Playdate

by Alex Dahl

  I don’t remember anything about my daddy, only the pappa in The Other Family, and Maman knows this. Your heart remembers, she always says, even when your head cannot.

  Josie and I close our eyes and I try to picture Daddy. I’ve seen so many pictures, so I know what he looks like, but I can’t really see him in my head if I don’t have a picture in front of me. I know that he was handsome and very kind and strong enough to lift me high on one arm and Josie on the other.

  In the car to school, Josie asks a question I’ve been thinking about too.

  ‘When is Antoine coming back?’

  ‘I don’t know that he is coming back,’ says Maman. ‘He just helped Boulette get settled and she’s getting big now, so there’s no real need for him to come back anymore.’

  ‘But he’s your boyfriend,’ says Josie, and I want to laugh because I know it’s true, but maybe Maman doesn’t know that we know that.

  ‘Of course he’s not my boyfriend.’

  ‘But he stays at our house in the night.’

  ‘Enough, Josiane. Look, he’s a friend, in a way. But I don’t think we’ll be spending any more time together. If I ever do get a boyfriend, I’ll be sure to let you know, okay?’ She looks at us in the mirror and from the look in her eyes I can tell this conversation is over. ‘Tonight we’re going to celebrate Daddy.’

  It’s Friday and our first lesson is les arts plastiques, my favorite. I love art. We can make things with scrap bits of paper from Monsieur Duchêne’s enormous crate of supplies. He pretends like the crate is a bank safe and that the only way to get stuff out of it is by saying the magic word.

  ‘Le mot magique,’ he’ll say, bending down to our height, and cupping his ear.

  And we whisper, ‘Fandango.’ I don’t know why, but it always makes us laugh.

  Today, I sit next to Noémie, and Monsieur Duchêne says we can make whatever we want for the first half hour.

  ‘I’m going to make a spaceship from Q-tips,’ says Gabin, but what he really means is that he will stick them up his nose, because that’s what he does every week.

  ‘No Q-tips for you,’ says Monsieur Duchêne.

  I decide to make a card for Daddy and I choose three sheets of cardboard: one blue, one green and one gold.

  ‘It’s my daddy’s birthday,’ I say to Noémie.

  ‘Your daddy’s dead,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah, but it’s still his birthday.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘Yeah it is.’

  ‘Not if he’s dead. Birthday is the day you became alive, so they only count when you’re alive.’

  ‘Mesdemoiselles,’ says Monsieur Duchêne, ‘stop the chattering, please.’

  I feel angry and my hand shakes when I try to cut the cardboard pieces so they fit on top of each other. I’m going to glue them together and cut out bits so it looks like a 3D picture. I’ve seen cards like that before. I look up and stare at Noémie, but she is painting an ugly flower, her tongue stuck out like a dog’s. She notices me looking and stares back.

  ‘Besides, I have two daddies,’ I say. ‘And my other daddy’s birthday is at Christmas, like Jesus, and he’s still alive.’

  ‘Lulu-Rose! Quiet!’

  I carry on cutting the cardboard, concentrating really hard to stop my hand from shaking, and when I look up again after a long time, Josie is staring at me, her face strange and maybe sad.

  When the bell rings, I stand up quickly and hurry to get out of the room, but as I reach the door, Monsieur Duchêne says, ‘Lulu-Rose, would you wait a minute.’

  Again, I feel Josie looking at me, but I don’t look back. When all the other kids have left the room, Monsieur Duchêne points to a chair in the front row.

  ‘Lulu-Rose, we’ve talked about talking in class before.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t worry about today. Class hadn’t really started yet, so it’s okay. But I wondered about what you said to Noémie about having two daddies.

  Next to Monsieur Duchêne’s head, on the wall, is a blob of purple paint, probably from when Gabin tried to turn on the light switch next to it. I stare at it and keep my face completely blank, like a doll’s.

  ‘I was joking,’ I say and give him a smile.

  ‘Joking?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought it was funny to pretend like Jesus is my other daddy.’

  ‘But that’s not what you said. You said my other daddy’s birthday is at Christmas, like Jesus.’

  ‘Oh. I was joking anyway.’

  Monsieur Duchêne, who is almost always joking, looks serious and strokes the side of his face with his hand. ‘Is everything okay at home, Lulu-Rose?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. This is The Truth.

