by Alex Dahl
Tobias already knew the basics of swimming; his grandfather taught him in the lake at the farm. I often think of that day I took him to Barlinek, too – he liked playing there. I wonder who his father is, it sure as hell isn’t that pale, ruddy-faced husband of Cecilia’s, and that is probably the very reason why she did what she’s done. Tobias’s face lit up at the sight of the turquoise water, and he gazed up at me with such gratitude as we approached the steps leading to the shallow end that I had to look away. There was a box full of pool toys that people could borrow, and Tobias chose some red goggles and a little blue stick to dive after. I sat by the side of the pool watching over him as he dived for the stick again and again, staying in the shallow end. Every now and again he’d stand still for a moment and lift the goggles to the top of his head, and he’d look around in awe, as if he couldn’t believe he really was at the swimming pool. The goggles were tight and left a deep imprint on his face. He smiled more freely than I’ve ever seen him smile before, and it was in that moment that I decided to take this situation into my own hands if Krysz doesn’t manage to solve it within the next few weeks. The boy needs a family. He needs to go to school. And he needs to smile like that a lot more often.
*
Camilla Stensland’s eyes are hard on me, and I stare back, unflinchingly. I carefully raise one eyebrow slightly, using all my strength to ensure my face is perfectly composed.
‘Would you keep reading, please?’
I swallow hard.
‘This is clearly nuts,’ I say. ‘I mean, this woman was so crazy she even lies in her own journals and letters.’ I laugh, but everyone is serious and unamused. They can’t possibly believe Anni over me. She was a crack-smoking junkie, and I’m a respectable, successful mother who made a single mistake years ago. I’m not going to let that woman take me down. I stare at the next section, the hairs on my arms standing up at the thought of the crazy allegations and lies I’ll have to read next. I don’t dare look at my husband, but his shock emanates from him. ‘I mean, this can’t possibly be considered proof. She could have written this crap just to frame me. And who is this Ellen character anyway? She could be a criminal, too!’
‘Mrs Wilborg,’ says Ellefsen sternly. ‘Let’s move forward. We’d like you to finish reading the letter.’
It’s nice here. Things have settled into a pretty comfortable existence, though not exactly as Krysz planned it. Pawel knew of someone who’d come here for a winter’s work last year and they’d stayed in an empty house, and so when we arrived we went there, and thankfully found it empty still. We don’t have much, just a couple of mattresses and some clothes. The house sits back from the road on a little hill, with the distinctive rounded cliffs that are everywhere in Sandefjord towering behind it. A small dense wood next to the house hides it from view, and so we feel pretty safe here. From the first floor, you can see the sea. Tobias likes to play in the wood, and we let him do it here because we have a clear view of the road and if a car approaches, we can see it from far off, and he knows to lie down or run inside.
I’ve opened a postbox in the town, and that is where I keep my journals. For so long now, I have toyed around with the idea of writing to you, wanting nothing, asking for nothing, just forgiveness. The thing I want the most in the world would be for you to read these words and somehow manage to forgive me. I thought maybe I could send you the spare key to the postbox, so in case anything was to happen to me, then at least you could read this and the rest of my journals and then you’d know everything.
Just after we arrived here a couple of months ago, Krysz and I found Cecilia Wilborg. It wasn’t difficult; this is a small town – all we had to do was look online at 1881.no and it gave her full address. Late one night, when Tobias was asleep, we drove over to the Wilborgs’ house on Vesterøya. It was a huge, newly built house with sweeping views of Sandefjord’s inner harbor, just above a big international school down by the water’s edge. It was late, but all the lights were on, and we didn’t want to take any chances, so we just drove slowly past. When we got home, Krysz and I drank beer and smoked pot, laughing into the house’s cold air, excited because the Wilborgs clearly had even more money than we’d dared hope. A couple of days after that, we made our move.
