Half past five in the morning. Not a sound to be heard on the ward except for the faint hum of machines. The sky outside the tall windows beginning to lighten a pale blue. It was Day Thirteen, and in the last couple of days Lærke had had recurring convulsions while still comatose. Now her right leg and arm went into spasms. Bernard held her hand as it twitched between his hands. He whispered that there was nothing to fear, that he was there to take care of her; that he loved her. For she always looked so terrified when she went into convulsions.
“Can you hear me?” he asked, just as he did every single time he was there. “Can you? Lærke, can you hear me?”
Her head lay still upon the pillow, turned toward him, and then her eyelids trembled. He was on the point of shouting; this was so major, so unexpected. Her eyelids trembled and they opened and suddenly, for the first time in almost two weeks, he was looking straight into his wife’s blue eyes.
“I’m right here,” he said. “Your husband.”
Her eyes regarded him for what felt like several minutes.
“Can you hear me, Lærke? Can you understand me?”
Her eyes that were only half open; that were far, far away. He sensed that she had no idea where she was.
“I’m Bernard,” he said. “Your husband.”
“Watch out!” she said—or in any case that’s what he heard it as, her speech nearly unintelligible, as well as muffled by the oxygen mask.
And then she disappeared again.
Bernard wanted to call everyone he knew, he wanted to get up and run out to the nurses, he wanted to squeeze Lærke’s hand. Everything. He could feel his body shaking, just like hers. He wanted to jump up and run into the corridor, but he couldn’t leave her; she might open her eyes again.
He called a nurse, and after she left, he sat and gazed at Lærke until the first nurse on the morning shift came in, one hour later.
Then he went down to the parking lot, where he was allowed to use his cell phone, and called his parents, who had flown up from Paris and were staying at a hotel in Copenhagen. They’d been very fond of Lærke ever since she’d been a teenager working for them as an au pair. He also called his in-laws, and the parents of the twins’ best friend from school. The twins had been sleeping there so that they’d be as unscathed as possible by the family’s disintegration.
The grandparents all arrived at the hospital an hour later, but nothing more happened that day. To wake up and try to warn Bernard about some unknown peril had required a huge effort from Lærke. She remained completely unconscious for another twenty-four hours.
Because Lærke might be about to wake, the doctors cut back on her morphine and replaced the oxygen mask with a thin tube that ran from her nose. It was odd to see her without the mask; she was starting to look more and more like herself.
The next day she woke again, and this time the boys were in the room too.
“Jonathan,” she said. “Benjamin.”
Her speech was still very indistinct, but there was no doubt she recognized them. Jonathan climbed up into bed with her, and Bernard let him. After his attack, Jonathan had said he didn’t want to go back to the hospital, and now Bernard was glad he’d insisted. Benjamin crawled into the bed too. Lærke said both of their names several times, and then a minute later she was gone again.
Bernard lifted the boys down, explained to them that their mother was very tired now, and took them out into the common room, where he unpacked some of the many lunches that their friend’s mother had packed them.
So Lærke could speak, and she could see, think, and recognize them. Good news. Just that she was in there, in her apparently dead body. Yet as Bernard was trying to make the shared meal a pleasant experience, he was also thinking of something he’d have to ask the doctor about: Lærke hadn’t smiled when she saw the boys. There was no joy on her face when they climbed up to her—only something that looked like wonder. The whole thing felt so new to him that he didn’t yet know what to think about it.
In the days that followed, she woke up for a few minutes every couple of hours. It was clear she didn’t understand where she was, regardless of how many times Bernard explained it to her. But he was patient, and he told her she’d get well, and he told her he loved her. The wonder was still in her face, though without a trace of the gentle smile she would have smiled if it’d been a movie. As if he were some math problem to her; as if she didn’t see him as a person.
Then, late one evening as Bernard listened to the sounds of a family out in the hallway—the family of a teenager who’d just died in the next room—Lærke said her first sentence.
“Ah luh ooh.”
He sat in his chair for a long time and gasped for breath in the half darkness. She closed her eyes again and he kept sitting there, stock-still, even though he’d read enough about brain damage in the last few days to know she was probably just echoing the words he’d said to her.
• • •
In the following months, the whole family began to founder. Lærke’s parents moved in to help take care of the boys.
The doctors at the rehab center were quick to say they didn’t expect Lærke would ever be able to return to her job as project manager at the ad agency. They also doubted she’d be able to walk again. Bernard had to relinquish his career plans and his hopes for the boys and himself.
But everyday life at home with Lærke was more draining than anything else. Her injury was distributed across her entire brain, which basically meant she had less of everything: she lacked emotion and was indifferent to herself and others; she got tired after a few hours of mere conversation and couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a couple of minutes at a time; she couldn’t make decisions or deal with the most ordinary trifles; and she usually couldn’t remember anything Bernard or the kids told her.
