Playdate

by Alex Dahl

  ‘Tell me the truth,’ she says, and Olav manages to meet her eye for just a moment. She can imagine how she must appear, standing across from him in the little glass box of an office, door awkwardly slid shut. Her long hair, the exact same dark blonde as her mother’s, fans out around her shoulders, a little frizzy on top from so many weeks of hat-wearing. Her eyes are blazing and to be avoided, judging by Olav’s reaction. Her fingernails are digging into the soft pink flesh of her palms, though he won’t be able to see that from where he’s standing. ‘Tell me. Is this to do with the Blix case?’

  He sighs heavily and sinks into his chair, swiveling it back and forth a couple of times, the way he used to when she first came to work here.

  ‘No, Selma, it isn’t. Absolutely not. I’ve told you – we’ve been affected by digitalization, just like everyone else has. So many reporters have been forced to go freelance. Which, by the way, can be great. I think it would suit you really well. And I’d appreciate it if any future articles were to land on my desk first.’

  Selma laughs again in disbelief. ‘I thought we were friends.’

  ‘We are friends.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Selma, look, this is really difficult for me.’

  ‘You think it’s harder for you than for me? Thanks a bunch, Olav. Come on.’

  ‘You know that’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I just want the truth.’

  ‘And I’ve told you: last in, first out. It has to be like that. Though… if you’re really serious about this and you can take a bit of advice from an old friend, I’d suggest casting your net a bit wider in the future. You are whip-smart and one hell of a journalist, Selma, but most national papers value versatility and the ability to move between stories. Things can get a little… one-track sometimes. That’s all.’

  ‘There’s a difference between one-track and thorough, Olav.’ Selma spins round to head out into the open-plan office and sees Lisbeth staring fixedly in their direction, mouth open. ‘Bye then,’ she says, softer now. She places a hand on the door handle and turns back around to face him. She can tell by his expression that he meant what he said, about being her friend.

  ‘Out of interest, what did you want to tell me about the Blix case? A new idea?’ he asks, as an afterthought.

  ‘You’ll read it in my article. I’m going to break that whole case wide open, you wait and see. I’ll send it to you. But it’s not going to be cheap, Olav.’

  She slides the glass door open and continues to her desk in silence, ignoring Lisbeth’s meek, curious presence beside her. She puts her jacket on and zips it slowly all the way up to her chin, taking strange pleasure in having the eyes of all her colleagues on her. Then she walks out, deliberately slowly, her head held high.

  April 2019

  Fifteen Months Later

  37

  Elisa

  I had to insist in the end. I even got my GP to write a medical note to my bosses saying I would benefit from returning to work and that my personal trauma is unlikely to affect my performance in any way.

  I drive to the airport myself and park in the outdoor staff parking area at the far end of Torp, bordering thawing fields. It’s 5.30 a.m. and completely dark. Spring hasn’t arrived yet; shavings of light snow fall as I walk towards the terminal building. I draw in a deep breath of air – the cold doesn’t bother me. But soon, the snow will melt and plump little flowers will push their heads through the black earth, vibrant green leaves will sprout from thin branches, the sun will begin to warm, the patches of snow on Sandefjord’s surrounding hills will melt away, the world will buzz with the intoxicating arrival of spring, the world will turn and turn and turn, without her.

  By now, Lucia is nine and a half years old and I haven’t held her in my arms for eighteen months. I am like those mothers we’ve all seen on the news: pale, thin, aged overnight. Every day and every night, I am haunted by the CCTV image of my child, held by that man at a roadside service station, shoved into a white van. Despite a massive search operation across the European continent for Eilaanen’s whereabouts, it is as though he vanished into thin air after that October morning in Southern Sweden. The police have raided several more addresses, in Riga, in Malmö, in Mölleryd, in Kraków, and even as far south as Sicily and east as Minsk. Several sightings of Eilaanen have been reported in Poland, Latvia and Lithuania.

  And still, nothing. All the leads they find just peter out into nothingness.