We’d found out that Cecilia Wilborg went to the gym in the former industrial buildings down by the water most mornings after dropping her daughters at school. We decided that it would be me who’d approach her, she’d be less likely to scream or make a scene if it was a woman. Krysz drove me to the parking lot by the gym, and sure enough, there was her Range Rover. It was a kind of bronze color and on the wheels were expensive-looking pinkish gold alloys. Like her house, it was extravagant, and I found I couldn’t actually envision sitting in a car like that, or living in such a home. She probably has matching cutlery and ironed sheets, I thought to myself, waiting in the freezing cold morning. After less than ten minutes, Cecilia emerged, her face bare of make-up, but beautifully smooth, like she spends every day rubbing expensive oils and creams into her skin.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, just as she opened the car with the key fob, and only then did she notice me standing there, in between her car and the one next to it. A look of disapproval passed over her face and her eyes were cold. She hesitated before answering.
‘Yes?’ she said at last.
‘I need to speak to you.’
‘Sorry,’ she said breezily, opening the boot and throwing in her gym kit. ‘I’m in a rush.’ She made for the driver’s door, but I blocked her, leaning against the car. Her eyes narrowed in anger and she shoved me, then tried to open the car door, a huge diamond on her ring finger glinting in the sharp winter sun.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she said, pulling harder at the door, but my body weight was against it, and she couldn’t get in. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ she whispered, looking around the parking lot, most likely terrified at the thought of being seen with some shabby stranger.
‘My name is Anni. Word on the street is, you’re looking to buy.’
‘Buy what?’ she hissed, her cold eyes blinking repeatedly.
‘Coke,’ I said, and again, she glanced around, though the car park remained thankfully empty.
‘You must be insane.’
‘Why don’t you meet with me tomorrow night, at ten thirty, in the boatyard behind Meny.’
‘Look. Anni. It would seem you find yourself in a difficult situation or something. This is not a town that has a problem with vagrants or druggies or criminals or anything like that, so I must say I’m surprised to bump into someone like you here. But listen. I’m going to give you ten seconds to get your fucking dirty hands off my car or I will immediately call the police.’
‘No. I will call the police, in fact.’ At this, she laughed. Though it was a spiteful, mean laugh, I could see how beautiful her smile was, how even and well-maintained her teeth were.
‘You will call the police?’
‘Yes.’
‘And why would you do that, Anni?’
‘Because I have your son.’ The exaggerated mock-smile died on her lips and she visibly shrunk where she stood.
‘What did you just say?’ she whispered.
‘I said, I have your son. A lovely kid, actually. And I will call the police unless you play ball.’ She didn’t speak for a very long time. Her hands were held in tight fists against her body, and I think she was fighting the urge to hit me. Just then, a voice broke the silence.
‘Cecilia?’ it said. I remained where I was, with my back turned, so whoever spoke didn’t see my face. Cecilia forced a wide smile back onto her face.
‘Oh. Oh, hey, Silje.’
‘You okay?’
I stared at Cecilia, whose eyes went quickly from Silje to me and back again, the smile still frozen on her face.
‘Yes. Oh yeah, just uh... yeah. Great.’
There was a slight silence before Silje spoke again. ‘See you at tennis tomorrow, then.’
‘Ye
p,’ said Cecilia, waving at the woman behind me with the fist holding the car key. A moment later we heard the other car start up and pull away, its tires squealing on the snow.
‘How fucking dare you,’ she said.
‘How fucking dare you,’ I replied, meeting her gaze.
‘If you bring who you say you have anywhere near me, I’ll fucking kill you with my own hands,’ she whispered.
‘Meet me at the boatyard tomorrow night. Bring twenty thousand kroner.’ She snorted hard.
‘What? Why would I do that?’
‘Otherwise I’ll hand the kid over to the police and suggest they run a DNA test on Cecilia Wilborg, that’s why.’
‘Say I do what you’re asking, which in itself is practically impossible, then what?’
