The Cold Song (24 page)

On those few occasions when they had the bed to themselves, those miraculous nights when the children slept in their own beds, he tried to hold Siri, but his arms weren’t long enough and she didn’t budge and so they lay there, each
teetering on their own edge of the bed. And Siri said, “I really need to sleep. Please, just leave me alone.”

They reminded each other on a regular basis that sleeping apart was merely a temporary solution, and they often talked about when they would sleep in the same bed again.

“I’ve so much to do,” he remembered her saying. “I feel so inadequate, on all fronts.”

In the beginning, when this arrangement of sleeping in separate rooms began, as a very temporary thing, she would carry his blanket to him in the attic and make up his bed for him on the mattress on the floor, then Jon would carry the blanket downstairs the following morning and put it back on the double bed. After a while, though, she stopped making up his bed for him and merely laid his blanket on the stairs so that he could carry it to the attic himself.

And now it was April. Nine months gone. Siri and Jon had started sending text messages to each other at night. She in the bedroom, he up there in the attic. Not about what might have happened to Milla or what had happened to their marriage or what had happened to Alma. Just little things.

Thinking of you
.

I miss you
.

Don’t leave me
.

Sweet dreams
.

Kisses
.

And one evening she took a picture of the water glass on her bedside table and sent the photo to him.

It was a very long time since Jon had touched his wife, and he sent her a picture of a corner of his pillowcase. The following evening she sent him a picture of a detail from a child’s drawing (Alma’s? Liv’s?) that was lying in the drawer of her bedside table, and then he sent her a picture of the knot at the end of the cord for adjusting the blinds in the attic. Siri sent him a picture of Liv’s flaxen curls on her Peter Rabbit pillow, and then he sent her a photograph of the two of them when they were young and in love. She was wearing her corn-yellow boots and he was Giacometti thin and had big curly hair. She sent him a picture of her left hand without her wedding ring—at some point during the evening she always took her wedding ring off and would spend the next morning trying to find it. He snapped a picture of her wedding ring, lying next to his on a stack of books by his mattress. She sent him a picture of the rusty window hinges, he sent her a picture of a wine cork, she didn’t know that he had opened the evening’s second bottle of Barolo, she didn’t know that she wasn’t the only one he sent text messages to at night, she didn’t know that he had to keep a firm grip on himself the next morning, so as not to scream at her, scream at the children, thus arousing the suspicion that he was drinking too much, the hangovers were the worst, she didn’t even know that it was a picture of a wine cork, it could have been anything, and during the short month of April when they were sending each other pictures at night certain unspoken rules evolved, one being that they should not ask what the pictures actually depicted.

And Siri sent him a picture of a tiny brown spot, no bigger than a pinprick, surrounded by what might have been skin. At
first he thought the brown spot was a freckle and this made him happy. Siri had freckles on her shoulders, or at least she used to have freckles on her shoulders and he had always loved that about her. He looked at the picture. Something brown. Something that looked like skin. Maybe a freckle.

And Jon sent her a picture of the cover of the VHS of
Manhattan
with a picture of the silhouettes of Diane Keaton and Woody Allen against the New York skyline. There were stacks of VHS tapes in the attic. They couldn’t bring themselves to get rid of them, even after DVDs came along, even after they started downloading all their films off the Internet, they had been proud of their collection, and Jon had once suggested that they could make a huge library in the basement at Mailund and fill it with only ghostly things—all their LPs and VHSs and DVDs and letters and books and actual photo albums.

Siri sent him a picture of her right hand, she sometimes fretted about her hands, over the fact that they were dry and bluish, that her cuticles were split and tender and that they hurt. On her bedside table she kept a jar of expensive, fragrant hand cream that she rubbed into her hands every evening. He sometimes missed the scent of her hands in the evening, and one night she sent him a picture of the jar of hand cream.

And Jon took a picture of his own face and sent her the picture and under it he wrote:
Can I come and lie next to you?

I miss you
.

I can tell you stories
.

BUT THERE WAS
no response. After waiting awhile and drinking some more whiskey—Jon had switched to whiskey, red wine gave him a headache—after searching for and finding Klaus Nomi on YouTube and watching Klaus Nomi do his weird and shattering rendition of Purcell’s aria from
King Arthur
and after drinking still more whiskey, Jon picked up his phone and sent another text.

Hey, answer, why don’t you? I want to be with you. I don’t want to lie here in the attic anymore
.

