Cabin Fever

by Alex Dahl

  I called it Supernova because that’s the word that comes to mind when it comes to you and me…

  I consciously calm myself down slightly by reminding myself that the event she is referring to – Carúpano – is hardly a secret, there is nothing she could find out about me or my past that isn’t a click away on the internet. And Elisabeth is dead.

  But Leah is a novelist and a famous one at that – she is someone who is in a position to draw public attention to things that could ruin my life. I need to know what Leah is playing at; I can’t sit around my house waiting for the phone to ring or something else to happen. Have it your way, Leah, I think to myself. I’m going to find her. And I’m going to shut her up.

  26

  Kristina

  It’s still early morning. If I leave now, I could feasibly be back home by late this evening. I grab a black leather weekend holdall from the closet and place a spare pair of contact lenses into it, as well as some underwear and a thick sweater. I’ll be back tonight, but you never know what might happen and I like to come prepared. I get a torch from the kitchen drawer and throw in some chocolate chip cookies and a large bottle of San Pellegrino too. I grab the car keys from the key holder on the wall by the front door, then step outside into the foyer. I can’t immediately recall when I last drove my car – living so centrally in Oslo, I never have to. All our groceries are delivered to the door, and both Eirik and I walk to work, and yet we keep both a BMW SUV and a Tesla.

  As I lock the door, I have a sudden and violent conviction that I am doing it for the last time, that I will never again see these gray turn-of-the-century floor tiles, never again stand in this exact spot, resting my hand on the smooth wooden door handle, never again walk down these black stone steps, or open this door onto Incognito Gate, letting the blustery air rush into my face. I stop for a moment and look back up the sweeping communal staircase toward our apartment. What I am doing is clearly in breach of professional conduct and perhaps a little crazy, but I have the sensation that I don’t quite know what I’m dealing with here. Could it also be dangerous?

  27

  Kristina

  It’s almost three hours to drive from central Oslo to Seljord, the nearest settlement to Leah’s cabin, according to the coordinates on her note. Thankfully I’ve set off early, so I should get there before it gets dark. Hopefully, whatever I find, I can get this strange situation out of my head, arriving back home again before evening. It feels good, actually, to be on the road, driving fast and listening to the radio, doing something other than sitting across from a client or moving around in the hushed, oppressive silence of our apartment. Besides, if nothing else, someone needs to go and check on Leah since the police won’t.

  In the aftermath of difficult times in my life I have always been able to find some peace on the road, just letting all the hard stuff drop away from me, leaving it behind on the road dwindling away behind me. In my twenties I sometimes felt that going for a long drive alone was the only way to process, but in recent years I haven’t turned to it in the same way. I guess I’ve been consumed by work and by my marriage. And it has finally been quieter inside my head. Until now.

  I listen to the weather report: heavy snow this afternoon. Hopefully I’ll have time to head back to the city before it sets in. I switch to a channel playing old hits and this makes me feel young again, like I might yet discover new things about myself or make decisions that would set my life onto a different path. This is of course true for everybody, but not many people live like that once the central pillars in life are in place; life partner, career, home. And yet. I could, technically speaking, retrain to do something else, just like I did once before, and live somewhere else, with another man. None of the things that feel fixed and set in stone truly are. This is something I try to convey to my clients in the therapy room, too – that, for better or worse, change is the one constant, and even if life feels unmanageable and impossibly dark in the present moment, it will change, if you can find a way to hang in there.

  I pull into a picnic area by the roadside a few miles past Kongsberg. There is nobody here and the sky is an oppressive slate gray. Patches of dirty snow line the roadside. I feel profoundly troubled by Leah’s words. I get out of the car to stretch my legs for a moment. Dark pines tower over the little parking lot, veils of mist twisting between their crowns, rising toward the low-hanging clouds. A bitter wind sweeps across the road, tearing at me. I can feel more snow in the air, and it occurs to me that I still have summer tires on the car.

