The Therapist

by Helene Flood

  Silence on the other end. I sit stock-still. Behind me I hear nothing, only the rustling of the smallest child moving in Annika’s arms, but neither of them says anything. It’s so silent here in this house where it’s usually impossible to hear yourself think. But here stands my sister, listening intently to my conversation, and I know I’ll have more explaining to do when I hang up.

  “Have you called his work?” Margrethe says.

  “I’ve called him on his mobile,” I say. “That’s the phone he uses.”

  “But have you called his colleagues?”

  “No.”

  “No, of course.”

  She exhales, a quick, efficient sigh – she’s solved my problem.

  “Call them,” she says, “or go down to the office. He’s probably at work. Sigurd is so conscientious, he’s always working, you know how he is.”

  “Yes,” I say, listless now. “And anyway, most people who go missing turn up within twenty-four hours.”

  Margrethe doesn’t deign to respond to this; I sense she doesn’t like this angle, not one bit.

  “Call me when you’ve managed to get hold of him,” she says, sharper than usual. “Speak soon. Bye.”

  I hang up and turn around to see Annika standing there with the boy on her arm. They’re staring at me, both of them.

  “Is Sigurd missing?” Annika says, and in her voice I hear the fear that I’m so desperate to keep out of my own.

  I sit in the passenger seat as Annika steers us out of the cul-de-sac and onto a larger artery in the intricate network of roads that makes up their neighbourhood, a grid you have no chance of learning to navigate unless you live here. We’re on the way to the police station. Annika acted with lightning speed when I told her what had happened. I spoke using small words, attempting to downplay the situation – told her how the policewoman who answered the telephone said that most people do of course turn up. I repeat this remark as if it were a mantra – I’m sure there must be an easy, simple explanation.

  “Don’t listen to what the police say, Sara,” Annika said, aghast. “Go down there right now and make a report.”

  “But she said . . .” I started, but couldn’t finish my sentence. Could hear how listless I sounded, bowing to the system.

  “They say whatever they can get away with,” Annika said, snatching up her keys from the kitchen shelf. “But if you report him missing, they have no choice but to open a case. Come on, we’ll go together.”

  Using the arm that wasn’t holding the child, she took her jacket from a chair and went out into the garden. She’s impressive is Annika, when she sets her mind to something. Now her every step, her every gesture, was determined. I ambled after her, feeling a hint of the reassurance I remember from our childhood: Annika will fix it for me. I stood on the veranda and watched her call out to Henning, who was still up the tree.

  “Sara and I have to go to the police,” she said, before giving her husband a few logistical instructions.

  “Is everything O.K.?” Henning asked from his perch. From where I stood I could see only his feet, but I heard him loud and clear.

  “I hope so,” Annika said.

  Henning came down from the tree; the smallest boy was handed over to his father, and soon my sister and I were sitting in the family Honda, making our way up one narrow street and down the next.

  “It’s important to be persistent with the police,” Annika says. “They do their job, but like everyone else they have limited resources, so it doesn’t hurt to show you’re keeping tabs on what they’re doing.”

  “I know,” I say, and I do – I know this all too well now. Of course you have to be persistent, say that you’re taking the situation seriously and demand that they do the same. Have I not learned this about every public agency I’ve come into contact with through my work? Why should the police be any different? As Annika turns onto the motorway and shifts the car into fourth gear, a gnawing sense of self-reproach seeps through me. Why did I listen to the woman I spoke to on the telephone this morning? Why did I let her mollify me? Why didn’t I trust myself, my gut instinct, my memory, reason? Of course there’s no logical explanation, other than that Sigurd has lied, which in itself indicates that something is dead wrong. Why didn’t I stand my ground, demand to speak to somebody there and then? What if he’s in danger? What if something terrible has happened? What if I could have done something, but instead was sauntering around the stores in Majorstuen in an attempt to pass the time? Annika would never have gone wandering around the shops like that – she would have known what to do straight away. She’s the one who knows how to make everything right, and here I am, the little sister again, with my snotty nose and grazed knees, and since our mum is dead and our dad always working and above such things, it’s Annika who will have to find me a plaster, fix me up. Which she always did, with her slapdash movements – “Why is it always me who has to help you?”

