The Therapist

by Helene Flood

  Sigurd is gone. He has lied. This seems indisputable. His document holder, the grey plastic tube which was gone, has reappeared. That’s all I know. Does that mean that someone has been here, or is that a conclusion I’ve drawn? I have to try to be clear, try to prevent my terrified brain from running wild.

  *

  The doorbell rings. It’s the pizza, I think, as I run down the stairs and into the hallway, but at the same time it could be someone else – it might be him, or someone who knows something? There is hope in this thought. A last hope, a luxury I still have.

  I turn the lock without looking through the peephole, open the door, and then, when I see the man and woman standing there, I know.

  They are wearing police uniforms. They are young, the woman around my age, the man a few years younger. He appears nervous. It’s the woman who speaks – she must be his superior. Perhaps he’s been brought along for some on-the-job training.

  “Are you Sara Lathus?” she says.

  “Yes,” I say, or rather my vocal cords say, of their own accord.

  “Yes, then I’m afraid that I have some sad news,” says the woman. She licks the corners of her mouth, once, twice. Perhaps she’s nervous, too. I imagine her at the police academy when they were given training on this, the delivery of difficult news – probably a double session, hardly more than ninety minutes. I imagine her sitting on the edge of her seat, eagerly taking notes: Be serious, but dignified. Deliver the message quickly. Be clear and concise.

  “I’m from Oslo police headquarters,” she says.

  Say where you’ve come from.

  “We found the body of a man who fits the description of your husband at around five o’clock this afternoon. We won’t have final confirmation of the person’s identity until a few days from now at the earliest, but everything indicates that the body is that of Sigurd Torp. He was discovered in Krokskogen, about two kilometres from Kleivstua.”

  She clears her throat. The man standing beside her looks at my shoulder, unable to meet my gaze. Or perhaps he’s been instructed not to.

  “I know this must be difficult to hear,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  On the day Sigurd and I got married it was cloudy and cold, a typical early autumn day in Oslo. Afterwards, we walked home beside the river and up to Torshov. I said to him, “You’re mine now, till death do us part.” He laughed and said to me, “Likewise.”

  And in this moment, that’s all I can think. The police officers look at me as I stand there staring into space, watching the pizza delivery boy as he parks his car in the driveway behind theirs and then gets out to stand there looking at us, hesitating, and all I can think is: till death do us part. He wasn’t mine for very long.

  “Open it,” Sigurd said.

  I picked up the gift that lay on the bed and tore off the paper, searching among all the newspaper for the tiny real present, and then pulled the paper off that, too. In the little box lay the chain.

  It was my birthday, the year I was doing my practical training at a rehabilitation centre for heavy drug users outside Oslo, instead of working at an outpatient clinic for young people in Bergen, as I had planned. Sigurd and I rented a small, ice-cold apartment in Pilestredet, and every morning I took the tram from Bislett to Oslo S, the train to Lillestrøm, and then walked in the pissing rain to the barracks-like building in which I worked. My patients were indifferent to me at best, and bordering on violent at worst. I was trained by an older psychologist two years away from retirement, who had clearly stopped caring many years earlier. On the train and tram home I tried to keep my mind occupied so I wouldn’t start to cry before I was standing under the shower at home where no-one could see me.

  “Sigurd,” I said, “it’s beautiful, but surely it isn’t real?”

  There was a glittering stone set in the pendant – small, but still. Sigurd’s smile widened, dimples appearing all over his face. I could never understand how it was possible, but Sigurd had dimples beside his eyes.

  “We don’t have any money,” I reminded him.

  “Don’t think about that,” he said, “think about whether or not you like it. If you don’t you can exchange it.”

  “Can I exchange it for money for the electricity bill?” I said, but laughed and looked at the necklace and knew that I could never part with it.

  A silver chain, a simple pendant, the tiniest little diamond. I wept in the shower so Sigurd wouldn’t see that I had been crying, but he wasn’t stupid.

  “Happy birthday,” Sigurd said. “Here, give it to me. I’ll help you put it on.”

