I followed Helena’s advice and left school early, so now I’m home three hours earlier than planned. Are reporters and photographers standing outside, lying in wait? No.
On my way into the house I can see that my in-laws have been with Frederik in the front yard, getting it ready for spring. They’ve trimmed the bushes and raked twigs, leaves, and the last half-burned remains of the fire into two piles. At the sight of their gifted son, Thorkild and Vibeke have always been fit to burst with pride. Now I remember Thorkild standing in our kitchen and saying, “If only I were dead, so I didn’t have to see this!” But that must be something I dreamt, because when they came to take care of Frederik this morning, it was the first time they’d been here since the arrest.
I let myself in, and already as I open the door I can hear Frederik’s mechanical sobbing from above. I rush upstairs and find Vibeke and Thorkild in the hallway outside the bathroom.
“He won’t come out. We’ve tried everything.”
“What happened?”
They hesitate, and I walk over to the bathroom door.
“Frederik, it’s me. I’m home now.”
Maybe he can’t hear me.
“Frederik, I’m home. It’s me here now. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you.”
Still no answer.
“We had a … discussion,” says Vibeke.
I don’t say anything, just look at her until she finally goes on.
“He peed on my pile. In the yard.”
“Peed on your pile?”
“The pile I was going to pick up with my hands and carry to the street.”
“Did you yell at him?”
Vibeke draws a breath and is about to launch into a long explanation, but I ask in a low voice if they would please go down below, and Thorkild squeezes her hand and leads her to the stairs.
“They’re gone, Frederik. It’s just me now. May I come in? I’d really like to.”
I end up sitting for a long time with my back against the door, making small calming remarks. And then suddenly his sobbing ceases.
Through the door he says, “I didn’t do anything.”
“No.”
“Word of honor, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t pee on her pile.”
“No.”
“And then Mom got angry.”
“I can understand how that would upset you … May I come in?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s just as easy for me to sit out here. It doesn’t matter.”
After a long quiet wait, I say, “I’m going to go down and talk to them. I’m sure it’ll be all right. Just call if you want me to come back up, okay?”
In the living room, I fall into my armchair and sigh deeply. But I don’t relax, not a bit. Vibeke can hardly wait to tell me everything she has to say; she shakes one hand so that her heavy bracelet slides up her arm, and I can tell she’s frightened of me. She has reason to be. My head feels cold; everything in me is ready to explode.
“The yard work was going so well,” she says. “Frederik and I did the trimming and raked up all the yard refuse, each of us making our own pile. I had to go in for a minute, and when I looked down from the bathroom window, I could see him standing there, urinating on my pile. The one I was going to put my hands into and carry out to the street!”
She pauses and looks inquiringly at me. I must be doing a good job of keeping my emotions in check, because she keeps talking.
“I became furious! And Mia, you can go ahead if you want and just tear my head off. But it’s not because I’d get urine on my hands. I’ve had plenty of urine on my hands—I’m a mother and a nurse, after all. Rather, it’s what it signifies. Why did he do it? It’s as if he’s urinating on me. There are so many symbols in such an act: the phallus, of course, that ridicules the mother …”
Vibeke’s psychotherapy training and the way it’s been teaching her to think have really gotten on my nerves in the last few months. But I control myself and listen.
“The burnt branches—are they death and decay? Does it mean that he doesn’t care if I’m old and will die in the not-too-distant future? That he mocks my mortality? Does he wish for me to die?”
“He’s hardly putting that much thought into it,” I say.
“It’s so obvious that he’s angry, that he feels this overwhelming grief that lies behind everything and every once in a while bursts forth. And that’s something we can all find perfectly understandable. That’s how any of us would react. But it feels deeply unjust when he lets his anger spill over on Thorkild and me. We don’t deserve it—not when we’re here almost every day, just to help him!”
“But there’s no way he can—”
“Mia, has anyone ever urinated on something of yours? Urinated? Really urinated on it?”
How can she punish a sick man, I wonder. Frederik can’t help it! And now he’s hiding upstairs, feeling miserable. I already know that in a few moments, when I finally permit myself to tell her what I think of her, I won’t ease up until she cries.
Just as I’m about to let rip, Frederik comes down the stairs. I hurry over to give him a hug but stop halfway; his body language tells me he wouldn’t like it.
Before I can turn my attention back to Vibeke, Thorkild says, “Mia, you haven’t seen the papers.”
I never would have thought that articles about Frederik embezzling would have been able to defuse a tense situation. But Thorkild pulls it off. Børsen, Jyllands-Posten, Politiken, Berlingske—he’s found articles on his son in all of them. Thorkild and I sit side by side on the sofa and read them, his tall thin body reminding me of Frederik’s. It gives me the same feeling of warmth—of something fundamentally right—to sit next to him. To sit next to Frederik thirty years from now; a future we’ll never know. As I study the articles, I glance occasionally at my father-in-law’s composed features.
