Cabin Fever

by Alex Dahl

  ‘I suppose I feel that we never talk about it, though.’

  ‘I suppose we don’t. I’m not sure I personally feel that anything can be gained by going over it again now, but if you need to talk about it, of course we can.’

  ‘Well, the thing is, since I’ve been here and really returned to the art, I’ve realized how much what happened influences me. It is the backdrop of my mind. The images are always there. I paint them sometimes, like all the pictures with swirls of red that are meant to look like bloodstains. They encourage that here, to bring what we see in our minds to the paintings.’

  ‘That sounds like a very healthy approach.’

  ‘Yes, but… The thing is, I think I need to speak about Carúpano differently. I’ve come to realize that it is harming me not to talk about it more explicitly. In my art. And in my life. I’ve been asked to contribute to an art book about trauma. You know, the experience written about and chronicled in writing on one side of the page, then depicted on the other side. I want to be more explicit in my image-building. I don’t want to just paint blood patterns and frightening foliage forever.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow.’

  ‘I can’t move on until I tell you what really happened back there.’

  ‘Elisabeth, what do you mean? We know what happened. Everyone knows—’

  ‘Nobody knows.’

  ‘What? You know, you were there. I know, I was there, too.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘I can’t recover those memories, Elisabeth, God knows I’ve tried. I wanted to process them fully to recover but came to understand that accepting I won’t regain full recollection is enough. I live with it now, in peace. But I know what happened.’

  ‘There are things I never told you. I didn’t tell anyone.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘What really happened.’

  ‘Elisabeth, you’re worrying me. We know what really happened. We’ve been over it endlessly…’

  ‘But it wasn’t the full story. When I saw you there, in Caracas, in the hospital, that first time, afterward, when I saw how frail and broken you were, and realized that you actually had no recollection of what had just happened, I made the decision to tell the story a certain way. But it wasn’t the whole truth…’

  ‘Elisabeth, listen to me.’ Kristina’s voice is crystal clear and controlled, and Elisabeth can see how hard she has to work to control the anger and fear running through her. ‘Stop, please stop. Jesus, Elisabeth, please just stop. You have to let it go now; we’re thirty-six years old. Hashing out some minor detail you haven’t told me about isn’t going to help me, or you. What happened has dominated your life for almost twenty years. You have to let it go.’

  ‘Let it go? That’s surprising advice coming from a psychotherapist, a Doctor of Psychology, especially one who specializes in trauma. Don’t you think I have read about this stuff? Don’t you think I know all about integrating trauma to process it properly?’

  ‘Of course. I’m just saying that going over and over what happened in Venezuela isn’t serving you. Look at your life, Elisabeth. You are in the process of rebuilding it. I love you and want you to get better. I think the way to do that is accept that what happened can’t be changed. It can never be changed. We can only attempt to move on.’

  ‘But it wasn’t what happened.’

  ‘Elisabeth. Please, please stop.’ Elisabeth can tell that Kristina is about to get up and walk away, and she might never get another chance to broach the subject with her.

  ‘I can’t carry this anymore.’

  ‘What… What is it?’ Kristina looks alarmed at the tears rushing down Elisabeth’s face, but she can tell she is listening intently now.

  ‘I only did it to protect you,’ she whispers. Then she speaks of Carúpano, slowly at first, stumbling for words, then faster and faster as the images leap back to life, the images she has never spoken of and when she stops, Kristina gets up and walks away, straight into the water, soaking the hems of her white jeans. It is several minutes before she returns, tears streaming down her face, which bears a strange expression; pinched and pained, like she’s just bitten down hard on her tongue and is trying hard to not scream out loud.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ asks Kristina.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Have you spoken about this to anyone? Your therapist here, or your mother, or—’

  ‘Never. And I think that is the problem. I need to speak the truth, and then maybe I can really let it go. Can you imagine carrying something like that for almost twenty years?’

