Love and Other Lies

by Ben McPherson

  The men looked unaffected when the psychiatrists read out the injuries they had sustained at the hands of their mother: the broken arms and the scalded legs, the kettle-cable marks, and, once, the imprint of an iron on the skin of Paul Andersen’s lower back. Time and again the social workers had recorded their concern. Time and again the boys’ mother moved them to a new district, and the social work evaluations began again from scratch.

  “The answer is you shoot the little one,” whispered Vee after a time.

  “Vee, no.”

  “What? This is a game. You shoot Paul Andersen. John Andersen shrivels up and dies. Two men, one bullet.”

  “Vee.”

  “It’s okay. I’m done.”

  I turned my phone over in my hand. There was Elsa at Stein Erik Lundgrens plass, an address I didn’t recognize.

  “Put it away, Dad.”

  “All right.”

  I dropped the phone into my pocket, tried to concentrate on the trial.

  After a while I began to see small differences between the men. It was the smaller brother, Paul, who made most of the jokes. The taller brother, John, did most of the laughing.

  Vee was right. John Andersen was completely dependent on Paul.

  Elsa spent an hour and a half at Stein Erik Lundgren’s plass number 2. When she left, it was at a slow walk. As if something had calmed her.

  In the café during morning break, while Vee fetched drinks and cinnamon buns, I dropped the address into Google. A low-rise industrial building, painted white.

  Skarpsno Pistolklubb.

  A pistol club in Skarpsno. Was this Elsa’s idea of therapy?

  I felt Vee hovering at the edge of my vision. I looked up.

  “It’s their sanity,” she said. I put my phone on the table, facedown.

  “What is?”

  She passed me a black coffee in a paper cup. “That’s what those men find funny.” She put down her soda. “Every time someone says the Andersen brothers are insane, that’s when they laugh. They find it hilarious that anyone could think that. Like they gamed the system.”

  And she was right. For the rest of the morning I watched the Andersens closely and the pattern was the same. Details from the reports were read out. Same facts, different conclusions. At every finding of insanity, the men sniggered. At every mention of planning, they looked bored.

  At twelve Elsa collected Franklin from kindergarten. There was her flashing orange dot. At quarter to one she put Franklin down for his nap. She was on the terrace at the back of the apartment for seven minutes. Nothing grows on our terrace, so she could only be drinking coffee or smoking a cigarette.

  The tracking on Elsa’s phone is very precise.

  I recorded my piece. I climbed the steps to Security. There was one person in front of me. Edvard, taller and thinner than ever, in an ill-fitting gray suit, dropping his belongings into a gray plastic tray.

  Perhaps he felt my eyes on him. He turned, made himself smile. “Hello, Cal.”

  “Hello, Edvard.”

  We embraced. “How’s Jo?” I said.

  He turned to face the scanner.

  “Oh, Jo’s okay,” said Edvard. “I’m sure he sends his love.”

  “Send mine back.”

  “I’ll be certain to do that.”

  The woman nodded at him. He stepped briskly through the scanner. Some strange edge to his behavior; something untruthful.

  The scanner woman smiled. I passed her my telephone.

  Edvard turned to me. “I thought perhaps I’d sit with you in the courtroom?”

  “That would be . . . that would be nice, Edvard . . .”

  The woman was inspecting my phone. I put my keys and belt onto the conveyor, and stepped through the scanner.

  Edvard was watching me, expectant.

  “I’m going to see you in there, Edvard. I have a couple of calls to make.”

  “See you in there.”

  I watched him go, then called Jo.

  “Hey, Cal,” said Jo. “Good piece. Moving.”

  “I worry I come across as angry. So anyway—”

  “Righteous anger.”

  I was in the foyer now. I sat on a low wooden bench. “So anyway, Edvard’s here at the courthouse, and he wanted to sit together, and I guess I was wondering how things were between you, because he was being a little odd.”

  A long pause. “Odd is a pretty fair description of how things are between Edvard and me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “And you really don’t want to hear about our problems.”

  “Actually, I kind of do.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Cal, he moved into the spare room. Says he wants us to experiment with celibacy. Like it’s something I should be getting excited about.”

  “Wow.”

  “And then he asks me if I think Mila Kunis is hot.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “It’s like he’s practicing not being gay,” said Jo. “Or being married. I mean, is Mila Kunis hot to married men? And who in the world decides it’s a good idea to experiment with celibacy?” He was making light, but I could hear the pain behind the words. “It’s like when his parents came to stay and I pretended to be his roommate. Only no one’s coming to stay. The flat is like a morgue.”

  “Wait a second,” I said to Jo, because there was Vee, coming down the stairs, computer bag in hand.

  I moved to stand up, but Vee did not see me. She began walking toward the exit. I watched as she passed, then stood up. At the top of the courthouse steps she looked about herself, then headed quickly away.

  “No offense about being married, by the way,” Jo was saying.

  “None taken. I’m so fucking sorry, Jo. Listen, I should go . . .”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m being an energy sink. Sorry. You don’t need it.”

  “No, mate. I want to hear.”

  “Not what you signed up for.”

