by Alex Dahl
‘I’ll come soon, Idun. I promise. I’m so sorry, but I need to leave in a moment, I’m supposed to be somewhere shortly.’
‘Of course. Just one more thing.’
‘Sure.’
‘Could you show me where it happened?’ My heart picks up its pace and I feel suddenly queasy at the thought of standing in that room with Elisabeth’s mother.
‘Of course,’ I say softly, and stand up.
The spare bedroom is immaculately tidy and the bed is freshly made up – our housekeeper must have done it; I can barely bear to be in this room. There is a desk by the window and a big wardrobe used to store winter duvets and cozy throws. Idun takes a visibly deep breath and steps into the room. I follow behind her. She walks over to the bed and strokes the pillow, as though it might still hold the indentation of her daughter’s head.
‘Oh,’ she whispers. I remain by the door, my knuckles tight around the door handle. Her shoulders begin to shudder as she cries, and I feel deeply uncomfortable in a way I never do at work when a client displays intense emotion. ‘May I?’ she gestures to the bed. I nod.
Idun clambers onto the high bed and lies down atop the comforter, eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling. From where I’m standing she now uncannily resembles her daughter, the way I found her lying in the exact same place, her eyes also wide open and staring at the ceiling. I swallow hard; it feels as though I’m going to black out.
‘I’ll give you a minute,’ I say, stepping back out into the hallway. I go through to the bathroom and from the highest shelf behind the mirror, I retrieve a tranquilizer from an ibuprofen box. I tuck it underneath my tongue, making sure it’s covered with saliva, then swallow it dry. I lean back against the wall, wishing Idun out of my house with all my might, but my eyes fall on the black-and-white photograph on the opposite wall, taken the summer I was nineteen. I’m standing between my two best friends, grinning widely, Trine on my left, and Elisabeth beaming on my right. I force myself to stare at the photo for several long moments until our faces grow fuzzy and blurred.
‘What did she look like when you found her?’ asks Idun. I hadn’t noticed that she’d emerged from the bedroom and is standing directly beside me.
‘She looked peaceful,’ I whisper, my voice trembling. It’s a lie. But sometimes we have to lie.
22
Elisabeth, June
She wakes soaked in sweat. She sits up in bed, letting her eyes get used to the darkness, her head groggy with heavy sleep medication, before picking up her phone. It’s only 1 a.m. and she’s been asleep for less than an hour. She scrolls through Instagram and likes Kristina’s most recent post, a picture of her and Eirik posing poolside in Thailand, sipping from the same drink, a carved-out watermelon cocktail. She stares into the darkness of her room and imagines Kristina in this moment, sleeping close together with Eirik in a languidly hot bungalow, beads of sweat studding her smooth, bronzed skin, her husband’s arms flung possessively around her waist.
Elisabeth sometimes wonders whether she’ll ever again sleep next to anyone. The idea of letting someone in, all the way in, like Andreas, feels impossible and wrong. She knows she hasn’t processed his death yet, and though it’s been over five years, she doesn’t feel ready to fully take in the fact that he is gone, that he simply doesn’t exist, that it could be possible to live in a world where she keeps breathing when he’ll never take another breath. It was easier when she was out there, on the streets; at least she’d have a few hours every day when she was high, when everything just felt mellow and possible, even living without Andreas, even living with the carnage and fear of her past, which play in her mind on a never-ending hellish loop. Now, she has to stare reality in the eyes, sober.
Still, she knows she is lucky in many ways, and she especially feels that when she is immersed in her art. She feels overcome with beauty and hope and gratitude when she brings the elegant curve of a bird’s wing to the canvas, or when she succeeds in capturing the spill of moonlight on the surface of the fjord in winter, like shattered crystals, or when she pinches a leaf from a branch in the garden and holds it up to the light, exposing its curiously perfect skeleton, later folding it into one of her thick coffee table books to dry.