  Monday, March 9: Husk

  There are police officers in my house. They rang the doorbell early this morning, with a feigned solemnity that disappeared the moment I let them in and they got to work. I’m sitting at the kitchen island with a cup of coffee. I haven’t dressed for the day. Nor have I showered. I haven’t called anyone. A few people have called me – Margrethe, Annika – but I haven’t picked up the phone. I’m simply waiting.

  The police are on the second floor. They are looking for things, but for what I don’t know – and nor do they, as I understand it. “Anything might be of interest,” said the cocky young policeman who is now trawling through my underwear and sock drawer. He arrived with the woman who came last night – she’s back, which I presume is meant to reassure me. But it’s having the opposite effect. I never want to see her again as long as I live, but here she is, refreshed and with her face arranged into sad creases to show me that she feels my pain.

  “Gundersen would like to talk to you at around eleven,” she says. “Gundersen is leading the investigation.”

  “He’s one of the best,” the cocky youth beside her says.

  I like him better, he’s down to earth. She’s a typical girl from the west side of Oslo: highlights in her hair, pearl earrings, and the sociolect, the diction, just like the girls I grew up with. I bet we have acquaintances in common. I imagine them having friendly evening get-togethers, her telling them about me – “You mustn’t tell anyone, it’s confidential, but . . .” Do I care? Would it matter if anyone found out? I search myself for the answer, but I find nothing within me to take hold of, no hooks on which I can hang theories, test how something would feel. Just a vast, empty void, ready to be filled with something. With blood, with grief, with the something or other I assume will be around the next corner.

  For now, I drink coffee. It doesn’t taste of anything. I can hear voices around me – the police, I suppose. The police are in my house. I haven’t answered any calls, haven’t attempted to contact my patients to cancel appointments. I’m supposed to see Sasha at nine-thirty, and I want to keep the appointment with her, I realise. There, yes, the shadow of a feeling. Sasha will do me good today. But stop, wait a minute – do patients exist to make their therapists feel better? Am I about to do something deeply unethical? Do I even care? I try to feel around inside the void within me, but it seems that was it. I can find no reaction to the breaching of ethical principles. Any reasonable person would understand that I’m in no fit state to be seeing patients, but now Sigurd’s gone I live alone, and I’m not sensible enough to give myself the necessary advice. So I haven’t called. My second patient is due at eleven, an anorexic fifteen year old – her I can’t see because the great Gundersen has decided that’s when he wants to speak to me. I should call her, but will I? Do I care? My mobile buzzes beside me – seeing as I’ve been waiting for it to ring all weekend I jump, but it isn’t Sigurd. Of course it isn’t him, it can’t be, I know that now. It’s Margrethe again. They’ve spoken to her – that’s one of the few things I do know, and that’s good, because it means I don’t have to do it.

  Here is what I know: Sigurd is dead. He was found in Krokskogen forest. They think he was murdered. They’ve spoken to his mother. The first three of these facts were given to me yesterday evening by the policewoman I don’t like, without my asking for them; the fourth I asked her about myself. It was the only question I asked. I sto
od on the step and stared past them, the policewoman and her colleague. Stared at the confused pizza delivery boy, who was clearly wondering whether he should bring a pizza up to a house with the police standing at the door, and I felt a peculiar kind of expectation – what would he do? – felt the need to make a bet with myself, ten kroner says he turns and leaves out of pure discomfort. In the end he set the pizza on the bonnet and waited. I turned my gaze back to the woman I didn’t like.

  “Will you be contacting anyone else?” I said.

  She looked at me, a questioning frown cleaving her forehead, her neatly plucked brows lifting. She looked surprised. Apparently this isn’t the first thing one is expected to ask on hearing that one’s husband has been killed. There’s something satisfying about seeing this sort of west-side yuppie surprised, because it happens so rarely – they have such boring lives, nothing unpredictable ever happens to them.

  “Who were you thinking of?” she said.

  “His mother.”