She used to pump so much energy into the family, but now her dominant trait was utter passivity. She never took the initiative or said anything of her own accord, and it seemed like she didn’t even think or imagine anything on her own. Her face hung dead from her cheekbones, without those tiny twitches that in a healthy person indicate life beneath the skin.
The boys started getting into a lot of fights, because they felt the other kids were teasing them about their mother. Sometimes it was true, but as a rule it wasn’t. And no matter how much Bernard and his in-laws tried to give them the support they needed, the boys’ close friendships began to fall apart, simply because the twins were fighting their best friends too much.
So this is my family, Bernard would think as he headed home from yet another parents’ meeting where the other parents had brought up the issue of his sons. This is what we’ve become.
He tried to be constructive in their new situation, to come up with something that would improve the boys’ lives, and above all to avoid destroying anything else. Jonathan and Benjamin mustn’t notice how he felt like he’d lost his way, every day, though he still lived with them in the same house on the same peaceful-looking residential street.
On one Saturday, around lunchtime, Bernard came home hauling five bags of groceries for the week ahead. Lærke was waiting in the hall. She always was when he came home, though she never opened the front door, even after a ramp was installed so she could roll herself outside.
“Hello,” he said, but she didn’t answer.
He tried to edge his way around her wheelchair in the narrow hallway.
“Do you think you could back up just a little, so I can get past?”
She backed up.
“Now then, Lærke. This bag has only frozen goods, so I thought you might be able to put it away in the freezer.”
No answer.
“Do you think you could do that?”
“Yes.”
“Great.”
She remained where she was, parked in front of him. Her long golden hair fell across her shoulders. Bernard brushed it every morning, a ritual he genuinely enjoyed. And it seemed to him as if her skin had gotten smoothe
r and younger after the accident, perhaps because she no longer tensed the skin in her forehead or around her eyes.
“Then you should go out to the kitchen now, over in front of the freezer,” he said.
So that’s what she did.
“Here’s the bag. Look. Try to set the new things farther back in the freezer, so that the open packages are easy to get at. Okay? Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Bernard put away the groceries in the four other bags and then came back to Lærke and the frozen goods. She still had a long way to go, but it was good for her to do it by herself.
He stood behind her and said, “Try to set the open packages on top. Then they’ll be easier to get at.”
“Oh, right.”
“You understand why, don’t you?”
She didn’t answer.
“Look, sweetheart, this package has been opened. If you set it in front of the unopened package, then we won’t end up having both of them open at the same time. Does that make sense?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He remained standing there.
After a little while, he said, “Look, this package isn’t open, while this other one is. Now if you set the new one in back … It’d be great if you did the same thing with all of them.”
“Did what?”
“If you set the new packages in back.”
“Yes.”
She did it with the one she had in her hand, but then she forgot to do it with the next one.
“Well, maybe you should just do it the way you want to,” he said. “You’re the one putting the frozen things away, so you should decide where they go.”
She didn’t answer, and he started to perseverate.
“So you should decide where they go, right? When you put them away?”
She looked up at him and said, “First the back ones should go first, because then the first ones … First the new ones should go in back, because then the old ones can first …”
Lærke could usually express herself more clearly, but when she got into a bad rut, she had a hard time getting out again.
She started to scold herself, while at the same time trying to say it correctly. “Not in back—front! By the door! The front ones shouldn’t first … the door.”
He gave her shoulders a little squeeze and said, “Yes, that’s where they should go.”
She didn’t answer.
On Saturdays, Winnie would drive the boys to and from soccer. Ordinarily they were back by noon, and now it was twenty minutes past. Bernard felt a mild unease, which he knew he ought to resist. Otherwise, where would it ever end? But Winnie wasn’t so young anymore; her eyes, the cars, what happens in traffic …
“Did your mother call?”
“I don’t know.”
“But did she call just before I got here?”
“She called.”
“Well, what did she say?”
“I don’t know.”
He went to the phone to see if there was anything on caller ID. Next to the phone was a scratch pad, where they’d tried to get Lærke to write down all the messages.
Winnie had called. He called her back and heard from her that practice had been delayed a little, and there was no need to worry.
He began setting the table, with Lærke at his heels, rolling back and forth between kitchen and living room so that she blocked the doorway every time he went back to get something new. Since she was following him anyway, he gave her something to take out to the table.
And then he sat down and waited. And Lærke rolled over to his side.
Tired, he stared into the air, and tired, she stared into the air. But at some point he had sat still long enough, and he turned his face to her. She didn’t turn hers.
He said, “What I wouldn’t give to know what’s going on in your head.”
She made no reply.
“Lærke, what are you thinking right now?”
She still didn’t answer.
He grabbed her hand so that she turned to face him. He looked her in the eye and asked again, “What are you thinking, sweetheart?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re not thinking of anything?”
“No.”
“Your mind’s a complete blank?”
She continued looking wordlessly in front of her.