He stared at the ceiling. No reply. Fuck her. Why couldn’t it just be simple? Why did he have to lie here in the attic, banished? Why couldn’t they just lie in the same bed and have sex? Was it so unreasonable to want a little normal, everyday physical contact? Why did the conversation have to be about everything but sex, everything that had to happen
before
sex, when they talked about sex? Housework, for example. Responsibility. He had to take more responsibility. Feelings. He lacked empathy. She couldn’t trust him. He didn’t see the bigger picture. Children. They wore her out. Work. She was worked off her feet. Money. He was never going to get that book finished. They couldn’t live on her income alone. He would have to find a real job. Only the other day she had
actually said, “We need to work toward an even distribution of chores and privileges.”

“Okay,” he had replied, and then he had started yelling: “How much is a fuck with you worth? Tell me and I’ll pay. Do you want me to vacuum the whole house? Cook dinner every day? Get a nine-to-five job? Write a best seller? Separate the trash? Vote Labour? Just say! How much to fuck you?”

He looked at his phone. No reply. Damn her. He wrote another text. To Karoline this time.

I’m going away for a few days, to write, have borrowed a house in Sandefjord. Can you come? I want to see you
.

The response was swift.

When?

He hadn’t actually been planning on going anywhere to write, not right now, after Easter sometime, maybe, and he certainly hadn’t been planning on taking Karoline with him, she was humorless, she bored him, he had been planning to end the whole thing, it had been going on for years and he was fed up, and it wasn’t entirely unproblematic that Karoline was married to Kurt and that all four of them—the Dreyer-Brodals and the Mandls—were friends.

What he had thought when he was offered the chance to borrow a house in Sandefjord was that it would be good to be on his own, that he needed some time on his own. To shut himself away. With no interruptions. And enough whiskey. Alone. No wife. No children. No dog. Or maybe the dog. He took a swig of whiskey and wrote:
In two weeks. Can you get away?

She replied right away. They all did. (Apart from Siri, who shut him out.) He pictured an entire city of lonely, sleepless
women sitting up at night with their cell phones, writing to him. The thought was amusing and at the same time depressing. His cell chirruped.

Kurt going to U.S. in two wks
so shld be possible. Will check with my mother if Gunnar can stay with her … Kisses
Jon looked at Karoline’s message. How old was this woman? He counted on his fingers. Two years younger than him. Forty-nine? So what the hell was going on with the little smiley faces? Did she think of herself as a little girl having her first love affair? A little Lolita. A little dish. He laughed out loud. How awful. A
smiley face
. She wasn’t just humorless, she was stupid too. And just the mention of that son of hers. Gunnar.

I don’t want us to be with these people, Dad
.

Alma is weird … She’s a freak, you know
.

He wrote:
I don’t ever want to go anywhere with you or talk to you again or hear about your son. You’re humorless, pathetic, ridiculous, ugly, and boring, I hate fucking you, I hate your shriveled-up cunt, you stink, you remind me of everything that’s despicable about myself and the whole fucking world.
Jon

He read it over. Yes, that was it, exactly! Then he pressed
DELETE
. What difference did it make, anyway? Why not go to Sandefjord with Karoline? He might just as well go to Sandefjord with Karoline as not go. Karoline would at least want to fuck. His phone chirruped again. He read the text.

Jon—has it ever occurred to you that everything you do has consequences. Always
.

Jon started. What the hell? Had he sent that shriveled-cunt message to Karoline after all? He eyed the whiskey bottle. What
the hell had he done now? He broke out in a sweat. He checked
DELETED MESSAGES
—and there it was. He hadn’t sent it. He deleted it again. He looked at the message he had just received.

Jon—has it ever occurred to you that everything you do has consequences. Always
.

He looked at the number from which the message had been sent. He didn’t recognize it. Was Siri sending him messages from a secret phone? Was this a new kind of game? Had she found out about the other women? He felt the whiskey coming back on him and had to put his hand to his mouth to keep from being sick. He took a deep breath. It was all right. He wasn’t going to be sick. He wasn’t going to die. This was nothing. There was nothing to worry about. He was here in his own home. Everything was all right.

But could Siri have somehow hacked into the night’s exchange of text messages and sent him a message from a cell phone he didn’t know about—and why did she have a cell phone he didn’t know about? Jon keyed in the number for directory inquiries but drew a blank there. And then came another message, repeating the words from the last one.

Everything you do has consequences. Always
.

He poured another drink and wrote:
Who are you?

He did not have long to wait.

You haven’t told all you know about why she disappeared
. Then came another message.

I’m Amanda, Milla’s mother, but you knew that, didn’t you?

IN THE SUMMER
of 2009 Jon and Siri and the children spent precisely four days at Mailund before packing up all their stuff and heading back to Oslo. Jenny and Irma had sat up every night drinking Cabernet and wanted nothing to do with the rest of the family, and when Liv wouldn’t stop crying after having run into her grandmother drunk in the kitchen early one morning at the end of June, Siri announced that she wasn’t staying there another minute. And there was nothing for it but to leave.