You Disappear: A Novel

by Jungersen, Christian

  Even after spending one entire summer Saturday alone together, we found ourselves slipping away from a garden party at a neighbor’s because the other guests bored us and we would rather spend a few more hours by ourselves. We ran back to our yard and sat in the hanging sofa that had become our special place. We opened our own bottle of wine, and there we sat and watched the pale blue summer sky turn slowly to night. Beneath us, the gentle swing of the sofa. I took off my shoes and sat with my legs tucked up. We looked up at the outermost twigs of the apple tree. Gazed at each other and our small yard.

  We had created everything here. It was good. Niklas and the house and yard and each other, our whole life together. Because we had stuck it out, because our love was strong enough.

  And when it became full dark that night, we went up to our room and made love, still taken with each other and how lovely life could be.

  Yet even more important than the marvelous days I enjoyed with Frederik, again and again, was the fact that Frederik began to cultivate a relationship with Niklas. During the bad years, we’d had a recurring quarrel about him not spending enough time with our son. It was one thing that he’d quit being with me, but he’d damn well better not quit on Niklas.

  That all stopped. Occasionally the two of them would sit in the living room until late at night, listening to Frederik’s large collection of old classical LPs. Perhaps they had deep discussions those nights, though probably not—that’s no doubt just my own fantasy of how it must be to hang out with a dad you’ve seen all too little of. For them I suppose it sufficed merely to be in the living room together, listening to music.

  At times I even felt that Frederik went over the top in his enthusiasm for Niklas—like the time a consultant from the Ministry of Education visited Saxtorph and happened to mention that down in his car he had a professional-quality camera with extra lenses, and that he was going to sell it all on the web.

  The present that Frederik brought ecstatically home for Niklas was worth more than several years of Christmas and birthday gifts put together. We argued about it. Yet now I can see that, as usual, Frederik was right. Niklas had started to become interested in photography, it was a gift that might change his life, and it was a good deal from a seller whom Frederik could trust.

  • • •

  It’s after eleven, and I’m beat after the long evening with the support group and, before that, a long day at my school. But I’m glad to have met these people, for now I feel there’s someone I can talk to who understands. And that changes everything.

  I park in front of our house, and even before I’ve turned off the ignition, I notice an orange glare from the lawn. I rush over and find the remains of a campfire still glowing a few yards from the house. I stamp out the largest of the embers close to the house, then storm in the front door.

  “Niklas!”

  He comes out of the living room, a confused look on his face. “Yes?”

  “Who lit the fire on our lawn?”

  “Mathias and I found some branches on the sidewalk. I asked Dad, and he said we could.”

  “But you can’t just light a fire in the yard! What were you thinking? The entire house could have gone up in flames, and now the lawn is ruined!”

  My hand passes close to his face as I hang my coat on the hook behind him.

  “And you know very well that it doesn’t matter what Dad says you can do!”

  “Yes, but I wanted to take some pictures, and he said as long as we were careful.”

  I proceed to the living room. “Why did you say Niklas could burn up the yard?”

  There’s an auto race on TV. Frederik lies on the sofa watching it with the sound cranked up way too high. On the rug there is a clump of pillows where Niklas must have been lying and watching with him.

  Frederik knits his brows, trying to think of what to tell me. But I only ask him from force of habit. It means absolutely nothing anymore.

  Rather than wait for an answer, I turn back to the narrow entry to change into my slippers, squeezing past Niklas on the way.

  “You knew that wasn’t okay,” I say.

  No response. I take a few deep breaths, and I consider that it ended all right after all. The house hasn’t burned down, and in a little while I’ll go out and extinguish the last embers. But now I see that my boots have toppled over, and when I pick them up, one seems oddly heavy. I turn it upside down, and a large salad onion tumbles out.

  Back to the living room. “Why’s there an onion in my boot?”

  Niklas is lying back down on the rug, his eyes glued to the set as he answers. “We had an onion fight.”

  “An onion fight? You mean that you and Dad ran around after each other throwing onions?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you can’t just do that!” I shout, though in reality I’m relieved they’ve found a way to have fun together. A day of onion fights and fires in the yard is a hundred times better than the life I feared of having to be his nursemaid.

  I have to force myself not to laugh. “Did you break anything?”

  “Just a vase.”

  “Just a vase! There’s no such thing as ‘just a vase’!”

  “It was Dad who started it,” he says, still following the race.

  “No, it was him!” Frederik shouts, and at last they both look at me.

  I can’t hold it in anymore. I splutter with laughter, and they start laughing too. I go over to Frederik and try to kiss him on the forehead, but he turns his face away. It’s like trying to kiss a ten-year-old boy—he doesn’t like it or see any point in it.

  “I swept up the pieces,” Niklas says. “And besides, it was him.”

  “Good. It’s good that it’s only one vase that broke. Which one was it?”

  “The little green one.”

  “That’s okay. You got all the shards, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Against the noise from the cars on TV, I go out and mix myself a big glass of black-currant juice, the way Niklas likes it. Glass in hand, I stand by the end of the sofa where Frederik’s legs are and prepare to sit down. But he doesn’t move them, and several seconds pass before I remember that I have to ask. “Frederik. Would you kindly move your feet, so I can sit down too?”

