My calf muscles brushed against rock. My back came to rest in the soft silt. I was calm now, calmer than I’d been in months.
I emptied my lungs, saw my breath plume and join into a single vast bubble, watched as it rose directly above me, softening and disappearing as it went. If I did nothing, if I did not push myself toward the surface, then I would stay here. I would merge with the water, become one with the fjord.
Calm.
I could feel the beginning of the ache in my stomach, and in my throat, could feel my body preparing to inhale.
Perhaps Licia was down here? Perhaps Licia too had merged with the water? Perhaps she was waiting for me, just out of sight. Perhaps she wanted me to stay.
I was very, very calm, though I could feel my body fighting me, trying to force me to open my lungs and breathe.
Calm.
If I stayed, perhaps I could merge with Licia?
For a moment I thought I saw the surface of the water, saw above it the faces of Elsa, and of Vee, and of Franklin, seeking me out. All was light and color and laughter.
I looked about me. All was dark.
“I’m sorry, Licia,” I said with the very last of my breath.
A tiny bubble rose swiftly through the dark.
Gone.
Nothing now but the sound of blood pumping in my ears, of my heartbeat slow and strong.
But Elsa. But Franklin. But Vee.
I can’t stay, Licia.
I curled my knees into my stomach, crouched for a moment, feet planted on the fjord’s rocky bottom. I raised my arms above my head. I pushed hard, upward, toward the world of the living, swimming for my life, fighting to keep the water from spilling down my throat.
Three strokes, and the water began to lighten. I saw shadows above me. Two more strokes, and the shadows resolved into shapes. Arms. Legs. Bodies in motion.
I was at the surface, breathing gratefully, surrounding by light and by people, laughing now. United by something more than grief, as we swam together in a sea of flowers that reached almost to the island.
Milla was waiting at the gate, as if she had known I would come.
“He’s at the barn,” she said as I got out of the car.
I walked past fruit trees where turtledoves billed and cooed. There he was at the side of the red-painted wooden building in his gray shirt and his gray robe, kneeling beside Arno. On the ground before them four rabbits were laid out, each bleeding delicately from a tiny wound in the shoulder. Two small-bore rifles stood nearby, barrels pointing toward the sky.
Arno saw me first. He smiled. He tapped Bror lightly on the shoulder, staring at me all the while. The dark rings around his eyes were gone.
Bror followed Arno’s gaze. He jumped lightly to his feet. “The hero returns.” He stepped forward. We embraced.
“You . . . are less troubled, Cal Curtis.”
“Doesn’t sound like me.”
He held my forearms, scanned my eyes. “No, something in you has changed.”
“You saw the broadcast?”
“Very good it was. And yet . . .” His eyes were searching mine. “I feel it is more than this.”
“Maybe . . .”
He looked back at Arno. “The boy’s mother will be coming for him soon. You don’t mind if we continue?”
“Of course not.”
Bror returned to the rabbits. He knelt. From a pocket he took a roll of canvas, which he unfurled on the grass. A set of cook’s knives, black-hilted, eight in all. Arno looked down at the knives.
“Choose,” said Bror.
The boy’s hand floated toward an eight-inch blade.
“You need a four-inch knife.”
Arno looked at Bror. Bror took Arno’s hand, guided it toward the shorter knives at one end of the roll. “This,” he said. “Or even this.”
Arno looked at him again, then reached for a blade with a slight curve.
“Good choice,” said Bror. “Very good.”
Arno smiled, briefly, and Bror returned the smile: an enveloping smile full of warmth and kindness. “Here’s how you hold it.” Guiding the boy’s movements, gently and with confidence. “And here’s how you make the first cut.”
He must have seen me turn away.
“Not a fan of blood, Cal?”
“In my world meat comes from the supermarket.”
He laughed. “You disapprove?”
“Not judging. Just not my thing.”
“I like your honesty,” he said. “Take a short walk.”
I glanced at Arno. He had made a neat cut on the abdomen of one of the rabbits.
Bror caught me looking. “Or stay.” He smiled. “It’s really not so bad.”
Arno nodded at me and smiled too. Unthinkable a year ago. Even a few months ago his eyes had been lifeless and empty. I smiled at the boy, and he nodded at me and picked up the next rabbit.
“I will go for a walk,” I said.
“Introduce yourself to my dogs.”
I began to walk toward the low black-painted farm building.
A dog gave voice. Then another.
“Hush!” said Bror from behind me. That same reassuring gentleness. The dogs fell silent. I saw a yellow eye in a gap between the black-painted slats. A second eye appeared. Watchful and poised behind thin wood. No sound now beyond a low, hoarse panting.
I crouched down, held out the back of my hand. A snout appeared, black and very close. I saw an open jaw lined with heavy teeth, felt the dog draw my scent in through its mouth. “Hey there,” I said. “Hello.” I pushed my hand closer to the slats, and a pink tongue appeared, lapping at my wrist.
“The door is around the side,” said Bror. “They really are very friendly.”
I opened the door to the barn, heard the rasping of breath and the clanking of chain on concrete, saw their dark lurking shapes in the gloom. Three dogs, all haunch and shoulder and pointed snout. Muscular, like sprung steel.
