In the living room, Bernard is now sitting by a coffee table with Lærke, Andrea, and Ian.
As I approach, I hear Lærke say, “I never want to die. Death is so sad, don’t you think?” She’s addressing Ian’s crustacean features. “Torben, who’s dead … it’s so sad … yes, really sad, don’t you think?”
When she discovers me, she tries to wave me over to one of the seats.
I stand behind Bernard and say that I’ll be back later, there’s someone I need to talk to from the Brain Injury Association. I walk away, and as I pass behind Bernard, I let my right index finger slide along one shoulder, across his nape, and out along the other shoulder.
Then I go back up to the guestroom without a backward glance.
A short while later he’s standing in the doorway.
I hurry over to him, close the door behind him, and kiss him while holding it shut with my foot.
The chair underneath the handle, depress it a couple of times and yes, the chair jams the door fast and then we’re onto the bed. A few minutes; the others outside. Panties off, dress up. Two in the morning and we’re in the toilet together in the rear of some small dark dive. Together in broad daylight behind a hedge at Farum Tennis Club.
We can do anything. Anything, anything, anything. We can start our own family and none of our kids will ever become like the people here. We stand with our beautiful children in our sun-drenched yard in Brede, the lawn sloping gently down toward the woods, the skies stretching wide above us, the inevitability of Nature blessing us.
Someone pulls at the door, but the chair keeps them out. It’s secure. No, it falls, landing with a quick hard bang. The door opens; a face. It shuts again.
“Shit!”
“Who was that?”
“I don’t know!”
“No, no, no!”
Someone’s feet clatter rapidly down the stairs. If Lærke hears about this … My panties on the floor. Bernard’s jacket on a chair.
We rush around the room getting our clothes back on, and as we do we can hear the conversation at the wake stop dead in the living room beneath us.
“Where are you running?” someone asks loudly in the silence. “What’s the matter?”
It remains quiet. Everyone must be looking at whoever’s rushed down the stairs. “There are two upstairs who are running!” a man shouts.
“They’re running?”
“Yes … no. They’re running! Oh … no, no!”
“They’re not running?”
“No.”
“So what are they doing?”
“They’re running! No, no! They aren’t. Running … running. That’s what they’re doing! Oh yes! They’re running! … No, no, they’re not running.”
“Who?” asks another voice.
“I don’t know. I haven’t run them before.”
“You don’t know?”
Someone asks, “Is it Rikke?”
“No, it’s not Rikke. It’s her that’s running and is Rikke, and he’s running Rikke. They’re running together!”
The man’s getting more and more worked up because no one understands him.
“Upstairs! Rikke—running!” he shouts. “No, not running. Not Rikke. They’re running! They’re not running!”
A woman’s gentle voice says, “You end up repeating the words we say, don’t you?”
“Don’t, don’t. I end up repeating them. Don’t. Running. I want to say running. No, not running. Oh, oh. Not running they’re running.”
By now, Bernard and I are out of the guestroom, but soon the man will find his way to the right words. We hear another woman’s voice; it must be his wife.
“We just have to be quiet for a bit. Then he won’t have any words to repeat, and then he’ll find the right words himself.”
And the man yells, “Upstairs they’re repeating! They’re repeating words! Rikke! Oh oh! They’re lying down and repeating words!”
30
It’s been three weeks since Torben’s wake, and I’m starting to think that Frederik might stand a chance in court after all.
The papers say that a jury’s sentenced a father who murdered his two children to psychiatric treatment instead of life in prison. In doing so, the jury went against the recommendation of the Medico-Legal Council. If it can happen to a child-murderer, it can happen to Frederik as well.
Bernard and Frederik have always thought such a verdict possible, and now I’m beginning to think so too. From the police, Bernard’s obtained logs of all Frederik’s phone calls from the past four years. He’s had an assistant enter the numbers and call times into several enormous spreadsheets to demonstrate statistical changes in who Frederik called, when he called them, and how long they spoke. The numbers should provide some objective proof that Frederik became a completely different person during these years, whose telephone habits changed radically.
The preliminary data’s quite reassuring. In the years leading up to his diagnosis, Frederik made a gradually increasing number of calls, but their average length became shorter each year. One interpretation is that he developed a greater need to call and talk to all and sundry—while at the same time his deteriorating sense of situation made people try to get off the phone more quickly when he called.
His circadian rhythms also changed, as well as his inhibitions about when he called. In the last year before his illness was discovered, Frederik ended up calling parents almost forty-five minutes later than in the earlier years. On the other hand, he completely stopped working in his home office and sending e-mails between 6:00 a.m. and when he’d leave for Saxtorph.
Over the course of four years, the mean duration of his calls fell 32 percent. The question is whether the panel of judges can be persuaded that this proves that Frederik wasn’t really himself anymore.
Frederik’s also become deeply involved in preparing the case. He’s bringing the intense energy he once used on stereo speakers—and later his new friends—to bear on the statistical analyses of his own behavior that he conducts with Bernard.
