Playdate

by Alex Dahl

  The town is indeed quaint, Selma decides as she walks out of Lillehammer station and up a quiet main road that peters out into a totally silent suburban avenue. It’s also unremarkable. The few people she sees look healthy and relaxed, as though they’ve wandered down into the town from the surrounding mountains. Nothing on their faces speaks of the tragedies, secrets and sorrows that Selma knows simmer and burn underneath the surface. Like everywhere else, Lillehammer harbors unresolved cases and as-yet undiscovered criminals. She might pass someone on the street who knows Elisa Blix, she thinks. It’s quite likely, in fact, considering Lillehammer’s modest size. She might pass someone who’s committed murder. She might even pass someone who knows exactly where Lucia Blix is, someone who could solve the case by making a single phone call but chooses not to.

  She comes to a large Meny food shop and stops for a Coke Zero and a ham and cheese baguette. She’s not so much hungry as nervous. She eats propped against a rain-soaked bench, drawing her jacket tight around herself – it’s significantly colder here than it was in Oslo. From where she’s standing, she can see a part of the big ski area on the hillside across the lake, and she can make out a snow scooter heading up to the crest of the hill, though she knows that the resort closed for the season the previous weekend.

  Kari Samuelsen lives just behind Meny in an unremarkable red bungalow on a cul-de-sac of similar houses. Selma stands for a brief moment looking down the empty street before she walks up to the front door, imagining Elisa as a child, playing on this same street with her brother and sister. Her heart thuds as she presses the doorbell, setting off a shrill chime inside the house. There’s no sign of anyone being at home, though an old Volvo is parked in front of the garage. Then a movement catches Selma’s eye – the slightest twitch of a net curtain in the window to the left of the door. She acts as though she hasn’t noticed but angles herself slightly towards the window, making her expression friendly and open so that whoever is behind it can see her clearly and will hopefully understand that she means no harm.

  Nothing happens, so she rings the bell again. ‘Kari?’ she shouts at the closed door. ‘I’m Selma.’

  She has already turned to leave when she hears the sound of the door unlocking. It opens a crack and Selma can make out a hand holding a metal door chain on the inside.

  ‘Hi,’ she says. ‘I was hoping we could talk. I’ve come all the way from Oslo to speak with you.’

  ‘What do you want?’ The woman’s voice is flat and without any trace of emotion.

  ‘Could I please come in?’ She’s bracing herself for the woman to say no, but the hand fumbles with the security chain and then the door is opened.

  The woman in front of her is relatively young, in her mid-fifties most likely, but appears much older with her stern grey halo of curls and scrubbed, raw-looking face. Glancing at her hands, which are also very red and flaky in patches, Selma realizes she has some kind of skin condition. She’s wearing an old-fashioned pale green housedress and orthopedic slip-on leather sandals. Over the top she’s wearing an apron smeared with what appears to be tomato sauce. Her eyes are dark, like Elisa’s, and hooded with heavy eyelids, not unlike Selma’s. Her lips are thin and clamped shut. She stands with her arms crossed and waits for Selma to speak.

  ‘I’m working on an article…’ begins Selma, but as soon as she says ‘article’ the woman’s expression grows even more forbidding and she begins to close the door.

  ‘No, Mrs Samuelsen, please – wait. This isn’t what you think. I just want to help find Lucia Blix. Please let me speak to you.’

  ‘No,’ she hisses.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t even know the girl. And I won’t have my family’s dirty laundry aired in your amoral press stories. My husband would turn in his grave, Jehovah bless him.’ She crosses herself quickly.

  Selma notices that Kari’s gaze is drawn to something behind her. She glances around and sees a man and a woman emerge from the house next door, hands raised in a little wave.

  ‘Can we talk about why your oldest daughter is estranged from your family?’ asks Selma, almost loud enough for the neighbors to hear.

  Kari Samuelsen looks as though she’s been slapped in the face, precisely the reaction Selma had been hoping for. A large, strong hand reaches out and grabs Selma’s wrist.