  *

  Stepping into the staff lounge, today feels briefly like any other day – like before. Back when I’d go to work and look forward to the long day ahead, and, even more, to coming home at the end of it. Back when my life was like a shimmering airtight bubble floating safely through space, sealing all the darkness out. Can I be that woman again or is she lost forever?

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are very pleased to welcome you on board this Nordic Wings flight to Barcelona-El Prat. Please pay close attention to the security information on the overhead screens. The captain will be back with more information when we reach cruising altitude.’ It’s Trude Jensen, a colleague I’ve known for over a decade, who makes the announcement. We used to fly together for Qatar and, by coincidence, we both started at Nordic Wings around the same time.

  She replaces the microphone in the cradle and gives me a reassuring smile. ‘I am so glad you’re back,’ she says.

  ‘Me too,’ I say. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  I lean back against the jump seat and look out at the near full cabin. It’s 7.51 a.m. and we are pushing back right on time. I must have done this thousands of times, but right now it feels like the first time. What if my phone rings with news of Lucia while we’re in the air?

  ‘You know how much I have prayed for your family.’

  I nod and turn away a little. I catch the eye of a handsome younger man in the front row and give him a smile, though I can feel my heartrate starting to pick up and my hands growing slick with sweat.

  ‘I just can’t believe they never found her,’ adds Trude, as though this is something one could say to someone like me.

  ‘Yet,’ I say.

  ‘What?’ Trude inches closer to compensate for the groan of the engines.

  ‘Yet. They haven’t found her yet.’

  She looks at me, her eyes wide and sad, as though I’m the only person who doesn’t realize that they haven’t found her yet because she’s gone forever.

  ‘Of course,’ she says softly. She reaches out to touch my hand, which I’ve been holding in my lap, but I see her doing it and move my hand to smooth down my hair before she gets a chance.

  The pilot pushes the throttle to maximum, the jet trembles and the engines roar as we hurtle down the runway. I focus on my breath and clear my mind. As the plane soars into the sky, the empty desperation of the last eighteen months briefly falls away and for a few short moments I am no longer broken, anxious and tense. I’m like the plane; nimble and strong and free.

  It will only be a matter of seconds before this little pocket of peace disintegrates and I am returned to my default state of being, my inside landscape like a war zone: barren, numb, ravaged. But for this single moment in time, I am just gliding through air.

  *

  The thing I haven’t prepared for is that several of the passengers recognize me.

  ‘Anything else?’ I ask a white-haired lady in 9A and hand her the Americano she ordered.

  ‘No, thank you, dear,’ she replies, her eyes wide and brimming with tears. I can tell she’d like to say something, but she wisely realizes that there is nothing at all she could say.

  Trude and I work our way down the cabin but soon have to return to the jump seat and secure the trolley because of turbulence. A middle-aged woman in 12 F is so frightened by the turbulence that she begins to cry and tries to stand up. I mouth for her to sit down but she doesn’t listen and, in the end, Trude moves slowly down towards her, holding on to the backs of seats – the turbulence is at on
e point so bad the three-point seat belt chafes painfully against my chest. I close my eyes and again have the sensation of never having sat here or done this job before. Trude and I spend the next half hour strapped in next to each other, awkwardly avoiding conversation and smiling at any nervous-looking passengers.

  With less than forty minutes to go before landing, the pilots manage to find a calmer altitude and we finish the service, then start to collect the trash. A man towards the back of the plane has a whole row to himself and has fallen asleep with his mouth dropped wide open, his tray table still down, full of meal cartons, a coffee cup and two beers. Funny how the general norms of alcohol consumption in the morning don’t seem to count in the air for most people. I step into the middle seat and quietly begin to retrieve the trash when I glance out the window.

  We are flying over brown and grey-green fields that thicken into forest-clad hills and then white-capped mountains in the distance – the Pyrenees. We must be somewhere in the south-west of France. I stare at the picturesque landscape far below us, and what strikes me about it is that while I can make out a few houses and farmsteads, every settlement seems really far from the next, a few nestled entirely isolated against the crest of a hill or deep in the woods. I feel a terrible cold anxiety at the thought of this. How many millions of places like this exist in the world, places where it would be easy to conceal a stolen child, even one of the world’s most high-profile missing children, with no immediate neighbors to even notice her presence?