There is a man here at Villa Vinternatt whose company she enjoys. He’s much older than her, at least in his mid-fifties, and they sometimes paint together, positioning their easels side by side in front of the bay windows overlooking the sound. He’ll pause his own work for long moments and watch her paint, handing her a color tube she hadn’t yet realized she wanted and it’s always exactly right. His name is Joel and in another life he was a concert pianist and hobby painter, whose life broke apart after his pregnant wife and his three-year-old son died in a car accident. He succumbed to alcohol addiction and eventually full-blown cocaine and heroin abuse, until he got clean after over a decade and got another chance at life at Villa Vinternatt.
Elisabeth gets up from the bed and sits at her desk in the dark, shivering slightly at the feel of the metal chair against her bare thighs. The huge house is quiet, yet comfortingly humming with the telltale signs of life – a tap running somewhere, footsteps in a corridor downstairs, the unmistakable feeling of a building filled with people.
She opens the selfie mode on the phone camera and studies herself. She still looks young, in spite of everything. She smiles at herself and takes a picture but when she looks at it she realizes she looks so sad it takes her breath away. She tries again, consciously bringing a smile not only to her lips but to her eyes. Better, but still visibly fake. She thinks about padding down the corridor and around the corner to room 21, where Joel lives. She could knock softly and he’d appear, disheveled but awake and he’d smile, happy to see her. They could sneak downstairs, through the big dining hall, onto the covered terrace overlooking the gardens and the fjord, and they could sit together on a bench, sharing a rollie Joel has smuggled into Villa Vinternatt, looking out on the trembling lights from buoys and reef markers on the water.
They could tell each other the stuff that is easier to tell a friend than a therapist or family member or doctor. She smiles at the thought; impossible, but still soothing. The residents aren’t allowed to socialize at night. All the doors are locked. No tobacco is allowed on the premises and she doesn’t even know if Joel would smoke, but it seems a fair assumption of someone who would shoot up heroin. There are cameras around the house, some no doubt angled straight onto the terrace. She doesn’t have the vocabulary to speak to a kind-of friend about the stuff she might have needed to speak of. None of it is ever going to happen.
Elisabeth goes over to the easel by the window. She picks up the paintbrush and holds it suspended over an unfinished white patch of her painting in progress. It’s one of her trademark paintings: reds and maroons and watery pinks swirled around and layered onto the canvas in splotches and streaks. This one is called Blood Storms. Some people, probably the ones who go through life mostly with quiet, kind thoughts in their minds, assume Elisabeth’s motives are abstract floral references; an experiential interpretation of the virginal, soft inner petals of roses, or swathes of poppies bleeding into each other on a hillside. Others react viscerally to her explicit references to violence and blood and chaos; her favorite was the critic who called her work ‘hypnotically grotesque’. To Elisabeth they aren’t mutually exclusive interpretations; pain and bloodshed and that which haunts her can surely simultaneously take on a form of beauty?
But tonight she is tired of the evocative but draining imagery. She wants to bring a touch of lightness to the painting, something fun. She smiles at the thought of fun, what a luxury fun is. She retrieves a pressed leaf from inside a picture book about Judy Chicago and places it directly onto the canvas. She draws its outline lightly with a charcoal pencil, nudging its outer extremities into the carefully built layers of reds already there, smeared from one corner of the canvas toward the center. She smiles to herself and colors in the outline of the maple leaf in a bright yel
low, just because the color makes her smile. The effect is strange, as if a child has walked into the room and taken liberties with her mother’s painting in an unsupervised moment, bringing an unstudied, fresh energy to the piece, and maybe on some level that is exactly what has happened. She might kick herself tomorrow for having ruined the painting, one of those she’s preparing for Villa Vinternatt’s upcoming vernissage, but tonight it feels possible to laugh by herself in the moonlight, filling in the painting’s blank spots with happy, bright shades of yellow.