  “Beer soon,” I said. “Gotta go.”

  I reached the top of the courthouse steps, thinking I’d lost Vee, but she was striding back toward me from the edge of the square.

  “Mum’s right,” she said as she reached the top of the steps. “Today’s pointless.”

  Still, though: She was avoiding my gaze. She turned and looked out across the square as if checking some detail.

  “What’s happening, Vee? Where were you going?”

  She turned and looked me in the eye. “Nothing, Dad, and nowhere. Don’t spy on me.”

  So convinced she was of her own position. I felt a strange protective surge of pride. Our stubborn little girl. “You can tell me later,” I said. “When you’re ready.”

  “Tell you what?” she said, her own eyes flashing. “What are you looking at me like that for?”

  Because, Vee, I thought, you are every inch your mother’s daughter.

  Twenty-Eight

  Elsa and I were on the sofa, drinking martinis in front of the evening news.

  I said, “I want to know your reaction to something Vee said.”

  Elsa reached across, took my hand in hers. “How do you get them so perfect, Cal?”

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  “I am too.”

  On the news was an interview with the immigration minister, in Norwegian. Arrest photographs of dark-skinned people. Cameras roaming through dusty African towns. Handcuffed figures being led up airplane steps. The minister in a studio, all bottle-blond hair, her lips and cheeks rouged, like a child’s drawing of a white woman.

  “So,” said Elsa. “Vee . . .”

  “Yeah, Vee asked me, if I had one gun and one bullet—”

  “—which one of the Andersens you’d kill?” That smile, as if the idea amused her. “I can see where she’s going with that . . .” She took a long swig of her drink, rolling the glass appreciatively in her hand as she swallowed. “My reaction is that it’s normal to play around with ideas.”

  The immigr
ation minister used the word ghetto. I turned to face the TV. The minister seemed to be making a point about Sweden.

  Elsa put her glass on the table. She turned to me. “That really is a great martini. Why don’t you tell me about the olives you used?”

  The immigration minister’s job appeared to be sending refugee children back to Afghanistan and Central Africa. A Facebook page full of love-heart emojis celebrated successful repatriations.

  “The olives, Cal?”

  I answered sharply, “You just . . . you buy the right fucking olives, Elsa. Is that really more important to you than Vee’s state of mind?”

  The interviewer was asking the minister if she was as skeptical about immigration as the Andersen brothers were.

  Elsa reached forward to take my hand again. “This is our ritual. Cal, why are you getting hung up on a child’s game? And will you please look at me, and not the TV?”

  On-screen the interviewer was asking the minister precisely how her views differed from the Andersens’. The minister replied that her views were nothing like the Andersens’. The interviewer quoted the prime minister’s words from the memorial service: “More democracy. More openness.” His tone was sarcastic. An argument broke out in the television studio.

  Elsa picked up the remote control, began flicking through the channels.

  “Okay,” I said. “So what’s your answer to Vee’s dilemma?”

  “It’s hardly a dilemma, Cal. You shoot the strong one. Paul Andersen. Without him the weak one crumples. Everybody wins.”

  How strange to hear my wife speak so casually about murder, even if it was a game. She turned to look at me, seemed to read my thought.

  “You do understand I’m joking?” she said. “Cal? Or do we not make jokes anymore?”

  I looked at her as she sat, rolling the stem of her glass between forefinger and thumb. Something about her had changed. There was a purposefulness to Elsa these days—though surely it had come gradually and imperceptibly—something decisive and hard, and sharp as new-forged steel.

  I should have asked her. The question was a simple one.

  What did you do today, Elsa?

  Instead I went out, angry and confused. I went to a bar with a stage where Mark Steiner & His Problems were playing. The songs were slow and melodic, the guitars full of discord and Nordic pain: “Insomnia’; “Fortitude’; “Sea of Disappointment’; “Don’t Explain.” With your voice of gravel and honey, I thought, you could be singing for me.

  Beside me a woman leaned in. “Guy can really move.” The warmth of her breath on my ear. Her dancing eyes.

  I nodded. She must have caught the look in my eye.

  “Hey,” she said. “Why so sad?”

  I had no answer to that, though we sat and we talked for hours on the steps outside. If Elsa had been watching, I know she would not have liked it. And when we parted, I felt her fingertips lingering on mine and wondered if this was an invitation to something more.

  But I love my wife, so I headed for home.

  Vee found me on the terrace. She looked at the cigarette butts that littered the soil of the planter, at the bottle of gin on the table in front of me.

  “I can’t get back to sleep. You woke me up when you came in.”

  “Sorry.” I put an arm across her shoulder, and we sat, father and daughter, looking out from our strange oppressive apartment into the black trees and the purple hills beyond. The night was at its darkest, though there was color in the sky. A cat roamed the long grass behind the apartment building, blue-gray and shadowless in the grasses below the trees.

  That expectant look on Vee’s face, all fired up.

  “What?” I said.

  “Dad, can I show you a thing?”

  But she was already on her feet and out of the room.

  She returned, carrying a bundle neatly wrapped in a dishcloth. She placed it on the table in front of me, sat down opposite me, watching for my reaction.

