The Boy at the Door

by Alex Dahl

  Pawel came. He’s very bad. He has grooves on his face like someone cut him with knives, and maybe they did even. He has very small pig eyes and every time he waves his hand so I’ll go away and if I don’t he kicks me. They closed the door to the living room and were in there for a long time, whispering. When they came back out, Anni stepped outside for a moment and returned with Krysz’s car key, fished from his pocket. She handed it to Pawel. Pawel then went down to Krysz’s red Skoda station wagon, which was parked by the side of the road, and reversed it up the narrow track to the front of the house, very close to where Krysz lay, just out of sight around a corner. He opened the boot, and then he and Anni half dragged, half hauled Krysz into it. They stood looking at each other seriously for several long moments, then Pawel placed a hand on Anni’s shoulder. She turned quickly away, as though this hurt her, and again her face looked like it did in the moments after the rock tumbled through the air – empty, mouth half open like a scream in a dream, watching Pawel drive away. Then she did something strange. She dropped to her knees in front of me and held me in a hug for a very long time. Come, she said again, and together we left the house. Walking along Østerøysvingen, half running after Anni, who seemed strangely calm and like nothing was wrong, I kept turning and looking back at the house and every time I couldn’t believe that it could just stand there like nothing had happened.

  Now that I’m here in this ‘home’, thinking about these things feels like a dream, just like the first while after Anni and Krysz took me away from the farm had felt like a dream. Every day I’d wake up and it would take me a very long while to really understand that my whole life had disappeared and I now had to live with these two people who were so crazy and mean. I would look around the unfamiliar walls of whatever house we were staying in that night and really pray that I was still asleep, that I would wake up and I’d be in the carved wooden bed in the old farmhouse, Baby sleeping on her similar bed next to mine, the only sound the wind outside or Moffa snoring through the walls. But every day I’d wake; back then most days in a new bed somewhere, in a different country, surrounded by strangers who all hated me, and I started to do many strange things, like biting my wrist, tugging at my hair, stabbing myself with a little fork and staying silent for several days, just to stop myself from screaming.

  18

  To his eternal credit, my father did not seem the least bit surprised to see me after nearly fifteen years. I arrived just after eight o’clock in the morning, and the air still had that violet, milky glow, with ribbons of mist rising from the fields. I left the car with the engine running in the space between the barn and the main house, and took a couple of tentative steps towards the building, which looked empty. I even left the car door open – that was how ready I was to just turn back around and return to the road, heading God knows where. As I approached, a light came on in the window immediately left of the entrance door, and then it swung open to reveal a man I didn’t immediately recognize. Rationally, I knew that it had to be my father, but he just didn’t much resemble the man I remembered. This guy looked relaxed, healthy and much younger than sixty. The man I remembered had always been stressed, fidgety, drawn-looking and evasive. He took one look at me and said, ‘Oh, honey.’

  When my father left my mother and me in Sandefjord, I was fifteen years old. I was so angry that, to this day, I believe that fury manifested itself in my mind as a kind of black fog every other experience and feeling had to be seen through. He went to live with a Swedish woman who was in her twenties at the time, and this obviously did not help. They bought a farm near Munkfors, and in those early years after the divorce, my father used to write to me frequently, asking me to please come and visit him and Helén, but I never responded, considering the thought of visiting him and his Swedish slutty child-bride at their hovel in the middle of nowhere was about as tempting as chewing off my own leg. Then, out of the blue, Helén drowned at twenty-nine in a freak accident while walking on a frozen lake, and my mother began to prepare for my father to come running back, begging for another chance. She’d turn him down twice, she said, then she’d welcome him home. But he never came.

  That was the background to the day I turned up, out of the blue, aged twenty-nine, six months pregnant with a stranger’s baby, desperate for help. I did what I had to do, just like I will do what I have to do now. That’s human. That’s how this species has survived and evolved through the ages. If nobody had the balls to do what has to be done, even when that is highly unpleasant, then the simple fact would be that the human race would have disappeared a long time ago.

  I assumed we’d have to talk everything through in depth immediately; that there would be the frenzied activity of accomplices, that he’d want to know every single detail of the events leading up to the current situation, but it wasn’t anything like that. My father brought me into an old-fashioned farm kitchen where a voracious fire burned in a huge open hearth. He placed a large bowl of milky coffee and some rye crackers in front of me, and only then did I realize how hungry I was. When I’d finished, I looked up at him and he was looking back at me, seriously, but not without a glint of humor in his eyes. You have to help me, I whispered. Okay, he said.

  And like that, we settled into a routine. My father dealt with Johan, telling him that I’d had a serious breakdown as a result of the aftermath of the postnatal depression with Nicoline, and that I had come to him desperate for help. He told him that he’d been able to secure a place for me as an outpatient at a progressive clinic near Munkfors with fantastic results in treating mental health problems. Johan called several times a day, insisting on seeing me, understandably upset at the very difficult position my sudden disappearance had placed him in, but my father was able to talk him around to the notion that I just needed time, and peace, to process the difficult year I’d had.

