by Alex Dahl
42
Leah, days before
The blood stops as suddenly as it started. She has heard of sporadic bleeding in pregnancy; it doesn’t have to mean anything at all. She prays; she doesn’t know what else to do, and though she’s never done it before, she knows how to ask for mercy.
Please, please let the baby live.
She conjures up the baby in her mind the way she constructed the characters in her book; she gives it little details that make it feel more real – a fuzzy little patch of strawberry blonde hair atop a soft pink skull, tiny fingernails, a slightly upturned nose, slim, almost see-through wrists. She breathes life into the imagined child, until she has a vivid image of it there inside her womb, fingers and toes moving, heart fluttering.
Please, please live.
She’s in bed, with her legs elevated on a tall stack of pillows. She’s waiting, for Kristina, for morning, for the dull ache in her stomach to stop. She brings her phone out, and realizes there is, unusually, a single bar of reception. She does something she has never done before: she dials Kristina’s number, which she knows by heart. It rings for a long while before she picks up, and when she does, tears begin to flow from Leah’s eyes at the sound of her voice. There was a time when Leah believed that Kristina could fix everything, and a part of her must still believe it, and maybe it’s true, because there is something so soothing in the silence that unfolds between them on the crackly line that Leah feels her heart resume its normal beat. In the end, she puts the phone down and lies back against the pillows. She prays again, feeling new hope and energy flow through her after hearing Kristina’s voice. Maybe now she’ll come.
She falls asleep. When she wakes again, she feels strange, as though her limbs are weighted down, and she has the sensation of being submerged in water. She blinks in the dark, getting her bearings, taking in the outlines of her surroundings; Bekkebu, she’s at Bekkebu. Fragments of the day before return to her. The screaming, the slashed tires, the fall, the blood, the email. It is completely dark outside but she can make out the glow of the moon through the gauze curtains. She tries to sit up but a searing pain across her abdomen stops her. Then she realizes she is bleeding again.
43
Kristina
At first I can’t makes sense of what it is I’m looking at. The bedroom is small, but neat, with pine walls and a big double bed with a white padded headboard and white bedsheets, gathered into twisted piles. There’s blood on the bed, as well as traces of it on the floor, half cleaned up with a big pile of bath towels. The door nudged against these when I tried to push it open. The bedsheets are gathered in a mound on the bed, and I give them a little tug to make sure she isn’t under them, though there is nothing there, only some streaky, brown bloodstains. I push a large cupboard open with my foot but there is nothing but towels and sheets and a couple of ski jackets inside it.
There is no sign of her but I think about the empty gun cabinet in the vestibule; whoever has killed or injured Leah is armed and still on the loose.
‘Jesus,’ I whisper. I’m about to turn around and leave the room when I notice something sticking out from under one of the pillows. I unfold it and recognize Leah’s handwriting from the note she pressed into my hand in our last session. I read it, and it’s instantly clear who killed Leah Iverson.
44
Kristina
It wasn’t going to be like this.
I’ve fought and fought so hard to find a way to be me. To be someone else. To be anyone at all. But I can’t. Even my own child couldn’t bear to remain inside me. And I can’t do this. I can’t bear it anymore because the thing is I just don’t get any breaks I don’t get a breather or a break or just peace it never ever stops. It’s like I’m roadkill, ripped open and exposed and bleeding to death in the road and my dark thoughts are vultures, feasting before my pebble-sized racoon heart has even stopped beating. The thoughts the images the words the pain and the endless black aloneness which is different from loneliness because it isn’t a perception, it’s a statement of fact. The only time it ever stopped was when I tried to be different, to undo me, and become someone else, someone sane and beautiful and whole and worthy but no one is really like that, even if it looks like it; the shiny perfection we see is just another symptom of the darkness inside isn’t it and anyway we can’t ever be anyone other than who we are, can we – not really
I felt the exact moment when the baby died
It was like the flip of the smallest switch
I knew it even if I couldn’t bear to know it
Lights out
I wanted the pain to come, then. I needed to see the blood and the evidence of it but now I wish I hadn’t. I wish away the inevitability of what will happen next. The darkness. The simple, simple answer. The shame. I am so sorry I’m so very sorry
I want Kristina to know about Supernova, I want people to read it, for Elisabeth, for Kristina, for me, for Trine, for all of us, could it be that if people did it could turn all of that destruction into something beautiful?
