The Truth Behind the Lie

by Sara Lövestam

  “Of course, she may have small feet,” Kouplan says soothingly. “Let’s talk about something else. When was the last time you bought Julia a toothbrush?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was it recently?”

  “I don’t know. No, no, no—it wasn’t recently. Are you now a dentist, too?”

  She doesn’t want to be so mean to Kouplan, but he’s pressing her. It’s that veil—she loves it and he’s trying to rip it away. It’s sky blue and covers her memories. There’s blood and sorrow behind it.

  “It’s brand new,” Kouplan says. “We can go look at it, if you’d like. It’s never been used.”

  Pernilla is torn by everything she has to feel. The veil she must keep in place, the fear someone has been in her apartment and took Julia’s toothbrush. Maybe Kouplan did it.

  “And her clothes,” he adds. “We can go and look at them if you’d like. They’re also completely new. Some still have price tags on them. And there’s no underwear.”

  She doesn’t know why that last sentence hangs in her mind. Maybe because it is so direct and yet so normal. Kouplan is looking at her, a question in his eyes, and she wants to attack him and say, Of course she has underwear but she can’t remember if she’s actually bought any. And if there’s no underwear, well, you have to wash pants more often and she doesn’t remember washing Julia’s pants at all.

  “You do the laundry every other week,” Kouplan says, as if he’s following her thoughts, “but kids get clothes dirty really fast. Even calm, quiet children. She has only three pairs of socks. And, Pernilla, her jacket has never been outdoors.”

  Don’t say it! The words scream in Pernilla’s mind.

  “And those drawings you said she made. Not even a great artistic talent can draw like that at the age of three. And, finally, there’s…”

  Don’t say it!

  “When a person gives birth, the umbilical cord is not as easy to cut as you said. I’ve talked to a mother and you can talk to her, too, if you’d like.”

  How does she know that Kouplan is not one of them? That that woman who had a child is not one of them? That they haven’t been sent by the mental hospital to trick her? In her mind, she is trying to find the most logical explanation. She has an idea of what he wants to do. He wants to tear down her entire world and kill her child.

  “I pay you to believe me,” she says, but it comes out as a whisper.

  “And to help you,” Kouplan replies. “Nobody is going to a basement storage room to steal three photos from the hard drive of an old computer. Plaster does harden around a foot, if there is a foot for it to harden around.”

  It’s as if his words are coming out like blood. She wants to wipe them away and cover them over, but they’re tearing at her beneath her skin. Don’t say it! Her breathing is quick and shallow and she’s pushing the air out before it has time to enter. She’s deciding whether or not to trust Kouplan. What he says is logical. Someone from Social Services would definitely know what a bead mosaic kit is. She takes a deep breath, even though she’s struggling with herself: Don’t tell me!

  “Tell me.”

  * * *

  His lie is incredible. His lie is so true that it kills her child.

  “Get out of my house!” she exclaims.

  She points a shaking finger at the door.

  “Think for a minute,” he says. He’s coaxing her with his eyes.

  Pernilla doesn’t want to think about it. She wants Julia back, even if Julia’s clothes never need to be washed. Even if Julia has small feet and talks like an adult. Her eyes sting, tears run down, snot …

  “You’re lying,” she says.

  Because if he’s not lying … she can’t breathe, she keeps struggling to breathe, her head spins. If he’s not lying …

  “Thor has met her,” she says.

  Kouplan looks at the clock. Hesitates before he says, “Why don’t we give Thor a call?”

  * * *

  In some magic way, he has Thor’s number.

  CHAPTER 37

  “Thor Lejon.”

  “Hello…”

  “Hello, this is Thor Lejon.”

  “…”

  “Hello. I don’t know who’s calling, but it is one thirty in the morning.”

  “… it’s Pernilla.”

  “Pernilla? How are you, Pernilla?”

  “Hi, Thor.”

  “How are you doing, dear child? What’s on your heart?”

  “Things are crazy here.”

  “Has something happened?”

  “I have a question. Just one question … okay?”

  “Of course. But what’s wrong? Has something happened? A young man came to visit me the other day and asked about you … what’s your question?”

  “Julia. You know, my daughter.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is an odd question, but…”

  “You can ask me.”

  “It might sound crazy.”

  “Maybe it will be hard to understand?”

  “It’s sick, actually. But you know that I was in the psych ward a long time ago.”

  “I remember you mentioned it.”

  “But as I said, this is an odd question … a really strange question. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “It might be the craziest question you’ve ever heard.”

  “Pernilla, I care about you, you know that. But it’s one thirty in the morning and I would appreciate it if you would just ask me your question.”

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  “God will be with you.”

  “Okay.”

  “And your question?”

  “You know, my daughter Julia. I’m wondering … I’m wondering … does she really exist? Is she real? Kouplan just told me she doesn’t … Hello?”

  “I’m still here. If Julia exists … she lives in your mind and in your heart, Pernilla.”

  “I know. But does she exist outside of my mind and my heart? Is she real?”