  “Annika,” I say, “do you think, I mean, was it stupid of me? Not to call?”

  Annika glances at me. We’re driving down the long stretch of road beside the fjord.

  “Sara,” she says, “that has no bearing on the situation.”

  She means to comfort me, to lift the guilt from my shoulders, but it only makes it worse. Makes it into an even worse case of guilt – because yes, this has now become a case, and as soon as we get down to Grønland it will be a real case, a police case, with a file and everything, or at least I think so. It has nothing to do with me – there’s nothing I could have done differently. I close my eyes and imagine myself at the moment he left our bedroom early on Friday morning. How he had kissed me on the forehead, his lips cool against my skin. “Just go back to sleep.”

  Before we go into the police station I throw up behind a litter bin.

  *

  I sleep at Annika and Henning’s place that night, unable to stand the thought of going home to Old Torp’s empty house. We eat tacos and watch a James Bond film on T.V. I get a text message from Margrethe in response to the one I sent informing her that I’ve reported her son missing, telling her that she must contact the police if she hears from Sigurd. She’s short with me even in her text – of course, thank you for letting me know, she writes. It’s almost acerbic, I think. The film flickers past me. I’m unable to keep track of what the action is about, and it’s all the same to me. I go to bed in the study twenty minutes before it ends, on the old IKEA sofa bed that was in the living room of the first apartment Henning and Annika shared – the sofa bed they conceived Theo on, Annika once told me through a titter. I close my eyes and think: two nights ago we were in bed together. Just forty-or-so hours ago, he kissed me on the forehead before he left. He smelled of toothpaste and coffee, the bag slung over his shoulder. It almost seems as if I’ve made the whole thing up.

  I’m so tired. It’s all so strange. I almost expect to wake up early tomorrow morning and discover that I’ve been dreaming or hallucinating.

  Every evening he comes to visit us. We’re often sitting on the sofa watching T.V. when he arrives; it’s late, we’re half-asleep. He has dewdrops in his hair and wears a fleece sweater and woolly thermals under his overcoat. He’s the only guy who forms a permanent part of the flatshare, although Benedicte has an on-and-off boyfriend. Sometimes he stops to buy something on the way over: fruit, chocolate or popcorn. He flops down onto the sofa beside me, immediately puts his arms around me and pulls me in close, as if he can’t properly relax until he’s holding me. He smells of cold and sweat and chemicals. He presses his lips to my hair and I smell precisely that, the cold of the building in which he stands and works all day, the frozen sweat he’s still accumulating, the chemicals he works with – varnish, glue, paint. The flecks on his hands. Sometimes the odour of wood, if the model he’s making calls for extensive carpentry. He smells of work.

  I now know that he bites his nails when deep in thought. I now know that when he was a teenager his father died of pancreatic cancer, two months after being diagno
sed. I now know that he embraces me as tightly as he can before he comes.

  He’s a visiting student at the school of architecture, but will be going back to Oslo once the spring semester is over. I have another six months of my course remaining. We talk about everything: about the parents we’ve lost and the ones we have left, about our childhoods and our studies and what we like to watch on T.V. But of what will happen when he leaves we say nothing.

  “True intimacy is fleeting,” I say to Ronja, “because you can only ever be completely and utterly yourself when you know it isn’t going to last.”

  “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say,” Ronja says.

  I try not to think about the future. I want to create some beautiful memories for myself. I skive off early lectures so I can stay in bed with Sigurd, wake with him, make small talk while we’re still half-asleep so that we ask each other, “Did you just say something, or did I dream it?” Lying there with him in the bedroom as it brightens, listening to the sounds of my friends beyond the door, the coffee machine, the rustling of newspaper pages, the hum of their low-voiced conversation.

