“A journalist called,” said Elsa, eyes shining, “to tell me Licia saved a little boy. Called her the hero of Garden Island. Said she ended the massacre.”
“Yeah. Tvist called me,” I said.
“So this can only be good,” said Elsa. “Right?”
Dan stepped away from Elsa. “I’d maybe switch your phones off for the next couple of days. Give some thought to how you manage this.”
Confusion in Elsa’s eyes. “Manage this?”
“Mum,” said Vee, “you really need to get ready.”
Elsa looked at Vee, seemed to see for the first time the kingfisher dress. Vee crossed her arms self-consciously across her body, drew the cardigan tight.
“Where’s the dress from, Vee?” I said.
“Julie,” said Vee, suddenly defensive.
“Because it looks awfully like—”
“Are those your sister’s shoes?” said Elsa, her voice full of simmering fury.
Vee, defiant, all jutting angles. Her mother staring daggers. Was that what she had found on the island? Her sister’s dress?
I saw the tremble in Vee’s jaw, saw the clenching of her right fist, saw the nail of her right forefinger digging into the quick of the thumb. “They’re Licia’s shoes. Julie lent me the dress.”
“And if I check with Julie’s mum?” said Elsa.
Dan walked toward Vee, took her in his arms, looked at Elsa, then at me. “This is a tribute,” he said. “Right, Vee?”
Vee nodded. Her eyes were filling with tears.
“Might be an idea to change, love,” I said, as gently as I could.
“You’re thinking of your sister.” Dan turned to Elsa. “Thinking of her sister sends exactly the right message.”
“I agree with Dad, Vee,” said Elsa, her voice tight with control. “It might be a good idea if you changed.”
Dan put a protective arm across Vee’s shoulder. “Family line is you’re looking forward to welcoming Licia home. Hence the dress.”
I stood very close to Elsa. “Dan’s good on this stuff,” I said, as quietly as I could. “And Vee clearly needs this. Let’s deal with the rest when we get home.”
“All right,” said Elsa, quiet as breath. “We mustn’t fracture. I see that.”
“I thank everybody who was on Garden Island for the courage they showed on that terrible day.” The prime minister was looking out across the cathedral at the survivors, at the families of the dead, with his buzz-cut hair and his Boateng suit. “Whether you faced down these two very disturbed men, as our tactical weapons unit did, or whether you simply survived to tell your story, as so many of you that I see before me, you have proven once again that courage is the defining Norwegian virtue.”
I felt eyes on me. I turned to the left. On the pew beside me was a small boy in a perfectly fitted black suit. I tried to smile, but the boy would only stare. So much stress in his sinewy, bony frame.
A hand reached out for the boy’s. His mother, an older woman, elegant in gray silk. I recognized her too now. She ruffled her son’s hair, then leaned across him to whisper to me. “I wanted to say thank you. On Arno’s behalf.”
“That means a lot,” I whispered.
Arno. Of course. The last of the children. Rescued from the water after Licia helped him escape. In the days since Garden Island his face had changed. His features were drawn, the flesh below his eyes puffy.
“Courage,” the prime minister was saying. “Courage is the . . . great . . . Norwegian . . . virtue.”
Arno’s mother squeezed my hand. “We are all very much hoping you will have news of your daughter soon. Without her . . .” So she knew, then.
Arno turned his blank stare on me again. “How are you, Arno?” I said.
“He hasn’t spoken,” said his mother. “Not once.”
“Give him time.”
She nodded, and I nodded, then we turned to face the front.
The prime minister was not done discoursing on courage. “Courage defined our forefathers when they faced down the Nazi threat during the war. Courage defines the young people who faced unspeakable dangers on Garden Island. Courage is the virtue shared by every man, woman, and child in this great Norwegian cathedral of ours.”
Beside me, Elsa said something to Vee that I did not catch. I turned toward Vee, who leaned across her mother. “That boy knows things, Dad.” She stared across at Arno. “Bet you anything you want.” Arno returned Vee’s stare, suspicious.
