High Risk

by Simona Ahrnstedt

  “Yes, I am. I’m happy. With Nilas.”

  Nilas. What kind of name was that?”

  “You really don’t look so great. Shouldn’t you talk to someone?”

  “I have. A psychologist.”

  Her face lit up. “That’s great. That’s good to hear.”

  He pulled a face. He didn’t like psychologists.

  * * *

  The breakdown had happened on one of his first days back at work. He’d been taken straight to the hospital on his return to Sweden; he was undernourished and infected. The day after he left the hospital, he went into the office. All he wanted was to work. It was raining, and the leaves were yellow. The first two days were fine. But on the third day, he was in a meeting. A Swedish businessman had been kidnapped in Pakistan. They were discussing whether to take on the task of trying to rescue him. It was nothing unusual. That type of request was very common, and it was one of their fields of expertise. They were talking about weapons and various strategies when he suddenly felt ill. At first, he thought it was a stomach bug, that he must have eaten something bad. But then his body started to shake.

  He had never experienced anything like it.

  At the same time, he also started sweating, and he thought that it would be too damn ironic if he died of a heart attack right then, after everything he had survived.

  “Tom?” one of his colleagues asked worriedly.

  The question sounded as if it were reaching him through water.

  Afterward, he could remember only fragments of loud voices, phone calls, and a trip to the hospital in an ambulance. An overworked ER doctor ran an EKG, took tests, and listened to his chest.

  “It’s a panic attack, nothing to worry about,” the doctor announced, and then hurried away, probably to see someone who was actually sick.

  Since Lodestar had incredibly expensive private health insurance, the head of HR insisted that Tom talk to a psychologist as a follow-up.

  “Acute stress disorder, panic attacks, and probably undiagnosed PTSD,” the psychologist said, studying him over her steel-rimmed glasses.

  “Not so bad,” he said with an artificial laugh.

  “I’d say it’s fairly serious.”

  “But it’ll pass?”

  The psychologist studied him awhile. “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On you.” Typical psychologist.

  “So what should I do?”

  She wrote something in her notepad. “What do you want?” she asked. It was as though she couldn’t give advice.

  “I want to be cured. I thought that was obvious.”

  “Of course. But what do you plan to do once you feel better? What do you want?”

  And Tom sat there in that expensive psychologist’s clinic, thinking that all he wanted was to have Ellinor back.

  The very next week, he decided to take a time-out from work, from Stockholm, from everything, and left for Kiruna. But Ellinor was stubborn. She didn’t want to see him, didn’t see any point in it. Though now she was here. That had to be a sign.

  “I miss you,” he said now.

  Ellinor stirred her tea more quickly. “Tom . . .” She looked away, bit her lip.

  “Can’t you give me another chance?” he asked. If he could just get Ellinor back, everything would be fine. He was sure of it.

  “I have to go now.” She got up, clutched her purse. He looked at her fingers. She wasn’t wearing her ring. Of course. Her eyes followed his gaze. “When they told us you were dead, I had to go through your things. Our things. I sent your ring to your mom. It was awful for her, thinking you’d died. Do you want my ring back, by the way? You paid for it.”

  “No, it’s yours,” he managed.

  She seemed to hesitate, as though she didn’t know how to say good-bye. Don’t go, he wanted to say. Stay. Don’t leave me.

  “Take care, Tom,” she said.

  He watched her leave, stayed at his table, drained of all the energy he thought he had managed to scrape together.

  What was he going to do?

  He glanced over to the table where the prickly journalist was sitting, but she must have left while he talked to Ellinor. Her computer was gone. The only sign of her was a white cup with a faint lipstick mark.

  Chapter 5

  Ambra stamped her feet against the cold and peered in through a store window while she thought. Should she call Grace to say that this job was going down the drain? Grace probably had at least ten other reporters out in the field right now. Hundreds of national and international news reports to read and prioritize, hour in and hour out. One lone reporter, way north of the Arctic Circle, who couldn’t get hold of a low-priority interview subject was hardly very important.