  ‘Yes, come in, my dear,’ says Kari in a strange singsong voice. She waves at the neighbors, her eyes shooting daggers at Selma, and closes the door behind them.

  Selma finds herself in a sparse, unfussy hallway. There are two pairs of sensible brown leather shoes tucked away underneath a wooden chair, a hook with several sets of keys on it, and an old-fashioned landline phone mounted to the wall. She imagines Kari Samuelsen sitting on the chair, her thick fingers stabbing at the dial. Does she ever pick up the phone wanting to call Elisa?

  ‘What do you want?’ asks Kari, her voice barely concealing a furious tremble.

  ‘I’m sorry for showing up unannounced, but I wanted to speak with you because I am trying to look at the abduction of your granddaughter in a slightly different way. I know you’ll be extremely familiar with the case, but—’

  ‘I am not familiar with the case,’ says Kari Samuelsen, nodding briefly after Selma has slipped off her Adidas Superstars next to the chair. She turns around and walks into the next room, which is a clean, plain, pinewood kitchen. It has a table and two chairs, but there’s nothing on the table, not even a little flower or a saltshaker. Looking around, Selma notes there aren’t any ornaments or decorations on the walls either. It’s as though the woman is allergic to personal expression in her home.

  Kari Samuelsen indicates to one of the chairs and sits down on the other, pulling it forward so that they are strangely close to one another, their knees almost touching. Selma suddenly feels overwhelmed and uncomfortable, as though all of her bravado in coming here and ringing Elisa’s mother’s doorbell has instantly evaporated.

  ‘Let me tell you something,’ says Kari, fixing Selma with her unusually dark eyes, which are like little buttons sewn onto the face of a teddy bear, too close together. ‘You have some serious nerve, just turning up here like this. You’re young, I get it, you’re hungry for a scoop, but there are laws in this country – anti-harassment laws. Though I don’t expect you’ve heard of such a thing?’

  ‘I just thought…’

  ‘You thought what? That because Elisa Blix is my daughter, I’d want to talk to you?’

  ‘Look, I know that Elisa is estranged from the Samuelsen family, and—’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘Elisa told me herself.’ Selma is good at thinking on her feet, and a white lie never hurt anybody.

  ‘Oh, is that right? Did she tell you that I have never met her youngest child? Did she tell you that that little girl means no more to me than any other little girl snatched off the street? Did she tell you that she comes from a family that not only believes but knows that God’s will is just, always just, and only ever just?’ Selma’s mouth has dropped open in shock at the tirade, and she feels real sympathy for Elisa having grown up with this woman as her mother. Better to have no mother, she thinks, though this thought is followed by a hot flush of shame.

  ‘I’m sorry… I don’t think I quite understand.’

  ‘Some people question God’s will when they should perhaps take a long hard look in the mirror.’

  ‘What… what do you mean?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask your friend Elisa. Ask her what she did to her own father, who did nothing but love and cherish her.’ Kari practically spits her daughter’s name out. ‘Now, I’d like you to leave.’

  ‘But… but whatever Elisa did, surely you don’t mean that a little girl deserved to be abducted?’

  ‘I’m not talking about the child. I’m talking about adults of dubious morals getting what they deserve.’

  Kari has stood up and is staring at Selma, waiting for her to do the same. Selma gets up slowly and follow
s Kari back towards the entrance hall.

  ‘Don’t you think Elisa deserves your support, no matter how immoral you judge her to be? She’s going through a lot, and she is your daughter, after all.’

  Kari stares at her, an astonished expression temporarily making her coarse features bland. Then she begins to laugh. A horrible, mocking laugh that brings on a coughing fit.

  Selma’s fingers fumble with her shoelaces as she tries to block out the disgusting guttural noises. The woman’s ruddy, angry face will haunt her for a long while yet, she’s sure of that. But as she stands back up to leave, she’s stunned to see that Kari is crying now, her face twisted in a grimace, her eyes blurred with tears. Selma opens her mouth to ask again, but decides against it. Nothing about this visit has gone as she hoped, and all she wants is to be back outside, away from this odd, plain house and the mean woman. She opens the door and inhales the rush of fresh, cold air deep into her lungs. She turns back around on the doorstep to say sorry, or goodbye, but the door is slammed shut in her face.