‘Then we’ll explain the full terms and conditions to you. Once you’ve done your part, we’ll return the boy to Munkfors.’ At this, she let out a sharp little exhalation and I saw that tears had sprung to her eyes.
‘Okay,’ she whispered. ‘Fine.’
*
She came on time, walking fast across the boatyard to where I stood leaning against the wall of some abandoned workshops by the water. Fifty yards away, to the side of the gas station, Krysz sat in the Skoda, smoking and watching. All the lights were off, but Cecilia passed less than ten meters from him and would easily have seen him had she turned her head. Her face was fully made-up this time and as she approached me, her lower lip trembled with fury. She looked like she was going to hit me, but focused on restraining herself.
‘Where is he?’
‘Who?’
‘The boy.’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Now, let me explain. We want five hundred thousand kroner.’
Cecilia stared at me hard. ‘I... I can’t get that. I don’t have it! You said twenty thousand.’
‘Yes. You’ve got a month. The twenty thousand is for this month. And then you find the five hundred thousand.’
‘It’s impossible.’
‘I’m sure you’ll find a way.’
‘How do I even know you’ve got him?’ I’d thought she might ask me that. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small item I knew she’d recognize. It was a tiny knitted bear, as small as a child’s palm, which she herself had made for the baby before she’d given birth to him and abandoned him. The old man told me this. Cecilia looked at it for a long moment, reached out and touched upon it lightly, before recoiling as though it had burned her.
‘Jesus,’ she whispered softly. ‘Please don’t hurt him.’
*
So now we’re waiting for Cecilia Wilborg to find the money. In the meantime, Sandefjord has been kind to us. There’s a daytime center for recovering drug users and I go there most days. They give you methadone and food and whatever medicines you need. The house we found is small but cozy. Tobias is much happier than in the Poland-house, I can tell, though he doesn’t speak much. Sometimes I think about what we’ll do when this situation has resolved itself. We’ll have lots of money. Krysz says we will go back to Gothenburg and get a nice apartment like the one he had before Magdalena died, and we’ll do things like go to the cinema and get gym memberships. He says he’ll get properly clean, and go to therapy even, and then we won’t fight or anything because there isn’t much to fight about when you have money. I think maybe those things won’t happen even if we do get the money; I worry that it will all just go on smack and there we’ll be, still sleeping on mattresses in other people’s houses.
I have so many regrets. I regret most of what I’ve done. I don’t know how I can make up for the things I’ve done, I just don’t think it would even be possible. I wonder what you are doing tonight. It’s summer, so maybe you are at the torp. Maybe you’re looking out at the same bright, pink-streaked summer sky as I am. We haven’t spoken since I went to live in Gothenburg when Krysz was a vegan Christian. But inside, I talk as if to you, all the time.
Taking a kid to the pool isn’t much in the way of atonement, I realize that, but I’m trying to think of more things I can do. This afternoon when we left the swimming pool in the early afternoon, Tobias’s fingers had become all crinkly from so many hours in the water. He kept looking at them and smiling. A young girl stood in the middle of the reception area handing out fliers and I walked straight past her, but Tobias took one and handed it to me outside. ‘Children’s swimming club starting August fifteenth,’ it read. Tobias kept his eyes on the ground, not daring to look at me. Do you want to go to this? I asked. He didn’t answer at first, he probably thought it was a trick question, like when Krysz asks him if he wants chocolate and then slowly eats the whole bar in front of the boy, laughing. Then he looked up at me, nodding boldly, and I noticed his eyes were full of tears. Okay, I said.
These are little things, I know that. But maybe those little things are better than nothing. I think, if you didn’t know me, and you were just another person at the pool this afternoon, and you’d happened to observe me with Tobias, you would have thought I was his mother. Not one of those perfect, healthy, energetic mothers, but someone who really saw their child and tried to give him a fun day. You might have thought I was a little rough around the edges and that the little boy was a little scrawny, but you might still have thought I was an okay person. Thinking of you watching me with the little boy has me really happy, like if everything was different and you knew where I was and you’d happened to come look for me, you might have stood there watching us and smiled.