Soon they should also be able to show trends in the proportion of his conversations that were private instead of work-related—and much more. And from his bank statements, the two of them should be able to document changes in his spending habits. For instance, it looks as if his clothing expenditures rose sharply—which could be because he had a harder time resisting impulse purchases, or perhaps because he wanted to dress differently once he started becoming someone else.
Frederik’s been getting so much better. But of course there’s no knowing what he might end up doing when he’s tired or upset. After all, he seemed just fine in the year leading up to his operation.
What would he do for instance if he discovered that his wife and his lawyer were having sex almost every day? Would he show as little compunction in destroying us as he did in destroying Saxtorph’s account balance?
It’s actually somewhat of a miracle that we haven’t been found out already. Seeing Bernard requires so many lies now that the school year’s started again. We can no longer meet in the school break room, and Frederik’s grown very observant about how I spend my time. I act as if I play tennis every afternoon, but what’ll happen if he chances to talk to someone from the club?
My cell’s always on mute, so that no one can hear when I receive a text—since I get so many—and I delete every one, though naturally I’d like to keep them as reminders of my first year with Bernard.
Niklas doesn’t notice anything either. The one I feel is really on my trail is Vibeke. She and Thorkild were visiting last Sunday, and we spent the whole afternoon discussing the phone and credit card analyses. When I told them what Bernard was thinking about the case now, Vibeke looked at me with what I would almost call alarm. It’d take only a few unguarded moments—of not being conscious of my voice and facial expressions while talking about him—for everything to fall apart.
And I have yet another reason to thank Andrea. At Torben’s wake, she figured out what the m
an with the speech disorder was trying to say, and she ushered him out of the room before he could find the right words.
Now she knows that Bernard and I have something going, and it’s been such a huge relief to share it with someone that I’ve also told Helena.
Neither of my friends has said that Bernard and I are doing anything wrong. They know that we both give our spouses so much more than we get back.
• • •
With ten days until the trial, now’s our last chance to try to rescue Frederik from prison and a criminal record that’ll prevent him from ever returning to the education field. For Niklas, it’ll determine whether he’s branded for the rest of his life as a swindler’s son. And as for me, I’d really like to rid myself once and for all of the endless gossip about whether I was Frederik’s accomplice and whether we’ve salted away millions of crowns somewhere.
It’s been a long time since Bernard first suggested we speak with Trine, one of Frederik’s secretaries, and find out if she noticed any personality changes in her boss. But Trine’s brother who works in Brazil invited her and her husband and kids to stay all summer in his house in Rio, and only now is she finally back home.
In Denmark, it’s highly illegal to do anything that could be construed as trying to influence the testimony of a witness. So Frederik mustn’t talk to Trine, and it’d be equally unlawful for Bernard to contact her. But if I seemed to bump into her by chance, and we fell into conversation, no one could object to my pumping her a bit.
Every afternoon just after four, she leaves Saxtorph and walks along Old King’s Road to the Frederiksberg subway station. There she boards first the metro and then a tram to Måløv, where she shares a row house with her husband and three children.
It’s unseasonably cold for August. The sky’s asphalt grey, and for the last two hours, it’s looked as if it could start pouring down at any moment. As Trine passes by the Netto supermarket on Old King’s Road, I step outside with a full bag of groceries, pretending I haven’t been standing just inside the door waiting for her.
She tries to walk past me as if she doesn’t know me.
We’ve talked to each other at tons of parties. During the many years he worked with her, Frederik came to trust Trine implicitly, and at home he spoke about her with greater respect than he did about the board members, his deputy headmaster, and almost everyone else on the staff.
“Hi, Trine,” I say distinctly, with a smile that I think seems natural.
She stops then anyway. She’s tanned but otherwise looks the same: she isn’t very tall, has always had a weight problem, and wears her thin medium-blond hair in a bad perm.
It’s Frederik’s fault that her husband, who taught at Saxtorph, was fired a couple of months ago as part of the bank’s harsh austerity demands—and that her closest friend, who also worked in the school office, was fired then too.
I start prattling away about all the ordeals of the last year, acting as if Frederik is still sicker than he actually is, and I say that Trine’s the only person who knows him as well as I do.
It’s true. In some respects, she knows him even better. Year after year, she spent many more hours with him than I did. And I know that, someplace deep within, she must still be fond of him. She must. Just as she must also hate him now too.
“I don’t think …” she says, screwing up her eyes and taking a step backward.
Of course, her world’s been ruined too. The school might limp along for the time being, but it’s with a new headmaster she never got along with when he was an ordinary teacher. She must feel the need to unload about a thousand things—and the need to ask about a thousand more.
“You’ve no idea how happy I am to run into you,” I say. “If you’ve got a few minutes, I’d really like to treat you to coffee and cake at the Métropolitain.”
I’ve planned this too; I know she loves Café Métropolitain.
“No thanks,” she says.
I remain standing there, smiling, giving her time.
She hesitates, but then just repeats herself. “No … no thanks.”