At this end of the barn light fell through the slats and from the open door. I could make out a wall at the far end, and in that wall a door. I hunkered down, held out a hand, but the dogs kept their distance, pacing just out of reach. I took a half step toward them, heard the smallest of them growl in warning.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m one of the good guys.” But none of them would greet me now that I was inside.
When I returned, the rabbits were laid out in a row, their entrails stacked in a neat pile by the fence. Arno was gone.
Bror smiled a disarming smile. “There’s a definite spring in your step today.”
I looked at him. “You want to guess Tvist’s reaction to my piece?”
“Misdirection?”
“He asked me who might have provided the Andersens with logistical support.”
Bror gave a cynical little laugh. “And whom did you suppose him to mean?”
“You.”
“Well, I’m an easy target, am I not? We’ve established that.” He gestured at the rabbits. “Shall we carry two each, my friend?”
I looked at him. He was not exactly my friend, I thought. But he listened. A part of me almost wanted to confide in him.
I bent down beside him. The rabbits were still soft, their fur silky, their bodies warm.
I said, “I’ve come to understand that the police and I are not on the same side.”
“Yes. That’s what I see, I think.” He smiled, as if he found an answer in my eyes. “You, Cal Curtis, are . . . a man reborn.”
“Is that a blessing?”
He raised his right arm, his forefinger and middle finger held almost straight, ring finger and pinkie curled. “Would you like it to be?”
I stood up, a rabbit in each hand. “Actually, I had an almost religious experience. In the waters of Garden Island.”
He picked up the two remaining rabbits in his left hand. He stood up beside me. He laughed gently, walked to where the rifles stood, knelt and picked them up in his right hand. “And did you see the face of the Godhead?”
<
br /> “I saw the faces of my family.”
“Good. Very good indeed.” He was nodding, as if to himself, serious now. We began to walk toward the farmhouse. “There is something heroic at your core. You did not believe me when I hinted at it before. But you are beginning to discover what I meant.”
“Am I?” I laughed. He turned and looked at me almost gravely. I stopped laughing.
“Follow.” He marched into the house, along the stone-flagged hall and on into the kitchen, where he laid the rabbits on the workbench by the sink.
I said, “Arno seems . . .”
“ . . . better? Much, though he hasn’t uttered a word since he arrived. And the girls terrify him. We quarter as many as eight a time. All of them exceptional. So hard to be a teenage boy these days. Even without Arno’s additional challenges. And yet still I say to Arno, you may open any door, enter any room, but you must not climb the stairs to the girls’ dormitory! Because even in the land of equality, men are still men.”
“You’re schooling him in the chivalric virtues?”
“All very chaste. Though I imagine that’s not easy for a pubescent boy either, and I can see that a part of you wishes to satirize me for it. But a young man must know how to behave in the presence of women. You’re a father to two daughters. I know that at heart we agree.” He looked at me, smiled a wise smile. “What we teach is really not so old-fashioned. Me-too, and all that. Think of our girls as a new template for womanhood, and Arno as a new template for manhood. The modern world wants to use women and cast them aside. We do not, and Arno will not.”
“So Arno is your little knight . . .”
At this he became very serious. He put a hand on my arm, looked me in the eye. “Cal, friend, even a good man knows how a bad man thinks. Surely it’s better that he respect women?”
“All right,” I said. “Yes. And I do see the change in him.”
“Now . . .” He gestured to the rabbits in my hands, which I passed to him. “Let us talk instead about this change in you, Cal . . . I’m tempted to say it’s an acceptance of calling.”
“I have no calling.”
“Oh, but you do. You spoke truth to power, and with such angry clarity. This is what the fightback looks like, my friend. And you know now for whom you are fighting.”
“Do I?”
“Your tribe, of course. You must not deprecate yourself. This is a huge achievement. And now that you have identified your enemy—with startling clarity, may I say—you are declaring war upon him with the truth as your shield and the pen as your sword.”
“Thank you,” I said. “For helping us get this far.”
“Oh, but you mustn’t thank me. Not yet. You must go home to your wife and your children and prepare for something utterly wonderful.”
Thirty-Two
Elsa was outlining her eyes with kohl, naked from the shower. In the bathroom mirror I saw how her eyes flicked to the crystal glass as I set it beside her, then flicked back to me. There was an openness to her, an expectancy that I hadn’t seen in months. She had left the doors open between the bedroom and the bathroom, remembering, perhaps—reminding me of a time, perhaps—when I would watch her as she prepared to go out.
I walked past her and into the bedroom, lay on the neatly made bed, glass in hand. I looked up to find her watching me, her own glass half-raised. She loosed her hair with her left hand. It hung heavy around her shoulders, glinting dully, the ends curling inward, trailing against her breasts.
She turned the glass in her hand. “Alchemy, Cal.” Sunbeams cut the heavy viscous liquid. Tiny golden shards of ice, disappearing fast.
We held each other’s gaze in the Norwegian way.
“Skål.”
“Skål.”
My phone rang.
I put down my drink untouched. Elsa watched me, her glass still by her lips, intrigued.
“Do you need to get that, Cal?”