Even now it’s the word I can’t let go of. The images. A big star and a little one, together in a celestial dance. The little white dwarf star stealing material from the big one until it has too much, too much to carry and to hold, drawing both stars into a gigantic thermonuclear explosion so bright it can light up anything, anything at all.
And afterward, a black hole, a rip in the lining of the heavens.
Lights out
I’m going to the lake, it’s so beautiful, there is nowhere more beautiful in this world, not to me, so I’m going there and I will stay there forever until I become part of it, disintegrating into its deep, cold water, infusing it with the very essence of me.
Ask Linda and Anton and Kristina to forgive me. Most of all Kristina. It wasn’t meant to happen like this, none of it
*
I crush the note in my hand, then smooth it back out – I’ll need to hand it over to the police. I glance around the sad room one last time and immediately wish I hadn’t – I know I’ll never forget this.
I rush back down the pine corridor and through the bathroom and the vestibule with the empty gun cabinet; I’ve seen enough and I need to get out of here. I burst from the cabin into frozen air, bustling and wet with thick, swirling snowflakes. I’m crying with shock and the horror of the afternoon and the tragedy of Leah’s last hours – all those hours she waited for me before she went to the lake. To think that she wrote those words after losing her baby, and waiting, hoping, that I’d come help her – I can’t bear it, in spite of everything.
My cries holler into the blizzard, settling against the wall of trees, against the iced lid of the lake deep in the valley. She’s down there, below the surface. Jesus Christ, the poor woman is in it. I didn’t help her, just like I didn’t help Elisabeth, in fact. I might as well have shoved her into the icy, black water. I haven’t cried like this in years. Like a trapped animal. Like a hurricane gathering wild speed, screeching through the night. I scream until my voice bleeds dry, until I start to cough and splutter. I take a few stumbling steps away from the cabin and turn around to look at it, but already it is almost swallowed up by the snowstorm, only a dim haze from one forgotten oil lamp still lit on the windowsill discernible through columns of whirling snowflakes. I’ve left it burning – will it catch fire and raze the cabin to the ground? I decide I don’t care, I just keep stumbling through the snowstorm. I need to get away from this place more than I have needed anything in my life. Now.
I try to remember the direction I came from but my mind is in overdrive, throwing random thoughts and images at me, and my heart is pounding. Which way? I scream the words out loud, but this time my voice doesn’t carry; instead it peters out mid-holler to a pitiful squawk. The cabin lay to my left as I approached, on the edge of a rocky promontory overlooking the lake. No. It lay to my right. Or did it? The air is murky gray, with particles of pure white rushing at me on a bitter wind like confetti, and there is just no way of maki
ng out the path that leads back down the hill to my car.
I’m shaking with cold and sheer dread, and I spin around on my heels, rubbing at my arms; I’m not dressed for a dash through deserted, mountainous woods in a blizzard.
I grab my phone from my parka pocket, but there is still no reception. I find the compass function and though I am only just able to make out the hazy green glare of the screen, I begin to follow the needle north – I am certain I headed south on my way up here – I have a vague memory of the opaque sky being brighter to my left as I emerged from the clutch of the woods into the cabin’s little clearing. I want to run as fast as I can away from the horror of Leah’s cabin and her terrible words, but I have no choice but to inch forward slowly, until I reach what must be the path, a sliver of space between towering rows of pine trees. I can see more clearly here – the snowstorm is hampered by the density of the trees – so I pick up my pace and rush down, down, away from that place and the terrifying reality of what I’ve just read.