23
Kristina
It takes me over an hour to calm down sufficiently to fully follow the conversation. I order garlic king prawns and chili mayonnaise chicken wings, busying myself with the food and the wine while my friends chatter, the volume steadily increasing with each unit of alcohol. After three glasses of cava, I feel more like myself again. Jenny regales us with one hilarious story after another of her adventures on Tinder – she’s the only singleton in our group of friends, and it’s pretty obvious that she’s the one having the most fun. Carla moans about the relentless pressures of motherhood, and feels that being a stay-at-home mom to her fourteen-month-old twins is a lot harder than her previous high-flying job in management consulting. I just want to sit on the toilet for five fucking minutes by myself, she says, taking another greedy glug from her cava. Our eyes meet and I sense a quick apology in the way she looks at me – my friends all feel awkward discussing their children around me. They stopped asking about IVF and how it’s all going a long time ago, and I’m glad they did.
‘So how’s that handsome man of yours?’ asks Simone, our impossibly glamorous onetime French-exchange student who ended up staying in Oslo and married Arne, a friend of Eirik’s.
‘Away, as usual,’ I say. ‘After the elections, things will presumably calm down. We’ll need to get a date in the diary and have you all over for dinner sometime soon. It’s been ages.’
Everyone concurs, it has been ages. Over the past year, I’ve hardly seen my friends at all; Eirik’s increasingly demanding career, as well as my own, combined with Elisabeth’s tragic death and my own therapy work have all added up to a very busy day-to-day life. It feels unexpectedly good to sit here with my friends, drinking wine as the afternoon darkens into evening, listening to their loud, tipsy laughter, just letting myself grow fully relaxed and mellow, emptying my mind of all the stress and tension.
On my way home, I find myself giggling to myself – it’s as though the seven-hour brunch replenished my energy reserves, though I’m sure I’ll be sorry tomorrow. I try to call Eirik, I want to hear his deep, soothing voice and tell him I love him, but it goes straight to voicemail. He’s probably at some boring dinner, listening to boring speeches by boring people. I giggle again and leave him a voice message on WhatsApp saying I wish he could be waiting for me at home, in bed.
At home, I walk from room to room, switching on all the little lamps, humming to myself under my breath. I used to like to sing, and I was pretty good at it – might it be a good idea to return to it, take some lessons, develop my voice? It would be something to do with the little spare time I have. I make a mental note to Google some options on Monday. I pour another glass of wine and sit down on the sofa. In this moment, nothing seems so bad. All the things that bothered me and made me fearful feel dulled by the warm, glowy feeling I have inside.
*
I wake with a start, my heart hammering, the remnants of a bad dream disappearing from my mind. I glance at the time, 5.50 a.m. All the lights are on and I’m still wearing my leather pants and silk blouse from the brunch. My mouth tastes terrible and I feel intensely dehydrated. I get up and stumble woozily toward the kitchen. For a moment, I wonder whether I might actually throw up, but feel better after a large glass of San Pellegrino. I realize that two chunky candles have been left burning on the windowsill, though I can’t remember lighting them. They’re both almost burned out, and one of them has started spitting wax and sending tall flames leaping out of the holder. If I hadn’t noticed when I did, it might have set the curtains on fire.
I blow them out and go back to the sofa to lie down. I’m going to give myself ten minutes of scrolling through Instagram before I go back to bed; I want to make sure the nausea disappears completely while staying close to the bathroom. When I unlock my phone, a series of notifications pop up on the screen. A text message from Elisabeth’s mother, sent last night, thanking me. I hope you know that to Elisabeth, you were an angel, she wrote. Another from my own mother, complaining about my father’s inability to plan for their weekend away. And there is an email from Leah Iverson, sent at 10.31 p.m. with the word ‘Supernova’ in the subject line.
24
Leah, two weeks before
She has the idea one of the many nights when she’s alone. The two of them, at Bekkebu. It would be the only way to paint a full picture. All that space, all the time they would have. She would understand. Or eventually, she would come to understand. Leah smiles to herself in the dark. She knows better than anyone that pain, while difficult, is the catalyst for growth. She’s just the facilitator.