  I just can’t believe they never found her.

  A teardrop slips from my eye onto the crumpled beer can and paper serviette I’m holding. I quickly wipe my eye with my other hand before turning away from the window.

  At the beginning, I could feel her continued presence so strongly. I held on to that feeling for months and months, but it’s gone now. Now when I think about Lucia, which is all the time, it’s like looking into a vast empty space inside me. I can no longer quite bring her into three dimensions; even when I look intently at photos of her, as I do every night, she remains an image. At the beginning, it was as though she leaped off the photo paper, and in my mind I could hear and see her talking and moving and laughing and crying. But not anymore.

  I take several deep breaths and try to chase away these thoughts. I’ve learned to control where my mind goes and which images I allow. I’ve had to. Whenever my mind inches too close to pictures so gruesome they would tear me apart, I consciously imagine them as being held inside a sealed white box. They are there, I must carry them, but I don’t have to open the box.

  I try to do this now, by placing Mikko Eilaanen and the fact that he was the last person seen with my child inside the box, because if I open it and look at the various possible scenarios, I will literally go mad. And as Gaute Svendsen said on that first night, I can’t go mad, because Lucia will need me when they find her. When they find her.

  I quickly glance back at the rolling fields, foothills and majestic mountains before making my way slowly back up towards the galley. I run through the check-lists, each task second nature after so many years on the job. And still, a thought won’t leave me: how many places like the one we just flew over exist across Europe and beyond? Lucia could be anywhere. Anywhere, and with anyone.

  38

  Jacqueline

  She walks around the periphery of the forest, holding Josie by the hand, staring into the dark mass of trees, ready to spot the slightest movement. The child’s hand is warm and soft, but Jacqueline is getting increasingly cold, both with fear and because the sun is receding into the dip between two distant peaks, burning pink, then orange and then blood red. She screams for Lulu-Rose so loud her throat hurts, and Josie screams for her too, until her voice breaks and runs dry. What if she has fallen from a tree and cracked her head open and is lying stunned and alone somewhere, maroon blood flowing from her skull into the ground seething with squirming insects and new plants throbbing with life, tall trees rising up all around her like the walls of a tomb? What if she chose to hide behind one of the enormous tree carcasses by the river, torn from the earth by the winter storms, and she slipped and tumbled into the icy, wild water and didn’t manage to get back out, carried flailing, then still, downstream?

  Or what if she wasn’t really playing the hiding game at all but was simply biding her time before running as fast as she could down, down, across the river via the stone bridge, through the fields, across the road and down to the scattered stone houses of the hamlet, where she hammered on doors until someone opened up and she could shout, ‘Help me! Help me, please!’

  Jacqueline’s breathing is becoming labored, air pushed to the smallest pockets of her lungs, panic burning black behind her eyes. Josie can tell she’s agitated and the little hand grows limp in hers, but Jacqueline keeps dragging her along, sliding her gaze very slowly across the mountain ridge, across the rolling brown-green fields, over the unbroken expanse of sky, to the vast forests that look like black hairs on a hillside chin, as though Lulu-Rose could be anywhere at all. She isn’t worried that anyone might hear her screams; there’s nobody here, not for miles and miles.

  If you try to run, the first person to find you will be me. Always.

  If you try to scream, the only person who will hear you is me. Always.

  ‘Maybe we should get someone to help us,’ says Josie, her dark eyes dilated and almost black in the last light of the lowering sun, her words floating up into the trees like air bubbles. A plane streaks past high above them, heading south.

  ‘Help us?’ Jacqueline hisses, bringing her face close to Josie’s, spitting out the words as though they’d scratched her tongue.

  Josie recoils.

  ‘Help us!’ She laughs now – a cruel, cold laugh. ‘Nobody can help us, don’t you get it? We have to find her, no matter what.’