I’m in a forest in the foothills of a long range of mountains that stretch from Skien in the south across much of Telemark to Kongsberg and into central Norway beyond, in the middle of a blizzard on the first day of November. Stay sharp, Kristina. Just get out of here and get home and all of this will eventually fade away into just another bad memory. The wind is bitterly cold and carries the scent of deep lakes and mulchy earth and ancient trees.
I stop for a moment, pressing my fingers to my eyes, before looking around at more static whiteness, more blurred outlines of trees. The path has opened out into another snow-drenched clearing. I am breathing so hard I feel as though I might black out. I can feel the downward slope of the path and its uneven surface of slippery roots and jagged rocks poking out of the earth, concealed by fresh snow, but can’t see anything. How much further? I’m about to keep walking when I notice something beside me, breaking the almost complete whiteout of the hillside clearing. It’s the blonde wood and charcoal metal barrel of a rifle, emerging from the snow like the mast of a sailing boat rising on the horizon. I reach for it, then decide against it: it could go off in my hands. Next to it is a huddled mound; at first glance I assume it’s a fallen tree. But it isn’t a tree; this is instantly clear when I kick it with my foot, revealing the outline of a hand, a sickly shade of ice blue, then a shock of long brown hair atop a rusty patch of blood-stained snow. It’s Leah.
Part II
EXPOSURE THERAPY
45
Leah, days before
It had always been the words that saved her. They gave her something to hold onto when she felt too little and too weak to go on. But they can’t save her now, nothing can. The violent contractions stopped a long while ago, and the blood, too. She is empty again, emptier than ever before.
She runs through everything in her mind, but her mind doesn’t work the way it usually does, there are vast chunks of nothingness, like black holes thoughts get sucked into and disappear. Is that what it feels like for Kristina? It makes sense that the brain would simply erase what it can’t bear to contain. Supernova. Yes. The big star and the little one, locked together in destruction. The beauty of them burning each other out.
She wants everyone to see these fires. She wants them to watch her burn.
Since the baby went, since she realized what the blatantly obvious answer to everything was, she has read back through everything, all the way up to the end of Supernova, and only the silent blackness of the night ahead remains. It’s time. She’ll send Supernova to Kristina and then she will go to the lake.
Supernova, back to Supernova, she needs to be quick, now. But how? There is no reception, though she has very occasionally been able to catch a faint signal in this newer part of the cabin. She composes the email, using all her remaining strength to sound vaguely coherent. But the document won’t attach, even when she moves around the room, painfully slowly, holding the phone up in the hope of a single bar of reception. By the lake, there’s a patch of occasional reception near the jetty, which is anchored to the surface now by ice. She’ll bring the phone, send the email, then take it with her into the lake.
Just one more thing to write, to be read by whoever comes to Bekkebu next and finds her gone. She starts writing, but keeps stopping, erasing, trying again; the words don’t come out right. Some words she crosses out because she doesn’t mean them.
I’m sorry.
She imagines the dark water of the lake closing over her head like the velvet blackness of the night sky and maybe when she really gives in to the lake and death, the glimmer of stars will reach her all the way down at its bottom. Maybe it will be like a supernova, when death itself is more beautiful than anything in life. She doesn’t want to die, she wants to live, but not this life, the life that can now never be separated from that other life, the lost life.
But what if there is a message waiting for her when the phone recovers reception? Maybe Kristina has left her a message. Maybe she is on her way, maybe she will come tomorrow. Would it make a difference now? She thinks about the phone call, days ago now; how she still didn’t come.
Leah gets up and stands a while at the window. She’s still a little unsteady on her feet after days in bed drifting in and out of dreamless sleep, and she feels a deep ache in her womb that travels all the way up to her heart. Her reflection is mirrored in the little grid window and Leah studies her sad, bruised face and its mournful expression. She finds it easy in this moment to access the empathy for herself that Kristina always speaks of.
