More Bitter Than Death (19 page)

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to explain,” Sofie says, irritated at having been interrupted. “Anyway, Anders is a really angry person. But he never gets mad at my mom. She’s like his angel. Like he would never touch her, or something. It’s like he gets angry at me instead. I don’t know how old I was the first time he hit me. In a way it feels like he’s always hit me. For a long time I thought all fathers hit their kids, that that’s just how it was. It wasn’t until school, when they talked about it being illegal to hit children, that I realized it wasn’t normal. He didn’t used to hit that hard. It was more like he boxed my ears or gave me a little slap if I was late or hadn’t cleaned up or hadn’t finished my homework. Mom used to say to him, ‘Oh, Anders, leave Sofie alone,’ but she never did anything, didn’t try to stop him or anything. She just let it happen, let it continue. She always had explanations for why he hit me. ‘Anders is having a hard time right now, he’s having trouble at work,’ ‘Anders is tired,’ ‘Anders is having back pain.’ There was always a good explanation. My mom always took his side. It was them against me, you know? It felt like I was just some random kid who’d wandered in and disrupted their perfect life. My own mother thought her boyfriend was . . . more important than me.”

“Oh, honey.” Sirkka rubs her knees and shakes her head so that her thin red hair leaves her skinny shoulders for a moment. “Didn’t you know that that was . . . wrong? It’s unnatural to do that to a child.”

“Is it?” Sofie asks, looking at Sirkka. “Maybe the abuse is natural.”

“What do you mean?” Sirkka looks genuinely confused.

“I mean . . . I usually think it’s like with the lion,” Sofie says, her voice cracking.

“The lion?” Aina asks.

“Yeah, you know, when a male lion meets a new lioness, he always kills her young, because they belong to another male. I think that’s probably pretty common. I’m not his, so he rejects me, you know? It’s . . . nature.”

The room is quiet. Sofie looks down at the linoleum floor without saying anything, but I think I hear a faint sniffle.

“So, Sofie, then what happened?” Aina asks gently.

“Well . . . Anders started drinking more and more. He always drank a little; Mom and Anders have always had a lot of parties and stuff. But then it got worse. And the more he drank, the madder he got. And I was always the one who did something wrong. He started hitting me, for real.”

Sofie gets quiet. Her eyes are glassy and her face is tense. She’s clearly in pain. Her story touches the whole group. Abuse in all its forms is wrong, but hitting a child contradicts our most basic instincts. I can see Sirkka discreetly drying her tears, Malin slowly clenching and opening her hands as if she wants to give Sofie’s stepdad a go herself.

And Hillevi, Hillevi doesn’t take her eyes off Sofie. Hillevi is serious, pale. She nods very slowly as if she is having some sort of realization.

Sofie continues, “I came home too late one Saturday night, and he hit me so hard I fell down the stairs and broke my arm. He would get mad when I spent time with Viktor, my boyfriend. He said Viktor was a loser and that I should go out with someone better, not some suburban slacker. But the worst thing wasn’t that he beat me, or that I broke my arm, or that he called me a whore. The worst thing was that my mom always sided with him. She always forgave him. She always thought there was a good explanation for why he did what he did. To be perfectly honest I couldn’t care less that he beat me. But the fact that my own mother didn’t stand up for me . . .”

Sofie stops and addresses Hillevi directly.

“Anyway, that’s why you have to leave him. For your kids’ sake. They have to know that you’re their mother, that you’re on their side, that it’s not right to hit. There, that’s it. That’s all I wanted to say.”

Hillevi reaches out to Sofie. The older woman’s cheeks are pale, almost white. Her eyes full of tears. She just brushes Sofie’s hand.

“I hear what you’re saying, Sofie. I hear what you’re saying and I promise I will never turn my back on my children.”

A knock on the door interrupts the spellbound room. Elin opens the door a crack and peeks in.

“Oh! Hello there,” she says. She looks confused, and Aina and I exchange a quick glance. Aina rolls her eyes and I have to bite the inside of my cheek. Elin is extremely nice, but she has no common sense at all. She should know that we’re busy, that we’re in the middle of a session, and that this time is sacred.

There is no excuse for interrupting us. Or almost none.

She’s standing there hesitating in the doorway and doesn’t seem to know what to do. Her black hair is artistically arranged atop her head today and her face is made up in the palest white and blackest black, as usual.