  Showering with him after they leave; standing there pressed close to him, naked, wet and quick to laugh in the cramped shower cabinet. “No, I’m serious,” he says, “you have to wash my back, I can’t reach, it’s too tight in here.” Drinking coffee and reading the newspaper across the table from him, thinking that we’re like a married couple, testing out this feeling, this future, all the while knowing that it won’t last. There’s only a few weeks left. Sauntering down to the city’s main square with him, hand in hand. Spring is on its way. His semester will soon be over. And then he’ll go, and I’ll stay, and I’ll find someone new and this will be no more than a memory.

  The week before he leaves we’re eating dinner in the cellar of the Naboen Pub.

  “There’s a girl in the year above me who did her practical training in Oslo. So it’s possible, if you find a placement yourself,” I say to him.

  He puts down his fork and looks at me, and there’s something so intense about his gaze right then, his eyes wide open, and he says, “Do you mean it?”

  “Yes,” I say, afraid now, unsure whether I’m moving too fast. “Yeah, I dunno, I mean, if you want me to.”

  And then a sunshine smile bursts through all the nooks and crannies of Sigurd’s face, through all the dimples and wrinkles in his cheeks and forehead and around his eyes.

  “I’m just so damn relieved,” he says, “because I’ve been walking around for weeks wondering how on earth I’m going to convince the school to give me another year in Bergen.”

  I move back to Oslo that summer, and Sigurd and I rent an apartment in Pilestredet.

  Sunday, March 8: White noise

  I arrive home in Kongleveien just before twilight. Annika and Henning have gone on working in the garden while I’ve played with the boys, drawing with crayons and playing house under the table in the living room. The boys – and Theo in particular – have been excited. Couldn’t believe that Aunt Sara, who usually only wants to play for ten minutes – and reluctantly at that – remained on her knees in the table house for more than an hour, let them ride on her back, play havoc with her as much as they wished. “Can’t you come visit every day, Sara?” Theo says, and it warms the cockles of my undeserving heart. I greedily accept it and close my eyes, because it’s false – the only time I’ve really let go and played with them is because it is preferable to being alone at home.

  “Why don’t you just stay here?” Annika says. “Spend a couple of nights on our sofa.”

  But I can’t. My work is in my house – both my real job, and the other one. To be there when he comes home. To have the candles lit, be waiting for him. I know that, and Annika does, too, or at least she says she understands as she shakes her head. There is life in Annika’s house – it’s loud and exhausting, but it’s alive, and I’m dreading having to go home to the abandoned building site of a house in which I live. But I know I have to. Finally, I gather enough courage to crawl out from the playhouse, put on my shoes and go home.

  It’s so quiet when I let myself in; Sigurd’s absence is palpable. I stand in the hallway, staring at the linoleum flooring worn down by Old Torp, on which Sigurd’s mother would walk barefoot when sneaking out at night during her youth, and I listen. What am I hoping to hear? Him? It’s so quiet, the only sounds are those that are always there: the distant judder of the train; the creaking that can be heard in all older wooden houses, of the framework that holds us, groaning under the weight of the rooms in which we live. But I hear no sounds from him. Have to call out to him regardless, but dread doing that, too, as I stand there, still wearing my shoes. As if I’ve just stopped in at this house, as if I don’t live here, am not about to spend the evening inside. I don’t want to hear my voice, lonely and unanswered, call out his name.

  I take off my shoes first. Put them on the old sheets of newspaper where we set our shoes – his are there, too, his trainers and the thin-soled shoes he’s taken out for spring. So big beside mine, like boats for tiny creatures. I pluck up my courage.

  “Sigurd?”

  My voice doesn’t echo between the walls as I expected it to. Instead it sounds small, almost imperceptible; it stops against the walls, can’t possibly be heard all the way up in the living room on the floor above. So I go up, careful to avoid the loose treads, hear the wood creaking and sighing with every step I take. The living room looms large in the dusk. I say his name again, before turning on the light. Sigurd? I click the switch; see that the room is empty.