  “Oh yes, of course.”

  Then I sit down and watch the race. In the old days I would have thought with my two men, but tonight I think with my two boys.

  I listen to how they sigh with irritation or satisfaction, and after a bit I ask, “Are we rooting for the yellow?”

  “Yes,” they both say.

  I swing my feet up on our small Ole Wanscher coffee table, not caring whether I make any scratches. I sip my juice and cheer the yellow car on. We’re almost a real family again—except that a sex life is out of the question, and my husband doesn’t care what I think or feel. I say to myself, Just like lots of other families. Again I chuckle to myself, thinking I should remember to pass the joke on to Helena.

  And I can be happy, I think. I’m happy now. And if I can be happy now, then anything’s possible—for then I can be happy other times too.

  I slip off to our bedroom, to call Helena and thank her for pushing me to go to the support group. It’s changed everything. I know it’s okay to call, even though it’s almost midnight.

  I lift the receiver, but there’s no dial tone. I see at once that someone’s pulled the cord from the jack. With vague unease I decide to wait with the call and go instead back to the living room.

  “What happened to the phone?”

  Neither of them replies, and now I see that the cords have been taken out of both the answering machine and the living room phone. I stand there waving the two phone lines.

  “Frederik, what’s this all about?”

  He keeps looking at the TV.

  “Frederik!”

  He looks up for a moment. “Well, Laust kept on calling, and I didn’t want to talk to him.”

  I know right away that something is very wrong, and hur
ry out to my bag where my cell phone is. I set it on mute during support group. There are five messages from Laust.

  “Mia, will you call me?”

  “Mia, it’s urgent that you call me!”

  “Mia, pick up the phone, damn it! What’s wrong with you all?”

  “What the hell’s going on? Are you mixed up in this too, Mia?”

  “You’ve ruined us, haven’t you. And Mia, don’t try to tell me you aren’t involved!”

  I run upstairs, shut the door, and call him.

  He’s furious and won’t talk to me.

  “But why were you calling us then?”

  “I couldn’t get myself to believe it about you. But then Benny showed me the documents. There’s no other way to understand it.”

  “No other way to understand what?”

  “You know what!”

  “No.”

  “Frederik didn’t bring home an extra twelve million crowns without you noticing and buying a few pieces of designer furniture or whatever it was?”

  “Twelve million?” I let myself fall on the bed. “I’m coming over to your house now.”

  “No. Anja’s sleeping, and she doesn’t know anything.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Where Frederik keeps the ledgers.”

  “Then I’m driving over to the school!”

  I hang up.

  In the living room I pull Frederik away from the TV so that Niklas can’t hear us. Niklas doesn’t even look up, he’s so used to me dragging his father off.

  Up in the bedroom, Frederik denies everything. He insists that he knows nothing. I grasp him by the shoulders and look into his eyes, probingly.

  “Can I trust you?”

  “Yes.” He looks back at me with large wide eyes that show not a trace of bad conscience.

  “One hundred percent? Can I trust you one hundred percent?”

  “Yes.”

  But I know that I can’t. He’s discovered how ridiculously good he is at lying now and he does it constantly, completely unfazed by the fact that I usually find him out a short time later.

  • • •

  I taught six classes today, went to school meetings all afternoon while Niklas promised to keep an eye on Frederik, had an intense but good session with my new support group, and came home to the remains of a fire still burning in my yard. Now it’s quarter to one, and I have no clue when my day will end.

  At Saxtorph I enter the alarm code and unlock the front door. On countless late evenings, I’ve walked down these long corridors in half darkness. When I was in Copenhagen anyway and wanted a bit of extra time with Frederik, I’d stop by so we could follow each other home. Often I ran into Laust, and sometimes Morten, the deputy headmaster, and once in a while we sat with Frederik at the conference table in his office and ate leftovers from the cafeteria, drinking red wine and kicking back after one of their fourteen-hour workdays.

  Now I open the dark mahogany door to his office and see Laust, Morten, and the school’s accountant, Benny, standing around stacks of papers spread out across the big conference table. On the walls hang the usual gloomy portraits in oil, some of them Laust’s forebears.

  Laust catches sight of me. He shouts at me in a strange, shrill voice, “The school’s bankrupt! The teachers have to be fired, we have to sell the buildings, we’re finished! Happy now?”

  “What?”

  “You helped him! There’s no way he could have done it alone!”

  “What?”

  “There had to be more than one person down at the bank.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He keeps shouting, and I don’t know how to get through to him.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about! I have no idea what you’re talking about! I have no idea what you’re talking about!”

  But nothing can penetrate Laust’s hysteria, and at last I raise the bust of Gustav Saxtorph from the sideboard to smash it down on the table.

  “Don’t you touch that bust!” Laust screams. He flings himself at me, trying to tear it away. I drop it and parry his attack so that he lands on the floor. It isn’t a hard fall, and he should be able to get right up. But he keeps lying there, fingers scrabbling against the smooth floorboards.

