You Disappear: A Novel (44 page)

“No thanks.”

He knows that if he claims he’s no longer sick, it can be interpreted as not acknowledging his illness. And the inability to acknowledge his illness is such a key symptom of his injury that an even longer time would
pass before I let him go online without sitting beside him, or go shopping without checking all the receipts.

We’re having homemade moussaka and salad. Frederik’s really made the dinner into something nice—as much as he can, considering there isn’t much money and he basically never cooked before a few months ago, when I gave him responsibility for all the household work.

When Niklas and I don’t say anything, he looks at us with disappointment. “What’s the matter?”

Niklas doesn’t answer.

“I thought we could enjoy ourselves tonight,” Frederik says. He looks over at me. “Did you have a good run with Andrea?”

I finally have to tell him. “Niklas and I were fighting about his music.”

“Oh, so that’s why.”

How did Niklas find out about Bernard and me?

The other day, he barged into the bathroom while I had my tennis clothes in the sink to make them wet before hanging them up to dry. They were supposed to look as if I’d been playing tennis all afternoon. But did he really know that was what I was doing?

Or did one of his friends see Bernard and me swimming in the sound the other day? What went wrong?

Niklas gets up without saying a word and walks out to the kitchen. I hear him open the fridge, and he returns with two beers.

“I don’t think you should …” I start to say. “It’s not a good idea for either of you.”

And then for the first time tonight, he looks me in the eye. It’s not a pleasant experience. He comes closer, sets one beer in front of his father, and opens the other for himself.

Frederik hesitates, and I can see that he’s thinking about showing his solidarity with me by telling Niklas to listen to his mother. Perhaps he wonders why Niklas can twist me around his little finger today.

“Is this okay with you?” he asks me.

I sigh resignedly, and Niklas takes a big gulp of beer.

“You should listen to your mother,” Frederik says in a subdued voice.

Other than that, not a sound.

Frederik doesn’t open his beer.

He says, “Well,
I
for one have no idea what’s going on around here.” All too quickly he corrects himself. “Or yes—of course I do. Obviously, you’ve been fighting about Niklas’s music—that’s clear.”

Silence.

“Yes, it’s difficult,” Frederik says. “We all have to live here, don’t we?”

In the end, I make an effort to pull myself together.

“What have you been up to today?” I ask Frederik in my most controlled voice.

He lights up. “Well, I was trying to find more evidence in my old bank statements.”

“Find anything interesting?”

“Yes, in fact I was looking forward to telling you. Just one new thing: in the years before my tumor was discovered, I signed up twice for fitness classes without ever going to them. And once for fencing, which I never went to either. Before that, I
never
signed up for exercise. It was my impaired inhibitory mechanism that let me sign up, of course—and my inability to focus that kept me from following through.”

Niklas looks up at the ceiling, as if to say he thinks we’re hopeless.

I find myself sounding a little grumpy, though I don’t mean to. “There are tons of people who sign up for all kinds of things that they never end up doing.”

“But that’s where Bernard is fantastic. We’re gathering lots and lots of these sorts of facts.”

What goes through Niklas’s mind when he hears his dad use the word
fantastic
about the man he knows to be my lover?

This past year, a wall of manhood has risen up around Niklas, and I can’t see through to his real self. My boy’s still there within the wall, I know he is—the boy who’d come running to me from the yard if he found a small animal or an oddly bent branch, the boy I could once embrace and lift into the air when he was unhappy. But now his real face hides behind a broad jaw and a coarse complexion, his real body under strange muscles.

“Yes,” Niklas says. “He can do a little of everything, that Bernard.”

I scowl into his bottomless, grey-blue man’s eyes. I do what I can to signal to my son that he should stop now.

“Yes, he can,” Frederik agrees, relieved that Niklas is finally saying something.

But Niklas doesn’t stop there. “He’s a real go-getter, eh? Throws himself into all
sorts
of things.”

“You shut your mouth!” I blurt.

Frederik raises his water glass and regards his son mildly. “What do you mean?”

“Well, that’s just my impression.”

“From what I was saying?”

“Yeah …” Niklas shrugs his shoulders, letting the word slowly dissolve to nothing.

Silence once more. Till suddenly Frederik looks horror-struck and gets to his feet so abruptly he knocks his chair over. He runs toward the front door. In this moment he must be healthy. Healthy enough to understand what the rest of us are thinking and feeling.

“Frederik! Frederik!” I shout. Followed by: “God damn it, Niklas! God damn it!”

Then I take off after Frederik. But he’s gone.

I run through corridors, down stairways, back through other corridors. Around the grounds. Now he’s going to die, I think. I shout, I look for him. Now he’s finally going to do what he’s talked about for so long.

He knows the area much better than I do, and he’s disappeared without a trace. I run back to the apartment, and as soon as I’m in the door I yell, “Niklas, what were you thinking?”

“What was
I
thinking? What were
you
thinking? You think it’s fun to hear that your mom’s on her back screwing some white-haired man behind the hedge at the tennis club?”

I half fall onto the couch. My voice grows weak. “Did someone say that?”

“Of course they said it! Everyone’s been gossiping about it! But you’re totally off in your own world!”

“Yes, but … yes, I probably haven’t—”

“Now I don’t have my mother anymore either!” Niklas’s voice sounds as if it’s coming through the wall of another room.

“You do have your mother. I haven’t changed.”

“You have, you’ve turned into someone else too! God damn it, behind the hedge at the tennis club! That’s not my mother. It isn’t! That’s not who she is.”

“Niklas, I promise you I’ll always be—”

“You’re gone! Dad’ll be in prison soon! And our house is gone too!”

