Love and Other Lies

by Ben McPherson

  When I crouched beside her I could hear the rapid in-in-and-out of her breaths. I put a hand across her shoulder. She leaned in toward me, and I held her very tightly. A tiny, sighing sound, then another, as she gulped air.

  I heard a splash, heard chain links on the fiberglass hull of the little white boat, looked up to see Elsa letting the anchor rope run through her fingers.

  Vee took her hands from her face. Her eyelashes were matted and wet. I kissed the hair on top of her head, held my palms against her cheeks.

  “Dad,” Vee whispered. “I’m sorry.”

  “My poor tired horse.”

  She looked guiltily at me. Her eyes were shot with blood.

  “I wanted to see.”

  I nodded. Last known whereabouts.

  “I get it,” I whispered. “We both get it.”

  “Dad, I want to go on land.”

  We followed a short distance behind Vee. I walked along the cliff edge toward the sheer wall of the staircase, looked down to where the girl matching Licia’s description had hidden from the gunmen. The churning fjord was still now, mirror flat.

  Elsa trailed her fingertips across the palm of my hand.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  You would never know, I thought. When you looked about you, the island was perfect. The neat lines of the cabins by the lake, the straight-sided path: the placing of man-made objects in nature, everything simple and rational. Ahead, Vee was walking the path toward the cabins.

  “So it was Vee,” I said. “The Knights Templar websites. Looking for answers, she said. Been going there for months.”

  Elsa watched Vee for a time. Then she turned to me. “And if we freak out about that we make things worse.”

  “Yeah. I resisted making a point-by-point breakdown of why everything those people believe was wrong. Figured it would make it more attractive. We should catch up with her, though.”

  She put a hand on my shoulder. “Let her do this, Cal. Let her understand for herself the implications of what those men believe.”

  “All right.”

  I stood looking down through the cut rock at the slash of fjord water. That intense Nordic summer blue. If you dived in, the water would be warm on your body. But keep diving down from the surface and you would soon feel the cold peaty dark of the fjord. Winter was always there, ten feet down, patiently waiting for summer’s end.

  “Elsa,” I said, “why did you never tell me about Bror?”

  “How could I guess he would become relevant?” That evasive little eye flick. So unlike Elsa. She seemed to notice it herself. She turned, made a point of meeting my eye. “I mean, here’s the thing, Cal . . . Oslo’s a small place. If you were going to parties at the Blitz squat, you knew Bror. He hung with the young Marxists. He was all Durkheim this and Lacan that, which was hilarious because he was a trance DJ. But he could make you feel that what he was saying made perfect sense, even when it didn’t.”

  “So you guys used to fuck?”

  “Okay.” She glanced at me, then glanced away. “I mean, he’s kind of an ex.”

  “Kind of?”

  When we locked eyes there was something apologetic in her gaze.

  “We went out. Half a life ago. I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Vee.”

  “And?”

  “I was sixteen,” she said. “He was nineteen. I liked that he took me seriously. He had a sense of his own ridiculousness, which is a quality I like in men.”

  “So that’s a yes?”

  “The sex was vanilla. Take a breath, Cal, and remember what sixteen means.”

  She was right. I was being ridiculous.

  “Look,” she said, “I mean, I doubt if we’d get on these days, but he was kind to me. You know, first my mother died, and then Dad went completely off the rails. And in the middle of all that I had this unplanned pregnancy, and Dad insisted I terminate it but he wouldn’t come to the hospital, so in the end I went on my own. And I was sitting in the hospital canteen afterward not knowing if I felt good or bad about what I’d done, but dreading going home to Dad, and I guess Bror was there and he could see I was suffering, because he came over and offered me coffee and a cigarette.”

  I knew about the termination. She had never told me about Bror, though.