  What am I doing here, by the roadside in the depths of the woods, on my way to Leah’s mountain cabin? Am I regressing into irrational behavior after having come so far? Nobody knows that I am here, not even Eirik. I think it’s because of Eirik that I’ve come here. Doing something out of character like driving halfway across Norway to check on Leah feels like a little rebellion against my husband’s relentless recent travel schedule. Though I am fully aware of the demands of Eirik’s political career, I sometimes can’t help but feel this isn’t what I signed up for. I worry about the toll on our marriage as his public profile grows, and that an ever-increasing distance will open up between us. There are times when I wake in the night and listen to Eirik’s soft, even breathing in the dark, and it feels like being in bed with a stranger. But there are also the times that he pulls me close and looks me in the eyes and strokes me all over, and I feel close to him again.

  I get back in the car, rubbing my icy hands together, but wait a moment to start the engine. I feel a deep trepidation in my gut that isn’t entirely unpleasant. As disturbing and worrying as the developments of the past ten days have been, Leah’s dramatic exit from the therapy room and apparent disappearance have dominated my thoughts, giving me something other than Elisabeth’s suicide to think about. Like with Leah, I was the last person to see Elisabeth alive. Like Leah, Elisabeth trusted me with her innermost thoughts. Or so I believed.

  I don’t want to think about Elisabeth, not now; I want to just block her life and death from my thoughts and my heart, but I know better than anybody that it doesn’t work like that. Elisabeth will always be on my mind. Elisabeth, whose talent for self-destruction overshadowed everything else – how wonderful she was, how intelligent, how good at her beautiful art she was, how very loved. But like most lifelong addicts, no matter how functional at times, she ultimately loved the needle more than anything else, including herself. And it killed her.

  Tears again. Jesus, I’m not going to go there now. I have spoken about Elisabeth constantly in my own therapy sessions; about how it felt like she was a part of me – a shadow with a penchant for darkness. I am wracked with guilt over how her life ended. It came after a long period when she had showed so much promise and improvement. I wish, so deeply, that things could have been different. That she could have made better choices. I take a few deep breaths and center myself in the moment. This isn’t about Elisabeth, or me; it’s about Leah.

  It’s been nine days since I last saw her. She was afraid. And hurt. She lied to me about Anton. What else did she lie about? She didn’t tell me she was pregnant, a kind of lie in itself. But why? And why did she say she wanted to speak to me about Carúpano? Every time I think about the way she casually threw that into her email I feel consumed by rage. And what will I find once I arrive at her cabin?

  I start driving again, slower now – I feel a little tender, and the dual carriageway has narrowed into a small, windy district road as I head into the mountainous forests of Buskerud county. The forests become even denser after I pass into Telemark county, the sky briefly clearing and weakening into a gorgeous pink-streaked indigo as the sun lowers itself down towards the rounded, snow-capped mountains in the distance. Close to Seljord I stop in another lay-by and peer at the map on my phone. The forests crowd in on the car, like the road is a wound that the forest is trying to heal.

  Leah’s cabin seems to sit entirely on its own, high up against the crest of a hill overlooking Heivannet Lake. She wouldn
’t be within earshot nor easy walking distance of any other cabins, and I wonder whether she ever even meets anyone else up there.

  I take several wrong turns before I manage to find the right forest track – they all look the same and they all inevitably end in a locked barrier. On my fourth attempt to find the right track, which is supposed to run alongside the lake, then rise to climb into the hills on its north shore, I’m successful. One of the two keys Leah gave me slots into the rusty padlock of the road barrier and the gate swings open. I drive through, then stop, leaving the engine idle while I return to lock the barrier behind me. Only the residents of a given area have the keys to the barriers on these remote forest roads, avoiding through-traffic and burglaries in scarcely populated areas. I feel a sudden irrational panic rise in me as I return to the car; for a moment I am dragged back in time to another forest, another car, another me. I slam the door hard and breathe calmly, focusing on the narrow road unfolding ahead, caught in the headlights. I urge the gas, my heart hammering wildly. Stop, Kristina, I tell myself. The only thing to fear here is your own mind if you can’t control it.