  “Well, then … Then I’d have to tell you, no. No, she doesn’t exist in reality.”

  “Are you absolutely sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Damn, hell, shit, fuck.”

  “Would you like to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  Click.

  CHAPTER 38

  Kouplan wakes up on Pernilla’s sofa again. Julia has been gone for two weeks and three days. He’ll have to go to Maria Square before they move the girl to another location. He should shadow Gustav and shouldn’t limit himself to Hökarängen. He sits up before yesterday’s events catch up. Then he thinks, there is no child, and then, once again, more slowly:

  There is no child.

  He really ought to take a shower. Still, inside him, his mind is churning. How can there not be a child? His entire notebook is filled with clues! The ticket agent at Globen. He opens his notebook and looks between the lines. He tries to recreate the conversation. The ticket agent had seen a man with a child. On a Monday, right? Did he say what time? No, just that he went to McDonald’s and ate a burger.

  The girl at the subway booth. When was she working? Did she even see the same man the ticket agent had seen? How could it be so exceptional to see men going on the subway stations with their daughters? Kouplan stares at his clues: just people who had seen people.

  Except for the librarian. She remembered Pernilla from the photo and remembered her daughter. Somewhat, at any rate. Only after Kouplan had described her and pointed out she was a calm, quiet child. But with hesitation.

  Everything else was a hunt for Chavez. The guy who runs errands for another man who, according to Kouplan’s fellow landsman’s landlord’s friends, runs business with women and children and doesn’t seem to be connected in the least with Pernilla or Globen. Spending the night on a staircase in Akalla, observation from Vita Hill while needing to pee, risky sneaking around Maria Square. Kouplan rubs his overheated forehead. He’s probably a complete idiot.

 
; * * *

  Pernilla has slept for ten hours. She has to check the clock again when she wakes up. Is it really eleven thirty in the morning? Then everything hits her. The serious conversation with Kouplan the night before; it wasn’t a dream. He had lifted her from the floor and, with determination in his velvet brown eyes, asked her to sit on the sofa. He’d said, “Pernilla, I’m going to tell you what I believe and you have to decide if I’m telling you the truth.” She’d steeled herself against him, knowing that he was going to lift the lid on everything inside her. And it would hurt.

  Julia is gone, much more than she could ever have believed.

  Which has to be impossible, because she still can remember her scent and her mild smile. The little body growing year by year. It’s impossible that that body had never existed.

  But it never had. Kouplan had demonstrated it for her. They looked at Julia’s toothbrush together. He was right—it had never been used. Julia’s clothes—unused. She’d been so cute in that top with the ladybugs—now, she’d never worn it at all.

  * * *

  It’s a shadow of a morning that turns into the shadow of a day. If you can call all this disorientation a day. Sometimes, she thinks she doesn’t exist, either. Not to mention Kouplan.

  “Maybe you are the illusion,” she says, but she doesn’t have the energy to give emphasis to her statement. “I’ve only known you for a little while. Who can say that you are more real than my child, whom I’ve known for six years?”

  He doesn’t argue. He just asks:

  “An illusion that came to ask why your child hasn’t needed any new shoes since she was four?”

  She shrugs. Glares at the boy who says he’s twenty-eight and who could just as well not be real. She could blink, open her eyes and he’d be gone. She looks at her own hands. They might as well be empty air.

  “What is reality?” she asks.

  Kouplan nods. “That’s a philosophical question.”

  “If I know someone, do I really know them?”

  “I think the problem is that everything happens inside our heads. Even we … who’ve never had non-existent children … build our thoughts on a reality that we think we see and hear and feel. And if we don’t really hear or see or feel, maybe it doesn’t exist, at least to our minds.”

  She’s a human being, too. One who hears, feels, exists.

  “And the opposite is true,” she says.

  “Yes, the opposite is true. But then we start to compare our realities with each other in order to figure out what the world is really like.”

  A moment of silence is broken by a thud. Pernilla stares at Kouplan, who stares back.

  “If we both heard that, then it’s real,” she says.

  “I think it’s the mail.”

  * * *

  He’s holding the phone list from the phone company. He decides to throw it out without looking at it. Nobody needs to know who may have called when Pernilla was away and Julia was alone at home. He’s finished—case closed—and he should go home.

  “Why do you think she disappeared?” he asks instead.

  Pernilla slowly shakes her head. She looks like someone who’s just gotten shocking news about reality.

  “I don’t even know why she was born.”

  “Were you pregnant?”

  “Yes.”

  He decides not to ask anything more, because it’s not the kind of thing people like to talk about. But she leans forward, looks directly at him.

  “It’s true about Social Services. They did want to take her as soon as she was born. Because I was mentally unstable.”

  She says this as if she’s reading from her medical record.

  “It’s sick that they have such power over other people’s lives. How could they know what kind of mother I would be?”

  Kouplan has no idea what kind of mother a person who dreams up the life of another person might be. But Pernilla gave him a half a chicken sub sandwich and nobody else has ever done that.

  “I think you’d be a fine mother,” he says.

  “So, when I had the miscarriage…” she says, and then falls silent.