  “He was patient with me, you know. Didn’t pressure me into anything. I’d gotten really thin, and all my friends were telling me I needed to eat, or worse, that I needed to see a doctor or a shrink. Bror didn’t care about any of that. He was the only person who just seemed to get that I was in pain, and he listened to me—every evening for weeks, it seemed like—and then at the end of the summer he gave me a pile of books he hoped would help bring me clarity, and he never minded that I didn’t read them. The sex was the least memorable thing about that time.”

  We stood, watching the divers as they reentered the water, closer to the shore this time. Here and there, I realized, you could see patches of dark red on the rocks, on the grassy banks. Vee was crouched by the side of one of the cabins, examining the wood near the door.

  I turned toward Elsa. “Would you be okay with me going to see him?”

  “Bror? Sure. You might like him.” She turned my hand over in hers. “Just don’t punish me for decisions I made when I was a kid.”

  “I know,” I said. “That was stupid of me. I’m glad you had someone who listened.”

  Ridiculous to be jealous over something so far away.

  Twelve

  The three police officers who stopped us were kind and showed us nothing but respect. They understood, they said, our need to see for ourselves. But Vee could not be here on the island. None of us could. They escorted us back to the boat and shook our hands. “We feel for you,” they each said in turn.

  Vee and I sat in our wooden speedboat, holding it in against the slipway, while Elsa stood on the pebbled beach, thigh-deep, holding the transom of the little white boat. Vee was carrying something delicate and soft, folded into her hands, held artfully against the side of her belly. I didn’t think Elsa saw it.

  “What’s that, Vee?”

  “We don’t need the police to feel for us. We need them to do their jobs.”

  The object in her hands glimmered softly.

  “Vee, what is that?”

  Vee looked at me, guilty, then at her mother.

  “Please,” she said gently. “She . . . she wouldn’t understand.”

  “Vee,” I said, “I am not a softer touch than your mum.”

  “She will freak.”

  Elsa shouted. “Cal!”

  “Vee,” I said quietly, “do not play us off against each other.”

  “Dad, you know she will.”

  “No, she won’t.”

  “Cal! Now would be good.”

  Vee’s eyes flicked toward her mother. “Shouldn’t you go and help her?”

  Elsa was standing in the water, arms folded, the boat braced against her thighs.

  “Hold the boat to the quay,” I said to Vee. I jumped up on to the jetty, walked a few paces toward the shore, jumped down onto the beach. At the water’s edge I took off my shoes.

  The water felt colder. The wind was getting up.

  We slid the little white boat up the beach. When we returned to our own boat Vee’s hands were empty.

  We sat on the sofa, Elsa and I, drinking our martinis as we watched the news on NRK, desperate for anything that could help our case. The announcer introduced a dark-haired woman, who began to hold forth about immigrants in heavily accented English.

  “Tasteful,” I said.

  Elsa sighed heavily. “So there’s this stupid thought I have about Licia, and I can’t shake it.”

  “Tell me your stupid thought.”

  Our eyes met for a moment. We were on edge, worn out, could barely look at each other. She reached for my hand instead.

  She said, “Did I ever tell you about driving her to that house church in the eastern suburbs? I mean, God knows why she as
ked me and not you, because it was four days before Franklin was born and I could barely walk. But anyway . . . I have this image of Licia standing there in the parking lot in her oversized woolen coat, folding and unfolding her hands, staring up at the open walkways that led to the apartments. And I had the window open and the snow was gusting into the car. I asked if she had her inhaler, and she nodded and smiled the most beautiful smile and said, “All I need is to remember to breathe.”

  “She was so painfully nervous, so I went up with her. The elevator barely had room for two people and smelled strongly of sweat, and we took it all the way to the twelfth floor, and when we got up there the walkway was slick with ice and the guardrails were low, and Licia got worried that I was going to fall, and she very sweetly held my hand, and we walked slowly up to this plain unmarked door. And from the inside there was just this music. The most beautiful melody, Cal: twenty voices—thirty, maybe—all singing in unison. And she turned to me and thanked me for not being weird about her coming here and asked me if I’d be okay getting back to the car. I called her my sweet child. And then the door opened, and there was this girl with white-blond hair wearing these ugly clumpy shoes, and she smiled the most beautiful smile and asked if she was Alicia Curtis. And Licia nodded, and let go of my hand, and began to walk across the threshold, and the girl asked if I wanted to join them. And I looked at Licia, and I could see what she was thinking. You know, No, Mum, please don’t, so I went downstairs to wait.”