  Morten squats by his side. I’d like to help too, but first I turn to the accountant. “Benny, just tell me what’s going on. I don’t have a clue.”

  “Frederik has had the school stand surety for loans worth twelve million crowns.”

  “But he can’t have!”

  “If there’s anyone who can, it’s him.”

  “But there must be some sort of misunderstanding. You know that Frederik could have never done such a thing. It’s somebody else, or a misunderstanding. It’s a misunderstanding, right?”

  “Mia, there’s definitely no misunderstanding. And you know that all too well.”

  My thoughts are racing. Could he have done it? I no longer know who he is. But that much money?

  Yet right away I know how it could have all vanished. On a vacation in Portugal once, we went into a casino. Frederik just wanted to try. I got him out again, but not before the fierce concentration in his face had made me afraid.

  “I don’t believe it,” I say. “I’ve installed passwords on the phones and the computer. And how could he have gotten to the bank by himself? It doesn’t make sense.”

  I crouch down next to Laust, who’s still on the floor.

  “Laust,” I say. “I’m sorry about the bust, Laust. It wasn’t on purpose.” I try to shoot Morten a worried look, but he won’t meet my eyes.

  Above my head I hear Benny’s voice. “But he did this all before he became ill. It began more than a year ago.”

  I get up so quickly that I momentarily lose my balance. “A year ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not a year ago.”

  “I said ‘a year ago.’ ”

  “Yes, but you all know that he … But back then he was himself!”

  Morten gets up too, and he places himself next to the accountant.

  “The papers are all here. Benny’s uncovered everything.”

  I have the odd sensation that it’s me who’s lying on the floor grasping after something, while Laust is standing up with the other men.

  “Yes, but you know Frederik. He wouldn’t do something like that. Not the real Frederik.”

  “We thought we knew Frederik. And we thought we knew you.”

  I feel as if whatever’s pressing me against the floor has grown heavier now. As if I’m scrabbling even more frantically on the floorboards.

  “God damn it, I’m disappointed in you!” I yell. “Right now, when Frederik needs you more than ever, you make up a story like this! How the hell do you know it’s Frederik if the signatures have been forged anyway?”

  “It required a special kind of genius for accounting, what he did,” says Benny. “I don’t know anyone besides Frederik who …”

  Laust starts to get up. It feels strange, because in some way it really felt like it was me who was lying down there. I have an urge to kick him so that he falls back down.

  I say, “If there’s one person you can trust, it’s Frederik. Everybody knows that! You know it too.”

  One corner of Morten’s mouth begins to twitch. “Is that what you said when he was with Gitte and Dorte?”

  I slam the door behind me, and after a couple of steps down the hallway I break into a run.

  • • •

  The lights are off in the house, so Niklas and Frederik must have gone to bed. The fire on the lawn has burned out, leaving only a black circle behind.

  I let myself in and sit down on the bed next to Frederik, who’s sleeping heavily. When he’s lying like this, I can see bits of the long narrow scar that runs beneath his hair in a half-moon. My index finger gently traces its course. The real Frederik would have been so disappointed in Laust. We would have held each other, figured out a plan, come up with an explanati
on. We would have done it together. But the real Frederik isn’t here now, no matter how long I talk to the body in this bed, no matter how long I try to hold it or to rest my head on its shoulder.

  Driving home on the freeway, I hit on the only possible explanation: that it’s all something to do with his employment contract. They want to fire him, and they can’t while he’s on sick leave. So they came up with this. On the other hand, Laust wasn’t acting, and could Morten and Benny really have staged the whole thing behind his back? I run through all the possibilities, then I discard them. There must be something I don’t know.

  “Frederik,” I say, very loud.

  I am almost shouting.

  “Frederik, something’s happened. Frederik! Frederik!”

  He doesn’t wake up.

  I shake him by the shoulder; no reaction. I don’t want to risk jarring his head, so I go down to the foot of the bed and start shaking one of his legs hard.

  Slowly he comes to life.

  “Whaaat?” he says with a plaintive moan. It’s the way he sounded at the neurointensive clinic; our week there, the despair we felt, Niklas locking himself in the handicapped toilet, and back home Vibeke taking to her bed. It’s terrible, every time he wakes up with that voice. The limp crackers in the visitors’ kitchen; the distant round eyes of the other patients’ relatives.

  I try to make him understand what Laust, Morten, and Benny said.

  “It wasn’t me.” He sighs.

  “No, I know that.” I sit down again on the edge of the bed next to his head; his eyes are still closed.

  “It’s all your doing.” He groans.

  “What?”

  “The two of you.”

  “Who?”

  “You and Niklas.”

  “How could we have done anything?”

  “You said I couldn’t use the computers. So the school lost the money.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You installed passwords on the computers.”

  I thought that our drive through the Majorcan mountains had been the major turning point in my life. The day everything disappeared. But I was wrong.

  I don’t yet know what happened, but I have a premonition that today’ll be the day Frederik’s exposed as the headmaster who destroyed Saxtorph Private School. The day we lose the friends who’ve supported us. The day we lose our house and jobs. Everything. Today.