A Blessed Child (5 page)

Chapter 17

At a bus stop on the edge of Fagerås, a woman waited for the bus. Beside her was a boy of fourteen or so. The woman and the boy stood motionless in the slush; it was snowing and raining by turns. The bus stop consisted of a pole with timetables mounted on it and a rotting shelter with a disintegrating roof, the bench inside unusable. The woman, dressed in a red checked coat with a tie belt and high-heeled black boots, had her dark hair up and was holding a big black umbrella in her right hand. The boy stood a little apart from her. He was wet and inadequately clad in a cap, a hoodie, and sagging jeans. Between them on the ground were a black suitcase and a yellow nylon bag with the logo of a Swedish soccer team. The woman and the boy were both staring in the same direction, to the left, as if their gaze could impel the bus along the road.

Erika saw the two figures as she drove past them. At first she thought that she was just imagining it, that the boy and the woman were a ghostly vision created by the rain, the dark sky, and the perpetually changing light. But when she looked in the rearview mirror to confirm that it
was
her imagination, they were still there. The woman under the black umbrella. The boy with the hoodie, soaking wet. The suitcase and bag on the ground.

Erika pulled over to the side of the road. She switched on the hazard lights and grabbed her anorak from the backseat and threw it around her shoulders. She opened the car door, got out to face the driving rain, and tried to attract the attention of the woman or the boy. They just stood there, unmoving, staring the other way.

“Hey there! Hello!” she shouted. “Hey there, you two!”

The woman with the umbrella turned toward her. Erika broke into a run. The boy still did not move. He was listening to music; a thin white cord ran from his ears to his jeans pocket. The woman looked inquiringly at Erika, who was wet and freezing cold and out of breath after her run along the road.

“You looked as if you’ve been waiting awhile,” said Erika.

“The bus should have been here ten minutes ago,” said the woman.

The boy had now realized that his mother—for the woman with the umbrella must be his mother, thought Erika—was talking to someone. He took out his earbuds so he could hear better.

“Where are you going? I mean, can I give you a lift part of the way?” asked Erika. “You’re drenched,” she said when neither of them responded. “And the bus definitely isn’t coming.”

The woman and the boy regarded her as if they didn’t really understand what she was saying. Erika switched to Swedish.

“Especially you,” she said, nodding to the boy. “You’re absolutely soaked.”

The boy shrugged his shoulders and looked at his mother.

“We’re going to Sunne,” the woman said. “Are you going there?”

Erika was heading for Örebro, to stay at a nice hotel, eat good food in the hotel restaurant, and get a decent night’s sleep before the long drive to the ferry terminal the next day; everything had been planned in accordance with Laura’s instructions.

Sunne would mean a detour of at least eighty kilometers.

“Yes, I’m going to Sunne,” Erika said.

And why not, she asked herself as she hurried back through the rain with her anorak over her head to the parked car and its flashing lights, followed by the woman and the boy with their luggage. The boy, who was about the same age as her own son, was wet and cold, and their bus hadn’t come, so why shouldn’t she drive them to Sunne?

“Do you live there? In Sunne?”

Erika turned up the heat and gave the hoodie boy in the backseat a towel that she had stuffed into her rucksack just before leaving home.

“Yes,” said the woman.

The boy had put the earbuds back in his ears. He was listening to music only he could hear and staring out the window. He had big brown eyes and an emphatically etched mouth that stretched from cheek to cheek. Yes, he reminded her a little of her boy, of Magnus. Perhaps because of his tall, slim body (huge hands and feet) well hidden in baggy clothes, or the finely chiseled face that could equally have been a child’s or an extremely young man’s, depending on the light and the constantly changing expressions.

She looked at him in the rearview mirror and tried to catch his eye. She wanted to give him a smile. She wanted to say: I’ll drive you all the way home.

“How old is your son?”

Erika lowered her voice. She could have spoken at normal volume, of course. The boy with his iPod wouldn’t hear in any case. From time to time he fished his mobile out of his pocket and his fingers moved swiftly over the keys as he texted someone.

“He’s fourteen,” said the woman.

“I have a son of fourteen, too,” Erika said eagerly.

“He’s not my son,” said the woman. “He’s my sister’s son.”

“Oh, right,” said Erika. “Well, obviously. You’re too young to have a son of fourteen. You’re much younger than I am.”

Erika didn’t think the woman looked much younger than she did—in fact there was something old and haggard about her—but Erika was trying to be pleasant; she had a feeling she had already offended or annoyed this woman, and feared she thought her banal and chatty and would never have set foot in Erika’s car had it not been for the rain and the dark and the cold and the bus being so late and the boy so wet.