  *

  Selma was right about Kari Samuelsen’s face haunting her. She walks fast to the station, though her train back to Oslo doesn’t leave for another two hours, and she keeps picturing the woman’s livid red cheeks and the wildness of her expression when she spoke of God’s will and how it is always just. What did she even mean by that? That Lucia being taken was some kind of divine justice or payback for whatever lifestyle Elisa had chosen in the face of her parents’ violent opposition? Could it be that Selma was on the right track with the idea that Elisa might have been involved somehow with Lillehammer’s drug gangs? Either way, she feels another surge of sympathy for Elisa; it must have been hard, growing up in that quiet, hostile house. She feels bad, too, about having asked Elisa whether it was possible that someone hated her – how was she to know that she had a mother like that. No wonder Elisa looked hurt at the question. Selma had no idea that women like Kari Samuelsen still existed in Norway in 2019.

  She looks around, trying to decide what to do until her train leaves. She could walk around for a while, getting a feel for the place. The weather has improved since the dreary drizzly cold of this morning – and the sky is now mostly blue with patches of wispy white cloud. She heads down the pedestrianized main street, slowing down to look into the windows of the familiar chain stores: Nille, G-Sport, Cubus, Peppes Pizza. She sits down on a bench, eats a chocolate-chip cookie from 7-Eleven and watches people meandering slowly past. Everything seems less rushed here than in Oslo. There are groups of gangly teenage girls, skinny legs in Bik Bok tights, phones clutched in their hands, chewing gum and chattering loudly. There are old people, walking leisurely along. There are families, lots of families: normal-looking, unremarkable mothers and fathers, with big boys and small girls and big girls and little boys.

  Selma’s thoughts return to the strange meeting with Elisa’s mother. It never ceases to amaze her how different families can be from how they seem. Growing up, Selma always felt different, growing up with a single dad and as an only child. She might as well have had ‘odd’ written on her forehead, judging by the way the other kids treated her in school. She craved a ‘normal’ family – a mother and a father, siblings and maybe a little dog. ‘A real family,’ she used to say to her father in her teens, if she wanted to really hurt him. She feels ashamed, thinking about it now. She knows now that there are no normal families and that every family is as real as the next, no matter the constellation. And she knows that it is most definitely possible to grow up in a family with a mother, a father and a couple of siblings and have crazy, disturbing things happen behind closed doors. The question is, what happened behind the Blix family’s doors?

  A chill has crept into Selma’s bones; she needs to keep moving before her teeth start chattering. She walks back down towards the station, stopping to take a picture on her phone of the iconic Olympic rings painted on the ground – Lillehammer is fiercely proud of hosting the Winter Olympics in 1994, the single biggest event Norway has ever seen. She catches a glimpse of the lake further down the hill from the station and decides to walk down for a look – she still has more than an hour until the train.

  There’s a large park beside the lakeshore, as well as a beach promenade. It must be nice here in summer, thinks Selma. She passes a garage with an unseasonal sign reading ‘Cheapest Winter Tire Change in Lillehammer’, and a garden center. Everything feels so intensely normal – people driving places without urgency, people buying dinner in the shops, people walking home with their kids after school – and yet, this town, like every other town, is marred by tragedy. Selma thinks about the two nineteen-year-olds she read about, killed when they drove into the truck by the Fåvang exit. What were they doing in the last seconds before impact? Selma has a mental image of them laughing, moving their shoulders in sync in a little dance to loud music blasting from the stereo, chunks of chewing gum shuffled around their mouths so they could sing the lyrics. Young hands loosely holding the steering wheel, wrists clogged with bangles and hair ties and ribbons. Foot too eager on the gas, the truck too close, the hand on the wheel a fraction too slow, the sound of metal splintering too loud, too loud.