“This isn’t the time, Vee,” I said.
“He should tell us what he knows, Dad.”
Arno’s mother, sensing something, reached out and drew her son close.
“As the man in charge,” the prime minister was saying, “I accept responsibility for what went wrong on that most terrible day.”
Murmurings behind us. Ahead people were nodding, visibly moved.
“But I also accept . . .” He paused dramatically, leaned forward on the lectern. “I also accept responsibility for the things that went well.”
“What?” whispered Dan. “What were the things that went well?”
“Nothing,” said Vee. “Not a single thing.”
The prime minister stopped. Had he heard? His eyes flicked across to our pew. A look of displeasure crossed his features. “We are,” he said, “the most courageous of nations.”
I turned around, expecting to see my family’s disbelief reflected in other faces, but if there was anger it did not show. People sat in rapt attention, tears pouring down their cheeks, as if listening to a different speech. Arno’s mother seemed profoundly moved.
The prime minister looked down at his notes. He pulled at the ends of his cuffs, cleared his throat, drank water from a crystal glass, made himself tall. “You will forgive me, dear friends of Norway, if I continue my speech in the language of our forefathers. Kjære alle sammen . . .”
And so we sat there at the memorial service, surrounded by the families of the dead, as the prime minister promised the television cameras that his country would not change, that he would meet this atrocity with more democracy, more openness. Dan sat beside Vee, holding her hands very tightly. Vee did not cry. None of us did until the final hymn. “To Those in Peril on the Sea,” sung in Norwegian by a choir of two hundred. The deep bass of the organ took hold in our bones, wrenching the emotion from us, while the descants in the choir soared high above, ethereal and timeless.
We cried then, huddled together, my wife, my brother, my daughter, and I, as Franklin gurgled happily on my lap. We cried for Licia, who was yet to come home, and we cried for the lives lost or ruined that day, for those who would not be coming home, and for those who had come home changed. And all the while little Arno sat staring rigidly ahead, saying nothing.
When the service was over we slipped from our pew past the journalists and the camera crews.
“Viktoria! Viktoria Curtis!” one shouted.
Vee turned. A man in a suit was stepping toward her, microphone extended. “Your sister, the hero of Garden Island . . .”
Vee made to speak.
“No, Vee,” I said.
I could see Vee’s confusion.
“Viktoria Curtis,” the man was saying, “do you have a message for your missing sister?”
I handed Franklin to Elsa, stepped between the reporter and my daughter, guided her away.
“They shouldn’t be trying to speak to you, Vee.”
The reporter moved to intercept us.
“Do the right thing, pal,” Dan said to the reporter as gently as he could. “Step away.”
I began drawing Vee to the side.
“But Dad.” She turned back toward the reporter. “She needs to know we’re looking for her.”
“This is not the time, Vee.”
“Your dad’s right, Vee,” said Dan. He stepped in front of the reporter. “Page one of the ethics book, pal. No mics in kids’ faces.”
The reporter was not giving up. “When you feel the time is right to give your side
of the story, Viktoria—”
“She doesn’t,” Dan said.
“She won’t,” I said.
I could feel Vee trying to pull away. “Who said you could speak for me, Dad?”
I took her hand. “Excuse us,” I said. “Please. Vee, we need to go.” I bundled her past the reporter and out onto the steps of the cathedral. From both sides of the path people watched us.
When we reached the gate on to the street, Vee stopped. “I want to wait for the others.”
There were camera teams everywhere. “They’ll catch up with us,” I said.
Back on the cathedral steps I could see Bror, speaking to Arno and his mother. Arno’s mother said something to Bror, and he turned toward us. His eyes seemed to meet mine, even at this distance. A hint of a smile, the merest of nods. Then he turned back toward Arno and his mother.
“Dad,” said Vee.
Almost as if Bror knew us. Had he seen us together with Elsa?