“Well, yes, I suppose I’m really too young to have teenagers,” said the woman.

Erika waited for her to say something else, offer some clarification. But she didn’t. The woman didn’t take off her red checked coat; she didn’t loosen the tie belt although the car was nice and warm.

Having thought that she and the woman had sons the same age, Erika had believed there would be something to talk about. The woman was dissatisfied
(With Erika? With Erika’s driving? With the weather? With fucking Sweden?),
and Erika felt an urge to mollify her. Entertain her. Make her laugh or give a nod of recognition or tell something about herself. Their common experiences might bring them to some sense of easy female solidarity. But maybe that worked only when your children were small, mused Erika, visualizing knots of mothers in cafés or parks, rocking; rocking a baby at their breast or a baby in a buggy. Erika didn’t dare ask the woman if she had small children.

If a woman in labor lashed out at Erika or begged to be allowed to die, as women in labor sometimes do, she would take the woman’s hand in hers and hold it firmly.

Face-to-face with her patients, Erika felt confident. She inspired trust. Unlike Isak, she covered her office walls with photos of newborn babies, photos sent to her by grateful new mothers and fathers. He never put up a single picture. Once the child was out of its mother’s body it was no longer his responsibility, he would say.

But beyond the hospital walls, Erika felt clumsy and awkward in the company of other women. Especially other women in flocks. They wouldn’t let her in, as if to say: There’s altogether too much of you, Erika. You’re awkward. You’re shallow. You’re loud. You’re quiet and shy and boring. You’re superficial. You’re earnest and humorless. You’re just wrong. We don’t like you. It would be better if you simply dissolved and disappeared. But you can’t. You won’t.

Ever since Erika and Ragnar were beachcombing and she saw Marion for the first time—Marion, in polka-dot bikini briefs, lolling on the rock farthest out to sea, surrounded by Frida, Emily, and Eva—Erika had felt enthralled. She wanted to be part of that picture. She allowed herself to be enthralled by the formation of four girls on the rock, supreme and inviolable, a secret, shining, unassailable alliance. And she could be part of that alliance or not, depending on Marion’s mood, and when she was not a part of it, her exclusion was pitiless and she was left with nothing but her own thin, boring little body, her best friend Ragnar’s childish games in the secret hut, and all the gray clouds in the sky.

Chapter 18

Many hundreds of years ago, this is what they did when a child was about to be born: when a woman began to have contractions and labor was under way, the other women made haste to let down her hair and unfasten any laces on her dress, her shoes, and everything in the vicinity that was knotted, tied, closed, barred, or locked, such as drawers, chests, windows, and doors. If her husband wanted to help her, he could attack something outside the house. He might take his ax and chop his plow in two.

Erika remembered that she had arrived for her night shift and inquired about the women in labor. The midwife said of one young woman: Tedious. It’s going to take time. Nearly twelve hours and only three centimeters’ dilation.

And she was no more than a child herself, thought Erika as she stood at the door of the maternity ward and saw the young woman in the light from the hospital corridor. No more than seventeen or eighteen, and alone. No boyfriend or sister or mother. No girlfriend. She was sitting in the middle of the floor in a white hospital gown, small and thin, with her face in her hands and her legs drawn up under her. She neither turned nor looked up as Erika closed the door behind her.

I crossed the floor and squatted down beside you. I took off the elastic band and unplaited your hair so I could run my fingers through it. You looked at me and let me do it, and finally you even rested your head on my shoulder.

After a time, as night became morning, the young woman gave birth to a girl, silently gasping for air and light. One day, thought Erika, she, too, might have her mother’s beautiful long hair.

Chapter 19

Erika opened her mouth to say something to the woman sitting beside her in the car. After all, she had to say something, didn’t she? No. She decided against it. Why say anything? And what about the boy in the back, who had not said a word and was not the woman’s son but reminded Erika slightly of Ragnar? She looked at him in the rearview mirror.

“Did I say Ragnar?”

The woman turned to her and replied: “You didn’t say anything.”

Erika smiled at her: “Sorry. I talk to myself sometimes, especially when I’m driving.”

She looked at the boy in the backseat and realized she had been mistaken.

He did not remind her of Ragnar.

Ragnar was spindly, with thin wrists.

This boy reminded her of Magnus.

Erika said: “I need to stop for gas and I must ring my son. I must tell him I shall be spending the night in Sunne instead of Örebro. Magnus likes to know where I am. He pretends not to be bothered but he is.”

The woman shrugged her shoulders, her eyes fixed straight ahead. “Well, naturally, it’s your car. Do whatever you like.”