  ‘Well, yes I can, because even though I can’t recall the events in a coherent way, I certainly carry them, too. And I don’t think there is anything to be gained by coming out with this now. It would crush the Rickards. That kind of shock could actually kill someone, and it would massively compromise me—’

  ‘Wait, what? Of course it won’t.’

  ‘It would most definitely compromise me. And Eirik. Can you imagine the effect on his political career? You have to understand that you can’t just suddenly drop a bomb like that on my life.’

  ‘But why would it compromise anything? We were the victims, we were just kids,-—’

  ‘Exactly. And we are going to leave it at that, Elisabeth.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’ repeats Kristina, incredulously, and Elisabeth sees something ugly then, in her eyes.

  ‘You don’t get to decide how I talk about my own trauma.’

  ‘It directly affects me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kristina stares hard at Elisabeth for several long moments, and it occurs to Elisabeth that her friend doesn’t recognize this Elisabeth who answers back and challenges her after so many years of being a downtrodden mess, pathetically grateful for the smallest of charities. I did it for you, she thinks. Now I’m going to put me first. Perhaps Kristina senses how serious she is, and how steely her resolve is, because she subtly changes her approach. Kristina begins to cry again, and doesn’t attempt to wipe away the tears that run down her face and hover at her chin before dropping onto her jeans.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers. ‘What you’ve told me is obviously a very big shock. I think I just need to process this.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Elisabeth, could you please do something for me? Could you please hold off a little bit before speaking about this? Just so I get a chance to really take it on board. I think that’s only fair – this does primarily affect me.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Just a little while, okay? Can you promise me that? Of course you deserve to speak your truth and I can only imagine how hard it must have been to hold all of this for so long to protect me. I was just thinking that maybe you and I could do some processing exercises together at the weekend when you come to ours. Eirik is away again. It could be really healing for both of us.’

  ‘Really? Uh. Are you sure you still want me to come?’

  ‘Of course, Elisabeth. This doesn’t change anything at all. But please just promise me that for now, you and I will work through this together, just the two of us, in the first instance.’

  Elisabeth nods, and returns her gaze to the water, but the sun has disappeared behind a cloud and the pretty deep blues of the sea have turned steely gray and obscure.

  65

  Kristina

  He stands on a chair positioned underneath the window and scrapes furiously at the mouth of the tunnel, dislodging big lumps of snow that come crashing into the cabin. The slash of blue sky grows wider, casting a patch of brilliant sunshine on the floorboards. He whoops like a kid. I can’t help but laugh. I watch his look of triumph as he judges the tunnel wide enough for him to pass through, and he instantly clambers onto the chair and hauls himself onto the window ledge. My husband disappears through the hole and sticks his head back down into it from the top.

  ‘I made it!’ he shouts. His face is red and elated, and though he is forty, he looks
about fourteen in this moment. He squints in the sudden bright sunlight and pumps the pickax up and down, like an actor who just received an Academy Award. ‘Are you okay? This is going to take a while. Just stay where you are on the sofa, I should get through the door in an hour or so. Maybe two.’ He shouts.

  ‘Okay,’ I say and smile up at him from my icy tomb. I’m huddled underneath a duvet and two woolen blankets and still, I can’t help but tremble with cold.

  ‘I love you,’ shouts Eirik, and then he disappears from sight. I wait for several minutes, until I can hear the faint repetitive thud of the scooping bowl hitting the top layer of snow outside the front door. Then I turn over onto my stomach slowly to not prompt another onslaught of pain, and slide Leah’s MacBook back out from underneath the sofa.

  I hesitate for a long moment, trying to breathe calmly, trying to maintain my composure in case Eirik suddenly reaches the front door – I’d only have a second to slip the laptop back under the sofa and face my husband. I’d need to make sure nothing about me would betray what I’ve read. And I fear what I’m about to read; I fear Leah will set about reducing Eirik to something other than what he has been to me for almost fifteen years, in just a few devastating sentences. I can hear him outside, but the digging still sounds distant, so I can assume I have a little more time. I have to know where she is going with this – I have the eerie image in my mind of Leah as my executioner, dropping an acrylic rope around my neck and pulling it tighter and tighter, watching me. And then – the moment that changes everything. Because sometimes it is a single moment that changes everything.

