You Disappear: A Novel (11 page)

“No! Not at all. You don’t have to worry about that, I’ll never do that again.”

He clears his throat. “Is there anything I can do?”

“No, it’s not really you who’s got to … you don’t really have to …”

It’s hard to believe how considerate Niklas can be, especially since he’s been on my case so much these past few weeks. Angry about the most trivial things. Now we converse as if he never yelled at me last night, as if he never screamed at me three days ago when his bike lock wouldn’t open, or before that, when Frederik put a Danish essay Niklas hadn’t turned in yet at the bottom of our pile of already-read newspapers.

On the debate forum at braindamage.com, I’ve read that if Frederik does get better, he’ll go back and forth between being affectionate and normal, and being irrationally testy and emotional—“like a teenager,” they say. There will be good moments, but they will disappear instantly without warning.

Niklas says, “I could show you my new pictures.”

He knows that I love to look at his photos with him. And lately I haven’t been allowed to.

I hug him and fetch a chair from Frederik’s office so we can sit next to each other in his room.

Whenever Niklas does come home, he sits at his computer and edits pictures and videos. Mathias composes the most unbelievable electronic music, and their latest plan is to project Niklas’s photos on a screen above the stage while Mathias’s music plays as a warm-up for a concert at the gymnasium.

There’s no bra in the laundry pile—I checked while he was in school—nor was there anything else white that might look like a bra in the dark. Niklas quickly exits a bunch of programs as I sit down, and I think I see the name Sara listed as sender in a bunch of chat messages, but they fly by too fast to be sure. I do know who Sara is: she’s in Mathias’s homeroom, pale with long dark hair and freckles, and she used a lot of bookish phrases during the few moments we spoke at Niklas’s sixteenth birthday. He’s changed the subject the couple of times I’ve mentioned her name since then.

Niklas brings up Mathias’s latest composition and clicks
PLAY
. A wave breaks against the coast. It breaks again. And then again. And with each crash, it sounds more and more like a person falling down a flight of stairs. Heavily; she must have broken a bone. The falls—the wave-crashes—come more quickly, a great dance rhythm. A melody wriggles in on a piano, and then the wind on the beach in Sweden.

“Our theme is water,” Niklas says, showing me a sequence of enigmatic black-and-white patterns. “What do you think this is?”

“No idea.”

“You see something round, don’t you?”

“It looks like the entrails of a dead animal,” I say, thinking it could be a brain, though I don’t want to say that out loud.

“It’s a glass of water with ice cubes, with the light playing on it. It was standing on the kitchen counter one day, and I took a whole series.”

He goes through the pictures explaining them, almost as if I were a little kid and he were reading to me. As if he were my dad. His hands dart quickly across the keyboard; there’s hair growing on them, a thin patch from the base of the pinky to the wrist. Lots of men would fantasize about what Niklas and Sara might be doing with each other. Would dwell needlessly on them in their fascination. That’s the way men are: they want youth, they think they can screw themselves younger, or marry themselves younger. Yet no matter how much they humiliate themselves, they’re just poor wretches, halfway to death. Just like me …

The heat’s always incredible in this room. I’ve got to take off my blouse if I’m not going to sweat too much. The water pours down over the screen and up across the screen and presses against us and disperses like steam. Mathias and Niklas are adults now, they’re artists.

I slip into Mathias’s sea of sound and Niklas’s drenching photos, and my son may be doing the same. When my phone rings, we both start. We would laugh if we weren’t so frightened.

It’s Bernard on the phone: the hearing went well. Frederik wasn’t jailed after all. They’re in Bernard’s car now, headed home.

Niklas has turned off the music and is watching me expectantly. I tell him what Bernard said, then turn my attention back to Bernard.

“Thank you so very, very much! What did they say, did he lose his temper? How serious are the charges? What did they say about him being sick?”

Surrounded by the sounds of urban traffic, Bernard’s voice is composed. “Unfortunately, I can’t tell you anything—client confidentiality. Frederik will tell you whatever he chooses to himself. I’m handing him the telephone now.”