It’s impossible to get through to him. “It’s not certain that Dad’ll go to jail.”

“I’m not that stupid. Of course he’s not going to win this case. I’m not an idiot!
Every
thing’s gone!”

I get up from the couch and go over to him to give him a hug, though I know he hates them.

He pushes me away, but I approach him again, and again he pushes me away. Normally I respect the fact that he doesn’t like me embracing him, but not today. When I try a third time, he doesn’t push me away. We stand there quietly in the living room. I wrap both my arms around him, I press myself against him and lean my head in against his shoulder.

“I’m here, Niklas,” I say. “I’m right here. That’s one thing you can always count on. I will always be your mother.”

The evening sun no longer reaches our apartment, but it glints off the windows of the next apartment block. Some of the neighbors are eating Saturday dinner on their patios, the clink of glasses and the sound of happy voices blending in with the background thrum of the freeway.

Somewhere out there is his father.

I raise my face from Niklas’s shoulder. I have an urge to tousle his hair, but I don’t.

“Do you want to come with me to look for Dad?” I ask. “I think you’d be a lot better at finding him than I would.”

“Can’t we let him come back by himself?” Then he thinks about it for a moment, and he says, “Yeah. I’d like to come with.”

• • •

We head down toward the freeway first. Up onto the high embankment that’s supposed to shield Farum Midtpunkt from the noise. I lead the way along a narrow path trampled down between high stalks of wild grass, among ripe seedpods and flowers. Now and then we have to duck to pass under a pine branch. There’s so much undergrowth here; so many places Frederik could hide. I’m thinking about what Niklas has been through. The humiliation in front of his friends. How can I ever make it up to him?

We draw near to the long slender footbridge that crosses the freeway. It seems the most logical place to jump, but there’s no sign of Frederik. Maybe he’s not out here at all. Maybe he’s over at one of his friends’.

I hear Niklas’s voice behind me. “Why didn’t you come down
here
that night?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you come down here, instead of staying home so that it was me who found you?”

I turn to him and look at his face, the warm yellow evening sun striking it from the side. I know right away what he’s talking about, but it’s too much for me to process all at once, and I can’t help repeating myself. “What?”

“That time in the kitchen with the tequila and pills.”

“But Niklas, there weren’t any pills! I didn’t take any!”

Silence.

“I didn’t want to die. As long as you’re still alive, I never want to die.”

Silence.

“No matter what happens.”

Silence.

“Who told you there were pills?”

“I don’t know, people just said that. That’s the rumor, anyway.”

The first time I see his small, wrinkled, blue-red face as he’s placed upon my belly; he has his friends over, in the yard at Station Road, all of them hopping with delight in the inflated kiddie pool; he runs in from the street, crying from a fall on his bike.

“I could never think of doing that,” I say, grasping him by the shoulders as I look into his eyes. My skinny boy who’s now taller than me. “Never. I could never ever think of doing that, Niklas.”

And then I watch as it unfolds before me. For the first time since he was thirteen, he presses himself against me. He sobs the way he could when he was a small boy. He’s shaking, and I am too. He hugs me, he hugs the woman who is his mom. For the first time in all too long. My Niklas. My son.

When Thorkild and Vibeke come by to pick up Frederik and everything he owns—a stuffed suitcase, four garbage bags of clothing, and three moving boxes, two of them with LPs—they’re polite. They say they understand that it’s not working anymore, and they make an effort to remain cordial.

But they don’t want any help carrying the things down to the car. And when I notice that Frederik forgot the power cord for his laptop behind the desk and run down with it, Vibeke says thank you with theatrical surprise—as if for the entire course of our marriage, right up to this very moment, I’ve been thinking only of myself.

As soon as Frederik moves into his parents’ basement, he’s allowed to be online all he wants, and every day he sends me an e-mail. Lots of them describe his dogged efforts to land a job.

The tests all show that his concentration, empathy, and organizational ability are now above average, and when he declares that he’s well, I no longer contradict him. He’s been cold-calling scores of primary schools to hear if they could use a substitute, but of course no one wants him.

He runs the risk of never joining the workforce again, but then rescue arrives in the form of Khayyat, from the neighboring staircase here in Midtpunkt. Khayyat gets his cousin to hire Frederik on a trial basis in his small corner shop in Lyngby. Frederik throws himself into it, trying to prove how dependable he is, how he doesn’t have the least trace of ludomania or brain damage anymore. Once he has a year at the shop on his résumé, he wants to apply for jobs in the school system again. Unless of course his case ends badly.

In some of his e-mails he’s effusively affectionate, in others he’s angry that I want a divorce, and in still others he just tries to understand what happened to us and the marriage we once thought would last the rest of our lives.

Bernard’s car is so tidy; ours never looked like this. By itself it doesn’t really matter, but every hour that he and I spend together, I notice these little differences that tell me we’re doing absolutely the right thing.

Bernard is also much more daring when it comes to new music. We go to concerts by weird unknown bands, while for a long time Frederik’s been content to play the same old LPs over and over again. It’s the way Bernard
breathes, without blowing loudly through his nose, the way he can actually tell the difference between my blouses. And in bed, the attentiveness and love of adventure that shine through every minute we’re together are in full blossom. There’s no question I’ve met the man I’ve dreamt of for as long as I can remember.

So who cares that Bernard didn’t get this way until after his and Lærke’s accident. I can no longer see that it makes any difference.

• • •

Though we both told our families that we want divorces, there’s still a lot of juggling we need to do to keep their daily lives functioning, and so make the breakups as easy on them as possible.