  ‘Look. I know that, uh, you and Josiane lost your father some years ago. It is very difficult, sometimes, to understand why you feel sad about something. Sometimes it’s easier to make it into a joke. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps it might be good for you and Josiane to have someone to speak to about it.’

  ‘We speak to Maman. We can speak to Maman about anything in the world.’

  ‘Sometimes it can be very useful to speak to someone outside of your own family, someone who doesn’t themselves have feelings about what has happened. Do you understand?’

  I nod.

  ‘I think it might be a good idea if I recommend this to your mother.’

  ‘No!’ I say, but it comes out like a shout. ‘I mean, I can tell her that. You don’t have to. It’s best if you don’t. She might get very sad. I will tell her.’

  ‘That’s not your job to worry about, Lulu-Rose.’

  ‘Please, Monsieur, please don’t tell her.’

  Monsieur Duchêne nods, but he is still frowning, then he taps his watch and looks at the door, and I rush into the empty hallway, my heart banging in my chest like I’ve just been running.

  *

  In the car on the way home, Maman talks about how we are going to celebrate Daddy’s birthday. Josie and me will bake him a cake, and we’ll set his place at the table. He would have been forty today if he hadn’t been killed. Murdered, Maman calls it, which is a special kind of dead because it’s someone’s fault.

  I go to the barn and feed Samba. Her pink lips nibble hungrily at my gloves, making me laugh, but when I come back inside the house, Maman’s face is different from a few minutes ago. She looks very angry. I look around the kitchen for Josie and Boulette, but they’re not here.

  ‘How could you?’ says Maman. I don’t get a chance to say anything because Maman keeps talking. Or shouting, actually. ‘Lulu-Rose, do you even understand how serious this is? Do you? You might have ruined everything! Everything! How could you?’

  ‘I haven’t—’ I begin, but suddenly my throat feels blocked and I can’t talk and my eyes begin to cry. Usually, if I cry, Maman gets sad too, and she tries to help me see that there’s nothing to cry about. Don’t cry, my heart, she says. Mon coeur. Now she just stands there, very close to me, her face in front of my face. Josie must have told her what I said to Noémie, even if she promised – no – swore, that she never, ever would.

  ‘How do you think I feel when I receive a call from your school saying you’ve been telling your entire class that you have two daddies and only one of them has died?’

  ‘I didn’t—’

  ‘Yes, you did. Don’t you dare lie to me. We tell The Truth in this house, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes.’ Maman always talks about The Truth and how we must always tell it. But sometimes I tell it and she says it’s not The Truth. Like now.

  ‘So how could you?’

  ‘I think I forgot.’

  ‘Forgot? Lulu-Rose, we have spoken about this, so many times! We can’t forget! Remember? We can never forget! Because if we do, then what?’

  ‘Bad things happen.’

  ‘How bad?’

  ‘Very bad.’

  ‘How bad, Lulu-Rose?’ She is
still shouting, and my eyes are still crying.

  ‘The little boy in The Other Family will die and Josie will die and I will go to the bad man’s attic.’

  ‘So why did you say something so stupid?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Maman.’

  ‘Sorry isn’t enough! Go upstairs! I don’t want to see you until tomorrow.’

  ‘What about Daddy’s birthday? And his cake?’

  ‘You don’t deserve a daddy like him after what you’ve said. Go! Just get out of my sight!’

  In my bedroom I scream and hit the wall and I don’t care if Maman hears me. I sit on my bed and punch the pillow as hard as I can and I imagine it’s the bad man’s face and the man with the attic house and Maman, even. When I get so tired I can’t hit anymore, I take out the special paper I keep inside my math notebook, because nobody looks in it. I don’t lie, I tell The Truth. On the paper I write down everything I know is The Truth. I write: ‘I have two daddies and only one of them is dead.’

  I wake in the night and Maman is sitting on my bed. She isn’t holding my hand and she isn’t saying bonjour, which is what she says every morning. I am afraid and I don’t want to open my eyes. I pretend to turn in my sleep, smacking my lips and making tired sounds and then I turn towards the wall. I open my eyes and for a very, very long time I lie still, waiting for her to leave. It takes so long, I almost think she already has and I didn’t notice her leaving, but then the weight shifts off the bed and she leans in to kiss me, its sound loud in my ear, like a slap.