The doorbell rings. She feels afraid, then angry. She’d told him not to come this week. She wants to be alone, to think and to figure everything out. It rings again. She won’t give him a key even though he keeps insisting on one. She glances around the apartment to make sure there’s nothing lying around that will trigger suspicion or accusations or fury. She presses the buzzer and stands by the open door, listening to his steps getting closer, centering herself with deep, calm breathing. She places a hand on her lower stomach as if to check the bump, still only noticeable to herself, is still there. It is – a tiny and delicious secret she’d defend with her own life.
*
For a long while afterward, they lie awake. She feels confused and tense. The familiarity of him used to feel so good, it was worth all the pain, at least she thought so, but now it feels stifling.
I think we should make a baby, he whispers. She’s speechless and turns her face away from him so he won’t see the tears that appear in her eyes. How is she going to get out of this? He is never going to let her go. Unless…
Her thoughts return to Bekkebu. To the soft glow from the fireplace and the crackle of the flames. To the imagined scene of sitting across from Kristina Moss, telling her everything. She glances over at the man beside her and feels a sharp bolt of dread in her stomach. She realizes that everything that’s happened and everything she has done could place her in danger. She needs a plan B. She closes her eyes and brings forth the images that never fail to fill her with awe – two stars colliding and bursting into mesmerizing luminous explosions, so bright they light up entire galaxies, if only for a moment in time.
25
Kristina, November 1st
I sit up fast, stabbing at the screen, waiting for the email to load. It was sent at 10.31 last night, and only a few sentences are written in the body of the email.
Why haven’t you come? I’ve been waiting and waiting for you. All I wanted was to tell you the truth. Something we have in common, you and I, is living a lie. And when you live in the shadow of one lie, you build more and more lies around that lie until nothing is true or real. If you’d come, we could have talked. I just wanted to tell you the truth. And I wanted to talk to you about Carúpano. But now – now it really is too late. Everything is lost. I wrote about you, and I wanted you to have it. I called it Supernova because that’s the word that comes to mind when it comes to you and me, it’s attached.
I look for the attachment, but there is nothing. I reload my email several times to see if it could have been sent after or filtered out of my inbox, but nothing. Supernova. I’ve heard the word before but can’t discern its meaning off the top of my mind. I feel suddenly, entirely sober. I sit in the hushed silence of the apartment for a long time, hesitating over the email. The fact that she refers to an attachment and then doesn’t attach it seems strange. What if Anton went back there and
surprised her, furious after being questioned by the police and killed her? Or what if she’s about to end her own life? Now it really is too late. Everything is lost. To me, these sound like the words of someone in an agitated state of mind, someone who has planned something.
That she mentioned Carúpano brings me an instant chill, a nervous tremble to my stomach, like the flicker of a tiny bird’s wings. Could it be that she has been snooping around in my personal life, and thinks she’s uncovered something she wishes to discuss with me. Leah clearly has no concept of how potentially damaging this could be. Or… could it be that she’s written about me the way she wrote about Anton, isn’t that what she’s implying? I feel a wild surge of fury. How dare she?
I open Chrome on my browser and type ‘Supernova’. After ten minutes of scrolling through websites from NASA to Wikipedia, I have learned that a supernova is the phenomenon of a star exploding spectacularly. The images of dying stars are beautiful and intriguing, their brightness sometimes reaching a billion times that of the sun. A supernova is the biggest explosion humans have ever seen, says NASA. The original star is completely destroyed, says Wikipedia. In obliteration, supernovae can outshine an entire galaxy, according to space.com. A beautiful death, I think to myself, picturing luminous, technicolor destruction drenching the dark corners of space with its light. I study the images, trying to still my racing heart and figure out why Leah referred to this phenomenon. Is this what she was getting at, comparing herself to a star whose death is both powerful and awe-inducing?