  Selma glances up at Lillehammer High-Security Prison, sitting high above the town on a hill. Funny that they decided to give prisoners the best views in town, she thinks. She remembers the man appealing his case for killing the father and daughter. ‘An unprecedented twelve-year sentence’, the article said. She pulls up Google on her phone and types in ‘Lillehammer father and daughter killed by driver under the influence’. There are several hundred hits, and she clicks on one from February 2012, from VG.

  Marcus Meling has been identified as the driver of the vehicle that plunged into a family in Lillehammer on the evening of 27 January, killing a thirty-three-year-old man and a two-year-old girl.

  Meling is pleading guilty to manslaughter and driving under the influence, as well as attempting to avoid law enforcement. His hearing is at Lillehammer Court tomorrow.

  Meling is known to many as the multimillionaire founder and CEO of tech firm iNovo and is a resident of Oslo. Little is known of Meling’s victims as their identities have yet to be released.

  Meling was significantly over the limit when he was arrested.

  Selma returns to Google and types in ‘Marcus Meling’. She is about to scroll through the results when her phone starts ringing.

  63

  Elisa

  Everything happened because I fell in love. So very deeply in love. It hit me like a tornado, a white heat, this instant surrender to a stranger. It grew into me, became a part of my insides. It was outshone only by my children. Still, it burns in me. And every day I am reminded that women like me don’t deserve men like Fredrik. Women like me don’t deserve a son like Lyder and a daughter like Lucia.

  I indicate and exit the E6, and Lillehammer comes into view ahead. I opt for the smaller district road that bypasses my hometown; there’s no need to save five minutes if I can avoid the place altogether. Seven years and three months, that’s how long it’s been. At least today is bright, the scent of thawed snow and last year’s decay drifting down from the mountains that tower over the road as it meanders into the hills east of Lillehammer. I roll down my window and stop for a moment in a layby, looking down at Lillehammer in the valley, the windows of the houses reflecting the sharp sunlight like pebbles in a rock pool.

  Down there somewhere is my mother. My sister and brother, too. Nieces and a nephew I’ve never met. Further on, the road I’m on peters out into a long gravel track, and at its end is Tollebu Prison.

  I drive through a little copse where vast patches of bluebells carpet the forest floor, then a series of buildings become visible in front of me. There’s a large main house which looks more like a mountain hotel than a correctional facility and a series of smaller buildings set around it in a semicircle.

  I close my eyes for a long moment. I try to still my racing heart. I take a few deep breaths and ge
ntly rub the still sore scab on my thumb. I read somewhere that rubbing the spot between your thumb and your index finger sends calming signals to the brain and makes you feel like someone is taking care of you. I think about when Lucia was a baby, how I used to stare at her for hours. Her sleeping face with all its odd little expressions, her tiny clenched fists, the wispy white hair covering her pink skull, her sheer beauty – I was awestruck by her. She was just pure love. I wanted to do right by her. And doing right by Lucia, and then Lyder, meant growing up. It meant getting real and getting serious. It meant watching my heart splinter into shards.

  64

  Marcus

  After two years he was moved from Lillehammer High-Security Prison to Tollebu. Many freedoms were returned to him, such as the right to speak on the phone whenever and with whomever he pleases, though any conversation may be listened to. He is allowed visitors any time during visiting hours. No one ever comes. In addition to being allowed to go to the timber yard twice a week to work, he’s also permitted once a month to run errands in Lillehammer, accompanied by two plainclothes guides. On these occasions, Marcus wanders down the streets, stopping every so often for a leisurely look in a shop window or to pop into a 7-Eleven for a bacon hot dog with chili sauce. At the beginning, he worried about these outings, and specifically the risk of being seen by the woman whose life he had destroyed. Back then, he wouldn’t have known her if he passed her on the street – she’d never spoken to the press and had remained anonymous – but she would have known him. His identity was splashed across the media after he pleaded guilty to manslaughter.