  She wanted to get back to Stockholm and the office. Wanted to be where the action was, loved the pulse and the energy of the newsroom and hated this dump of a town. Imagine if something huge happened right now, and she missed it because she was here?

  There was a time, just a few years ago, when she got to report on important things, to write articles that made a difference. That was before they got the new editor-in-chief. After that, everything went downhill. She and Dan Persson didn’t click at all. Just thinking about it made her stomach ache. She wanted nothing other than to work for Aftonbladet, it was that simple. She knew a lot of people thought she was confident, but she really wasn’t. She didn’t want to lose her job. Couldn’t. Because if she couldn’t be a reporter, she genuinely didn’t know what she would do.

  She started to walk as she blew hot air between her palms and her gloves, trying to warm up her hands. She passed a tourist shop. The place was crowded with people, offering snowmobile rides, trips to see the Northern Lights, dogsledding, and ice fishing. She stopped. The window was full of Sami Christmas decorations, souvenirs, and fluffy hats. Packages wrapped in red ribbon gave the place a cozy holiday feeling. Her eyes fell on a pair of earmuffs. They were the world’s lamest accessory, but when she was a kid she had wanted a pair so much she practically hadn’t been able to think of anything else. Not that she ever got any. She hadn’t gotten any Christmas presents at all.

  She turned away. She’d promised herself not to care about the approaching holiday—it was just a few days she needed to get through—but she could feel her mood worsening the closer the damned day came. A young girl was coming toward her with a man, presumably the girl’s father. They were chatting, the man holding the girl’s hand tight, listening, nodding, stroking her hair. Ambra swallowed, looked away.

  As she quickly crossed the road, her cell phone rang.

  Praise God and Hallelujah, finally! She quickly accepted the call as she plugged in her headset. She pushed the headphones into her ears.

  “Hello, this is Elsa,” she heard on the other end of the line.

  “Hi! How are you?”

  “Good, thanks.” And then it sounded as though Elsa giggled.

  Ambra glanced at her watch. It was only five o’clock. “I’m so glad you called. Could I come over? Now? Or tomorrow?”

  “No, no, not tonight, I’m expecting company. And tomorrow is Christmas Eve day.”

  “I can do tomorrow,” Ambra said quickly, hoping Elsa wasn’t going away or hosting thirty-six relatives at home. People rarely had time to meet on Christmas Eve, the biggest holiday in Sweden. “Is that okay for you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Could we come over to your place? It’ll be me and a photographer.”

  Silence.

  “Elsa?”

  Elsa giggled again, and Ambra could have sworn she sounded drunk. “Sorry. That’s fine, dear.”

  “So tomorrow morning at ten?”

  Elsa said they were welcome, and Ambra hung up, hugely skeptical about the entire piece. She pulled out one earbud and continued to stamp life into her feet. Her cell phone rang again. Shit, had she changed her mind? But this time, it wasn’t Elsa.

  It was Jill.

  “Are you at work?” Jill asked t
he moment Ambra answered.

  “Nah, in Kiruna.” Ambra caught sight of her reflection in yet another store window, phone in hand, headphone in ear. Sometimes, it felt like all she did was talk on the phone. “You?” Jill was an artist, and she spent more time on the road than she did at home.

  “I’m so tired, I can hardly remember what the town’s called. What’re you doing there? I thought you hated Kiruna.”

  Ambra saw her reflection smirk. “I hate most things.”

  “True. Me too. Everything fine with you? Sure you don’t want a Christmas gift?”

  “Completely sure,” Ambra replied firmly.

  Jill earned roughly the same in one week as Ambra earned in a year, so things quickly got strange when it came to giving gifts. Having one of Sweden’s most successful singers as a foster sister wasn’t always easy.

  “I’m due onstage soon,” said Jill. “And I’ve been invited to dinner with some county governor afterward, so I just wanted to call and say hi before. I’d prefer to skip the dinner. It’ll be all canapés and champagne and five courses and a load of boring people.”