  I just happened, for the briefest of moments, to let my eyes roam around the cabin, and perhaps it is because the room is now brilliantly lit up by the sunlight streaming through the hole Eirik made that I notice it – it would have been harder to spot last night or this morning in the meager light. On a top shelf, close to the hand-carved, exposed supporting beams, several small picture frames are lined up. From what I can see from here, a couple are photographs from nature, places I don’t recognize – a beach, a mountain, a forest-fringed lake. One is a drawing of a middle-aged woman leaning her face against the palm of her hand and staring into the distance – Leah’s mother? The last is a little oil painting, an abstract in beautiful shades of vermilion, maroon, scarlet. And it is unmistakably one of Elisabeth’s paintings, not dissimilar to the one I have at home.

  I have to swallow a scream and fight the urge to launch myself from the sofa and grab the picture, but I’d have to climb onto a chest of drawers to reach it, and it’s not like I’d be able to do that, let alone move over there.

  It is like finding another piece of a puzzle and realizing that it alters the whole picture in every single way. I feel like I am looking right at the answers but can’t decipher them. This casts Supernova in an even more sinister light. She stalked me. She claimed to know things about me that seem impossible for her to have found out about. She infers that she knew things about my marriage and my husband. But could it be that Leah Iverson somehow also directly contributed to Elisabeth’s death? Elisabeth was my best friend, and now she’s dead. I get a sense, in this moment of what she has done, and how.

  I’m so worked up that I can no longer feel the pain in my leg or the icy cold air of the cabin. I’m running out of patience, and battery, and time. I feel a strange sensation in my left hand and realize I’ve dug my nails into my skin so hard I’ve pierced it, making dark beads of blood appear. I suck at the cut and return to Supernova.

  66

  Elisabeth, August

  Elisabeth feels strange to be somewhere other than the ordered, predictable world of Villa Vinternatt, even though she comes here overnight once every month. Kristina picked her up in the late afternoon after spending the day in Drøbak with Camilla and the kids, and they got stuck in unusually heavy traffic heading into Oslo on the E6. They talked about what had happened since they’d last seen each other less than a week before, but Elisabeth fell silent as Oslo came into view, a gray blur in a wide valley, held in between dark pine forests on one side and the shimmering fjord on the other. She spent her whole life in this city and its outskirts, but since what happened with Andreas and getting sober and living at Villa Vinternatt, Elisabeth feels trepidation at returning, as if bad memories will spring forth from Oslo’s streets, chasing her down.

  At Kristina’s house, she slips her shoes off and places her weekend bag down on the gently heated wooden floorboards of the impressive hallway, and stands a moment looking at the familiar pictures on the walls. Elisabeth is always momentarily taken aback by just how grand Kristina’s apartment is, but then again, she is married to a wealthy politician and has a successful career in her own right. She remembers living in a similar apartment just down the road when Andreas was alive, though the circumstances were certainly different. Theirs had been a world of painting, passion and wild drug parties.

  Elisabeth stops for a moment in front of the black-and-white photograph of herself, Trine and Kristina, taken at graduation from high school, just weeks before they set off for South America. Kristina comes back into the hallway, having gone ahead into the kitchen.

  ‘Look at us,’ says Elisabeth, softly.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Kristina. ‘Come.’