“Look, Trine, I was just as devastated by the embezzlement as you. My life’s completely changed now too. We’ve had to move, our pension’s gone, the car’s gone, my furniture, everything.”
She begins walking away.
Bernard’s carefully instructed me that I’m not, under any circumstances, to press her or give her any pretext for saying that I tried to. The laws about this are completely different here in Denmark than in the U.S. or on TV. But I end up not sticking to the plan.
I rush after her, shouting, “Trine! Trine!”
She stops and lets me catch up with her. She speaks to me slowly, enunciating each word with great deliberation. “I trusted him more than any other person in the world.”
“But that’s the way I felt too. I also trusted him more than …”
My despair at this moment is completely genuine. I have nothing! Nothing except a clandestine lover and a hope of maybe rescuing my husband from prison.
Perhaps that’s what she sees now. She peers calmly into my face, and I see how the muscles around her eyes have gone slack; how she’s abandoned them.
The first raindrops strike us and we look up into the sky. And she says, “I know that it was at night that he gambled away the school. Maybe his brain was sick when he was tired … I have no way of knowing. But during the day, when we were together? Then he really wasn’t sick! He wasn’t! Why didn’t he say anything during the day? We had meeting after meeting. Parent conferences, him and me alone looking through correspondence together, all those trivial things. And yet it was during the day he went to the bank and forged the signatures.”
Then the roar starts. Not of thunder, but of water sluicing down upon the pavement. Everyone around us is fleeing toward driveway ports and shop doorways, and we run under a tree. From there we look out silently on the rain.
Frederik often said that if Trine had had another degree, she could have had a stellar career as an administrator. But that was not to be. Instead, in her job as school secretary, she had a crucial part in why Saxtorph became a refuge from the world outside—the refuge it once was. And she knew she played a linchpin role. Everybody knew.
It isn’t possible for us to walk out into the rain. I see her weighing how wet she’d get if she left the tree behind and ran into one of the nearby stores.
She says, “Frederik and I were sitting in his office, going through the teachers’ scheduling preferences—”
Her sentence grinds to a halt.
I say, “Yes?”
The sound of the rain lashing the city. Pedestrians standing everywhere motionless, under every kind of shelter. She says, “It took almost the entire day, but it was important—or so the rest of us thought. And later I saw in the documents that on that very morning, he’d been in the bank, defrauding the school of another eight hundred thousand crowns. He knew that it would destroy the school. He knew it. Why didn’t he say something?”
“He’d become a completely different person, Trine. And now the tumor’s removed.”
Oops; that just slipped out. Did I just suggest what her opinion should be in court? Can she tell that our meeting might not be totally random? I know she’s as smart as a whip.
“We felt kind of sorry for you,” she says. “It was clear that Frederik didn’t especially want to spend time at home.”
“I know that.”
“He said he was bored.”
“He said that, did he?”
“Yes. You just weren’t much of a match, he said, intellectually or emotionally.”
I answer calmly. “But that changed, didn’t it? The last years before he was diagnosed, he was perfectly fine staying home with me.”
She doesn’t say anything, which must mean she concedes the point.
But can I take that to court? Your Honor, my husband’s secretary felt that when he was healthy, he found me boring. At the time of the crime I was no longer bori
ng him, so therefore he must have been severely mentally impaired.
“There was also the suicide thing,” Trine says. “He had to stay home with you.”
“What suicide thing?”
“I mean your attempt. In the kitchen.”
“I didn’t attempt suicide in the kitchen!”
“The … you know, four years ago. In the kitchen.”
“Trine, I didn’t try to commit suicide! Did he say that?”
She regards me skeptically. It’s obvious she doesn’t believe me. “I don’t know if he said it. But it’s something everyone knew.”
“Everyone knew—everyone thought that I tried to drink myself to death in my kitchen?”
“Yes, and then the pills—”
“There weren’t any pills!”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Does Laust also think I attempted suicide? And that that’s why Frederik needed to spend more time at home?”
No answer.
“Well it isn’t true! There weren’t any pills! There weren’t any pills! No pills at all! There was one single evening when I ended up drinking too much. Four years ago! That’s it. That’s all there was!”
A drenched little woman shuffles in under the tree with us. Sopping wet, foreign-looking, perhaps a beggar … southern Europe. She doesn’t look like she understands Danish.
Trine remains quiet. I manage to recover some of the calm in my voice. “So you do think Frederik changed dramatically four years ago?”
“Yes. A lot. An unbelievable amount.”
“But you thought it was because of me? You thought he got tired and unfocused and weird because he had problems with me?”
“Everyone knew it was you. Your marriage.”
“Did you have to help him so he could make it through the day? Did he start getting forgetful and disengaged?”
She won’t answer.
“You thought it was my fault? That I took your beloved headmaster away from you? Such a remarkable, responsible person—even toward his boring wife—that he had to take care of me? Even though it meant all of you at Saxtorph had to suffer? And that’s why he became different?”
You Disappear: A Novel Page 32
