an up–and-coming Cuban DJ, DJSoulo. I laughed, smoked thin French cigarettes and wished on the myriad stars that my life would be good again. One of the Swedish girls pulled me into one of the bathroom tents, and together we snorted a couple lines of coke. The rush of clarity I’d yearned for, that I hadn’t had since before my pregnancy, washed over me, and I walked down to the ocean and sat in the sand, letting the wavelets lick at my toes.

  ‘Hi,’ said a man’s voice. I looked up and saw the DJ from earlier, DJSoulo.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘You looked like you were having fun out there on the dance floor.’

  ‘Yes, it was amazing. Great set.’

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Sure. Just needed a moment – it’s busy over there.’

  ‘Tell me about it. I’m on again in half an hour. Mind if I join you?’

  I didn’t mind one little bit and shook my head. ‘I’m Cecilia.’

  ‘I’m Thiago.’ Thiago was the kind of handsome most people only ever see on a movie screen, and even I, who’d certainly had my fair share of attractive men, was taken aback by his sheer beauty. He was of indeterminable ethnicity – there was something Cherokee and Johnny Depp-esque about his high cheekbones, but his skin was a rich brown and his eyes a playful, dark amber. I fought the urge to make excuses for
the way I looked, but from the way Thiago looked at me and laughed at everything I said, it would appear he hadn’t noticed that I was a chubby, sad mother. Maybe he thought I was like one of those Swedish girls – a young, rich jetsetter travelling the world on yet another gap year. Less than ten minutes after he sat down beside me, Thiago was inside me, moving frantically, kissing me passionately, breathing hard in my ear, grabbing me by the back of my neck and my lower back. We were up against some rocks further down the beach, but frankly, I wouldn’t have cared if we were doing it in front of the whole beach club – just looking at the man made me tremble with lust.

  And afterwards, well, he was gone. He went back to do his set and I danced for a while longer, gazing at him flirtatiously and laughing as he winked at me, still weak in the knees from the sex. It would have ended there, like all my other little dalliances have. Since my period had not returned since the birth of Nicoline, and since it all happened so fast, we had not used any protection. With hindsight, that was obviously a stupid thing to have done, but personally I have never met anyone who hasn’t made a decision like that in the heat of the moment. And it really was hot; I’ve never forgotten it. I haven’t forgotten Thiago’s warm smile and killer cheekbones either, and when I first saw Tobias there was something intensely familiar about his smile. Though I didn’t immediately put two and two together, I was unsettled by how I felt like I’d seen him before. I think I knew it was him when I met the swimming pool receptionist that rainy day, but I couldn’t be absolutely certain until the last time I saw Anni.