  My father had a friend called Rolf, who was a retired doctor. Rolf came to the farm on several occasions during my stay, and on one of these occasions, he brought with him an ultrasound machine. We watched the baby dance on the screen in flickering neon darkness as Rolf ran the device across my distended belly. He wrote a statement saying I was undergoing acute psychiatric treatment in his clinic, and that the long-term prognosis for my particular challenges was very good, provided I’d be given the space and peace to complete the course of treatment.

  Every day my father and I would go for long walks around the farm. Ironically, I was in much better shape than I had been during my pregnancy with Nicoline, and over the course of the three months I spent in Sweden with my father, I believe we became friends. He liked to walk around the lake and once I asked him if that was where Helén had drowned, and he’d nodded slowly, gazing out over the frozen blue sheath stretching out between towering pines. I asked him if he hadn’t considered coming home after she died and he said that of course he had, but he’d always felt like he couldn’t leave her here.

  As November neared its end, it was apparent that it wouldn’t be much longer now. From my calculations, I must have gone over the due date. The baby sat tight and high inside me, moving only occasionally and slowly, as if his movements were thought through and necessary – nothing like Nicoline’s wild, unpredictable tumbles. What a strange time it was; I’d gone from being a wife and mother at home to being a kind of daughter in exile at my estranged father’s home, but the strangest thing was perhaps that I was happier there than I had been at home during the past year. It was decided that Rolf would assist with the birth, though in the end it didn’t turn out like that. I was adamant that the baby would be put up for adoption immediately after his birth, and that Rolf would take the child away with him and hand him over to social services, saying he’d helped a young, vulnerable teenager with the birth and that he’d promised never to reveal her identity. My father and Rolf were equally adamant that I should wait for the child to be born before making that decision final.

  One night I sat down and knitted a little blue bear for the baby. I tried to make it simil
ar to one I’d had as a child, which my paternal grandmother had made for me. While I was fully committed to giving my baby away at birth, I liked the idea of sending with him one little thing from me. It turned out rather lovely and I sat holding it to my chest a long while by the roaring fire, my tears dripping onto the little wooly thing.

  Nicoline’s birth had taken twenty-four hours and I truly believed that eternity in hell would have nothing on childbirth, so I wasn’t looking forward to another round of self-slaughter. Värmland at that time of year is a rather bleak place, and that year it was particularly cold. The lake had been partially frozen since mid-October, and every day my father and I walked around it, increasingly slowly. I just couldn’t understand how he could bear looking out over the shimmery blue ice, knowing how Helén had been held beneath it. The last day we did that walk, we were halfway round our usual circuit when I felt a sudden, unbearable twinge in the lower-right part of my stomach, and had to grab on to my father’s arm for support. It was the middle of the day but it wasn’t fully light – the bleak sun didn’t seem to properly rise above the enormous pine trees that surrounded the farm. The air was so cold that every breath hurt. We went back up to the farm and I half sat, half lay on a sofa my father pulled up close to the fire.

  Should I call Rolf? he asked, every time I winced at a contraction, by early evening, they were coming thick and fast. Not yet, I whispered, having learned the hard way just a year earlier that this could take forever.

  Outside it had started to snow heavily, and after less than two hours it had covered the cars, leaving white, eerie mounds where they’d stood. I remember biting hard into a damp cloth, then having it taken from me and wiped gently across my forehead. I focused on the fast-falling fat snowflakes and on not screaming; even then, I was intent on not losing control. My father became increasingly worried as the night wore on – he’d tried to call Rolf constantly for several hours by then, but thought the phone lines were down because of the incredible snowfall.

  Ten minutes past midnight on December fourth, Tobias was born. In my mind, all those months leading up to that moment, I’d imagined I wouldn’t look at him or hold him, or spend even a moment drinking in his tiny, perfect features. It didn’t happen like that. He didn’t cry much, not even when my father slapped his bottom firmly to get him to breathe, but he was most certainly alive, alert and with black, alien eyes. He had thick, black hair and little pink fists he clenched and unclenched. He kept smacking his lips as though he’d just been given something delicious and wanted more. I laid him to my breast, because what else could I do? And I cried so hard my whole body shook and the baby kept losing his grip, but he was a persistent little thing, and that was how we sat that whole first night, by the fire. The next day, and the day after, I didn’t let go of the baby – I found that I couldn’t. Unlike with Nicoline’s birth, I felt strong this time, and by the third day, physically well. I need to go soon, I told my father, and though he’d known it all along, I could tell he’d thought I’d change my mind. You need to give him a name, said my father, but I shook my head. You do it, I said, and so I never even knew his name. On the morning I was leaving, when Tobias was five days old, my father sat me down in the kitchen and told me he intended to keep the baby at the farm until he was six months old. In that moment I was holding the boy, my boy, and I just nodded. I didn’t need to ask why, because I knew my father felt sure I’d come back for him. But I never did. I went home, bleeding and dazed and hardened inside in a way I’d never thought possible.