Oh, Ellen, I wish you could know these things. I wish I could just go and post this letter to you but you’d hate me and you wouldn’t believe that I could have done what Ive done, not to a little kid – youd never have thought that about me. Would you? Maybe you would. Often when I write to you I get myself all upset and very sad about how much I have messed things up and how much Ive lost because we came so close there for a little while, didn’t we. So close to everything being okay. I know i said I’m not using and its mostly true, I swear but on nights like tonigt when im writing to you and thinking about everything and knowing that it doesn’t even matter what I write because I will just put this away like all my other letters to you, it’s just too hard to not smoke up.
‘You can stop there for a moment,’ says Camilla Stensland.
‘I don’t understand the point of any of this,’ I say, and glance briefly at Johan. I’m taken aback to see that he is crying, and not even bothering to wipe away the tears running down his face. A sudden, unexpected twinge of real sadness hits me. Where can I go from here? I can’t go to prison and lose Johan. I just can’t. If I did, all of my sacrifices, all of my suffering would have been for nothing.
‘I’m sure we can agree that this brings new light to the circumstances of Annika Lucasson’s last few months and subsequent death.’
I don’t respond, but pointedly stare at my hands for a very long time.
‘Mrs Wilborg?’ asks Inspector Ellefsen. ‘The next section, please. This part was written less than two weeks before Annika’s death and is taken from her journals. It will fill in a few gaps from her letter to Ellen Egedius.’
Annika L., October 14th, 2017
Things have changed here. It is dark and rains all the time and Krysz hates Norway and wants to go back to Poland. He is trying constantly to get more and more money from Tobias’s mother. I’ve done something that was probably both stupid and dangerous. If Krysz knew, he’d break every bone in my body. For so many months now, I’ve felt that this situation just can’t go on, so I contacted Cecilia secretly and told her I will hand the boy over to social services and tell them who his mother is, unless she pays us one large final amount, and then either takes him, or finds him a place to go. To my surprise, she agreed, but said she’ll never give us another penny unless I show her the boy. I’m not even sure I believe you have him anymore, she said. Usually it’s me who goes to get the money from her. We meet somewhere quiet, late at night, she h
ands me the cash and I walk away, and that’s it. We’re due to meet again soon, and I’m going to gently tell Krysz that she wants to see the boy in person to be sure of the fact that we really have him. Then I’m going to hand him over to Cecilia, and he’ll be hers to do as she pleases with. I imagine she’ll try to return him to her father. She’ll give me enough money so that Krysz and I can go back to Poland and lay low for a long while, and I’ll tell Krysz that she threatened me and stole the boy. We just can’t keep doing this. It isn’t even so much that I feel sorry for him, though I usually do, but more that it is absolutely exhausting, and at one point Cecilia might decide she’d rather face the music than keep paying us.
Also, I feel mostly sorry for the old man. I was surprised he didn’t call the police immediately when we took Tobias, but Krysz just laughed at the suggestion and asked what he’d have said to the police. That he’d kept an unregistered child at his home for years and years? He was fucked and he knew it, Krysz said.
Today is a Saturday, and it is almost completely dark by five p.m. I feel a melancholy so strong I don’t quite know what to do with myself. Tobias is outside in the forest behind the house like he usually is, and Krysz is sleeping upstairs. Yesterday it was terribly cold and Krysz smashed the old sofa that was here when we came and burned its legs in the fireplace, though he’s always said we shouldn’t use it because someone will see the smoke. We sat on the floor in front of the flames, the three of us, eating Maryland cookies and drinking freezing beer. Tobias likes beer and I don’t think he knows children aren’t supposed to drink it. Krysz thinks it’s really funny, and always laughs mockingly when Tobias asks for one. It’ll make the little idiot sleep well, he’ll say.