  The woman on-screen was ranting now. Her Norwegian accent got stronger by the second: “We need to look away for a moment from the obvious crimes committed by the Andersens because these crimes are a distraction from their actual message. And that message is that people in Europe are tired of their homelands being a dumping ground for the cultural detritus of Africa and the Middle East.”

  “God,” I said, “this is chilling. What are they doing, interviewing her? What can she usefully tell us about Garden Island?”

  “She’s from a free speech think tank.”

  “Free speech?”

  “She makes a living winding up people like you, Cal. She’s a provocateur, and she’ll be finished soon. Can you please focus on what I’m trying to tell you? Because I was sitting there with the engine on and the heater on high, and the snow was falling all around, and the apartment building was beautiful in the snow. And when Licia returned to the car we drove quietly along the highway, and she was singing to herself under her breath, but she was shot through with excitement. So I asked her how it went and she said, “I wish you could know the happiness that true faith can bring, Mum.” And it was like the most perfect moment. Except . . .” Elsa was shaking her head, biting back tears.

  “Except what?”

  “What if the island was her opportunity to get away from us? What if Licia actually wanted out?”

  I reached out a hand, drew Elsa to me. “She was happy with her life.”

  “Was she?”

  “Wasn’t she?”

  “I guess I always thought so.”

  The woman on-screen seemed calmer. She was speaking slowly, but her words were no less chilling. “Our culture is being held down by the ankles and raped, and it is being mongrelized. These are the real crimes being committed daily against the Norwegian people through this mass immigration, and that is what the Andersen brothers are trying—imperfectly and clumsily, I concede—to communicate.”

  The presenter on-screen was trying to hold her to account. “But what these men did is not communication. What they did is murder.”

  The woman turned contemptuously to the camera. “You see? Instead of reporting the message, you and your media colleagues brand them criminals and murderers and side with the people who would see our heritage disappear.”

  I could feel the anger rising in me. “Seriously, though,” I said, “you can’t separate those men’s ‘message’ from the killings. The killings are the message. Can we please watch something else?”

  “With pleasure.” Elsa picked up the remote and flicked the channel.

  On-screen a ginger-haired man was speaking English, slowly, to a very tall black man. “You are perfectly nice,” he was saying. “And entirely welcome here. But Norwegian research proves your reaction time is likely to be slower than mine. And your IQ significantly lower.”

  I said, “I guess I was hoping we could watch something a whole lot less racist.”

  “Our TV is racist,” said Elsa. “How did you never notice this?”

  “Just weird.” I picked up the remote. “When everything else is so right on.” I flicked through the channels till I found a quiz show. The room filled with the sound of audience laughter.

  Elsa watched distractedly for a moment.

  “What, love?” I said.

  “We need to visit that house church.”

  She drove purposefully, hands clamped on the wheel. Franklin sat in his car seat, alert and excited, very far from sleep.

  The eastern suburbs looked very much like our western suburb. The same no-nonsense architecture, though the buildings were placed closer and there were fewer trees. There were basketball courts here and a soccer field on green-painted tarmac that was floodlit, though there was light in the sky. There were more dark faces among the players here than in Øvre Øvrebøhaugen. Fewer cars.

  As Elsa turned left up a narrow road that wound to the left, the players stopped to watch. The road surface was dusty, the grass at the side spattered with dried mud. We reached the top of the rise. Elsa parked the car, got out. I got out too. In front of us a hole, three stories deep, and behind it a towering wall of rock. Around the edges of the pit stood vast industrial machines: earth movers; cranes; pile drivers.

