The Darkest Room (8 page)

There was a kind of ceremonial, funereal atmosphere in the air, thought Tilda, as if someone had died here in the house, not over by the lighthouses on Eel Point.

Maria Carlsson disappeared into a dark room. It took a minute or two, then the little girl came out into the light.

She was wearing pants and a sweater, clutching a cuddly toy firmly under her arm, and her expression was sleepy and
uninterested as she looked at them. But when she realized who was standing at the other side of the room, she quickly brightened up and began to smile.

“Daddy!” she shouted, scampering across the floor.

The daughter didn’t know anything, Tilda realized. Nobody had told her yet that her mother had drowned.

Even more remarkable was the fact that her father, Joakim Westin, was standing stiffly by the door, making no attempt to move toward his daughter.

Tilda looked at him and saw that he no longer looked tense, but frightened and confused—almost terrified.

Joakim Westin’s voice was filled with panic.

“But this is Livia,” he said, looking at Tilda. “But what about Katrine? My wife, where’s … where’s Katrine?”

Joakim was sitting
waiting on a wooden bench outside a low building at the district hospital in Kalmar. The weather was cold and sunny. Beside him sat a young hospital chaplain dressed in a blue winter jacket, a Bible in his hand. Neither of the men spoke.

Inside the building there was a room where Katrine was waiting. Beside the entrance was a sign with the words
Chapel of Rest
.

Joakim was refusing to go in.

“I’d really like you to see her,” the junior doctor had said when she met Joakim. “If you can cope with that.”

Joakim shook his head.

“I can tell you what you’ll see in there,” said the junior doctor. “It’s very dignified and respectful, with low lighting and candles. The deceased will be lying on a bier, with a sheet covering—”

“—a sheet covering the body, leaving the face visible,” said Joakim. “I know.”

He knew, he had seen Ethel in a room like this the previous year. But he couldn’t look at Katrine lying there like that. He lowered his eyes and silently shook his head.

Eventually the junior doctor nodded.

“Wait here, then. It will take a little while.”

She went into the building, and Joakim sat down in the pale November sunshine and waited, gazing up at the blue sky. The hospital chaplain next to him was moving uneasily in his thick jacket, as if the silence were unpleasant.

“Were you married long?” he said eventually.

“Seven years,” said Joakim. “And three months.”

“Have you any children?”

“Two. A boy and a girl.”

“Children are always welcome to come along and say goodbye,” said the priest quietly. “It can be good for them … help them to move on.”

Joakim shook his head again. “They’re not going through this.”

Then there was silence on the bench again. After a few minutes the doctor came back with some Polaroid photographs and a large brown package.

“It took a little while to find the camera,” she said.

Then she held out the photographs to Joakim.

He took them and saw that they were close-ups of Katrine’s face. Two were taken from the front, two from the side. Katrine’s eyes were closed, but Joakim couldn’t fool himself into thinking she was just sleeping. Her skin was white and lifeless, and she had black scabs on her forehead and on one cheek.

“She’s injured,” he said quietly.

“It’s from the fall,” said the doctor. “She slipped on the rocks out on the jetty and hit her face, before she ended up in the water.”

“But she … drowned?”

“It was hypothermia … the shock of the cold water. This late in the year the temperature of the Baltic is below ten degrees,” said the doctor. “She took water into her lungs when she went below the surface.”

“But she fell in the water,” said Joakim. “Why did she fall?”

He didn’t get a reply.

“These are her clothes,” said the doctor, handing over the package. “And you don’t want to see her?”

“No.”

“To say goodbye?”

“No.”

The children fell asleep
in their bedrooms every night in the week following Katrine’s death. They had lots of questions about why she wasn’t home, but eventually they fell asleep anyway.

Joakim, however, lay there in the double bed, gazing up at the ceiling, hour after hour. And when he did fall asleep, there was no rest. The same dream recurred night after night.

He dreamed that he was back at Eel Point. He had been gone for a long time, perhaps for several years, and now he had returned.

He was standing beneath a gray sky on the deserted shore by the lighthouses, then he began to walk up toward the house. It looked desolate and completely dilapidated. The rain and snow had washed away the red, leaving the façade pale gray.

The windows of the veranda were broken and the door was standing ajar. Everything was dark inside.

