Playdate

by Alex Dahl

  I look down and see Josie’s mamma sitting in the driver’s seat of the car that brought me here. It’s parked in front of another house that’s very big but has no windows. Its roof is made from brown metal and it has huge red doors, opened wide. Josie’s mamma drives the car slowly into the house, its wheels spinning in thick mud.

  There’s a large courtyard between the house I’m inside and the house Josie’s mamma drove the car into. There’s another building too – it has only one floor but it’s very long, with many dark windows. Like the house I’m inside, it also has plants covering it. There are lots of puddles in the courtyard, some so big they’re like little lakes, and I remember the rainstorm last night. I also remember seeing Josie’s mamma again for the first time, standing in the enormous open door like a witch in a nightmare. The man carried me up the stairs in the dark. I wonder where he is now. He was nice to me even if he’s been to prison. He knows the way home; could he take me there?

  Then I remember that I heard the man and Josie’s mamma talking in the night, and when they were finished the man drove away in a small white car. I got up and watched from the window.

  Josie’s mamma didn’t want him to go – I was on the landing, listening. I can move around in this house if I want to, it’s not like the attic house in Arden where I had to stay locked away because there were dangerous people there.

  ‘It isn’t safe for you,’ Josie’s mamma said to the man. ‘Stay here until it all dies down.’

  ‘This won’t ever die down, goddammit, Jacqueline!’ the man said.

  ‘Please don’t go,’ said Josie’s mamma, but then the door slammed and the man drove off down a long driveway and into the thick woods.

  My windows have little purple doors that I can shut to make the room totally dark. I think this is a farm. I’ve been to a farm before, but that farm was different because it was at the edge of a town and I could see houses in the distance and chimneys blowing smoke from factories. Here, I can see nothing but big sky, fields, mountains. And Josie’s mamma, coming back out from the windowless house. She looks different now. She isn’t wearing make-up. And her hair is a different color – it was almost black before, but now it’s light brown with yellow streaks. She is crossing the courtyard and looks up at the house and sees me standing here. Her face, which was angry or maybe sad, becomes smiley. She waves at me, but I take a step back and stand beside the window so I can’t be seen from outside.

  I hear her steps on the stairs. I stare at the door, which looks like it was made from a knobby tree trunk. The house is completely quiet. Then the door opens.

  ‘Hey, sweet girl,’ says the mamma, ‘how about I fix you something to eat? You must be starving.’

  I make myself look her in the eyes. ‘No.’

  ‘You can’t hide up here forever,’ she says.

  ‘I’m not hiding,’ I say, ‘and I’m not staying here forever. I’m going home.’

  Josie’s mamma is standing in the middle of the room and I run past her and through the door. I can hear her laughing as I run down the corridor. There’s a huge wooden staircase that goes all the way around a big open space, like in movies. I rush down it, and downstairs there are many rooms one after the other, but I pull open the main door and run outside into the courtyard.

  It’s very cold and I’m not wearing socks or shoes or anything, only the nightdress, but I don’t care, I have to find someone to help me. I scream ‘Mamma!’ as loud as I can, then I scream ‘Help!’, but I can’t see anyone at all. I turn around to see if Josie’s mamma is coming to catch me, but the door is wide open and empty. I don’t know where Josie is either, but I don’t care, I just want to get out of here. I run through the gap between the house with the black car inside and the long, low house to the side of it, and come to a metal fence with a strange round door. I’ve seen one before – it’s to stop cows because they can’t go through it, but people can.

  I hurry through it and then I run up a long hill towards where the forest begins. The mushy mud makes my bare feet slip. I’m halfway there when I see that there are two big cows in the field, chewing and looking at me, so I run even faster. There are sharp stones underneath the mud and grass, and they slice my skin open. I fall three times but get back up again and keep running. When I reach the first trees I turn back and look. I can see the houses but no people. Thick smoke puffs from a chimney on the biggest of the houses, the one I was inside. From here it looks like a fairytale house with the purple window-doors and the thick leaves covering the whole house. I have to get away from here. I can’t see any other houses, just fields and trees and mountains. It’s nothing like at home in Sandefjord, where one house looks into the garden of the next, and where you can almost always see the sea. The mountains are even higher than they looked from the window and maybe they’re the same mountains I went to with Mamma and Pappa, where me and Lyder learned to ski in the kids’ club.