  “Yes, of course – I mean, if you’d like us to?”

  And so the burden of this choice was dumped onto me. I wonder what they said about this at the lecture on how to deliver the news that a loved one has died. Or perhaps this is best practice, user involvement or whatever you want to call it. The pizza delivery boy checked his watch. I wondered why I cared about all these things, why my mind travelled down these paths, why it seemed so much easier to let it chew away on these details instead of focusing on the message I had received, the veritable elephant on the doorstep.

  “Yes,” I said, clearing my throat, “I’d like you to.”

  I took my mobile from my pocket to give her the number, and saw that Annika had sent me a message.

  Hope you’re O.K., let me know if you hear anything. I’ll call you tomorrow. Look after yourself. Hugs.

  I knew I should call her. I gave the policewoman Margrethe’s address and number, and for a while that was all that happened. I read out the numbers, she noted them down, the kind of situation you might find yourself in every week, just jotting down a number. The pizza delivery boy looked at his watch again.

  “We’ll come back tomorrow morning to ask you a few questions,” she said, “and to take a little look around the house, if that’s O.K.”

  “O.K.,” I said. O.K., sure, they could do whatever they wanted. Who was I to protest?

  I was just glad that they seemed to have a plan for how to move forward, a script for what needed to be done in this kind of situation, guidelines perhaps. Yes, of course they have guidelines, probably printed in a brochure and inserted into a ring binder made available at every police station across the country, or perhaps a separate booklet, a dedicated folder, a printed publication with a spiral-bound spine. Dear God, why was I thinking about all these things?

  “We’ll be able to answer any questions you might have then, too,” she said.

  As I understood it, I was expected to be wondering about all kinds of things. But as it happened, I did not have a single question.

  “Do you have someone you can call?” she said. “I mean, your parents, or a friend – someone like that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I can call my sister.”

  “Good. It’s best not to be alone in situations like this.”

  How would you know? I wanted to ask her. How is it possible to make such a general recommendation as to what would be good for someone in such an acute situation? But of course I said nothing. The pizza delivery boy had started to walk up towards the house. He’d decided to carry out his assigned task. He surprised me in that, I have to say.

  “Thank you,” I said – for what I don’t know.

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  Her eyes creased into a squint; she stretched out a hand, placed it on my arm and squeezed.

  “Are you O.K.?” she said.

  And I had the peculiar feeling that I needed to reassure her, that the task fell to me, the next of kin, to comfort her, the professional. Are you O.K.? Who was I to answer such a question, with a fresh, gaping wound?

  “Yes,” I said.

  As he got closer to the house, the pizza delivery boy almost slowed to a stop.

  “We’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. And that’s how she told me that she would return. Offer information about what will happen next. They turned to go then, the police officers, and almost walked straight into the pizza delivery boy. For a moment there was confusion, they wondered what he was doing there, but said nothing; he wasn’t expecting them to turn around; I was beyond providing an explanation, so he ended up speaking, “I don’t mean to intrude, but I have this delivery for you . . .” and the policewoman seemed to feel that she should take responsibility for handling the situation, she mumbled something generic along the lines of it being good to eat something at a time like this, and the young policeman nodded in agreement. And then they walked back to the police car as the delivery boy held out the pizza box to me.

  *

  They found him in Krokskogen forest. His father’s old cabin. I stood there in the hallway with the pizza box in my hands and knew what I had to do. There was one simple thing I needed to check.

  Sigurd’s father had always had a passion for the sea, and while the rest of the family had no connection to that kind of thing other than Margrethe’s friend having a small sailing boat at Hankø, Sigurd’s father had left behind a few maritime effects. One of them was a so-called garnkule, a hollow sphere of green glass encased in a net of crocheted twine. In the old days fishermen used them to float their nets, but now they’re mostly sold as souvenirs. Sigurd’s father had probably claimed that this one “was actually used for fishing” – he had bought it years ago while on holiday in the north. Sigurd attached it to our cabin key, and both he and Margrethe laughed heartily at the idea – because it’s a cabin in the forest, he said to me when I didn’t laugh, as if that explained it. He would tell the joke to people who came to the house, to my Pappa and Annika and Henning, to Thomas and Jan Erik. He never garnered more than a polite chuckle from anyone, but I don’t think he noticed. The key has its own special place, in a little cabinet with hooks inside it in Sigurd’s office. As long as we’re not using it, as long as we’re not at the cabin, it hangs there alongside the other keys. But the Krokskogen key, with its huge garnkule, is the one that always sticks out. All I needed to do was take eight steps into Sigurd’s study.

