More Bitter Than Death (36 page)

The cramped little space is pitch-dark. If she presses her back against the wall and stretches her legs out in front of her, they hit the door. To the sides she can feel damp wood paneling in both directions. It feels like the walls of the stall in the stable Mama sometimes took her to: hard, damp, and sort of rough.

The floor is covered with piles of magazines with faded pictures of naked women with goofy smiles and big breasts that hang all the way down to their stomachs; Tilda sees them whenever he opens the door to set the little tray of bread and juice on the floor.

She knocked the big glass over when she tried to drink the juice, so now she’s sitting in a sticky juice puddle, thirstier and colder than ever.

The rope is tied firmly around one of her wrists and from there runs up into the darkness, keeping her from touching the floor with that hand. When she sleeps, her tingly hand floats like a balloon in the darkness over her.

She’s cold.

The man left a pot in one corner of the little room. Tilda doesn’t really get what she’s supposed to use it for. Besides, she’s scared to take her underwear off in the dark, scared that someone or something will nibble on her butt. So she peed sitting on the floor with her panties still on instead. A short-lived feeling of warmth, like summer, spread around her, and then: wet, cold, itchy pee all over her legs.

In the corners she can feel soft clumps of dust and small hard things that might be stones, dead insects, or something else, something worse. And once again she thinks about all the monsters she knows there are in the dark. The ones lurking over her, with long insect arms, teeth sharp like awls, and claws as long as her legs. The ones that are just waiting to swallow her up, as soon as she stops concentrating, forgets to think about the woman who keeps the monsters away.

Mama.

Tilda wonders when her mother is going to come and rescue her from the man who might be a monster. And she wonders if she’ll recognize her mother
when she comes, if her face will have healed. All that pink and red stuff that ran out of her, did they stuff it back in? Papa says they did, that she will be pretty again at the funeral, but that she’ll be lying in a box then. Just like the doll Papa bought her, although Mama’s box won’t be see-through. It’ll be made of wood and is going to be buried underground. And Tilda thinks that sounds terrible, that Mama is going to have to lie there in that dark, little box all by herself and never get to come out again.

Tilda’s tummy aches with hunger. The bread he put in there for her was hard and cold, as if it had come right out of the freezer; maybe it hadn’t even been in the microwave at all. She sucked and chewed on it until she was able to break off some small, floury pieces that tasted like cinnamon.

She thinks about Papa too, and about Henrik, and about the teachers at the daycare.

But still, if she closes her eyes really hard, really squeezes them shut until she sees little glowing balls, it’s her that she sees. It’s always her.

Mama.

Sometimes she smells her scent too, that funny mix of perfume, caramel, sweat, and cigarette smoke. But as soon as she tries to figure out where the scent is coming from, it’s gone, and all that’s left is the faint odor of mildew and pee.

Then she hears footsteps on the stairs somewhere below her. She huddles in the corner, because even though she’s scared of the dark, she’s even more scared of him out there. Suddenly it feels safe in this dark, little room and she thinks that she never wants the door to open again, she wants to keep sitting in this puddle of pee and juice with her mama’s scent in her nostrils.

Then the door opens and piercing, white light stabs her eyes like a thousand knives.

She hides her head under her free arm, makes herself as small as she can, like a ball in the corner of the little room.

“Come on, we’re going,” the voice says from above her, but she doesn’t move, just lies still, curled up, with her one arm hanging from the rope over her head.

“Didn’t you hear what I said? You have to come now.”

The voice sounds mad, mad and determined, like an angry teacher who just discovered that one of the kids in the daycare was being naughty. She still doesn’t dare move, squeezes her eyes shut tight and thinks about Mama, about her rough cheeks with the little hollows in them, her happy eyes, her belly that’s so soft she can hide her hands in it, in the skin, in between the folds.

“Well, come on, you stupid brat. Didn’t you hear what I said?”

A rough hand drags her up by her armpit, forces her into the white light. She struggles against it. Twirling like a monkey on the piece of rope, around, around, until she droops, nauseated.

“Mommy!”
she screams.
“Mommmmmmmmy!”

“Shut up.”

The blow on her cheek burns and heat spreads across her face. Tears blend with her snot and form salty, slimy rivers that run down into her mouth.

“I want my mommmmy.”

Suddenly she hears that ring tone. He seems to have heard it too, because he lets go of her and takes his cell phone out of his pocket.

“Yeah?”

She hears him talking softly and quickly. He hunches his back over the phone as if he were cradling it, as if he were talking to a very small child. Then he turns around and shoves her back into the darkness again, and slams the door shut with a bang.

“I’ll be back,” she hears him say from the other side.

Slowly she sinks back down into a squat, sits down on a stack of magazines, wipes the slimy tears from her cheeks with her free hand. Smells the scent again: perfume, sweat, smoke.