She stands at the window a long while looking out at the beautiful night with crystal clear skies awash with billions of stars. She’s about to put clothes on and get ready to go when she hears a sound. Footsteps approaching. A muffled cough. A series of firm knocks on the door as knuckles strike the thick timber.
46
Kristina
She’s buried in fresh snow which I brush easily away from her face, but the back of her body is welded to the ground by older layers of snow that have hardened into solid ice. There is nothing but a fleshy crater where the left side of her sweet, familiar face was. Her right eye is intact but grotesquely rolled back in her skull. The rifle points its cruel black mouth straight at her.
On impulse, I touch her hand with my own, as though my touch might make her leap back to life, but she’s cold as ice and as hard. I scream, and it is my screams that suck me from these impossible moments, back in time and into the blank patches of my consciousness. It isn’t Leah I’m looking at, it isn’t Leah at all anymore, there’s nothing Leah about these mangled remains. I can smell the bitter, rotting-egg smell of gunpowder trapped in the pit of my brain – it must have been there all along, stored away. I can see the strange maroons and grays and purples hidden inside skulls, blasted open and exposed, like the vivid wet cores of smashed melons. I know these images; they were just removed from my consciousness like words with correction fluid, invisible but nonetheless still there underneath, black on white.
I become aware of my own high-pitched, uncontrollable screams ripping through the air and force myself to physically clamp my mouth shut with my left hand. Whoever did this to Leah could still be roaming the woods. But she did it herself. She wrote that. No, she said she was going to the lake. She must have changed her mind. Or someone must have hurt her after she’d already written the note. Anton – it must be him. And he could be on his way back up here, right now.
I have to get help. The snow is still falling heavily, and there is nothing visible to mark the spot where Leah lies; she’ll be covered again by the time anyone can get here. How am I going to direct the police or emergency services to the exact place? I point the phone to the grotesque remains of Leah, my hand shaking violently, and open the camera function. I take several pictures, but have to stop and retch, spitting mouthfuls of bile into the snow at the harrowing sight of Leah’s shattered face, even more brutal in the light of the flash. It’s not her, it’s not her, I tell myself out loud, fighting the urge to start
screaming again – it’s not her. This isn’t real.
I can’t control the wild gallop of my heart or my shallow, panicked breath, and I begin to run, hurtling down the steep incline of the narrow path, stumbling over slippery rocks and partially buried roots coiling from the earth, and it must be under one of the bulbous roots my right foot slips and catches, bringing me crashing to the ground, and it must be against one of those sharp rocks my head strikes because in an instant the white night is replaced by solid blackness.
47
Kristina
I’m in space. Silent technicolor explosions tear into the velvet backdrop of the universe, sending soundwaves across light-years, tearing my skin clean off and melting my insides. My consciousness drifts into vast clusters of swirling green gas. It goes from green to ocean blue, then deep indigo, before it gathers again, drawing together into bulbous clouds of electric blues and pinks and neon orange that collide and burst into white flames, streaking and pulsating across the black.
No. I’m not in space. This isn’t air, it’s water. The water is black and so cold that my limbs have grown stiff and numb and I sink slowly, slowly, like a statue thrown into the deepest part of the ocean. I try to move my hands and feet but they are entirely unresponsive to my commands. I hear something, a muffled sound traveling slowly through the water, but can’t discern what it is or where it is coming from. It grows louder and then louder still, and it seems to be a siren, with prolonged wails followed by silence, but then I realize it is music. Rising and falling, closer and closer, until it is crystal clear, a warm, trembling vibrato, produced by an expert hand. I feel overcome by emotion listening to the cello, and just then, it seems as if I reach the bottom of the sea, my body settling onto something firm after all the falling. Like the water, it’s cold and dark. The bottom is entirely smooth so this must be a pool rather than a lake or an ocean.