  I don’t want to sit down in this room – something is different, but I’m not sure what. The curtains? Is that the way they usually hang? Sigurd always pushes them as far from the windows as possible, says he wants to let in plenty of light, found it unnecessary to buy them at all. Did I move them on Friday evening when I sat here alone? Could I – who remembers so much in such detail – have done this, but forgotten? Might Margrethe – the only other person who has keys to the house – have returned from Hankø and been here? To ruffle our curtains?

  In our bedroom on the second floor I have the same feeling, less tangible here but also more frightening because this is where we sleep, because nobody but us has any business being here. Our bed, covered by the bedspread. There are some creases in one end of it, as if someone has sat on it, or perhaps just leant a hand on it. Did I do that before I left? I brushed my teeth, I came in, put on jeans and a sweater, decided against it, got out another sweater which I laid out on the bed, and then changed. Has the sweater created these creases? Or, more to the point, am I losing my mind?

  My nerves have taken over, I decide as I make myself a cup of tea in the kitchen. I’ve been to the police station to report my husband missing; it’s been more than two days since I last heard from him. This is what I would tell myself if I were my own therapist. It’s no surprise that I’m nervous. It isn’t strange that my mind is spinning faster, more paranoid than usual. I’m in emergency mode – have to remember that all these thoughts of crisis I’m having are exactly that: thoughts. They’re not any truer, just because they scare me. I need to understand my own reaction. I have to calm down, understand that right now, given my understandable anxiety, I’m not at my most clear-headed. I shouldn’t be attempting to solve the mystery of Sigurd’s voicemail message; should not be trying to understand why the curtains look different. I should order a pizza, watch T.V. for a couple of hours before I go to bed. I have to work tomorrow. I’ll call Sigurd’s colleagues. Things will be easier once the weekend is over. And perhaps Sigurd will come sauntering through the door this evening as planned, and this nightmare will be over.

  That’s when I notice it. Sigurd’s document tube. It’s back. It’s hanging on its hook.

  *

  This will be no relaxing evening eating pizza in front of the T.V. – or rather, the T.V. is on and the pizza ordered, but that doesn’t mean anything. The voices from the box – rea
lity show part-icipants discussing their strategies and the one-notch-louder advertising voices enthusiastically recommending washing-up liquids and online casinos – are nothing but white noise. I direct my gaze at the flickering images as in my inner cinema I play the scene over and over again. Scene 1: Friday, lunchtime. I’ve listened to Sigurd’s answerphone message. I eat my tuna sandwich. I look at the empty hook, consider it. That’s peculiar, I think. Has he taken it with him? Wasn’t he supposed to pick up Thomas early this morning? Cut to a new scene: Saturday morning. I look at the empty hook, again, before I go down to the hallway and let myself out. I know that’s what happened.

  Someone has been in my house. There is no other explan-ation. It’s not Julie – this happened while I was in Nordstrand, at Annika’s place.

  And yet I can’t believe it. I go through the reasoning again and again, sitting unseeing before the T.V. Am I absolutely – one hundred per cent – sure? Is there no other justification?

  The best therapist to ever deliver a lecture at my university said: “The most important thing you can do for your neurotic patients is this: help them to see the world as it is. Not the way they want it to be, or the way they fear it will be. Not the way the conclusions they have drawn tell them it is. As it is. Implicitly, help them to distinguish their imagination, desires and fears from reality. For example, the nervous, newly married woman who’s afraid she’s married the wrong man needs help to understand that the doubt she feels need not say anything magical about the relationship she’s in. The young student who buckles under exam pressure needs help to understand that his fear tells him nothing about his abilities, nor anything about how he will do in the exam. Here are the truths: every now and again, you find yourself irritated by your husband. You think the material you need to learn for the exam is hard. That’s all. It isn’t realistic to love and admire one’s spouse every waking moment of every day you spend together. It isn’t a given that you will never understand all your course material, just because you don’t understand it on first reading. The world isn’t so simple. The truths are what is. Everything else is the conclusions you draw.”