“Uh, there’s a guy here who wants to come in,” Elin says. She looks back over her shoulder, concerned, and I notice a shadow behind her.

“Unfortunately we can’t let anyone in now,” I say. “We’re in the middle of a session. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to ask him to come back later. Or call.”

Elin nods and starts to pull the door shut. Then everything happens very fast. The shadow moves away from the wall and shoves Elin ahead of it into the room.

“You have to let me in. I have to say something. You have to listen to me! Listen to me!” The man roars. His shaved head is glistening with rain, or maybe sweat, under the overhead light. He’s wearing that big down jacket this time too. I immediately recognize Henrik, the man who may have killed his girlfriend. The man who showed up out of the darkness on Medborgarplatsen.

He looms in the doorway and I notice that he’s staggering. His eyes have a feverish gleam and the faint but distinct scent of alcohol spreads through the room.

Elin looks like a little doll, down on her knees in front of him.

“You have to listen to me!” His voice is loud, his face desperate. His sunburn from the last time is peeling, making his skin look ashen. Stubble covers his emaciated cheeks.

“I’m very sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” I say, and walk over to Henrik slowly, trying to appear calm but decisive, to give the impression of certainty. Inside me there is only a void filled with terror, the sound of my heart beating hard, hard, magnified by a hundred decibels, my stomach tightening, a sound in my ears that grows into a loud recurrent howl, a scream.

Henrik looks at me. His light blue eyes are rimmed with red.

Rage, sorrow, desperation.

Looking into his eyes is like drowning in bleakness.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll go, but you have to listen to me first. You have to listen. She has to listen,” he says, pointing at Kattis, who is curled up in her chair. She’s covering her head and her whole body looks like it’s trembling.

“Well, look at me, then. Look at me, Kattis! We’re going to talk now. You wanted to talk, right? Now’s your chance. Here I am. Let’s talk!” Henrik stumbles, almost trips over Elin, but catches himself at the last second by grabbing my chair. “Shit,” he mutters, mostly to himself. He is swaying slightly.

Aina and I look at each other. She looks resolute and starts to get up from her seat.

“We’re sorry but we have to ask you to leave now, otherwise we’ll be forced to call security,” Aina says, her voice authoritative, determined. As if we could summon a security guard here just by wishing for one. Because we don’t have
an alarm system. The one Vijay was supposed to order hasn’t arrived yet, or maybe he forgot to even order it.

“You’re not going to call security, you’re going to listen to me! And I’m going to tell you how things really are. Do you hear me?” Henrik growls. Suddenly he sniffles and I can see tears welling up in the corners of his eyes. “Damn it, damn it, damn it all to hell,” he mutters, as if he were cursing at himself.

I scan the room. Sirkka is sitting bolt upright, staring straight ahead. Her wrinkled face is completely unreadable, devoid of expression. Sofie has started crying, huddled up next to Hillevi’s side, as Hillevi carefully strokes her hair. Kattis is still hiding her head in her arms. And Malin is glaring at Henrik. Elin is sitting on the floor, huddled amid a heap of black clothes and necklace strands.

“Absolutely, of course you’ll have a chance to speak,” Aina says soothingly, slowly approaching Henrik, speaking calmly, enunciating clearly, as if she were speaking to a child.

“Don’t come over here! Don’t come close,” Henrik snarls, raising one arm. I see something flash in his hand. Metal. A gun?

“Aina, sit back down!” I exclaim. “Let Henrik talk. Henrik, you can talk now. Tell us what you want to say.”

I wave my hand to get Aina to back away. I don’t know if she’s seen the weapon in Henrik’s hand, but I understand that we suddenly find ourselves in a totally different situation. A drunk, aggressive abuser of women, possibly also a murderer, is here to settle things and he has brought a gun. The only thing I don’t understand is why Henrik is
here
. Maybe to hurt Kattis, but why? Why not somewhere more private, why attack her like this, publicly?

“You have to listen to me!” Henrik’s eyes are locked on me, pleading for confirmation.

“We’ll listen. Please tell us,” Aina says, again in her gentle voice.

“You have to understand, she’s nuts! Do you get that? Crazy,” Henrik declares, pointing at Kattis with the metal object. She turns her face to look at him and their eyes meet. She looks naked, vulnerable, desperate.

But not scared.