Erika stared at her. Was that it? Not the slightest veneer of anything polite or friendly? Erika had now even given away that she had been heading for Örebro, not Sunne; that she was actually making a detour of eighty kilometers for the sake of this woman she didn’t know. The woman became aware that Erika was looking at her. She looked down, fingering something in her lap.

“We’re hugely grateful, of course, that you’re giving us a lift.”

The woman was looking straight at her now. Her expression was defiant.

“Hugely grateful! You really have gone out of your way!”

What do you want from me?

“No problem,” said Erika.

She turned in at the next gas station. She found her mobile phone, opened the car door, and got out into the wintry rain, which would soon turn to dense snowfall. She left the car without saying a word to the woman or the boy. Erika didn’t look at her passengers as she shut the car door; she didn’t ask if they were hungry or thirsty. The woman could damn well buy her own food and drink. Erika ran into the shop and asked for the toilet. A young man with a scarred face and ginger mustache gave her a key and pointed to the right. Erika took the key and unlocked the door. She went in and locked it behind her. It stank of shit. The toilet was blocked, its seat missing. The bin was full and there was litter all over the floor. Erika imagined the woman in the car, her fellow traveler, who wasn’t the mother of the soaking wet boy, wasn’t anybody’s mother, and somehow this goddamned stinking toilet and everything that stank was all
her
fault. Erika could have been in Örebro by now: in her hotel room, or in the restaurant having dinner. Erika rang Magnus’s number. She got his voice mail. She listened to her son’s voice, no longer clear and singsong as it had been when he used to lie beside her in bed to have stories read to him. His voice was like the rest of his body: everything was growing, darkening and deepening. Magnus would be asleep in his bed, and when she came into his room to tuck him in she would see a strong, hairy, man-size foot sticking out from under the cover. And now he was on a school trip, in Poland. She said: “Hello, love. It’s Mum. I’m taking a detour via Sunne. I’ll be staying the night there, not in Örebro. I’ll ring you when I get to the hotel.”

She hung up. She should have sent a text. Magnus hated it when she left him voice mail messages. It cost money to check messages on your mobile, he said, and it was pointless paying just to hear a message from your mother. He didn’t mean anything unkind by it. Or hurtful. It was simply a point of information. Erika sent him a text message.
Hi Magnus. Left you a voice mail, no need to check it. Staying in Sunne, not at hotel in Örebro like I said. Speak soon. Love Mum.

Erika studied her face in the mirror, which amazingly enough was unbroken and even quite nice and clean. The mirror. Not her face.

“It’s not the one in the car who’s haggard,” Erika said to her reflection. “It’s you! It’s me! The one in the driver’s seat. It’s Erika! Here in this hellhole of a gas station, in this stinking shit!”

Tomorrow she would ring Isak and tell him she wasn’t coming after all. She didn’t want to ring him from her mobile; it just made him nervous, and if he was nervous, it made her nervous. She wanted to sit quietly and calmly on the edge of the bed and use the hotel phone. She wanted to say she couldn’t come after all, because something had come up at work and she needed to sort it out. She combed her hair and applied some lipstick, vivid red. She studied herself. Now she looked as if somebody had hit her, as if she had a gash in her face instead of a mouth. Erika rubbed off the red with her hand.

And then it struck her that the woman she had picked up on the road was pregnant. She saw her in her mind’s eye, in her coat and boots. The belt pulled tight around her waist. She was pregnant but didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t want to think about it. Maybe she was going to have an abortion? Maybe she was about to lose it? Maybe she was bleeding?

When Erika was pregnant with Magnus, she had felt sure it would destroy her. She had felt she would never be able to see the pregnancy through to term. She had felt she would get ill and not have the strength to give birth. She or the child would die. She had survived bringing Ane into the world. A little girl had forced her way out of her, drawn breath, and found the breast.

They had both come through that unscathed.

“God has blessed you,” Isak had said on the phone, as if he were not a doctor but a minister like his father.

But this time it was different. With Ane, everything had been so easy. At least, she remembered it as easy. The pregnancy, the birth, the breastfeeding. Erika wasn’t ready for this other thing. This blackness. She dragged herself through the nausea, the nausea that never relaxed its grip on her, the nausea that mixed in with everything she ate and drank, everything she wore, the places she went and everything she touched. The nausea in her nostrils, under her nails, in her freshly washed hair. And even all these years later, she sometimes felt a touch of that nausea. It took no more than the scent of lilac to make it well up inside her, because the lilac had been in bloom when she was twelve weeks pregnant. Yet simultaneously, the terror of damaging this child that was not yet a child. She had given it a name. Not a proper name. Not the name that it would one day be given, that would be written in official registers, books, minutes, and lists, but a secret name. Saying it out loud would bring bad luck, just like buying clothes or equipment before the baby was born, or at any rate before the pregnancy was fully visible.

