Anxious People: A Novel

by Fredrik Backman

  * * *

  And then?

  * * *

  Then she lets go.

  * * *

  The drop is further than you realize, even if you’ve just been standing up there. It takes longer than you think to hit the surface. A gentle scraping sound, wind seizing hold of paper, the fluttering and crumpling as the letter drifts out across the water. The fingertips that have held that envelope ten thousand times since they first picked it up from the doormat give up their struggle and let the letter sail off toward its own eternity.

  * * *

  The man who sent it to her ten years ago wrote down everything he thought she needed to know. It was the last thing he ever told anyone. Only four words in length, no more than that. The four biggest little words one person, anyone at all, can say to another:

  * * *

  It wasn’t your fault.

  * * *

  By the time the letter hits the water Zara is already walking away, toward the far side of the bridge. There’s a car parked there, waiting for her. Lennart is sitting inside it. Their eyes meet when she opens the door. He lets her put the music on as loud as she wants. She’s planning to do her absolute utmost to get tired of him.

  71

  They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.

  * * *

  The girl always thought that the weirdest thing was that she could never be angry with her mom. The glass surrounding that feeling was impossible to break. After the funeral she did the cleaning, pulling empty gin bottles from all the hiding places she never had the heart to tell her mom she already knew about. Perhaps that’s the last lifeline an addicted parent clings to, the idea that their child probably doesn’t know. As if the chaos could possibly be hidden. It can’t even be buried, the daughter thought, it just gets handed down.

  Once her mom slurred in her ear: “Personality is just the sum of our experiences. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. So don’t you worry, my little princess, you won’t get your heart broken because you come from a broken home. You won’t grow up to be a romantic, because children from broken homes don’t believe in everlasting love.” She fell asleep on her daughter’s shoulder on the sofa, and her daughter covered her with a blanket and wiped the spilled gin from the floor. “You’re wrong, Mom,” she whispered in the darkness, and she was right. No one robs a bank for their children’s sake unless they’re a romantic.

  Because the girl grew up and had girls of her own. One monkey, one frog. She tried to be a good mom, even though she didn’t have an instruction manual. A good wife, a good employee, a good person. She was terrified of failing every second of every day, but she did genuinely believe that everything was going well for a while. Fairly well, anyway. She relaxed, she wasn’t prepared, so infidelity and divorce hit her hard in the back of the head. Life knocked her flat. That happens to most of us at some point. Maybe you, too.

  A few weeks ago, on the way home from school, the elk and the monkey and the frog all got off the bus as usual and started to walk across the bridge. Halfway across the girls stopped, their mom didn’t notice at first, and when she looked back they were ten yards behind her. The monkey and the frog had bought a padlock, they’d seen people attaching them to the railings of bridges in other towns on the Internet. “If you do that, you lock the love in forever and then you never stop loving each other!”

  Their mom felt crushed, because she thought the girls were worried she was going to stop loving them after the divorce. That everything was going to be different now, that she’d stop being theirs. It took ten minutes of sobbing and confused explanations before the monkey and the frog patiently cupped their mom’s cheeks in their hands and whispered: “We’re not worried about losing you, Mom. We just want you to know that you’re never going to lose us.”

  The lock clicked as they fixed it in place. The monkey threw the key over the railing and it spun down toward the water, and all three of them cried. “Forever,” the mom whispered. “Forever,” the girls repeated. As they were walking away the youngest daughter admitted that when she first saw that thing about the padlocks online, she thought they were doing it because they were worried someone might steal the bridge. Then she wondered if they might be worried that someone was going to steal the padlock. Her big sister had to explain it to her, but managed to do so without making her little sister feel stupid. Their mom couldn’t help thinking that she and their dad had at least gotten something right, because the girls were capable of admitting when they were wrong, and of forgiving others when they got things wrong.