“Dad,” said Vee again. She motioned toward a camera team farther up the street. They were lining up on us.
I took her hand and we turned and began to walk away down the street.
“Can you promise me something?” she said.
“What, Vee?”
“Just promise me you don’t all think she’s dead, and I just don’t know yet.”
“Oh, love. No. We don’t. Of course she’s not dead. She’s a hero, Vee, and we’re going to find her. But Dan’s right about keeping to the family line.”
She laughed. “What’s Dan scared we’re going to say?”
“It’s more subtle than that.” I stopped, turned to her. “Love, if you felt lied to or patronized, I’m sorry.”
She swallowed hard. “Patronized, maybe.”
“That was never our intention. Listen, your Uncle Dan thinks we need to manage our relations with the press. So the story they are reporting is ours, and not someone else’s.”
“Oh.” Her manic energy seemed to drop away. She stood thinking for a moment. “Yeah, that actually makes sense.”
Vee’s door was ajar. I stepped toward it, heard movement, stopped. There was Vee in her windowless bedroom, facing away from me, taking off her dress. Behind her, the connecting door into her sister’s room was open. Light was streaming through the window at the far end. The sequins at the edges of the dress flashed in the low evening sun. Like fish scales.
Vee laid the dress out carefully on the bed. She reached to the top bunk, took an old Bauhaus T-shirt of mine, pulled it on.
I smiled, about to turn away.
I saw Vee kneel, reach out to the rear panel of the dress, run her fingers along it. She lifted it away from the front panel at the strap, held it in the flat of her hand. She crossed the floor to the door into her sister’s room. She walked toward the window, stood, silhouetted, dress in hand. Tiny specks of light on every wall.
I stepped forward, stood in the doorway of Vee’s room, watching. The area Vee was holding seemed duller than the rest, and when its sequins did glint it was not blue but orange-red.
“Vee! Cal!” Elsa’s voice from the kitchen.
I slipped out into the hall, stood watching through the hinge jamb as Vee returned to her own room. She folded the dress at the middle and slipped it down between her mattress and the wall.
“That dress today,” I said to Elsa, as we stood washing dishes at the sink.
“I know,” she said. “Something really not right there.”
“I saw her hide it down the side of her bed. I mean, it feels wrong to breach her privacy . . .”
“We need to know,” she said. “Absolutely we do.”
“So what do we do?”
“Vee!” she shouted. “Honey! Can you go fetch the ice cream from the freezer?”
Vee sauntered in. “Dan’s smoking cigarettes on the patio. What do you want to do about that?”
“Nothing.”
Vee rolled her eyes. “Hmm.” She opened the fridge, made a play of opening the icebox.
“The freezer downstairs,” said Elsa. “In the storage room.”
“Why can’t Dad?”
“Your father and I are talking.”
Vee rolled her eyes again. But she took the key Elsa handed her and headed out of the door.
I found the dress at once, between Vee’s bed and the wall.
Elsa was waiting in the kitchen. I held the dress by the straps, let it unroll. The sequins sent tiny shards of light onto every surface. Elsa took the dress from me, turned it around. A brown stain in the rear panel below the right shoulder.
I said, “She brought something home with her from the island.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“I wish I had now.”
I heard the door of the apartment swing open, heard Vee kick off her shoes in the hall, heard the door slam shut.
“We agree it’s a bloodstain?” said Elsa.
I nodded. Elsa blinked hard, handed me the dress. From the front it looked perfect. You wouldn’t know. But when I turned it over there was no mistaking the small tear in the darker blue fabric underneath, and the stain that radiated out from it. Like Elsa’s pictures. Carmine 12 shading to cinnabar 14.
Fourteen
We asked Dan to take Vee out.
“Vee,” said Dan as she entered the room. “Vee, what say you and I go for a walk?”
“I’m fourteen, Dan.”
“Which means what? You don’t do walks?”
“Which means there’s nowhere to walk to. Literally, like, nothing.” She looked at Elsa, suspicious, then at me. “What are they planning?”