The oblong stones forming the steps up to the veranda were cracked and askew. Joakim walked slowly up them and into the darkness.

He shivered and looked around in the gloom of the
porch, but everything was just as shabby and run-down inside as it was outside. The wallpaper was ripped, gravel and dust covered the wooden floors, all the furniture was gone. There was no trace of the renovation he and Katrine had made a start on.

He could hear noises from several of the rooms.

From the kitchen came the murmur of voices and scraping noises.

Joakim walked along the corridor and stopped in the doorway.

At the kitchen table sat Livia and Gabriel, bent over a game of cards. His children were still small, but their faces had a network of fine wrinkles around the mouth and eyes.

Is Mom home?
asked Joakim.

Livia nodded.
She’s in the barn
.

She lives in the hayloft in the barn
, said Gabriel.

Joakim nodded and backed slowly out of the kitchen. His children stayed where they were, in silence.

He went back outside, across the grass-covered inner courtyard, and pushed open the door of the barn.

Hello?

There was no reply, but he went in anyway.

At the steep wooden staircase leading up to the hayloft, he stopped. Then he began to climb. The steps were cold and damp.

When he got to the top, he couldn’t see any hay, just pools of water on the wooden floor.

Katrine was standing over by the wall, with her back to him. She was wearing her white nightgown, but it was soaking wet.

Are you cold? he
asked.

She shook her head without turning around.

What happened down by the shore?

Don’t ask
, she said, and slowly began to sink through the gaps in the wooden floor.

Joakim walked over to her.

Mom-mee?
called a voice in the distance.

Katrine stood motionless by the wall.

Livia has woken up
, she said.
You need to take care of her, Kim
.

Joakim woke up
in his bedroom with a start.

The sound that had woken him up was no dream. It was Livia calling out.

“Mom-mee?”

He opened his eyes in the darkness, but stayed in bed. Alone.

Everything was silent once again.

The clock by the side of the bed was showing quarter past three. Joakim was certain he had fallen asleep just a few minutes ago—and yet the dream about Katrine had lasted an eternity.

He closed his eyes. If he stayed where he was and didn’t do anything, perhaps Livia would go back to sleep.

Like a reply the call echoed through the house once more:

“Mom-mee?”

After that he knew it was pointless to stay in bed. Livia was awake and wouldn’t stop calling until her mother came in and lay down beside her.

Joakim sat up slowly and switched on the lamp on the bedside table. The house was cold, and he felt a crippling loneliness.

“Mom-mee?”

He knew he had to take care of the children. He didn’t want to, he didn’t have the strength, but there was no one else to share the responsibility with.

He left his warm bed and moved quietly out of his bedroom and over to Livia’s room.

She raised her head when he bent over her bed. He stroked her forehead, without saying anything.

“Mommy?” she mumbled.

“No, it’s just me,” he said. “Go to sleep now, Livia.”

She didn’t reply, but sank slowly back onto her pillow.

Joakim stood there in the darkness until she was breathing evenly again.

He took a step backward, then another. Then he turned toward the door.

“Don’t go, Daddy.”

Her clear voice made him stop dead on the cold floor.

She had sounded wide awake, despite the fact that she was lying in bed like a motionless shadow. He turned slowly to face her.

“Why not?” he asked quietly.

“Stay here,” said Livia.

Joakim didn’t reply. He held his breath and listened. She had sounded awake, but he still thought it seemed as if she were asleep.

When he had been standing there, silent and motionless, for a minute or so, he began to feel like a blind man in the dark room.

“Livia?” he whispered.

He got no answer, but her breathing was tense and irregular. He knew she would soon call out for him again.

An idea suddenly came into his head. At first it felt unpleasant, then he decided to try it out.

He crept out of the door and into the dark bathroom. He groped his way forward, bumped into the hand basin, then felt the wooden laundry basket next to the bathtub. The basket was almost full; nobody had done any washing for almost a week. Joakim hadn’t had the strength.

Then he heard the call from Livia’s room, as expected:

“Mom-mee?”

Joakim knew she would carry on calling for Katrine.

“Mom-mee?”

This was how it was going to be, night after night. It would never end.

“Quiet,” he muttered, standing by the laundry basket.

He opened the lid and started burrowing among the clothes.