The shame in his cheeks, the old skin drooping over his shirt collar. I think of the large office he had as headmaster at North Coast Private Grammar, the office where naughty boys were sent to be punished. Thorkild and Vibeke never found anything strange about Frederik’s obsession with his work. When Frederik was little, Thorkild was basically absent all the time.
The urge to put Vibeke in her place dissipates. She’s sitting in my armchair now, catching her breath and sending me timid looks.
“Don’t you need a bite to eat, Mia? After your long day at school?”
On her way to the kitchen to put on some tea and get the things for sandwiches, she pats Frederik’s hair gently.
“Sorry,” she says. “I’m really sorry, Frederik.”
He shakes off her hand as if it were an insect that landed on him.
When she comes back, Thorkild and I look up from the papers.
“Frederik,” I say. “Did you pee on your mother’s pile because you were angry with her?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. That’s definitely not the reason.”
“Well, then why did you do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think you peed on it because you’re sick?”
“Oh no! Are you going to talk about that again?”
“Yes. But you are sick, aren’t you?”
“I know perfectly well that I’m sick! But that has nothing to do with it.”
These days, he’s been saying that his memory has gotten poor since the operation, but it hasn’t. He also thinks the operation has affected his bodily control, and that’s why he falls down the stairs all the time and bruises himself by bumping into everything. In truth, it’s because he runs around the house, fearlessly and all too quickly. But other than those two things, Frederik’s convinced that he’s the same as he’s always been.
• • •
Was Frederik himself two and a half years ago when he came home driving a used orange-red Alfa Romeo? We’d agreed that we should get a new car—but that car? So much extra money for style and speed? That’s something
we hadn’t agreed on, and such extravagance wasn’t like him—or me. Back then neither of us had heard about impaired inhibitory mechanisms, much less orbitofrontal syndrome, and we rapidly became fond of the car. Months later, we even got to the point of thinking that Frederik had done exactly the right thing in buying it.
I’m like Vibeke. I can’t stand it either if there isn’t some meaning behind all the strange things that Frederik does.
He’s completely stopped closing windows, doors, cabinets, and jar tops. Our jam jars have all gotten sticky, and one day when I knocked over some gherkins in the fridge, the pickle juice got over everything because he hadn’t screwed the top back on.
I’ve asked several specialists, and they all say there’s no separate system in the brain that controls whether you can close things. There is a directional center, which is often defective in patients with damage to the right temple. But if Frederik’s damage had spread all the way to that region, he’d be having a hard time finding his way around the rooms of the house, he’d unzip his trousers instead of zipping them and start putting his shoes on the wrong feet.
If his recent aversion to closing things isn’t due to brain damage, perhaps we should understand it psychologically—as Vibeke’s therapy teachers doubtless would. Maybe he doesn’t want to close off his possibilities, regardless of whether they lie before him or behind him. Maybe it’s something to do with being unable to stand his present state.
Every minute of the day, I hope that he’s getting to be more like himself again, and so I’m constantly on the lookout for signs. If the sun is shining as I put the last plate in the dishwasher, he won’t lie to me in the next few hours. If the next person who walks past the window has a blue jacket on, Frederik will want to eat a steak like in the old days, not just bread with jam or honey. If the light at the intersection turns green before I pass the parking sign, he’ll say something nice to me of his own volition.
I’ve never been superstitious before. And of course I read more into Frederik than into black cats and ladders, than stars and stoplights. That glint in his eye—isn’t that the old Frederik? The way he looks distractedly into the air as he buttons his shirt, that’s the way he buttoned his shirt when he was well! It’s just like him!
• • •
“The soul is not born, and it is not created. It has always existed, independent of matter and the formation of the universe.” That’s what it said on one of the many odd pages I came across on yet another sleepless night when I googled soul and orbitofrontal.
Was Vibeke yelling at a diseased brain that couldn’t help itself—or at a person with a soul and a sense of responsibility? Can you be responsible if you don’t have a soul? Or can you have a soul without being responsible? Responsible for ruining an entire school? For wrecking your wife’s and son’s lives, for being lewd to your son’s friend?
Yet Vibeke’s anger can hardly compare to me beating him yesterday with the stainless-steel bowl while he lay defenseless underneath me on the floor. I would give anything for the chance to do it over. Last night, I could see that besides the many bruises and swellings he already had, new ones ran up and down his back. He draws me deep into a wilderness of inexcusable behavior, and there’s nothing for me to blame but myself.
Vibeke makes me an open-face cheese sandwich, like I sometimes make for Niklas as comfort food. She places it before me, but I can’t even choke down a mouthful. So she pours tea in my mug and sits down in the armchair.
She fiddles with the amber chain around her neck and the cuffs of her woolen jersey. Once she settles down, she says, “When I look for psychological meaning in his actions, something besides brain damage, it’s also about showing him respect. In nursing, that’s something you always strive for. He’s a human being—much more than just a diseased body. It’s important that you try to listen—”
I’m on my feet before I have the chance to think. “Don’t tell me I don’t show Frederik respect!”