“She’s not what she’s pretending to be,” Henrik continues, his voice slurred. “I never touched her. Do you get that? I never . . . hit her. I swear to God. I’ve never laid a hand on a girl. Don’t you understand? She’s the one who’s a . . . monster, who follows me. She’s crazy and she’s going to manipulate you too. And you—”

Suddenly he laughs. At first it’s a stifled little chuckle, but it grows into a full-fledged laugh, a belly laugh that bubbles out, uninhibited, filling the entire room.

“She’s already tricked you. Do you see that?” He’s laughing again, so hard now that he’s hardly able to speak, so much that he has to lean forward and brace himself with an arm on his knee. “Do you get that? She’s already . . . You’ve already fallen for it, all of you. It’s a lie. She’s already . . . Don’t you get it?”

Then his laughter stops and the room gets quiet. No one says anything and Henrik doesn’t seem to know what to do either. He looks at Kattis, and when he speaks again, it’s as if the words are meant for her, not for the rest of us. We’re just extras.

“Susanne is dead. I loved her. I love her. And now everything is ruined, you whore. Are you satisfied now?”

He is sobbing now. His sorrow and pain, so strong and palpable.

“You’ve ruined my life.”

His voice is just a faint whisper, and I can hear the dishwasher rumbling in the kitchen and the cars whooshing past in the rain out on Götgatan. It’s as if time is holding its breath. The hands on the wall clock are slowly moving forward. The ticking sound of seconds passing echoes through the room. No one moves. No one says anything.

Henrik pulls up a chair and sits down. He’s breathing hard, wiping snot and tears off his face with the sleeve of his down jacket, which rustles when he moves. He is holding the weapon out in plain sight now. I don’t know anything about guns, don’t know if it’s a pistol or a revolver, don’t know what type or caliber. I think of Markus, of his service revolver, which he takes care of as if it were a baby and which he won’t even let me touch. He keeps it locked up like he’s supposed to.

I don’t know what kind of weapon Henrik has, but I know it can kill people. Henrik looks tired, as if his life is already over. Images of hostage situations flash through my head: dead and injured bodies, the hostage taker threatening suicide, specially trained police officers called in to speak calmly, establish contact, talk him down.

But for the police to respond, someone would have to know we’re here, to know Henrik is here. And no one knows. There isn’t anyone else in the office today. Sven took some time off to go down to his summer house—and fall off the wagon, I’m guessing.

“Why, Kattis? And what the hell are you doing here with these women?”
Henrik asks, glancing around again and raising the gun. Sofie sniffles and squeezes closer to Hillevi.

Aina says, “How can we help you, Henrik? We want to help you. Tell us what you need to make this better. We’re listening to you.” She sounds confident. There’s nothing to indicate that she’s scared or worried.

“You just need to understand that she’s crazy and lying about everything. Nothing she says is true.
She’s evil!
” Henrik screams the last part.

Aina’s attempts don’t seem to be working. Henrik is somewhere else, in another world. Suddenly Kattis gets up. Holds out her hands to Henrik.

“I’m sorry, Henrik. It’s all my fault. I see that now,” Kattis says, her face expressionless, cheeks pale, eyes big.

I see that she’s crying and so I want to hold out a hand to her, comfort her.

She approaches Henrik with her head down. Looks as if she’s going toward her own execution, and I wonder if that’s what she’s planning, to sacrifice herself.

I wish I could prevent her, stop her in midmotion, but I don’t dare. Somewhere inside me I am forced to realize that I don’t dare, that I’m not prepared to give up my life for someone else’s.

The only thing I want is to be home in my cottage. I think of the life in my belly, of the life that’s growing there.

My baby.

I think about Markus, about his warm hands, his body, his laugh. Markus and a baby. Once so complicated, and now suddenly so simple.

“No!” Hillevi’s scream cuts through the silence. She positions herself between Kattis and Henrik.

“No,” Hillevi repeats. “Leave her alone. Get out of here. Get out of here.”

Henrik stares at Hillevi in confusion as if he doesn’t understand what’s going on. Hillevi stands there shaking her head.

“You need to get out of here now,” Hillevi insists. “Give me your weapon. We’ll help you. We’ll make sure you get help.”

“But you don’t understand.” Henrik is whispering now, and I can just make out something resigned in his intonation. His eyes are glassy and he looks almost afraid of Hillevi. Then he backs up a step and raises the gun.