Different aromas rose up to meet him. Most of the items were
hers;
all the sweaters and pants and underclothes she had worn in the final days before the accident. Joakim pulled out a few things: a pair of jeans, a red woolen sweater, a white cotton skirt.

He couldn’t resist pressing them against his face.

Katrine
.

He wanted to linger there among the vivid memories the scent of her brought into his mind; they were both blissful and painful—but Livia’s plaintive cry made him hurry.

“Mom-mee?”

Joakim took the red woolen sweater with him. He went past Gabriel’s room and back into Livia’s.

She had kicked off the coverlet and was waking up—she raised her head when he came in and stared at him in bewildered silence.

“Sleep now, Livia,” said Joakim. “Mommy’s here.”

He placed Katrine’s thick sweater close to Livia’s face and pulled the coverlet up to her chin. He tucked her in closely, like a cocoon.

“Sleep now,” he repeated, more quietly this time.

“Mmm.”

She mumbled something in her sleep and gradually relaxed. Her breathing was calmer now; she had placed her arm around her mother’s sweater and buried her face in the thick wool. Her sheep from Gotland was lying on the other side of the pillow, but she ignored it.

Livia was asleep again.

The danger had passed and Joakim knew that next morning she wouldn’t even remember that she had been awake.

He breathed out and sat down on the edge of her bed, his head drooping.

A darkened room, a bed, the blinds pulled down.

He wanted to fall asleep, to sleep as deeply as Livia and forget himself. He just couldn’t think anymore; he had no strength left.

And yet he couldn’t sleep.

He thought about the laundry basket, about Katrine’s clothes, and after a couple of minutes he got up and went back into the bathroom. To the laundry basket.

The thing he was looking for was almost right at the bottom: Katrine’s nightgown, white with a red heart on the front. He took it out of the basket.

Out in the corridor he stopped and listened outside both the children’s rooms, but all remained silent.

Joakim went into his room, put the light on, and remade the double bed. He shook and smoothed the sheets, plumped up the pillows, and folded back the coverlet. Then he got back in, closed his eyes, and breathed in the smell of Katrine.

He reached out and touched the soft fabric.

Morning again
. Joakim woke to the stubborn beep of the alarm clock—which meant that he must have slept.

Katrine is dead
, he said to himself.

He could hear Gabriel and Livia starting to move about in their beds—and then he heard one of them padding barefoot over the wooden floor to the bathroom—and he realized that he could smell the scent of his wife. His hands were holding on to something thin and soft.

The nightgown.

In the darkness he stared at it with something close to embarrassment. He remembered what he had done in the bathroom during the night, and quickly pulled up the coverlet to hide it.

Joakim got up
, took a shower, and got dressed, then dressed the children and settled them at the breakfast table.
He glanced at them to see if they were watching him, but they were both concentrating on their plates.

The darkness and the cold in the mornings seemed to make Livia more lively. When Gabriel had left the kitchen to go to the bathroom, she looked at her father.

“When is Mommy coming back?”

Joakim closed his eyes. He was standing at the counter with his back to her, warming his hands on his coffee mug.

The question hung there in the air. He couldn’t bear it, but Livia had asked the same question every morning and evening since Katrine’s death.

“I don’t really know,” he replied slowly. “I don’t know when Mommy’s coming back.”

“But
when?
” said Livia more loudly.

She was waiting for his answer.

Joakim didn’t speak, but eventually he turned around. The right time to tell her would never come. He looked at Livia.

“Actually … I don’t think Mommy will be coming back,” he said. “She’s gone, Livia.”

Livia stared at him.

“No,” she said firmly and decisively. “She has
not
.”

“Livia, Mommy isn’t coming—”

“She is too!” screamed Livia across the table. “She
is
coming back! End of story!”

Then she went back to eating her sandwich. Joakim lowered his eyes and drank his coffee; he was beaten.

He drove the children
into Marnäs at around eight in the mornings, away from the silence of Eel Point.

The sound of joyous laughter and screams met them as they walked into Gabriel’s nursery school. Joakim had no strength whatsoever. He just gave his son a tired hug as they said goodbye. Gabriel quickly turned away and ran off toward the cheerful voices of his friends in the soft playroom.

But the children’s energy would disappear with time,
Joakim thought; they would grow old and their faces would become gray and sunken. Behind those bright faces lay pale skulls with empty eye sockets.