  They had pizza that evening, the girls’ favorite. When they’d fallen asleep on their mattresses on the floor of the little apartment that cost six thousand five hundred a month, and which she at that particular moment had no idea how she was going to pay the next month’s rent on, the mom sat up on her own in the darkness. It wasn’t long to Christmas, then it would be New Year, she knew how much the girls were looking forward to the fireworks. It was tearing her apart that they still trusted her, unaware of how many things she’d failed at. When dawn came she packed their backpacks, and a notebook fell out of her eldest daughter’s. She was about to put it back, but it fell open at a page that began with the words: “The Princess with Two Kingdoms.” At first the mom felt annoyed, because she had spent their whole lives trying to persuade her daughters not to want to be princesses—she hoped they’d want to be warriors. And because the girls loved their mom, of course they did as she wanted, or at least pretended to, then did the exact opposite, because it’s the duty of children not to pay the slightest bit of attention to their parents. The eldest daughter had been told to write a fairy tale of her own for school, so she wrote “The Princess with Two Kingdoms.” It was about a princess who lived in a big, beautiful castle, and one night the princess found a hole in the floor under her bed, and down inside the hole was a secret, magical world full of strange, fantastical creatures, dragons and trolls and other things her daughter must have thought up herself. Things so fantastical that the imagination and flight from reality that lay behind them crushed the mother, because all she kept thinking was: How terrible must your real life feel to require this much… escape? All the creatures were happy, they lived in peace, and there was no pain in their little world. But the princess in the story soon uncovered a terrible truth: that the magical realm she had found, where all her new friends lived, was actually located between two castles in two different kingdoms. One of them was ruled by a king, the other by a queen, and they were fighting a horrible war against each other. They sent their armies to fight and fire terrible weapons, but the walls of both kingdoms were too tall and strong to give way, and in the end the girl realized that the war wasn’t going to destroy either of them. It would just ruin and kill everything that lay between them. And that was when she learned the truth: that the king and queen were her parents. She was their princess, and the entire war was about her, they were each trying to beat the other with the sole aim of winning her back. When the mom read the last words of the story, her daughters were just starting to wake up on their mattresses, and everything that was worth anything inside her shattered. The story ended with the princess saying good-bye to all her new friends and setting off, alone. She disappeared into the darkness one night and never came back again. Because she knew that if she disappeared, there would be nothing left to fight over. That way she would be able to save both kingdoms and the realm in between.

  * * *

  When her daughters had gotten up, the mom had breakfast with them, trying to act as if nothing were wrong. She dropped them off at school, then walked all the way back, out onto the bridge, and stood there in the middle of it, holding on to the padlock as tight
ly as she could.

  She didn’t fight her ex-husband for her old home, she didn’t argue with her former boss about her job, she didn’t clash with their lawyer, didn’t fire any weapons, didn’t cause chaos. For the sake of the children. She did all she could to prevent any of the adults’ mistakes from affecting them. That doesn’t explain why she tried to rob a bank. It doesn’t excuse it. But maybe you’ve had the occasional really bad idea, too. Maybe you deserved a second chance. Maybe you’re not alone in that.

  * * *

  On the morning of the day before New Year’s Eve she left home with a pistol. That same evening, right now, she is walking back. A few hours after the hostage drama that the town will be talking about for many, many years to come, the mom picks up her daughters and asks: “Have you had a nice time at Dad’s?”

  “Yes, Mom! How about you?” the youngest daughter asks.

  The mom smiles, thinks for a moment, then shrugs: “Oh, you know… nothing much has happened. Everything’s been the same as usual.”

  But as they cross the bridge the mom puts one hand gently on her eldest daughter’s shoulder and whispers quickly into her ear: “You’re my princess, and my warrior, you can be both at the same time—promise me that you’ll never forget that. I know I’m not always such a great mom, but the fact that your dad and I are getting divorced isn’t you… you must never think, even for a single second that this is… your…” The eldest daughter nods, blinking away tears. The younger calls to them to hurry up and they run after her, their mom wipes her face and asks if they’d like pizza for supper, and the younger one cries out: “Do bears poop in the woods, or what?!”

  Just after they fall asleep that night, in their mom’s new home in the apartment of a kind and just-crazy-enough old lady called Estelle, the eldest daughter takes hold of her mom’s hand and whispers: “You’re a good mom, Mom. Don’t worry so much. It’s okay.”

  * * *

  And there they find it, at last: peace for the realm between the two kingdoms. All the magical, wonderful, made-up creatures can sleep safe and sound. Monkeys, frogs, elks, old ladies, everyone.

  72

  The new year arrives, which of course never means as much as you hope unless you happen to sell calendars. One day becomes another, now becomes then. Winter spreads out across the town like a relative with slightly too much self-confidence, the building on the other side of the road from the bank changes color in line with the temperature. It doesn’t look like much, of course, a gray building under its temporary white covering in a place where no one seems to choose to live but merely tolerates being stored. In a few years no doubt one of the locals will point to the door and tell some smug visitor from one of the big cities: “There was a hostage drama in there once.” The visitor will peer at the building and snort: “In there? Yeah, right!” Because things like that don’t happen in a town like this, everyone knows that.

  * * *

  It’s a few days after New Year, and a woman is coming out of the door. She’s laughing, her two daughters are with her, and they’ve just said something that’s made them all laugh so hard that their noses are dripping amid the swirling snowflakes. They walk to the trash bin and dispose of a pizza box, then the woman suddenly looks up and stops mid-stride. One of her daughters starts to climb up her while the other one bounces up and down.