  60

  Selma

  ‘Murders Lillehammer’, types Selma, sifting slowly through the results. In 2009, a man in his twenties was murdered by a woman in Lillehammer. The woman is still serving time for the crime. Selma pastes the link into her Word document. There were no murders in the county between 1992 and 2005, when an eighty-six-year-old woman was killed by her own son. Selma considers it unlikely that Elisa was involved in a murder, but could she have witnessed something that placed her in a precarious position? Or could she have been involved with another kind of crime, financial or sexual? She googles ‘rape Lillehammer’ and is taken aback by the hits that appear. In 2005 alone, three violent rapes were reported, and all the victims were women in their late teens or early twenties – seemingly random victims and of a similar age to Elisa at the time. In a town the size of Lillehammer, she would have likely known, or known of, at least one of them. In both 2004 and 2006 there were two rapes, of which two were linked to the town’s ‘drugs environment’.

  She googles ‘Lillehammer drugs-related crimes’ and, again, many articles pop up. One, titled ‘Notorious Drugs Gangs Unstoppable in Lillehammer?’, outlines the town’s persistent problems with ‘teenage drugs culture’ and affiliated crimes. According to NRK, the state broadcasting corporation, crime in Lillehammer is relatively rare, but some particularly brutal gangs operate drug-related networks, and most other crime is traced back to these environments. In the Word document, Selma writes ‘Could Elisa have been involved in the drugs culture and for that reason have been disinherited by her pious parents?’

  She suddenly feels overwhelmingly tired and just wants to drift off to sleep, Medusa’s little body held close to her own, one hand clutching the smooth, warm moonstone. Still, she can’t shake the feeling that she is missing a connection or some obvious fact that might link Lucia Blix’s abduction to something in her mother’s past. She blinks hard, trying to rid her eyes of the inevitable dryness after so many hours in front of the screen. She types ‘fatal accidents Lillehammer’ and skims through the long list. A seven-year-old boy was killed when he tripped and fell into the road in 2002; the male driver was absolved of all liability in this tragic accident. Two girls aged nineteen died on impact when their car hit a truck near the Fåvang exit on the E18 in 2008. A young man was sentenced to three years in prison for reckless driving that caused the death of an eighty-two-year-old pedestrian in 2010. A man and his two-year-old daughter died after being struck by a car in January 2012 on Birkebeinervegen on the outskirts of Lillehammer; the driver was under the influence and tried to flee and is currently in prison serving an unprecedented twelve-year sentence. Selma feels a dull ache in her stomach at the awful reading – so many lives, particularly young lives, cut short in a split second.

  She clicks on the article about the little boy, and a photograph appears. A sweet, unremarkable boy with an unruly mop of blonde hair and a gap between his teeth. Petter Mikkelsrud, was his name. Petter – dead, aged seven. His parents are inconsolable after the incomprehensible accident, reads the article. She returns to the feed and clicks on the piece about the father and daughter. The man had been sledding in the woods on the eastern fringes of Lillehammer with his wife and two daughters when a car came hurtling around a bend in the road, slamming into the family. The father died on impact, his child in the ambulance on the way to hospital. The other little girl sustained non-life-threatening injuries, and the mother was unharmed. Selma tries to picture that poor woman, how she must have howled, her screams cutting the freezing January air, hollering through the bare winter forests. How does one survive something like that? She presses the ‘Back’ button, but as she does it, she notices the article below the one she had just read. Its headline is ‘Drunk Driver of Birkebeinervegen Tragedy Launches Appeal from Tollebu Prison After 7 Years Inside’ and the article is dated just two days ago. Jesus, thinks Selma. Asshole. Driving under the influence and killing an innocent child and her father. She can’t think of anything more selfish.

  She closes her Mac and lies on the bed for a while, tickling Medusa’s tummy, making her purr loudly, closing her eyes. There’s no point doing any more research tonight: it’s almost midnight and her head is spinning. Tomorrow she’ll go through all her notes and investigate each point further.

  After cleaning her teeth, she gets into bed and closes her eyes, expecting the strong pull of sleep immediately carrying her away. Instead, the thoughts just keep coming, one leading to the next, as though they are being fired at her.

  61

  Elisa

  I come downstairs just before eight. Fredrik is standing by the refrigerator, drinking milk straight from the carton. Once, I would have told him off, but those days are long gone. We avoid each other’s eyes, and I welcome the loud screech of the milk foamer on the espresso machine.