  I step into the forest. The trees are taller and thicker than they looked from the house and it’s quite dark. I’m so cold. My eyes begin to cry even though I don’t want them to. How can I find someone to help me when there’s nobody here? I walk a bit, but I’m too cold and my feet hurt so much and when I look down I see that they’re bleeding from lots of places and this makes me cry more and all I can hear is myself crying, but then I hear something else too and I stop for a moment and it gets louder and louder. It’s a voice shouting my name, but in a happy voice, almost like a song. ‘Lucia! Lucia! Lucia! Where are you, sweet girl?’

  I have to get away. If I don’t get away from her, I’ll never see my mamma and pappa and Lyder again. But this is all my fault to begin with. It’s my own fault that I’m here. My whole life, I wanted a sister. My brother is stupid sometimes. He only talks about Lego and farts and dinosaurs and he doesn’t like it when Pappa tickles me on the sofa because he gets jealous so he hits me even if it isn’t allowed to hit, and when we drive in the car he makes engine noises all the time even if we’re going really far, like to Grandpa’s cabin. So I wanted a sister. I wanted a sister so bad I even prayed for one. On my birthday Lyder peed into the bathtub so he would get Mamma and Pappa to look at him instead of me even though it was my birthday, and I screamed at him that I hated him and that I wished he’d never been born and that all I wanted was another family. My mamma grabbed my arm and said, ‘Hey, don’t you ever say that,’ and, ‘Be careful what you wish for, you drama queen.’

  ‘Lucia!’ calls Josie’s mamma and her voice is louder now. Closer. ‘You’ve got this all wrong, sweetie. Come here so we can talk.’

  I move very quietly over to a tree with low-hanging branches. I pull myself up onto the lowest branch, like it’s one of the climbing frames at my school. I step onto a higher branch, but it isn’t strong enough and it snaps off loudly and I fall down onto the bottom branch and I grab hold of it but it’s bendy and I can hear it groan. If I can hear it, then probably so can Josie’s mamma. I grab another branch and pull myself onto it, then another and another. I sit entirely still, trying to figure out where the voice is coming from. It’s really close now. My whole body shivers. I press my face close to the thin trunk, letting it rub against my cheek. My eyes are still crying because now that I am sitting still my feet hurt so much and I won’t look down at them because if they are full of blood I might scream.

  ‘Lucia!’ calls Josie’s mamma, and she must be almost right underneath me, though I can’t see her; it’s a Christmas tree kind of tree and the branches are thick and prickly and very dark green. I hold my breath and count silently in my head. When I get to thirty-six, I hear twigs snapping and Josie’s mamma must be walking away. But it isn’t twigs, it’s the branch I’m sitting on. It suddenly breaks right off, dropping me down onto the one underneath it, and I scramble to grab hold of something and climb higher, but there isn’t anything, and I slam to the ground, scratching myself badly on other branches on the way down.

  I can’t breathe and when I open my mouth to scream, nothing happens
and I can’t move because I landed on my leg and it hurts so much. I lie still and look up at the white sky high above the black and green branches. Josie’s mamma might not have heard me fall. She might go back to the house and I can try to get up and find help.

  ‘There you are,’ says a voice. ‘You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you were playing dead.’ Josie’s mamma is standing over me now, laughing a little, but then she notices that I’m hurt and her face becomes worried. She sits down on the ground next to me, and says, ‘Oh no, darling, what have you done? Oh, sweet girl, Maman is going to fix you.’

  My eyes start to cry again and Josie’s mamma wipes the tears from my face and then I notice that her eyes have changed – they are brown like mine now. I want to ask her how come, but I also want to not speak to her.

  ‘You aren’t my mamma,’ I say.