  The sky is changing again in the East – from frosty white to a dark charcoal. Thin wisps of fog drift between the trees, giving them an eerie, milky glow. Leah would have driven down this exact same track not long ago. Did she intensely commit all of this to memory like I am: the dripping spruces, the brown-black pines, the meek, steely skies, the black lake at the bottom of the valley, occasionally glimpsed through the dense crowd of trees?

  The phone vibrates and a voice says: ‘Your destination is on the left.’

  There is nothing to the left except a wall of trees, but then I spot a wooden sign nailed to a trunk that reads ‘Bekkebu’ and next to it an even smaller track. I turn onto it and quickly realize I’m going to have to leave the car and continue on foot. Light snow begins to fall. There is a cleared, car-sized grassy area to the side of the track and a white Range Rover Evoque is parked there, tucked in neatly from the track, surrounded by mounds of hardened snow. I assume it is Leah’s car, and as there are no visible tire tracks in the patches of snow surrounding it, it would seem it has sat here for days. It looks as though it has been placed here from above by the hand of a giant, like a Lego car.

  I turn off the engine and the lights and sit for a long moment in the deep silence of the woods. I feel a nervous flutter in my stomach, but refuse to indulge this kind of irrational fear. Walking alone at night in central Oslo is much more dangerous than being out here in these remote, untouched forests, though it doesn’t feel like that.

  My phone vibrates in my hand.

  Hey babe, all set up and ready to smash it, reads a WhatsApp from Eirik, accompanied by a selfie of my husband against the picturesque backdrop of Bergen harbor, a line of Høyre Conservative Party campaign flags snapping in the wind behind him. I smile at the goofy expression on his handsome face. It occurs to me that I haven’t actually let Eirik know that I’ve come here on my own. I open the camera and take a selfie, angling the phone to catch the snow falling against a backdrop of thick forest outside.

  Impulsive road trip, I write. I’ve gone to Telemark to find Leah Iverson, long story. Turns out she wrote about me (!) so I’ve decided I need to speak with her and get her some intervention. Couldn’t make it up. Good luck & call me later.

  I only have one bar of phone reception and have to press ‘resend’ three times before the message finally goes through. You’re not in Frogner anymore, that’s for sure, I think to myself and ready myself to step outside into the cold.

  I grab a flashlight from the emergency pack Eirik insists I keep in the glove compartment and fasten the strap of my handbag across my chest. I shine the flashlight into Leah’s car, but there’s nothing unusual there – just a pair of iPhone headphones and a chewing gum wrapper on the passenger seat. I take a couple of steps back and am about to start walking when I let my eyes rest on the tires of the car. I can’t help but release a shocked sound when I see that both tires on this side of the car are flat, clearly slashed. My pulse rising, I walk around the other side. These too, are flat.

  I stare up the narrow, steep slope of the track. Again, I think about my sensation of danger as I left the apartment in Oslo. What am I going to find at the end of this track? I decide to leave the holdall in the car – I’m just going to do a quick sweep of the cabin. Hopefully Leah is there, safe and willing to have a real conversation about what’s going on. We can talk in the car on the way back, no reason to remain in a remote cabin. No wonder she hasn’t returned home if her car has been deliberately damaged and she has no phone reception. I get a sudden, terrifying picture in my head of Anton slashing her tires, angry with her for refusing to return to the city with him because she was still waiting for me. I have no intention of staying for longer than to convince Leah to come back to Oslo with me, but I simply have to get to the bottom of this. I glance at the crude map Leah drew for me, and walk for a good ten minutes, and my legs start to ache as the track’s incline gets ever steeper. The snow is still falling in tiny flakes from a dull white sky, and as I turn and look back down the way I came, I see much darker, lower clouds encroaching, closer now. They’re the kind that carry heavy, wet snowflakes capable of covering the landscape in a swift whiteout.