  ‘I’m leaving in a minute,’ I say, pouring the milk into a takeaway coffee mug then adding three shots of espresso.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Stepping in for a colleague. Trude. Rome and back. The return is into Oslo Airport, so I might crash at the staff hotel.’

  ‘Wait, I don’t understand. Elisa, we need to talk.’

  ‘You know, I had a great drive last night and I got some proper thinking done. You’re absolutely right,’ I continue, keeping my voice light and even, ‘we mustn’t drive ourselves crazy with what-if scenarios. We need to let the police do their jobs.’

  ‘Umm,’ says Fredrik, staring at me as though trying to glean the subtext from my expression.

  ‘She’s alive, honey. We just need to keep hope alive. She’s coming home – I know that.’ I make myself smile at my husband, and he smiles back, relieved.

  Turning away from him, I briefly think about all the little lies and untruths and omissions that pass between a husband and a wife over the course of a marriage. All the little betrayals. And the big ones. For some reason, Karoline Meister pops into my head, her last words to Fredrik as clear in my mind as though they’d been spoken out loud. Enjoy your little life while you still have it, asshole.

  Once I’m outside the house, I allow my cool control to crumble again. My heart is racing and tears run down my cheeks, dripping off my chin and onto my light jeans. I drive faster than I should, taking the E18 to Oslo, then the E6 through the web of tunnels leading out of the capital to the east. Soon I will know if I’ve been betrayed.

  ‘I would give my life to undo what has happened,’ he wrote. ‘Fo
rgive me.’ When I first read his letter, just weeks after Lucia was taken, I couldn’t process it at all. I crushed it into a dense ball in my hand and made myself forget about it. I was in no state to be thinking about him. But why did he ask for forgiveness? ‘What have you done?’ I whisper out loud, steeling myself for what’s coming.

  I drive fast on the E6 but hit heavy traffic near Oslo Airport; there’s been an accident. I find it hard to sit still as the car crawls along the tarmac past police tape, my fingers drumming nervously on the wheel. I follow the trajectory of a jet on its final approach, and it occurs to me that in this moment no one in the world knows where I am. I am obviously not headed to Rome.

  My thoughts still feel jumbled and chaotic, like I can’t quite grasp the sequence of steps I have to take to fix this mess.

  This could all be in my head. Karo-Line and karma and the notion that the past is suddenly coming for me – it’s not real. It isn’t real, Elisa. Remorse, yes. Shame, yes. Heartbreaking regret, every moment of every day. But that is all it is, and it could well be playing tricks with my mind.

  The traffic starts moving again and I urge the car back to ninety, tears streaming down my face. Most likely, I’ve got this all wrong. I just need to be sure.

  62

  Selma

  The train ride, which should have taken three hours, is delayed due to an accident near Oslo Airport. Selma is not a patient person at the best of times, but she feels especially restless today because what she’s doing is unorthodox, even for her. She taps her fingers to an imaginary beat against her jeans-clad thigh and stares at a big patch of dirty, leftover snow in a field. A large jet drops out of the low-hanging charcoal clouds, wobbling visibly in the wind as it lowers itself towards the runway. Its tailfin is green and bears the gold-feather logo of Nordic Wings. Selma wonders if Elisa Blix could be on it, leaning her head back against the jump seat, perhaps counting down the final approach in her head.

  She avoids the eye of the man sitting across from her. She’s noticed him staring at her and she can’t think of anything less appealing than making stilted small talk with a stranger on a train. She pulls her phone out and decides to do some more research on Lillehammer. The town is located on the shores of Mjøsa, Norway’s largest lake. Selma vaguely recalls a school trip when she must have still been in primary school, where they went on an old steam ship on Mjøsa. Scrolling down, she comes across a photograph of the same ship, Skibladner, and smiles to herself. The man sitting across from her must have thought the smile was intended for him, because when she randomly glances up at him, he is beaming at her, and she immediately drops her eyes back to the screen. The town has a population of just 26,000, so it’s significantly smaller than Drammen, where she grew up, but it’s substantially better known, not only as one of Norway’s oldest ski resorts but also on account of its outdoor museum of traditional homes, Maihaugen, which is among the most important in Europe, apparently. Lillehammer also has a ‘well-preserved and historically important center with charming wooden buildings’, according to its tourist office. The perfect destination for a day trip, thinks Selma as the train starts up again.