  She picks me up very gently and wraps me in a fuzzy pink shawl that smells nice, like sea and flowers, and she carries me slowly back out through the forest, towards the fields and the mountains and the farm in the hollow.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ she says.

  28

  Jacqueline

  The weight of the child in her arms as she crosses the field is just right – familiar and heavy but not too heavy. The girl is genuinely hurting and the cuts on her bare feet bleed onto Jacqueline’s beige overcoat. She cradles Lucia like a much younger child; she’s not struggling anymore. Jacqueline’s sneakers are slick with mud and by the time she reaches the cattle gate, her legs hurt with the strain.

  The front door is wide open and she rushes the last few steps across the courtyard. Inside the farmhouse, Josie stands watching from the top of the staircase. Lucia’s sudden hoarse cries echo around the vaulted entrance hall. ‘Mamma!’ she screams, over and over, her voice breaking like glass shattering on stone.

  Jacqueline repositions her so that she is flung over her shoulder like a baby, and blood drips onto the coarse stone floor from one of the wounds on her feet. She takes the stairs slowly, rubbing the girl’s back as she goes, and her screams turn guttural, then gravelly, then whispered. In the bathroom, she places the child gently on the closed toilet seat and runs a bath in the deep, ancient tub. At first, Lucia won’t get in, and when she finally does, she starts up again, wailing and sobbing. The water must hurt her cuts – blood seeps from them into the water in pink, cloudy bursts. Jacqueline very gently runs a sponge across Lucia’s jutting shoulder blades, around the deep hollows of her collarbone, down the small of her back. When she is finished, she hauls her from the water like a big glinting fish and towels her off tenderly. Her little face has gone from tortured and anguished to wan and unreadable.

  Very carefully, she sits the child back down on the closed toilet lid and takes her feet in her hands, rubbing antiseptic ointment into them in slow circles. Most of the bleeding has stopped now, except for one cut that’s particularly deep. She wraps a gauze bandage around that foot, giving the back of Lucia’s calf a little squeeze when she is finished.

  She can’t believe the little girl is really here and that they have actually managed to bring her here. For the past couple of days, Jacqueline has felt giddy with excitement. At Mölleryd, when Mikko’s ex-girlfriend showed up unexpectedly, she’d feared it was game over, that it would all go to hell, but now she realizes that the woman’s appearance there was a gift from heaven. They did what they had to, and it turns out to have been a stroke of genius. ‘Mölleryd Body Likely the Female Abductor’, read VG’s main headline this morning. She read it standing ankle-deep in mud at the very edge of one of the fields belonging to Le Tachoué, where it’s occasionally possible to pick up a 4G mobile signal. She laughed into the cold wind rushing down from the mountainside behind her. Could it really be that she was free?

  She picks the child up off the toilet seat and carries her across the hallway to her bedroom. In the weeks before Jacqueline and Josie traveled to Norway to bring Lucia home, she spent a lot of time on the child’s room. She removed most of its previous contents to a smaller bedroom towards the back of the house, the one that overlooks the meadows and the forest beyond. She replaced the toddler’s bed with a beautiful carved wooden bed, perfect for a big girl like Lucia. She bought new clothes for both Josie and Lucia: pristine white linen smocks and soft cotton tights and T-shirts with nostalgic prints, two sets of everything. Jacqueline likes children to look like children and not like small, commercialized teenagers. She agonized over making the room just right, because she knew that coming here would be very difficult for Lucia; of course it would.

  ‘I spent a lot of time making this room nice for you before we brought you home,’ she says, placing Lucia on the bed, taking extra care not to graze her injured feet. ‘This used to be my bedroom. And before that it was my grandfather’s, your great-grandfather’s. It was him who built this house. I wanted you to have the room with the best views of the Pyrenees. When you feel better, I’ll point out all the highest mountains to you. We have all the time in the world now.’

  Lucia turns towards the wall and sheds more tears onto the crisp white bedsheets.

  ‘I got you some new stuff. It’s all in your closet. It’s really nice stuff, sweetie. I hope you’ll feel like taking a look later.’