  “And this is definitely the address you came to?” I said.

  Angry tears were forming in Elsa’s eyes. “I should have taken a telephone number from someone, or gotten an email or a name . . . I just didn’t think . . .”

  I took her in my arms. “This is a blow, love,” I said. “But we’ll tell Tvist about the house church, and maybe he’ll turn something up.”

  Thirteen

  My brother Dan came for the memorial service. I was late to the airport. He was standing there, alone in a black suit, hair cropped close, a tan leather bag slung across his shoulder, coffee in hand.

  “The traffic,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “Christ, man, don’t be daft. I would have met you at the kirk. C’mere.” He dropped his bag to the ground, bear-hugged me. Always the older brother, though there was only a year between us.

  There was whisky on his breath. I stepped back. A tracery of red veins in the whites of his eyes.

  “You didn’t sleep on the flight,” I said. “Did you?”

  “Wrong way around, pal.” He laughed, shook his head. “You don’t get to worry about me.” His eyes were searching my face, all brotherly concern.

  “We’re getting by,” I said.

  “Right. Yeah.” He exhaled heavily. There was something more than concern in his eyes. Something more like grief. He ran the palm of his right hand across his right eye, blinked hard. “The station are being understanding,” he said. “So’s Daisy. She wanted us all to be here, but we didn’t feel we could take Lyndon out of school.”

  “Dan, the official line is that Licia’s coming back. Great if Vee could hear that from you as well as us.”

  “Aye. Sure.” He nodded, swallowed. “What’s your instinct, Cal?”

  “My instinct is she’s coming back.”

  He was searching my eyes. Perhaps he heard the catch in my voice.

  Brake lights in front flashed twice. I cut and swerved to the inside lane, swore under my breath. I felt my seat belt jam. We came to a stop.

  “Hate it when that happens. You okay?”

  “Are you?” said Dan.

  My phone began to ring. I checked the mirror. Gridlock in front. Gridlock behind. I unclipped and unjammed my seat belt, let it flow back into the reel, reattached it. Dan did t
he same.

  I answered the phone hands-free.

  That rich voice filled the car. “Cal Curtis? It’s Ephraim Tvist.”

  I felt my brother’s eyes on me.

  “Hello,” I said.

  I heard Tvist say, “A girl matching your daughter’s description . . .” I felt my muscles tense against the news I was sure was to come. Licia’s body, borne by the currents . . . I avoided my brother’s eye.

  “A girl matching Licia’s description?”

  “Saved the life of a young boy. Got him out of the woods and into the water. While she was in the woods she appears to have jettisoned an ammunition box along with the silver bracelet. I thought you’d want to know. Cal, the men ran out of bullets. When my tactical unit arrived they offered no resistance. It seems your daughter may have shortened the massacre.”

  “Oh my God.”

  The relief was overwhelming. I felt Dan’s hand gripping my arm. I could almost see the smile on Tvist’s face. “I wanted you to hear it from me and not from the press, Cal. You will have many questions, I’m sure, but a piece of the puzzle has fallen into place. We shall speak more.” And he was gone.

  “Wow,” I said, “Fuck.”

  “That’s my Licia,” said Dan. “You can be proud.”

  “So fucking proud.”

  “We both know Licia’s a survivor, Cal.”

  I took the roundabout at the top of the slip road, turned left across the bridge that crossed the highway.

  “Just the one wee note of caution,” said Dan “You do understand that man has already released this story to the press?”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I’d say that’s pretty much what he was telling you.”

  Elsa was fresh from the shower, hair wet, a towel knotted over her breasts.

  Dan stepped into her waiting arms. “Good to see you, darling. Wish the circumstances . . .”

  “Circumstances just improved a little,” said Elsa. “I think.”

  “Dan, tell Mum we have five minutes. She literally needs to get dressed now.” Vee was standing, impatient for her mother to end the embrace, in a blue sequined dress exactly like her sister’s, a thin black cardigan across her shoulders.