And she knows her mother’s with her, watching over her and protecting her from monsters, both the one in this room and the one on the other side of the door.

My breakfast is just as uninspired as the gloomy fall morning outside my window—a piece of old, damp crispbread that hangs feebly in my hand, and a cup of tea.

Markus walks in the front door again. He carries the firewood firmly against his chest, stacks it carefully on top of the already enormous pile by the woodstove, and then brings in some more.

“Are you stocking up for World War Three, or something?”

Markus doesn’t laugh, and I can sense his irritation from across the room.

“There’s a storm coming in tonight. But I suppose you don’t care about mundane things like that, do you? If it were up to you, your refrigerator would be empty and the firewood would stay out there in the shed.”

I shrug and look over at the black windowpane. Like polished granite, I think. The darkness outside the cottage is impenetrable.

Then I say, “Boy, are you grumpy.”

He doesn’t respond, just keeps stacking up the firewood in silence.

“Snowstorm. There’s a snowstorm coming. I don’t think you should take the car to work today.”

“I’ll take the bus, as usual. I never take the car into the city, do I? And besides, what does it matter to you?”

He’s quiet again. He looks at me, and then I see the pain. “I’m worried about you. Why can’t you understand that?”

Something inside me softens, and a warmth slowly spreads through me. I get up, tug a little at the long T-shirt that is getting tight over my belly, walk over to Markus, and wrap my arms around him. Feel the cold from his quilted jacket, inhale the faint scent of wood smoke in his damp hair.

“Hey,” I say. “I love you.”

He pauses, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move at all. The only sounds are his breathing and the crackling of the fire.

We stand like that for a long time.

“I always do all right, I’m like a cork. I always float to the surface, you know?”

Patrik’s voice is calm, quiet. But his eyes dart around my little office. There are dark-purple rings of exhaustion and grief under his eyes. This is our last appointment. Our sessions are over, like the relationship they were supposed to fix. I wonder if that means that I failed, because obviously I wanted their relationship to work, wished that I could glue the shards of their life back together, as if it were a broken flowerpot.

“And Mia?”

“She . . . seems calm, almost happy,” Patrik says.

“And how does that make you feel?”

“How the hell do you think that makes me feel?” Patrik is staring at me menacingly, but behind the rage I glimpse the sadness and I realize that my question was a therapist cliché.

“I’ll tell you how it feels. It sucks. It would’ve been easier if she left me for someone else.”

“Easier?”

“Yeah, I mean, she didn’t leave me for someone else, she just left me for . . . nothing, nothing at all. You know?”

I nod slowly. I do know the sadness, the shame of being rejected. And suddenly I’m ashamed, because I realize that’s exactly how I’ve made Markus feel.

Yes, of course I love you, but I need my freedom. I want the baby but not you. Not here in my house, in my bed, in my body. Not so close.

“And what about the practical details: how will the separation work?”

Patrik shrugs and runs his hand through his limp hair, which reminds me of the tufts of dead grass poking out of the puddles outside my cottage.

“All right, I guess.”

“What does that mean?”

“The kids spend every other week with me. Mia is renting a two-bedroom on Brännkyrkagatan. She took almost all the furniture, so the house is pretty empty. But the strangest part of all is that suddenly we have some kind of . . .
I don’t know what to call it . . . a business relationship? It’s like we’re running a company together. We negotiate stuff, like, ‘If you take the table, then I’m taking the chairs. Oh, you already bought chairs? Then maybe you want an armchair instead? Fine, that’s what we’ll do then.’ It’s really weird. Sort of civilized in a . . . really sad and painful way. And then we make appointments to pick up and drop off the kids and go to parent-teacher meetings together and pretend to be normal even though we just want to scream at each other. And then we tell the teachers, ‘Yeah, we’ve separated, but it’s working great. Really. Mia and I communicate well and of course you can call either of us if anything comes up, we keep each other posted.’ You know?”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” Patrik says, and gives me a tired look, and I realize that he doesn’t actually believe me.

Sometimes you wind up in a situation with a patient where you feel like it might be valuable to share some of your own experiences—if nothing else, to explain why you really, really, really understand. I could tell Patrik about Stefan and his death. How I was convinced that my life was over. I could admit in a whisper that I’m not able to love Markus as much as the memory of my dead husband. Share my insights on my inability to really love. Love in the good, mature sense—the self-sacrificing, 2.5 kids, white-picket-fence, nuclear-family sense.

But I don’t. I say nothing. Just look at him as he sits there, huddled in my armchair with those long legs in tight jeans stretched out in front of him, because I don’t usually share that kind of personal information with my patients.

“Surely you would agree that your newfound ability to cooperate is positive?”

Again he shrugs those skinny shoulders, jingling the chains on his leather jacket.