  ‘When can I go home?’ asks Lucia.

  ‘Look, you and I need to talk—’

  ‘No! I just want to go home!’

  ‘I understand how hard this is. And how confused you must be. You must think I’m a terrible person and that your life is over. But, sweetheart, that couldn’t be further from the truth.’

  Jacqueline sits down on the bed next to Lucia and leans in closer, but Lucia presses her body against the wall.

  ‘Are you ready to hear the truth?’ she whispers, straight into Lucia’s damp pink ear.

  Lucia strains away from her, but Jacqueline puts her hand firmly on her shoulder, makes her turn back around and holds her firmly in place. ‘You need to hear the truth, because in all your life, nobody ever told you the truth.’

  29

  Marcus

  Every morning he goes to sit in the prison chapel’s hushed, unfussy space for fifteen minutes, focusing on simply breathing from his stomach, slowly in and out. The chaplain doesn’t attempt to engage him in conversation today; he just nods when Marcus enters before returning to his tasks. Marcus wonders if, were the chaplain to find out what he did, he would still be able to look him in the eye and tell him that Jesus loves him anyway.

  Since he’s been at Tollebu, Marcus has become interested in his own mind and its processes. He reads psychology books and practices mindfulness, letting himself be entirely still inside a moment. He reflects on forgiveness and vengeance, and how, in his case, both are fundamentally impossible. He’s unsettled by the case of the missing child and can’t shake the thought that one bad thing leads to another, and then another, and another still. One eyelid begins to twitch and he makes himself focus on the plain wooden cross above the plain wooden altar. If Jesus could hang on the cross to absolve humanity of sin, could there be forgiveness for him? No, thinks Marcus. For me – never, especially now.

  To calm his racing heart, Marcus lets his mind go to one of his favorite places. In his other life, he used to travel frequently, all over the world, and he used to love that moment shortly after takeoff on a cloudy day when the plane emerged into the brilliant blue above the clouds. It brought him comfort, to think that the sun was always shining, whether he could see it or not. He’d lean his head against the plastic window, taking in the cloud formations far below, knowing that those exact patterns and peaks and colors would never again be repeated in all of time. He’d feel overcome by a kind of yearning, a sensation of being close to something bigger than anything else. He tries to summon that same feeling now – the feeling of being held entirely by a world so impossibly beautiful.

  30

  Lucia

  ‘Memory is a strange thing,’ says Josie’s mamma. ‘You don’t remember me because you
can’t. So many things are lost, for all of us, in our minds. That doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. Do you remember lying flat on your back in your baby stroller? No? And yet, you did. For months and months you lay there and I smiled down at you and you smiled back. You don’t remember those smiles now, but I do. Do you remember the first thing you ever ate? The first time you stood up and fell back down? The way you and Josie used to like to sit in the bay window and wave at Daddy going off to work? See, sweet girl, your mind can’t remember those things, but they all happened, all of that and so much more. I will help you to remember who you are. I will teach you who to be, now.’

  She strokes my hair softly and I want to swat her hand away, but it feels good to be touched, so I let her, for a moment.

  ‘The lady you lived with took you from me. Maybe she didn’t mean to. Maybe she wasn’t all bad. But what she did was very, very bad. What she did was the worst thing one person can do to another. To take someone’s child, Lulu – it can never be forgiven. Never. Not ever.’

  ‘It’s not true!’

  ‘It is true.’

  ‘No! My mamma is my mamma and you’re a bad lady and soon you’re going to be in prison!’

  ‘My darling, I understand that you are angry and confused. Everyone has lied to you, your entire life. But I swear, Lucia, I will never tell you lies. Never.’

  ‘I want to go home!’

  ‘Look at me, mon amour. Look at me. Sometimes the heart remembers when the mind does not. With time, your heart will remember, and your mind will understand that you belong here, with me and Josie.’

  I’m so confused and scared and I squash my hands over my ears and try to put my head under the pillow, but I can still hear her.