  “Sounds better than my evening.”

  “Nah, it gets boring in the end too. Well, I need to go warm up my voice. Don’t work your ass off. Kisses.”

  That was something new Jill had started doing. Ambra remembered seeing it on Instagram too. Kisses. She hated it. Jill moved in a bizarre world of artists with strange rules of interaction that Ambra had never understood.

  “Bye,” she said, ending the call.

  She looked up at the sky. That was something she remembered from her childhood. How bright the stars were up here. Did astronomers ever get into conflicts like she did at the newspaper? Arguments about being the boss’s favorite, competition for interesting jobs, e-mails from anonymous haters. Of course they did. The entire academic world was like a soap opera. Early in her career, she wrote a report on professors who took bribes to raise their students’ grades at a particular Swedish college. Her first death threat arrived after that article. She still had it, in a frame, on her desk. Macabre, maybe. Though not as macabre as threatening a young, female journalist with anal rape. There hadn’t been any mention of that in the job description. Being called whore, slut, and traitor on a daily basis.

  Ambra decided to keep walking. Yes, she was freezing her ass off, but she needed to clear her mind. The snow crunched beneath her feet as she crossed the road. The air was so cold that it glittered in the glow of the street lamps. The scent of ginger cookies and mulled wine hung over the streets. That familiar fragrance of companionship. But it’ll be over soon, and then it’s an entire year until next Christmas.

  She was still trying to pep herself up when the façade of the hotel appeared. She hurried toward it. A man came out of the entrance and headed straight toward her along the sidewalk. Wasn’t it the same man, the one from the restaurant earlier? The one with the sexist T-shirt? He seemed to be deep in thought. Ambra was on the verge of stepping into the road, but then she decided to stubbornly continue on the sidewalk. The man was getting closer. Would he move to one side? Nothing suggested that. Maybe it was stupid of her, but Ambra kept walking straight ahead, on a collision course, her pulse rapidly picking up. He still hadn’t seen her. Was she invisible, or what? The man’s head was bare, and he wasn’t wearing gloves or a scarf. His chunky boots crunched in the snow. She had time to see that he was wearing pants with pockets on the sides. Maybe he was some kind of construction worker?

  And then they crashed into each other.

  Not hard, he looked up and swerved at the last moment, but since Ambra refused to move a millimeter, their upper arms and shoulders collided with a faint rustling sound. She shuddered a little, almost imagined feeling his warmth through the layers of coats separating them. She saw the surprise in his eyes, then recognition, and then he was gone. It sounded like he mumbled something, maybe a “sorry,” but by then she had already picked up the pace and was almost at the hotel. She hurried in through the entrance without turning around.

  What a weird guy.

  And what a crappy day this had been.

  Chapter 6

  Jilliana Lopez stretched across the hotel bed in her suite. She was still wearing her stage clothes—a tight sequin dress, shiny pantyhose, and super-tight spandex underwear—but she had pulled off her red booties and was wiggling her toes. Her dress glittered at the slightest movement. Today’s show ended with “Ave Maria,” her showpiece, and she’d been given a standing ovation by the hundred or so Christmas guests. A good show, all in all. And now she was full of the special feeling she always had after a performance. Exhausted and worked up at the same time. Full of impressions but devoid of feelings. She was also a tiny, tiny bit hoarse. She would have to be careful with her voice—she was fully booked for the next two years.

  She raised her legs into the air and studied them. The boots were pretty, but they were tight and her toes ached. Everything ached.

  “When am I next free?” she asked her assistant, Ludvig, who was darting around the hotel suite with silent, effective movements. Jill squinted at him. Without lenses, she was practically blind, but even when she was wearing them, her vision wasn’t great. She squinted even more. Ludvig was sweet. “How old are you, exactly?” she added. He looked terrifyingly young.

  “Nineteen.” He pushed a strand of blond hair behind his ear, but it fell forward again immediately. He had done the exact same thing at least ten times in the last minute.