But he couldn’t let the riddle rest. “Do you see images, or is there something that’s making you sad, or happy? Something we could do differently? Are you excited about physical therapy on Monday? Are you remembering something we’ve done together?”
“Yes, it’s completely blank,” she said. “Completely.”
• • •
As any family member of someone with brain damage knows, the hard part isn’t the initial shock. The hard part comes when the adrenaline recedes and you have to set out down the endless grey corridor of disheartening days, days that look like they’ll last the rest of your life.
The daily grind in which companionship is lacking. Where you find yourself more alone than you thought humanly possible; where you grieve so much, you just want to stay in bed for months. And where you force yourself to get up anyway for your kids’ sake—and because your spouse isn’t actually dead.
Yet there are joys, too. During the first year after the accident, Lærke became better at remembering, speaking, moving—and she began to get her feelings back. Just seeing the boys could once more make her happy.
And then one day when Bernard was sitting at home, working in what used to be his home office but was now furnished as a bedroom for his in-laws, she came in to him beaming with pleasure.
“I was daydreaming! I lay on the bed, and then I imagined being on vacation with the three of you. Imagined it! There were palms there, and a beach. I just imagined it and it showed up, completely on its own!”
Could anything be more momentous than the return of your inner life? Bernard and Lærke celebrated. And the boys did too. They understood what a big day it was for their mother to imagine things once more.
I press my bare chest against Bernard’s as he tells me this, and it’s as if my body thinks it’s me he’s crying for. Rationally, I know that’s not true, but my arms squeeze him tighter, and I feel the urge to say, But I’m here, really. I’m not dead, don’t cry. I’m right here.
And I try to be a little bit Lærke, and it’s almost as if he’s my old Frederik. And I wish I could just wrap my arms around Niklas like this—with my clothes on, of course—just hold him and weep with him for the real husband and father who now is dead.
For a second, it’s Frederik who lies in my arms. We’re at Trørød Elementary. We’re young again and I’m a student teacher, he the committee chair for teachers of Danish. We’re starting our lives all over again. Bernard met me when I was an au pair in Paris, and he followed me here to Denmark. I am his young healthy wife.
26
“Whenever water appears in dreams or fantasies, it symbolizes feelings—particularly feelings of grief and depression. And I must say, Mia, that never in my life have I seen such a huge collection of water photos. I have absolutely no doubt that Niklas is one deeply unhappy young man.”
My mother-in-law’s on the phone, all worked up. Yesterday she joined Facebook, and since then she’s been going through the photo albums Niklas posted.
Since Frederik’s well enough to be left home by himself now, his parents no longer come over as often. Yet every day when Vibeke’s name shows up on my phone display, I can’t help but groan a little before I take the call.
“It’s an art project he did last winter with Mathias,” I say.
“But why did he pick water as the theme for the project?”
“It wasn’t him who—”
“Or if he wasn’t the one who picked the theme, why did he take on this particular project, when other people had decided it’d be about water?”
“Can’t you just look at the pictures as some
beautiful photos where he’s simply practicing how—”
“Mia, you’re going to have to trust me on this one. It’s no coincidence that he threw himself into a project that happens to involve water. Young people today have thousands of other options. There’s a reason for everything—even if you may not want to admit it. I’m actually studying for a certificate in this, you know.”
I stare down at the pension papers I was about to dig into. What are the rules for withdrawing some of your pension funds before they mature? The tax consequences?
“Water can also represent trauma,” she continues. “A sense of entrapment while experiencing volatile emotions, for instance hate or feelings of inadequacy. Quite often, water symbols can be traced back to a parent who makes it impossible for a child to express his feelings.”
“Vibeke. Can’t you ever let it rest?”
“There might be some primordial situation, perhaps several years in the past, in which the child was overpowered by the parents. He felt surrounded—as if it was water threatening to drown him. A new crisis could actualize the repressed emotions.”
“So just to be perfectly clear: you think I’m to blame for this.”
“Oh, not at all, Mia! I’m only saying how one usually …”
• • •
After the conversation’s over, I gaze out of our big new windows at the apartment block opposite. Beyond it’s the sky and more apartment blocks, while behind me looms the large earthwork that’s supposed to dampen the freeway’s continual drone.
Though I completely disagreed with my mother-in-law on the phone, and though I still consider her psychological “expertise” an utter fraud, her description of my relation to Niklas couldn’t be more accurate. He feels I suffocate him—exactly like water that’s drowning him. And he feels that way no matter how much distance I keep, how much room I give him. I retreat farther and farther, making hardly any demands on him with respect to his father’s illness, and still he feels stifled. Where will it end? Do I have to disappear completely before he can feel free?
For almost four years now, without naming it directly, Vibeke’s been circling around the night I had a breakdown after throwing Frederik out. The night that I was sure I was embarking on a happy new life, but that instead made it clear I couldn’t manage without him.
You Disappear: A Novel Page 27