  Elisabeth follows her back into the kitchen. On the granite countertop is an opened bottle of red wine, an Italian amarone. Outside it’s raining lightly, a relief after a relentlessly hot August. Elisabeth feels suddenly excited about the coming fall and what it might bring. The vernissage at Villa Vinternatt had gone beyond all expectations, and many of her paintings were sold that same evening. She’d had several additional commissions in the months since, as well as an interview request from one of Norway’s major newspapers, Dagbladet. Elisabeth also can’t wait to get properly started with the art book curated by Ella Victor. Ella had been to see her twice more at Villa Vinternatt since the first time and on both occasions they’d ended up talking for hours and hours, and it had felt like a beginning friendship. It was nice to laugh with someone and to discover common ground. It was fun, Elisabeth realized. Such an easy, light word – fun, but how important and difficult, too.

  She’d been in contact with Ella again by email just days before about the book. Elisabeth found it easier to talk that way, and Ella had been so pleased to hear that Elisabeth would be willing to take part in the project and her preliminary thoughts. She glances at Kristina, who is placing pieces of cheese and fat olives and serrano ham on a metal Alessi tray. She feels momentarily guilty for having agreed to do the book and for having decided that the only way she can really move on is to deal with the full truth in the only way she knows how – through her art, and with real honesty. Kristina was very clear about her feelings when they spoke on the beach below Villa Vinternatt, and while Elisabeth understands and wants to protect her and please her, she can’t do it forever at such a high cost.

  She watches Kristina pour two large glasses from the bottle – strange: she knows Elisabeth is required to stay totally sober at all times, including when on leave like now, to continue to be eligible for Villa Vinternatt’s residency program. Elisabeth remembers how angry Kristina was last winter when she was caught drinking smuggled whiskey with Joel and one of the other guys. I put my professional reputation on the fucking line for you, she said, a vivid red stress rash appearing on her neck.

  ‘Is Eirik home?’ she asks, looking around as though he might suddenly appear. Elisabeth assumed he wouldn’t be; in the past five years she’s only seen him a handful of times as his political career has skyrocketed. It’s strange to her that the undeniably charismatic but rather immature man Kristina met at university has morphed into this political powerhouse often on the cover of Norway’s major newspapers.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah, I thought you said he was traveling for work. Is someone else joining us?’

  ‘No.’ Kristina smiles, a warm, carefully honed smile, the kind Elisabeth imagines she gives her cl
ients when they say something particularly disturbing and she wants to make them feel secure. She slides one glass across the countertop to where Elisabeth sits on a bar stool.

  ‘But… You know I can’t drink. Obviously.’

  ‘Well, I was thinking to myself this morning how far you’ve come. It isn’t at all obvious, actually, at this point, that you shouldn’t be allowed to unwind and have some fun with your best friend.’ Fun, that word again. Light. Dangerous.

  ‘I…’ Elisabeth begins to respond but is so surprised she actually has no words.

  ‘Look. I work with this stuff. On a daily basis I see clients struggling with grief and addiction and trauma. I know about these things, probably more than anyone else you’ll ever meet. And I know you. I know your personal strengths and weaknesses and in the past year I have seen, firsthand, your incredible strength and ability to pick yourself back up. You should be proud of yourself and feel free to celebrate.’

  ‘By breaking my sobriety? Kristina, I’m sorry but this has really thrown me.’

  ‘Obviously no pressure. It was just a suggestion. I think it is also important to take steps back to normality when it comes to sobriety. I don’t believe that complete abstention is necessary forever; true healing can only come when you find balance.’

  ‘But the rules…’

  ‘You’re right, Elisabeth. Maybe this was preemptive of me. Just, I’ve had a tough week at work. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you. I just wanted us to have some fun. Like in the old days. You know, a couple of girlfriends on the sofa, watching Sex and the City reruns, eating crazy amounts of cheese and enjoying a couple of glasses of nice red wine.’

  Elisabeth feels a warm, cozy feeling spread out in the pit of her stomach at the description – she knows that is how they could have been, in another life. She looks at Kristina, noticing the way she emanates calm and trustworthiness, as always. Maybe she’s right. If someone as knowledgeable and experienced as Kristina says that balance is the goal and that occasionally allowing yourself a little bit of fun is necessary, then why shouldn’t she?