  Ludvig was her first male assistant. The record label had sent him, and it had gone surprisingly well. Nineteen. Technically, he was legal. He pushed his hair behind his ear again. Young men were usually very energetic. “And I guess you want to be an artist?” she said, giving up the thought of seducing him before she even finished the question. She didn’t sleep with people who worked for her. Things got too messy. Been there, done that.

  “I’m in a band,” Ludvig said, picking up the red booties and putting them in the closet. He didn’t elaborate, and Jill didn’t ask. Wannabe artists were thirteen a dozen. It was awful, really, the music world. New, hungry youngsters were constantly snapping at your heels. And the others, those who were more or less successful already, were just waiting for a chance to drive a knife into your back. Though you would still exchange hugs on the red carpet. She groaned. The spandex was like a straitjacket. She raised one hand in the air. Ambra sounded low when they’d spoken on the phone, she thought absentmindedly as she studied her long red gel nails. Red wasn’t really her shade, despite her dramatic Latin coloring. There was something in the gaudy Christmas red that made her own skin tone look almost vulgar. Pornographic. Ugh, she hated it. She would take off the nails as soon as the Christmas shows were done.

  “You asked when you were free,” Ludvig interjected, interrupting her thoughts. Jill liked that, the way he kept on top of things. It was an unusual quality, especially in a young man.

  “You have two shows on Christmas Eve,” he continued. “But then you have a few days off before the New Year’s shows start. The first is in Örebro city. The Swedish National Public TV, SVT, is coming to film. Skansen, the Sconce, on New Year’s Eve. And then the televised Melodifestivalen, the Melody Festival, starts.”

  Crap, that damn circus. Can I really manage another year?

  “I haven’t decided what to do about that,” Jill said, still thinking. Why was Ambra down? Was it because it was Christmas, or was it something else? You never knew with Ambra, and they weren’t great at confiding in each other. Neither of them liked this time of year. They just handled it differently. Jill made sure she was fully booked with shows and concerts. She had done so ever since her breakthrough on Swedish Idol. As long as she was booked up, laughed a lot, and kept moving forward, she had no time to be sad. But Ambra had a tendency to wallow a little.

  Jill looked at Ludvig, who was now shaking a feather boa as he hummed a Christmas tune. Jesus, it suddenly struck her. If he was nineteen now, he must’ve been a
bout seven when she’d had her breakthrough. How could twelve years have passed already? Where had the time gone? Ludvig placed a huge bouquet of roses into a vase.

  “I don’t understand why people always give me flowers,” said Jill. She was never in the same place for longer than a day, sometimes even less than that. Did people think she took them with her? “They should give me money instead.”

  Once, in an interview, Jill had mentioned that she loved yellow roses—the kind of nonsense statement she sometimes made because of a sponsor, because it felt right in the moment, she couldn’t remember. But now she was constantly being given yellow roses. She hated them.

  “I think they’re pretty,” said Ludvig.

  “Upload them to Insta, and you can have them. Or give them to someone in the hotel, I don’t care.”

  She would rest for another five minutes, and then she would get up and change. But Jesus, she was exhausted. Was it normal to be so tired? Was she getting old? She closed her eyes to fight the panic. But she had been doing the same Christmas show since October, working her way northwards from Ystad, Malmö, and Helsingborg in the south, and now she was finishing things off in the north of the country. No surprise she was tired. She wasn’t old.

  She rolled over onto her stomach, pressed her chin to her chest, and stretched her neck. Her hairline itched. There was so much spray, foam, and glitter in her hair that it felt like plastic beneath her fingers.

  She reached for her cell phone, posed for a selfie, and uploaded it to Instagram. She handled most of that stuff herself. She had a good sense of what her followers liked and started to write in English long before her label even entertained the thought. The minute she switched to a more internationally accessible language, her account exploded, and she now had close to two million followers. That wasn’t much in a global context, but the number was growing all the time.

  “I need a hit in English,” she philosophized as the likes started to pour in. And she should upload a moving image, she thought. The fans always went crazy for video clips.