“What about that Viking grave?” I said.
“It’s barbed wire and dead grass,” said Vee. “Maybe some skater goths drinking beer and smoking weed.”
“Sounds edgy,” said Dan. “Let’s go.”
“Thanks, Dan,” I said.
“It’s not edgy. It’s lame.” Vee looked at me, then at Elsa. “Fine,” she said. She walked from the room, angry.
“Thirty minutes?” said Dan.
“An hour would be good,” said Elsa.
We drew the bed away from the wall, but Vee had hidden nothing there beyond the dress. I pulled the sheet from the mattress, pulled the cover from the duvet. Elsa rifled through Vee’s diary. I searched Vee’s schoolbag. We searched every drawer, opened every jeweled box.
Nothing.
Elsa stood on a chair and ran her hand across the tops of the wardrobes. Nothing more than dust.
We put everything back exactly as we’d found it. We agreed that I would speak to her, but when Vee returned something went wrong. I heard shouting from the kitchen, and when I walked in Vee was in tears and Elsa’s eyes were white with fury.
“Fucking hypocrite,” Vee spat at her mother. She turned on her heel and strode out.
“I’ll take this,” I said.
“I think that might be best,” said Elsa.
Vee was sitting on the bed. I sat down on the floor, facing her.
“Unbelievable,” she said. “Can you believe she would do that?”
“Do what, love?”
But Vee was looking around at the bed, at the bookcases, at the wardrobe. She could tell.
“She searched my room, Dad.”
“We searched your room, love.”
“Oh.” She sat for a time examining her foot, rubbing her thumb across the side of the arch. Her voice, when she spoke, was very small. “What did you find?”
“Vee, you know what we found.”
She nodded as if to herself.
“I know I have to take the dress to the police,” she said, her voice small.
Then she got up and sat down beside me on the floor. I put my arm around her and we sat for the longest time, saying nothing.
At eleven, when Dan and I sat drinking whisky in the living room, and the sun was still up, and the sky was red and the clouds feathered to gray, when we heard Elsa’s footsteps in the hall, heard the front door sliding open, my
brother looked at me as he shouted, “Elsa?” And Elsa walked into the apartment, and through the dark space that we called the library. And she stood there at the edge of the room in the pool of light from a spotlight in the ceiling and said very simply, “Maybe you can manage to get Vee off her computer. I’m meeting Hedda.”
Dan looked at me, and I could tell he expected me to say something, so I said, “Sure,” because I didn’t know what else to say.
“Want to go with her, Cal?” said Dan. “I can hold the fort.”
I looked at Elsa.
“Better not,” she said.
As we watched, Elsa stepped out of the light and I saw her shadow move through the library and into the hall, and Dan was looking at me all the while.
“You okay with that?” he said, as the door swung shut.
And a part of me was running after Elsa, asking her not to go, but I said, “Price of a good marriage. Bit of give-and-take.”
“So your marriage is good?”
“Sure.”
“So you’re okay with bars and late nights? Wow.”
I said nothing.
He reached across, began to pour himself another whisky. “I don’t buy it, Cal.”
“Drop the concern. It’s what we do.”
“Elsa goes to bars while you sit at home, seething.”
“Do you see me seething?”
“And, I mean, these pictures of hers.” He gestured up at the print above the sofa. “All those huge swaths of Rothko red. All those purples. I’ve never known what they mean. I’m not even sure that I like them. But they express something, for fuck’s sake . . . Some kind of inner landscape . . .”
I looked up at Carmine 34. So young she had been when she had taken it. So full of confidence. So certain that this would be the picture that would make her name. And it did. For a time.
“They’re American crime scenes,” I said.
Dan laughed. “Aye, right.”
“No, they actually are,” I said. “Elsa had this agreement with the PD. She would travel out with the detectives, hang back until the crime scene technicians were done.”
Love and Other Lies Page 12