“Frederik, tell me! How’d it go?”

“It went fine.”

“What did they say?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Frederik, are you tired? How are you doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re probably real tired now, aren’t you?”

Still no answer.

“Isn’t there anything you want to tell me about your hearing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Something, Frederik, just say
something
. Are they planning to take you into custody at a later date? Was Laust there?”

Again he says nothing. Then Bernard gets back on the line.

“A long hearing’s always rough; anybody would be exhausted. We’ll be back at your house soon.”

Niklas and I hurry down the stairs and out to the street, while I describe for him Bernard’s word choice and tone of voice. During the course of the afternoon, it’s turned into one of the first mild days of spring. The sun’s starting to warm everybody up, and our leafy street is just as seductive as the first time Frederik and I met a realtor to look at the house. We stood at precisely the same spot on the sidewalk; the realtor arrived in his red car, a young man, and a few moments later this was the only house I could imagine living in. Now Bernard’s white station wagon comes driving toward us, and through the window I can see Frederik sleeping on the passenger side.

We help him out of the car, and he leans on Niklas and me on the way upstairs, where we lay him on the bed, fully dressed. I kiss him on the forehead but get no response, and then we go back down.

Bernard’s sitting on the sofa in the living room. Nearly invisible blue pinstripes run along his creased grey trousers; the top buttons of his white Oxford, with its slightly thicker stripes of light blue, are unbuttoned. He is grasping the couch’s arm and appears to be studying a seam in the leather. This Wegner sofa was never put into regular production and it’s quite rare, my greatest treasure. He must understand furniture.

Niklas and I remain standing. “Bernard, thank you again. I know that they would have kept him in custody for months if you hadn’t made some sort of special effort.”

He smiles, and I can see I’m right.

“But you can’t tell us what you did,” I say.

“No.”

In a few months, Frederik might be better—nobody knows, but the doctors say it’s possible. Yet the legal case is another matter entirely; we’ll be stuck with it till we die. None of us will ever be able to
make great strides
or
rehabilitate
our way out of it.

I try again to get Bernard to say just a little bit about what happened, but he deflects my attempts in friendly fashion by talking instead about general case law pertaining to financial fraud—and in this way he manages to tell us about Frederik’s case indirectly, without violating confidentiality.

He does so skillfully, thoughtfully, pedagogically. Maybe it’s just because he’s a seasoned lawyer, but it feels more like his personality, like he’s genuinely concerned for Niklas and me.

As Bernard talks, I look around the living room and think about how it must look to an outsider. The speaker drivers have all been unscrewed from the cabinets, leaving behind gaping black holes. Frederik doesn’t think our stereo system sounds good enough and wants to repair it, but now the drivers, along with various snipped cords and small brightly colored electronic components, have lain on the carpet for a week. Two posters also lie on the floor because he’s been wanting to hang them up but can’t decide where, while the shelves with all his classical LPs have been pushed out from the wall because he was going to do something or other with the electrical socket behind them.

“You’ll have to excuse the mess,” I say.

“I like it; it’s homey. And you have remarkable taste in furniture.”

“Thank you. What can I offer you? You must be famished after such a day.”

“Well … yes.”

“A sandwich, rolls? Cheese, ham, pâté, jam? Coffee, tea, beer?”

He smiles. “It all sounds great.”

I set out rolls and various fixings on the dinner table, along with beer and water. Niklas sets out three plates without asking, but I know I won’t be able to eat a thing.

Our lawyer eats in a controlled, almost dainty manner, despite the evident hunger in his eyes. Perhaps he had a strict conservative upbringing in France. After he’s eaten the first half of a roll, he carefully finishes chewing and wipes his mouth with a napkin before speaking. “Of course, now you’re both completely confused, and you have no idea what’s going to happen to Frederik—or to you either.”

“Exactly.”

“First you need to collect yourselves. In cases involving financial fraud, it takes the police months to get a general overview of all the accounts and set a court date. In the meantime, Frederik has plenty of time to decide on a lawyer.”