“Pardon me, no, no, Mia. I didn’t mean that at all.”
“You don’t show him any more respect than I do—not with all your silly psychobabble!”
“No, of course not. I don’t—”
I throw the cheese sandwich against the wall. “Get out now! Out! Out!”
“Mia, you can’t just kick everyone out! We’re the only ones who will still come and take care of him.”
Thorkild positions himself in front of Vibeke. As if he’s seen the marks on his son’s back. “Mia, please. Won’t you sit down?”
I can’t. I can’t sit down, I can’t go near Vibeke, I can’t even speak.
“Mia, I would like to have you sit down,” he says again.
Behind him Vibeke is crying, and so I sit down. I sit down slowly while Thorkild remains standing, calm and ready for action, like a retired animal tamer.
“We’re all very angry,” he says. “But we need to stand together. We need to live with the fact that Frederik can no longer love us.”
With theatrically large tears falling upon her cheeks, Vibeke gasps, “It’s so difficult. He doesn’t love me anymore. I feel it all the time. It’s so hard.”
I glance over at Frederik, who’s fallen asleep in his chair.
Vibeke looks at me. “And you must find it hardest of all, Mia. Don’t you? Him no longer loving you?”
• • •
The following day, I explain to Thorkild my thinking about when Frederik stopped being himself. We’re standing in the hallway; he and Vibeke have their coats on and are on their way out the door. They’re actually in a bit of a hurry—they’re going to the emergency room to see if Vibeke might have broken something in her right hand. She maintains that she accidentally struck her knuckles hard against our dinner table.
Thorkild says, “If anything, the opposite is true. Frederik was his real self when he was working sixteen hours a day. Then the tumor started affecting him, and he began getting tired more quickly. And because he wasn’t healthy anymore, he needed to relax with his family. He was most himself when he was working a lot.”
Vibeke’s anxious to get going; her face is twisted in pain.
“Yes, yes,” Thorkild tells her without moving toward the door. Instead he keeps talking to me. “The disease made him weak and turned him into a family man.”
“But the last three years he was the most present he’s ever been—the most normal!”
“I’d think it over again. A judge isn’t going to buy a story about a defendant being himself during the day and then at night being some brain-damaged gambler.”
“But that’s the way it was!”
“Then Frederik will go to prison for four years, and you’ll lose your house, your pensions, everything.”
He shoots Vibeke a quick sideways glance and then he says, “We have to go now.”
12
“How old were you when you first came here?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Did you meet a Danish girl, perhaps?”
He laughs. “Everyone knows that all the foreign men here immigrated because of Danish women.”
“No, but I didn’t think—”
“And you’re right! Lærke was an au pair for my parents in Paris. I followed her when she went back home, and it changed my life.”
Two weeks have passed since Frederik was arrested and released. I’ve taken the day off work, and Bernard and I are in the living room, waiting for the school’s new lawyer to show up with an assessor, who will appraise the sale value of our house, car, furnishings, pension savings, et cetera.
Bernard shows me a picture on his cell phone. “Here we are on vacation together.”
In the photo he looks much younger, but it must have been taken within the last ten years—around the time of the accident—because his twin boys look pretty big.
“She’s really lovely,” I say. And she is: she has big blond curls and a broad happy smile. Bernard was dark-haired then, lean without being quite as thin as he is now. They stand with t
heir arms around the two boys in some southern European village, with peaks and forests in the background.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “I’ve aged a lot in the last eight years.”
“Was it on that vacation you had the accident?”
“No, that was two weeks later, back here on Lyngby Road. Fortunately, the boys weren’t with us in the car.”
I get goose bumps from looking at her; now she uses crutches and goes to a handicapped center all day because she’s mentally incapacitated. While he’s marooned in a foreign country, without the support of his family or boyhood friends. What’s prevented him from leaving her? How can he stand it?
“Her disability is general,” he says. “Bodily control, speech, thought, energy.”
I look into his dark eyes but he doesn’t return my gaze.
“The odd thing is that she’s still the same. She’s still my Lærke.” He almost looks proud when he says it.
I don’t understand him. I shudder to think of what his days and nights have been like for the last eight years. And yet the very moment I think that, my own spouse lies brain-damaged and our house is being taken from us.
It’s been one week since Bernard called and warned me about the assessor’s visit. “In accordance with Danish law, Frederik will have to pay back as much as he possibly can of what he embezzled—regardless of whether the court finds him criminally responsible for his acts or not. So the school will seize all of Frederik’s possessions—and half of what you own in common.”
“But why don’t they simply look at everything we own and take half?”
“No, we need to have receipts for everything. Whose name is on which receipt? Where did the money for each purchase come from? Did you receive any large gifts from Frederik that were paid for with embezzled funds—or with his income? Are there things that are in reality yours, even though his name’s on the receipt? Things like that.”
You Disappear: A Novel Page 11