  There was the little cabinet. I opened it. No garnkule. No cabin key.

  Later, as I stood in the kitchen with the pizza box in my hands and stared at the T.V., which carried on as if nothing had happened, I realised it would be impossible for me to call Annika as I had promised the policewoman. Annika would support me and make everything right, just as she always does, but the very thought of calling her in such raw pain crushed something inside me.

  And so I went to bed. After all, why not?

  It’s impossible to describe what that night was like. Of course I hardly slept. That’s all I can say. The first piece of pizza was eaten by one of the officers now rummaging through my belongings on the floor above me.

  It’s nine-thirty and I’ve showered, dressed for work and made my way over to my office above the garage. Two police cars are parked along our drive, I can see them through the window from where I’m sitting. I haven’t yet called the girl who is due to come at eleven; I’m not sure what I plan to do about it. I should call now, before she leaves school to make her way here, as she will have done by the time my session with Sasha is over, but I don’t have the energy to move from the chair in which I sit.

  Instead, I count. One-hundred-and-twenty-four, one-hundred- and-twenty-five, one-hundred-and-twenty-six. I’m not sure why. I’ve clearly stopped caring why. Police officers may have taken over my house, but here in my office I’m still in charge. I sit in my chair, the chair that feels most mine, in which I sit opposite Christoffer, and opposite Sasha, too. One-hundred-and-thirty-one, one-hundred-and-thirty-two. Now Sasha appears, down the
re in the street. She’s wearing a black coat, a red scarf around her neck. It feels good to see her. She’s my patient. I’m her therapist. I have a job to do.

  Sasha is a trans person. The name she was given at birth is Henrik, but she says she has known she isn’t a boy her entire life. This became clear to her during puberty, and now, at the age of sixteen, she’s receiving hormone treatment, dresses as a woman, and has adopted a feminine name, just like that. All this might sound like a real handful to anyone else, but Sasha is actually one of my healthiest patients. She knows exactly where she stands in terms of her gender identity, something most sixteen year olds can only dream of. Her parents are nothing but supportive, and she has some great friends around her who accept her for who she is. She feels the need for therapy in order to “clear her head”, as she puts it, which she mostly needs to do because of the stupidity of certain narrow-minded people she encounters. She’s also somewhat devastated that she has to wait until she’s eighteen to complete her gender affirmation surgery and have her legal gender registered as “female”, but even this she manages to handle with good humour for the most part. She comes to me just once a month, and our sessions are good. The interventions I make are well received; she considers my suggestions and is active in using them. I could not have asked for a better patient to see on the day after I’ve learned that Sigurd is dead.

  One-hundred-and-eighty-eight. Sasha stops beside the two police cars. For a moment she stands still, contemplating them, then lifts her gaze to the house, before letting it wander towards the garage and up to the window where I sit. I lift a hand and wave. She lifts hers, gloved although the weather is mild, and returns my greeting. But she doesn’t smile. In fact, she looks sceptical, almost afraid. I wonder why as I watch her walk the last stretch to the garage, and realise, as she rounds the corner and disappears from my field of view, that it’s because I didn’t smile myself. I don’t think I can manage it. I slap myself hard across the cheek with the flat of my hand. Pull yourself together – you’re a professional. If I don’t maintain some kind of control, I can’t work. I wonder whether I really care, and feel a sharp tug somewhere deep within me. Good, so there are some feelings left in there. I may not care about professional ethics, but I do care about Sasha.