  Her eyes search the room, trying to fasten onto reality.

  “Well, at the time … I couldn’t grasp what had happened. But at the same time, I was pleased because then they couldn’t come and take her.”

  Kouplan can’t imagine being pregnant, having a miscarriage, or being institutionalized in a psych ward, but he does his best.

  “Maybe your mind reordered everything,” he says. “You kept what felt good and got rid of what made you sad. The miscarriage.”

  Pernilla makes a humming sound as if she’s agreeing with him. She leans her head back and stares beyond her white ceiling.

  “Everything was all mixed up.”

  She doesn’t need to say anything else. The psyche is fragile, his mother had once said. The psyche is fragile and the world is hard. But Kouplan is still wondering why Julia disappeared.

  “Was she getting older, just like a normal child? Has it been more than six years since she was born?”

  “Yes.”

  Pernilla thinks some more.

  “Well, she talked early, she spoke in a mature way. She was wise beyond her years. But you’re talking about the years going by.”

  “How were you going to work things out when it was time for her to go to school?”

  “I was thinking of home-schooling her. But that would be difficult when she got to the upper grades. I thought about all that a great deal, because I can’t … you know, timetables and all that.”

  Different parts of her mind are reconnecting, Kouplan realizes. He wonders what new connections are forming, especially in a person who could invent an entirely new human being from scratch, and explain away the lack of this person’s photographs or why the plaster cast of her foot didn’t take. Still, it is entirely logical to worry about what a child needs to learn in the upper grades. His mother would have been fascinated to meet someone like Pernilla. She wouldn’t find it at all unpleasant.

  “Julia would no longer be a small child,” he says. “Perhaps, with her age, it was starting to feel difficult. Your brain couldn’t deal with it anymore.”

  Instead of answering, Pernilla hits herself on the side of her head. It’s so sudden that Kouplan leaps up to save her from herself.

  “I don’t understand my own mind,” she says. “I don’t get it! What’s going on in there? Did I ever tell you I used to hear voices when I was a teenager?”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “People told me that those voices weren’t real and I came to understand they were right. I never saw anybody, but the voices kept saying the weirdest things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, they babbled. Like: Uncle Lalala at the edge of nothing and lalala and Uncle has no wool, macaroni and more, you know. You must think I’m crazy.”

  According to the normal definition of the word, it fit Pernilla.

  “The psyche is fragile,” Kouplan says. “And the world is hard.”

  “It’s a good thing I knew I heard voices, or I would never have believed you.”

  “You didn’t believe Patrick.”

  She shakes her head as if Patrick isn’t part of the discussion.

  “I was pregnant, of course.”

  Kouplan wonders if she ever had an inkling that Julia was not real, especially since she’d become aware that the voices from her teenage years were never real.

  “Did you ever think about the fact that you never washed her clothes?”

  “No. But you don’t always think about routine things. Now that you think about it, though, it is really odd, isn’t it … you have to look at it in a whole new way.”

  Kouplan notices that she says you instead of I. Perhaps she doesn’t want to take it too personally.

  “You miss a lot,” he agrees.

  People miss things. There’s that experiment where some young people were asked to watch a movie of some kids p
laying basketball in black shirts and white shirts and the test takers asked them to keep count of how many times the ones in the white shirts had the ball. After watching the movie, they were asked if they’d seen anything unusual. Most of them had not noticed that there was a person in a gorilla costume walking among the basketball players. He’d even stopped and thumped his chest. They were much too focused on counting the times the white shirts got the ball. Kouplan had read it somewhere and put it into his memory. Not to relate to psychotic victims of crimes who weren’t crime victims, but to always stay alert, to always be aware of border police.

  * * *

  It’s a shadow of a day and with every breath: Julia does not exist.

  Pernilla has perfect eyesight, but she knows what astigmatism means. Nothing can focus. No matter how much you try, the picture is never sharp.

  She understands this feeling so well.

  CHAPTER 39

  The room is now her entire world. The walls, the ceiling, the window that only leads to empty air. She’s nine years old and she ought to be in school. They were supposed to be learning the names of the lakes.

  She’s writing a list of five things in her head. Not one that she’d be doing in school, such as an essay about My Favorite Candy or The Best Songs. This list is The Worst Things. She has enough time to weigh each choice and rearrange the list, because sometimes she thinks one thing is worse and sometimes she thinks another thing is worse.

  * * *

  Number Five. That George calls himself my real father and lies about my mother.

  He thinks she ought to say “Hello, father” when he walks into the room. Ever since she overheard his name, she says “Hello, George.” It irritates him and she really ought to be smarter than trying to rile up her kidnapper, but it’s the only resistance she can give. Yesterday he came in after the disgusting man had left. He told her that her mother had moved. In her joy at being free from her troublesome daughter, her mother had moved to Russia to follow her dream of being an actress. She did not ask: So, then, what did she do with my siblings? She also did not tell him how much her mother hated Russia. She keeps her memories tightly to herself. It’s information George does not have. She’s not stupid.