“But I thought we had you!” My voice rises to the point of shrillness. I
glance quickly at Niklas, but apparently he doesn’t find me embarrassing today.

Bernard’s voice remains calm. “Frederik has to choose his own lawyer. That’s critical, even though he’s ill. And although I was with him at the hearing today, he might very well choose someone else.”

“But you understand brain injuries, and you have experience with such cases, don’t you?”

“That’s something Frederik will have to judge for himself.”

It gives me a brief moment of calm to discuss something so obviously nonsensical. All Frederik’s decisions are made by me now. Having him sign his name to anything is just a matter of form.

As he chews, Bernard’s jaw muscles move distinctly beneath his skin. It’s amazing that his body’s so lean and athletic, given his age—but then again, Gerda said he’s actually my age, something I keep forgetting.

“Meningiomas grow very slowly,” he says. “So Frederik’s was definitely present already when the embezzlement started. It may have affected his actions in a way that he couldn’t help.”

“Of course it was the disease! Everybody knows that he could never have come up with something like this!”

Still the same easy voice. “The question is whether it affected him enough that you can say it was the
disease
making his decisions. In cases involving neurological damage, there is one question that determines everything, a question that family members need to consider right away. Did the personality of the accused change markedly in the period leading up to the crime—whether or not anyone thought it might be due to illness?”

I find myself shouting with relief. “Oh but yes, three years ago he changed radically!”

For the first time, Bernard’s composure breaks. “Fantastic! That’s utterly crucial! Congratulations!”

“For the first time, Frederik was coming home from work at normal times, for the first time he took the time to—”

I grasp the arms of my chair. Squeeze them tightly and fall silent. And then run from the room.

In the kitchen I stop and lean over the counter, gasping for air, slumped
over the outstretched arms that are propping me up. I don’t want to cry while Niklas is sitting in the living room with a guest. But I can’t help myself.

The best years we’ve had together. Years that were going to sustain me the rest of my life. Were they just a by-product of a tumor?

Frederik and I walking down the narrow wooded path along Lake Farum, remodeling the house together, cuddling in the yard and sitting up late in the hanging sofa. His high spirits, regardless of what we had to deal with in our respective jobs; his impulsiveness, which was so life-giving after all those years of sense and discipline; the way he horsed around, the way he suddenly relaxed about work obligations. Where’d it all come from?

In the living room, I hear Niklas assume his most adult voice. “It can get to be a little too much for her. It’s hard for everyone.”

He clearly doesn’t understand what I understand. Because our three good years also gave Niklas his father back.

I hear Bernard reply, “That’s something we’re all allowed to do. After my wife became brain-damaged, I can assure you I had to leave my share of rooms too.”

It’s strange to hear a sensible adult male talking to Niklas. The calm deep voice and words of wisdom, in contrast with Frederik’s prattle. And to hear how Niklas listens. How good for him to be with a healthy man. It seems so long ago that our home was ever like this.

• • •

I have to lie down. And I can’t go into our bedroom, where Frederik is. The only place I can be is Niklas’s room. I lie down in his bed with my clothes on, even though maybe that’s wrong of me. Pull the comforter up to my nose.

I mull over details from the best years of our marriage. Frederik coming in from the yard barefoot one Sunday morning, he chases me around to tickle me, I run away, both of us laughing until we tumble onto the sofa together. Frederik arriving home from work jubilant after he bought that expensive camera for Niklas on the spur of the moment. They were my memories of the best we’ve had. What are they now?

Bernard drives away without me going back down and saying goodbye.

A little while later I hear Niklas open the door to the room. My eyes are still closed.

He must be surprised to see me, yet he just comes over to the bed, as if to look down at me. Then in a concerned voice, he asks, “How are you doing?”

I remain prone, eyes closed, in the same position. “I’m sorry, Niklas. I can’t go into our room right now.”

“I understand.”

“You were really great down there. With the lawyer.”

“Thanks.”

“Is it okay if I lie here for a little while?”