  It’s getting late, the sky is January black and the falling snow is obscuring visibility, but she sees the police car on the other side of the street. Inside it are an older and a younger police officer. She stares at them, her daughters haven’t noticed her terror yet. All she can think is: Not in front of the girls. This takes a matter of seconds, but she manages to live two lifetimes. Theirs.

  * * *

  Then the police car rolls slowly toward her.

  * * *

  Past her.

  * * *

  It drives on, turns right, disappears.

  * * *

  “I’d understand if you want to bring her in,” Jim says quietly in the passenger seat, worried that his son’s changed his mind.

  “No, I just wanted to see her, so there were two of us in this,” his son says behind the wheel.

  “Two of us in what?”

  “Letting her go.”

  They don’t say any more about her. Either the woman outside the building or the one they both miss. Jim saved a bank robber and deceived his son, and Jack might perhaps never quite be able to forgive him for that, but it’s possible for them both to move on together despite that.

  They drive through their town for several minutes until the father eventually says, without looking at his son: “I know you’ve been offered a job in Stockholm.”

  Jack looks at him in surprise.

  “How the hell did you hear that?”

  “I’m not stupid, you know. Not all the time, anyway. Sometimes I just seem stupid.”

  Jack smiles shamefacedly.

  “I know, Dad.”

  “You ought to take it. The job.”

  Jack signals, turns, takes plenty of time to come up with a reply.

  “Take a job in Stockholm? Do you know how much it costs to live there?”

  His dad taps the plastic door of the glove compartment sadly with his wedding ring.

  “Don’t stay here for my sake, son.”

  “I’m not,” Jack lies.

  Because he knows that if his mom had been there, she’d have said, you know what, son? There are worse reasons to stay somewhere.

  “Our shift’s over,” Jim notes.

  “Would you like coffee?” Jack asks.

  “Now? It’s a bit late,” his dad yawns.

  “Let’s stop and get coffee,” Jack insists.

  “What for?”

  “I thought we could pick my car up from the station and go for a drive.”

  “Where to?”

  Jack makes his answer sound obvious.

  “To see my sister.”

  At that, Jim’s eyes lose their focus on his son and slide off toward the road.

  “What? Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why… why now?”

  “It’ll soon be her birthday. It’ll soon be your birthday. There are only eleven months to go before Christmas. Does it make any damn difference why? I just thought she might like to come home.”

  Jim has to stay focused on the road, the white line running along the middle of it, to keep his voice under control.

  “That’s at least a twenty-four-hour drive, though?”

  Jack rolls his eyes.

  “What the hell, Dad? I said we’d stop for coffee!”

  * * *

  So that’s what they do. They drive all night and all the following day. Knock on her door. Maybe she’ll go home with them, maybe she won’t. Maybe she’s ready to find a better way down, maybe she now knows the difference between how it feels to fly and how it feels to fall, maybe she doesn’t. That sort of thing’s impossible to control, just like love. Because perhaps it’s true what they say, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and uncontrollably for one simple reason: you’re theirs. Your parents and siblings can love you for the rest of your life, too, for precisely the same reason.

  The truth. There isn’t any. All we’ve managed to find out about the boundaries of the universe is that it hasn’t got any, and all we know about God is that we don’t know anything. So the only thing a mom who was a priest demanded of her family was simple: that we do our best. We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow.

  * * *

  We save those we can.

  73

  Spring arrives. It always finds us, in the end. The wind sweeps winter away, the trees rustle and birds start making a fuss, and nature suddenly crashes through with a deafening roar where the snow has swallowed every echo for months.

  Jack gets out of an elevator, bewildered and curious. He’s clutching a letter in his hand. It landed on his doormat one mornin
g, without a stamp. Inside was a note with this address on it, as well as the floor of the building and office number. Beneath that was a photograph of the bridge and another envelope, sealed, with another name written on it.

  Zara saw Jack at the police station and recognized him, in spite of the years that had passed. And because she’s been living those same moments over and over again since then, she realized that he’s been doing the same.

  * * *

  Jack finds the right office, knocks on the door. Ten years have passed since a man jumped, almost exactly the same amount of time since a young woman didn’t. She opens the door without knowing who he is, but his heart turns to confetti the moment he sees her, because he hasn’t forgotten. He hasn’t seen her since she was standing on the railing of the bridge, but he would still have recognized her, even in darkness.

  “I… I…,” Jack stammers.

  “Hello? Are you looking for someone?” Nadia wonders, friendly but bemused.

  He has to reach out for the doorframe, and her fingertips brush his. They don’t yet know how they’re capable of affecting each other. He hands her the large envelope, with his name written untidily on the front, and inside it are the photograph of the bridge and the address of her office. Beneath those are the smaller envelope with For Nadia written on the outside. Inside is a small note, on which Zara had written, in considerably neater handwriting, nine simple words.