  The corners of the cloth were folded into the middle.

  “Did you go searching among your mother’s things? Because that’s an abuse of trust, Vee.”

  “So wake her up and tell her . . .”

  I lifted a corner, felt fabric drag across the object inside. Something heavy and dark and metallic. I unfolded the cloth, corner by corner.

  The handgrip was textured, the trigger guard square. I leaned in. Engraved into the gunmetal were the words Glock 17 Gen4 AUSTRIA.

  Vee’s face was flushed, her eyes electric with excitement. “Aren’t you even going to pick it up?”

  I shook my head. “Vee, I’m sorry.”

  I could feel her disappointment. This was not the response she wanted.

  “Why?”

  “We are not providing the stability you need.”

  “Did you know she had this, though?”

  “It’s not a complete surprise.”

  I began to fold the corners of the cloth back over the body of the pistol.

  “Dad, is Mum having some kind of breakdown?”

  I laughed. “Your mother is the sanest person I know.”

  She looked at me, unconvinced. She made to say something. She stopped.

  “What is it, Vee?”

  “There’s another thing. Only now I don’t know if you’ll be interested.”

  “Is this other thing also about Mum?” I said.

  “No.”

  “All right, then. What sort of a thing is it?”

  “A story. One nobody else has.”

  She left the room and returned with an iPad.

  “Vee,” I said, “where is this from?”

  “I promised not to say.”

  “Vee—”

  “You can take it to the police if you like, Dad. But please watch what’s on it first.”

  Twenty-Nine

  It began like a feature film, though there was no sound. The camera skimmed the glassy fjord, raised up as it came to the island, followed the path from the boat dock up to the clearing. It hung suspended, looking down at the main house, at the bodies that lay strewn on the sun-scorched grass beyond.

  Children. Other people’s children. You could almost imagine they were sleeping.

  I reached across, pressed pause, turned the iPad on its front.

  “Okay,” I said. “Vee, I want you to go to bed.”

  Vee met my eye. “I already watched it, Dad. Twice. It’s not like I’m going to sleep better if I go to bed now. But if that’s what you want . . .”

  I pushed the tips of my fingers together, tapped both index fingers against the tip of my nose, breathed out heavily. I turned the iPad over. Vee pressed play.

  Even in close-up, the camera held steady. Now it followed a dark-haired boy as he ran along a path, panning and tilting with him. So close. You could see his eyes, read the fear in them, see patches of sweat around the collar of his T-shirt. The camera watched as he left the path, made his way into a wooden cabin.

  The cabin was one of many. The helicopter stayed in position for what must have been about a minute. The shot held wide, staring down. In that time you saw another boy, then two girls, each running to a different cabin. The camera tilted up, zoomed in to a path, found a man in police uniform.

  The tall brother. John Andersen. Carrying a pistol. The merest hint of a smile.

  John Andersen holstered his pistol. A rifle raised into position. He checked something on the side of the weapon, then looked through the gunsight at the helicopter, taking aim. The helicopter jerked upward, John Andersen dropped out of shot, and the screen was a blur of faded greens and browns.

  Fleeing.

  I looked at Vee. There was something very adult about the set of her chin, about the determination in her eyes. She looked older than her sister ever had, and I wanted to tell her that I was sorry, that I could see sometimes how Licia’s disappearance had robbed her of her childhood.

  “Dad,” said Vee, looking up, “you’re not watching.”

  “Of course I’m watching
.”

  On-screen the water was an indistinct gray-black mass.

  The camera steadied. The world fell into focus. There was the slipway on the mainland. At the waterline a red rubber boat, and on the boat four men. Figures around the boat busied themselves with levers and ropes. The boat seemed to be floating free. I had seen that boat before, in the video still that Bror had left for me on Elsa’s seat in the courtroom.

  “You see that, Dad? No one’s even holding it.”

  Two more men jumped aboard. The rubber of the boat seemed to swell around them.

  “Fucking amateurs,” said Vee.

  “Vee, please,” I said.

  “Okay, but do they look to you like they know what they’re doing? It’s way too low in the water.”

  Another two men approached and jumped in. The boat pulled slowly from the slipway. Water plumed out behind the motor.

  “This is what they didn’t want us to see.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “No, Dad, it is. That’s the police tactical weapons unit.”

  The helicopter was returning across the sound toward the island.

  “You’re right,” I said. “That is a little odd.”

  “That’s not the end of that story, Dad . . . But you have to keep watching . . .”

  Now the helicopter was back above the island, hovering over a block of flat-roofed buildings at the side of the clearing.

  The shower block.

  At one end of the block a door opened. Two girls appeared on the steps. They waved frantically up at the helicopter. The shot began to close with the ground. Yellow-green grass filled the frame, then the screen turned dark gray. Pavel was landing, I realized, in the clearing by the shower block.

  He had tried to help. He had been telling the truth about that.

  “Vee,” I said, “was it Pavel who gave you this?”

  “I know you told me to keep away from him. But if you’re going to shout at me, can you at least wait till you’ve seen it all?”

  I took her hand. “I’m not going to shout at you. I promise.”