I looked at her: at the keen intelligence in her wolf eyes; at the implied question in her gently parted lips. I looked down at the water droplets on her breasts, at the exhilarating angle of her thigh. I switched off my phone.
For the first time in a year we fucked. It was slow and intense, far too full of expectation and longing to be satisfying. Neither of us came, but there was an intimacy to it that I thought we had lost. Something simple and overwhelming and beautiful.
We took the train into town, saying nothing, each lost in our own thoughts. We stood for a while in front of the town hall, watched the cranes as they hoisted girders into place on the facade. Still we said nothing.
We headed into the East End of Oslo. People thronged the street, speaking languages we did not understand. There was dirt here, and color, and life, and noise. Kids on snakeboards glided through gaps in the crowds, bumped fists with friends as they passed. White boys with face tattoos and plaited Nordic beards sank beer from cans. Laughing women passed by in niqabs. Lesbian couples held hands or made out in the doorways of bars. There was an edge on these streets, something intoxicating and new.
Elsa put her arm around me. She rested her head on my shoulder and we stood stock-still, let the people flow around us, watched them as they surged and ebbed.
“Why did we never choose this, Cal?”
“We’re choosing it now.”
“We chose the part of town that’s the very opposite of this,” she said. “And we wondered why our daughters weren’t happy.”
“It was for six months.”
“That’s what we told ourselves. But we never chose this life anywhere we lived. We’re not even forty. How did we become this old white married couple?”
“Tonight we chose this.”
“No,” she said. “No, tonight we chose a cocktail bar that has a barbershop on the second floor. They take thirty bucks for a peach Bellini. I don’t know what that is, but it’s not this.”
I looked around me, at the ebb and surge of the crowd. “All right,” I said. I led her to a bench table outside a dirty bar that opened onto the street. “Turn your phone back on. Tell your friends they’re meeting us here.”
“Hedda won’t like it.”
“No,” I said. “She won’t.”
She put her handbag on the table. She rummaged.
“That bag,” I said. “Not really you.”
“And what do you know? No cigarettes.”
“I’m trying to start a fight, Elsa.”
“Okay.” She leaned her head to the left, then to the right. “Okay, fuck you. I like the bag. And I like Hedda. Even if she doesn’t like you.”
“I knew it,” I said. “I fucking knew it.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, Cal.” But if this was the beginning of something more honest, I could take these little shards of pain.
We sat watching the people as they passed, our fingers entwined, saying very little. I kissed Elsa’s neck; it was good to feel her skin beneath my lips: so familiar, so ordinary, so alive.
“Do you and Bror ever talk about me?” she said.
“I kind of assumed you wouldn’t want me to,” I said. “Though I think he’d like it if I did.”
“What if I were to tell you a truly monstrous secret?” she said, her gaze level and easy.
“What if I already know your monstrous secret?” I said.
“You can’t,” she said. “You don’t know the first thing.” Her wolf eyes, all flecked with gold.
“What if I knew more than you think?”
“Not possible.”
“Elsa,” I said, “what have you done?”
She looked me in the left eye, then the right. She looked away.
She said, “Do you ever scare yourself?”
“No.”
“You’re never frightened of what you might do?”
“Never.”
She smiled. “Must be nice.”
“Elsa,” I said. “What have you done?”
“Nothing.”
“Then what?”
; The color disappeared from her eyes. Time slowed. She bit down on to her lower lip. She inhaled once, then paused, then inhaled again.
“Okay,” she said. “So here’s the thing . . .”
“Cal. Over here. Happy fucking anniversary, mate.”
And so the moment passed, and we were on our feet and embracing our friends. And still I didn’t know if Elsa was joking, or if she was about to tell me about the Glock.
“Great piece,” said Jo, his arm across my shoulders.
“Yeah,” said Edvard.
I stepped forward to hug Jo, felt his stubble raking mine.
“How are things?” I whispered.
“About the same.”
But from his smile you would have thought nothing was wrong. “You really shook them up, Cal,” he said, turning to Edvard. “Didn’t he?”
“Yeah.” Edvard stepped forward, hugged me with surprising warmth. “Yeah, management’s freaking out.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No,” said Edvard. “They should freak out. Happy wedding anniversary, by the way.”
Elsa embraced him warmly and said something that made him laugh, and she turned toward me and smiled.
Only Hedda was hanging back. Elsa’s oldest friend, clutching defensively at the hem of her dress. She was made up for the cocktail bar, not for the street, in her too-short black dress and her too-high red shoes. She looked exposed, shrinking in the summer light.
“Hedda,” I said. “Sorry about the change. You look beautiful.”
And when Hedda leaned in and hugged me there was no hostility between us, no sense of putting on a show.
“Beer,” said Jo. “The boyfriend’s buying.”
“Really?” said Edvard. “Am I really?”
“Handsome does as handsome gets told,” said Jo.
Edvard looked from face to face, gave a what-can-you-do smile, and went inside.
“Seriously,” said Jo as we sat down opposite each other, “seriously, Ed can’t tell you this, but he’s fucking delighted that someone said what you said about Tvist.”
“I was worried,” I said.
Love and Other Lies Page 24