In her eighteenth week, Erika learned she was expecting a boy. She was examined by a male doctor who had been a few years ahead of her in medical school. When he had said that the fetus was lying in a position that prevented his seeing whether it was a boy or a girl, Erika grabbed hold of the transducer and managed to get a picture of the child that showed them both it was a boy.

It was a boy, but was he viable? She checked his head and neck, the length of his legs. Everything looked fine, but Erika left the clinic with a sense of having intruded on her child. It had looked at her from the other side, not wanting to be disturbed, not wanting to be invaded. It was just a glimpse before it dissolved into lines and dots on the screen and a heart beating and beating and beating.

In week thirty-one, she began to think: I won’t escape this time. Day after day she was helping women through complicated pregnancies and births, calming them, reassuring them, calling it
the most natural thing in the world,
but she herself was afraid. Afraid lest she bleed to death, lest she not be able to breathe. There he lay like a little suicide bomber, waiting to blow himself and Erika to pieces.

So she asked him if he could manage the journey. Can you handle the choices life is going to thrust at you as soon as the umbilical cord is cut—taking a breath, finding the breast, crying when you need me? Or will you turn inward, into yourself, not have the energy, not cope, not want to? Ane stroked Erika’s blue-white full-moon belly and talked about all the games and songs she would teach him. She stood in the middle of the floor and sang:

Goosey goosey gander

Where shall I wander?

Upstairs and downstairs

And in my lady’s chamber

There I met an old man

Who wouldn’t say his prayers

So I took him by the left leg

And threw him down the stairs

Ane looked at Erika. She asked: “Can he hear us in there?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“What’s he going to be called when he comes out?”

“I don’t know.”

And then you’re here. You’re mine and I’m yours and I shall never be myself again. First the fear of being ripped apart, and once the baby is born, the knowledge that I have been ripped apart, though not in the way I thought. Night after night after night without sleep and with you held near to me; the blood, the tears, the milk, the fever, and hard lumps in my breast that are only sometimes eased by warm water, warm skin, or your mouth; the loneliness when everyone else is sleeping, except you and me.

She would lie awake in the night, listening to the sounds he made. She would keep bending over the crib, bringing her face close to the baby’s to check that he was breathing. She would pick him up and take him into her own bed. His body was so warm and heavy. One night she whispered something in his ear, first into the left ear, then into the right. He can’t remember it now, but what she whispered was his name, because she wanted him to be the first to hear it.

For many weeks after the boy was born, he had no name. There were plenty of suggestions—Kristian, Sebastian, Lukas, Bror, Thorleif—all rejected. But one evening, his parents came to a decision. He was lying between them in the bed, not quite two months old. He had a cold, and a fever. His airways were still so narrow, and Erika said several times that if he got any worse, they’d have to take him to the emergency room. She tried breastfeeding him and dissolved into tears when he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, suckle, his little mouth slack and immobile around her nipple. But as the night wore on, he improved. His breathing grew less labored. He took milk from the breast. He relaxed and let himself slip into a few hours of peaceful sleep. And suddenly, just when his parents could fight their sleepiness no more, he opened his eyes and said,
Let’s always remember this moment. Always! No matter what happens, let’s not forget that we lay here in this bed, all three of us, utterly alive and utterly still. When I’m older I want you to tell me about this night, how we lay here in bed close to one another and you sang the night away. I know nothing of how my life will turn out, but whatever happens I want you to tell me about our lying here, all three of us, about how much you loved me and how scared you were of losing me.

The little boy opened his eyes and looked at his parents, and suddenly they knew what they were going to call him. A few years later they split up, parting as enemies and tugging their children in opposite directions, as if the children had very long arms, but on that particular night they lay quietly beside each other in bed with the little boy between them. His mother slept and his daddy stayed awake, or his daddy slept and his mother stayed awake, and the little boy slept and woke, slept and woke, as is the way with very small babies quite new on this earth.

Erika filled up the tank. She bought two bars of chocolate. One for herself and one for the boy in the backseat. She considered buying a bar of chocolate for her pregnant passenger but decided not to. She came out of the shop and ran to the car, then turned and ran back in again. She bought oranges. She had had a taste for them both times she was pregnant herself. It wasn’t far to Sunne. She got into the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition. The woman beside her was staring straight ahead. She hadn’t taken off her coat or loosened the belt.