  I reach the top of the hill and pause for a minute to catch my breath. The track flattens out and I emerge from a dense clutch of trees; I’m standing on the shoulder of the mountain. Far below me a jet-black lake spreads out in full view, its water held beneath a fragile lid of sparkling ice. I look around for signs of Leah’s cabin, but can’t see anything man-made at all. I notice a smudge of blue paint on a birch tree a few meters away, and realize it’s a trail marker. I consult the map again, it seems I need to find a much smaller path winding further into the woods from the clearing. When I start walking again, I see a little hand-carved wooden sign strung from a tree that reads ‘Bekkebu’, with a pointed arrow in the direction I’m heading. I wonder if she made it herself; it seems like the kind of thing Leah might do.

  How does she even bring groceries up here? I can’t imagine wanting to stay in a cabin so remote you have to walk for twenty minutes from the parking spot up a steep, slippery track through the woods, but each to their own, I guess, and it is fairly common among Scandinavians to seek out this kind of very basic back-to-nature experience.

  I stop for a minute and have to control another onslaught of sudden fierce fear of being here in the woods, so utterly alone, so far from my real life, but there is something rather exhilarating about it, too. I’m able to control my thoughts and dispel the anxiety. I feel proud of myself for being able to be somewhere like this, in the thick forest, alone, and not succumb to an irrational, blind panic.

  I look at my phone, but as I suspected, I have lost reception. I’m about to keep walking when I glimpse a slash of wan white sky beyond the trees just ahead of where I’m standing. It must be another clearing, and I push my way through the trees and spot what looks like the low grass-topped roof of a cabin, noticeably straighter than the craggy clearing it edges on, nestled up against the woods, overlooking the lake and the valley. The snow, already falling thicker and faster, settles onto the roof and I imagine it’s only hours until the cabin will merge with the surrounding terrain in a cloak of pristine white.

  I walk toward it, slowing down as I approach because my heart is beating so hard. A light is on inside. I imagine Leah in there, sitting at an old wooden desk by the fireplace, typing quickly, her beautiful face glowing golden in the light from the snapping, lively flames. I approach the door and glance around for footsteps around the cabin, but the snow has already started to settle on the ground around the cabin, erasing whatever might have been there.

  I knock on the door and listen, but can’t make out anything other than the soft rustle of branches. I knock again. I could just turn back around and hurry to my car and call for help once I have reception. I have the sudden conviction that if I use the key Le
ah gave me I’ll find her dead inside. Perhaps that’s what she wanted, and why she tried to get me to come here in the first place. I don’t want to find her dead. It’s been less than three months since I walked into our spare bedroom and found Elisabeth on the bed, staring straight at me, unseeing, her sweet face already eerily different.

  I knock for the third time, harder, then instinctively try the door handle. The door is unlocked and swings open inward.

  28

  Leah, one week before

  She closes the door to the cabin behind her and draws its familiar scent deep into her lungs. No matter how the future plays out, at least she has this sweet, beloved place. She moves without fear through the silent, dark space and twists the knobs on the oil lamps lined up along the windowsill. She stares out at the impossible beauty of the valley, its trees shimmering in autumnal shades of gold, bronze and ochre in the last of the afternoon light. Already, the long, exhausting Friday-night drive from the capital is forgotten. She steps back from the window and her face is reflected back at her. Her expression is haunted and her left eye is still swollen shut. She runs a fingertip alongside the broken and bruised patch on her face, prodding gently for signs of broken bones.

  In the kitchen she unpacks her one small bag of groceries. Minced meat, shredded cheese, cucumber, taco spices, corn tortillas – Leah has come to love the Norwegian obsession with Friday-night tacos. There is also a bottle of wine, some milk and a pizza for tomorrow. She pours herself a small glass of wine, they say just one doesn’t hurt the baby, and sits on the sofa, just listening to the deep silence. She touches her hand to her belly and is filled with the most unbearable dread. She would give anything for this to be different. How is she supposed to forgive him for what happened in Oslo? But she knows she will, if only he’ll come back.