  They’re on the crest of a hill overlooking the empty, shadowed valley and a brisk wind surges past them. She pulls her hand free from Josie’s and rubs hard at her upper arms. Then she starts walking again, faster now, dragging the little girl along, and they slip into the gloomy woods.

  Twigs snap, little animals scurry into hollow trunks or down burrows, the wind scrambles the leaves high above them, and water trickles somewhere deeper inside the forest. Though the sky is still a pink and purple slash up above the treetops, it’s almost completely dark down amid the crowd of trunks. She draws Josie close, then opens the torch on her iPhone and shines its light around them and upwards. A bird takes off with a shrill cry and Jacqueline has the sudden eerie sensation of being watched. A cold, wretched dread washes over her; is this how it’s going to end, after everything that’s happened? Could Lulu-Rose really have run away and alerted someone, speaking the words that aren’t even true anymore – I don’t belong here, help me, I want to go home?

  A rustling sound makes them turn around. Lulu-Rose is standing very still, almost indistinguishable from the trees.

  Jacqueline lowers the torchbeam and rushes towards her. When she pulls her into her arms, Lulu-Rose is trembling with cold. She peels off her jacket and bundles it around the little girl’s thin body.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Lulu-Rose whispers. ‘I’m so sorry, Maman.’

  Désolée, Maman.

  Maman.

  They walk down the hill towards the farmhouse together, a little-girl hand in each of Jacqueline’s. At home lamb and baby potatoes roast in the oven. After dinner there will be board games in front of the library fireplace. A sleepy cat will cuddle up close to her sleepy little girls. She will carry them up the stairs to their beds one at a time, then she’ll sit with them, smoothing their long strands of brown hair, kissing their smooth, cool foreheads.

  They can make out the shape of Le Tachoué now, big like a ship, held by miles of rolling fields as empty as an ocean. Lulu-Rose has warmed up a little and skips lightly as they go, as if she’s never had a worry in the world, as if she’s never been someone else’s, as if she hasn’t just spent several hours in the woo
ds on her own, watching the sky turn from cool cobalt to inky and sprayed with stars.

  *

  In the night, when the children have been asleep for many hours, Jacqueline lies awake, listening to the distant lament of a fox. The frightening moments of the afternoon keep coming back to her: her fear, the cooling afternoon, the heavy silence of the woods, the missing girl. Had she reacted the way she did because it reminded her of the very beginning, eighteen months ago, when Lulu-Rose fled into the forest, fell out of the tree and tore up her feet, and Jacqueline carried her home, gently bathed her and told her that she had been taken from her as a much younger child? Lulu-Rose had gone into deep shock after that, crying every day and running away constantly, either up the hill to the forest or down to the river. She refused to speak even a single word to Josie, and sometimes refused to leave her room for several days. Jacqueline had waited it out and eventually, like she’d hoped she would, Lulu-Rose began to come around. It started slowly.

  In the afternoons, Jacqueline would often bake bread with Josie. Lulu-Rose started to appear in the doorway to the kitchen, at first as a shadow, always making sure to stay just out of sight, and then, after a while, she would come and sit at the kitchen table, watching. One day she walked determinedly into the room, washed her hands under the tap, then gently lifted the plump white dough from underneath its damp rising cloth and started to knead it the way she’d seen Josie do it.

  Their trip to Saint-Girons for midnight Mass that first Christmas Eve was another turning point. Soon after, the girls began to play hide-and-seek together. Inside the house at first, and then, as winter mellowed into spring and then summer, they played in the garden, in the fields, down by the river, and up in the forest. When Lulu-Rose had been at Le Tachoué for a few months, she started to return to being the happy child she’d appeared to be in Norway. Happier, even, thought Jacqueline. Here, the little girl was free of the endless rush of family life with two working parents in a busy town. Jacqueline was always around, always willing to join in the girls’ games, always ready to soothe and kiss away a small injury. Besides, how could someone like Elisa Blix be a good mother?