  *

  Melancholia doesn’t have much of a function, I’ve always found. No point in dwelling on that which cannot be changed. I think I’ve transcended regret, even. It’s occurred to me, having watched my life disintegrate entirely, that there is so much freedom in destruction. I can just be. Obviously, everyone’s lives would be less complicated at present if I hadn’t gone and gotten pregnant with a random stranger on a beach in Uruguay, but then there would be no Tobias. And if there’s one thing that’s become very clear to me over the course of the last few months, it is that that kid is supposed to be here. Something feels strange and liquid inside me to think of those first few days when I clutched the baby to me, watching his trusting, gentle face by the light of the flames my father kept going day and night. And to think of driving away, my foot on the accelerator, the wheels crunching on gravel as the car began to roll away from the house when my baby was still inside it, sleeping in his wicker crib by the hearth, the bear next to his heart, not knowing that his mother didn’t want him and had just left him forever; well, it makes me want to break something. It is the middle of the night now, and I think I’ve worked out most of what I need to do in my mind – it is difficult to think much at all through this medicated sludge. I stand up and sit down several times, suddenly angry with myself for having cleaned the washroom, because it means that now there is absolutely nothing to do except sit here, alone with my thoughts. Or... or I could go out. It’s a free country. I’m a free woman. Yes, that’s it. I need to retrace my steps of the night when Anni died. I can’t believe I haven’t thought of this before.

  Quietly, I find a down jacket of Johan’s, a torch and some mountain boots – it’s ten below zero outside, according to the thermometer by the basement door. If Johan were to stumble across me now, dressed like a yeti, getting ready to go outside at three o’clock in the morning in mid-December, to go walking around Sandefjord’s harbor basin retracing my steps of the night a junkie was murdered, he’d surely have me sectioned again.

  *

  The freezing air hits me like a clenched fist, and I half run down the driveway, concentrating on not turning back to look at the house; it would be too tempting to go back inside if I saw the soft glow from the windows. My heart is beating wildly, though it is hardly dangerous to walk around little Sandefjord in the middle of the night. Unless you’re Anni, then it is dangerous indeed, but I don’t have enemies like she did. Or do I?

  Even in the middle of the day, Sandefjord is sparsely populated, and it is perfectly possible to drive along for several minutes without seeing a single soul. At night, it really feels post-apocalyptic, but tonight this suits me just fine. It isn’t a long walk from my house to the frozen inlet behind Meny, the food shop, where Anni was found – past the international school, past the pizza restaurant that burned down last year, across the parking lot behind the gas station. I find this part frightening – in the winter, the parking lot is used to store boats on land, and they are towering above me underneath swathes of tarpaulin, creating myriad hiding places for potential assassins. I stand completely still between two large sailing boats, listening. Though it is cold, there is no wind, and I feel as though I could pick out the sound of a pin dropping. The water is a solid black sheath of ice, probably thick enough to walk across the bay now. I think about Helén, whom I never met, who was four months beneath the ice before they managed to recover her body, but the image of Helén bleeds into that of Anni – and I can practically see her floating before my eyes, face down in black water. I don’t think that one could say I killed Anni. Like many other things, I suppose it is a matter of perspective. I’m not sure why I’m here tonight, when I could be home in my bed, next to Johan, in my silk pajamas, cozy with our state-of-the-art heating. Then again, Johan most certainly doesn’t want to sleep next to me, and may never want to again, unless I manage to pull all the strings in the right order, absolving me of all blame. One shot. And that is precisely why I am here, to piece together the night Anni died, step by step; I can’t afford one more incriminating lie.

  I stood approximately where I am standing now, in between two large boats. They’d probably been pulled up from the sea just a few days earlier – they still carried the stench of decaying seagrass on their hulls. It was ten thirty at night, and she kept me waiting the way she often had. I clenched and unclenched my fists in my pockets and shuddered as lashings of rain struck my face underneath the hood I’d pulled over my head. In my pocket
was fifty thousand kroner in five-hundred-kroner bills. I rocked back and forth on my heels, trying to keep warm, or maybe just steeling myself.

  I felt extremely nervous and jittery at the prospect of seeing the boy for the first time. The day before, when I bumped into the receptionist in town and had a sudden panicked feeling that Tobias was my son, I texted Anni and insisted that she confirm everything was okay. She responded immediately, assuring me everything was fine. I tried to believe her, but needed to see him with my own eyes.

  Suddenly she appeared, walking fast from behind the Shell station, cupping her hands, trying to shield a cigarette in the torrential rain. She was alone, and I felt a surge of wild anger at the realization that she’d disregarded our agreement. Bring the boy, I’d said. What part of that had she not understood? But it wasn’t that she hadn’t understood. It was that she’d lied to me. Everything is fine, she’d said in her text. Meet me tomorrow. I’d desperately worked out a plan to solve the situation with Anni and Krysz, which had spiraled completely out of control. I’d drive the kid back to Munkfors to my father, and he’d just have to stay there.