You Disappear: A Novel (17 page)

I sit down on the naked springs of the hanging sofa. How long ago is it now that Frederik and I blew off the neighbor’s summer party and sat here with a bottle of wine before going up to our bedroom? Was that about the same time we were doing the bathroom remodel?

The metal wires press against my buttocks, and I look up at the window of Frederik’s office workshop. It’s still dark; I ought to go in and turn on a light for him. He forgets to, every evening, and it’s wrecking his eyes.

My cell phone rings.

“Hello, it’s Bernard. Am I bothering you?”

“No, not at all.”

“You sound like you’re freezing.”

“Nah, not really. Has something happened?”

“I got an e-mail from Andrea in the support group. She said we should google
Iowa Gambling Task
. I did, and it makes a convincing argument that when Frederik was playing the commodities market, he wasn’t his real self.”

As he speaks, I can almost see the dew descending in the half darkness among the branches of the shrubbery. It falls and falls, it soothes without ever seeming to land. Bernard’s voice is that way too: deep and steady as it settles over me.

“She sent that to me too. I just read about it on the web—just now!”

“So you must be happy, right?”

“Yes.” I choose not to mention the graffiti on the wall, to say that even children hate us now. And it’s too complicated to explain that even when I’m “happy,” I still have an underlying angst, a feeling that if I exhale
deeply and really relax for half a second, the world will collapse. Hopefully, if Frederik is acquitted, the anxiety will stop.

“You and Frederik should celebrate.” He notices my hesitation almost before he has a chance to draw a breath. “Well, Frederik might not be so interested. But when he’s better …”

“Yes … then he’ll realize how important it is.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to go inside? Because you do sound like you’re freezing.”

“I’m going in now.”

As soon as I’m in the house, I discover how cold I am.

“I’m going to lie down on the sofa,” I say into the phone. “I’ve got to enjoy it as much as possible before we have to sell it.”

And then we both laugh.

• • •

“What happened to the house?”

Niklas is speaking to me, and I struggle to figure out where I am. The sofa in the living room, still mine. He stands in front of me. It’s dark; I must have slept for several hours. Where’s Frederik? Did he run outside? And where’s Niklas been—what was it he said?

“What happened to the house?” he says again.

Yes, what
did
happen to the house? I sit up. How dark it is! It starts coming back to me.

“The house? The house? Somebody wrote on it this afternoon. Can you see it in the dark?”

“It looks like big clouds on the front.”

“That’s where I scrubbed off the spray paint. The surface is lighter there, isn’t it?”

“From the street it looks like there’s ghosts floating around the yard.”

“Have you had anything to eat?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Is it late?”

“After nine.”

I stumble up to Frederik’s office. He isn’t there, but I find him sleeping in our bed. So I go down to the kitchen to throw together a bite to eat. I
imagine that his brain heals better when he’s asleep, so I never wake him unless it’s absolutely necessary.

On the kitchen counter stand a half-empty carton of milk and half a pear pie I bought on my way home from work.

“Niklas!” I shout.

He doesn’t respond, so I go out into the entry.

“Niklas!”

“Yes!” The voice comes from his room.

“Would you come down here, please?”

The potatoes are boiling by the time he appears. His shirt is buttoned wrong; it wasn’t before.

“What’s up?”

“You’re old enough to set the milk and pie back in the fridge when you’re done with them.”

“I forgot. Why didn’t you do it yourself, since you were here already?”

“Because you need to learn to do it. We have to save money. We can’t let food go bad.”

“Dad forgets the butter on the table all the time.”

“Yes, which is why it’s even more important that the rest of us remember to put things away. Dad can’t help it.”

“I can’t help it either.
My
orbitofrontal region is also—”

He breaks off suddenly when he catches sight of something behind me. I wheel around, but I can’t see what he’s reacting to. There isn’t anything there, just one of Frederik’s typical piles of speaker clutter. I step closer: electronic components soldered together, a soldering iron, a coil of solder, some sort of meter. I haven’t seen the meter before. It looks highly technical, and expensive. I lift it up; engraved on the bottom it says
PHYSICS LAB / PROPERTY OF BIRKERØD GYMNASIUM
.

“What’s this?”

“It’s for Dad’s speakers.”

“Did you take it from the school?”

“I borrowed it for him.”

“Did they give you permission to?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Have you started
stealing
?”

“Everything Dad does is just
fine
. All the time, no matter what. You
don’t give him a hard time for stealing twelve million crowns! But if I borrow just one little tiny thing that isn’t even for myself—”

“Niklas, your father is gravely ill.”

“Yeah, but
my
frontal lobes don’t function the way they should either.”

Something here isn’t quite right, but I can’t put my finger on it. He’s not yelling at me as loudly as he usually would; his shirt is misbuttoned; he’s taken a double portion of pie. Does he have someone up in his room with him—Mathias? The girl that Frederik was so rude to, Emilie? Is she up there now? My thigh bumps into the counter so that the soldering iron tumbles over the edge and dangles on its cord, three-fourths of the way to the floor.

A note of Frederik’s indifferent, unsympathetic tone creeps into Niklas’s voice. “You should also show some concern for
my
brain.
My
impulse control and long-term planning aren’t—”

“What are you talking about?”

The thought of Emilie in his room: myself once, in Casper’s room. Sixteen years old. He let his fingers slide lightly—almost floating—up the length of my forearm. And down again, back and forth, floating. That’s what we did—for an eternity. The darkness and Duran Duran. On the captain’s bed in his room with our clothes on.

“There was an article about it lying on the coffee table.”

“An article about what?”

“Something you printed out. About how when you’re sixteen, you’re just as smart as a grown-up, but some parts of your brain still need to develop and won’t finish till you’re twenty.”

Casper thrust a hand underneath my blouse, and afterward down my pants. The thin pale boyish skin of his cheeks, still hairless.

Niklas regards me defiantly. “They’re in the frontal lobes, same place as Dad. So
I’m
just as—”

“Niklas, you can’t think about yourself that way. It doesn’t give you permission to do whatever you want.”

“But it’s true!”

“Yes, it might be true enough. But you should think that way only about others. With other people, it can help you understand and forgive. But with yourself …”

We discuss the matter. I’ve never caught him taking something from
school before, and I want him to understand how serious it is. But the whole time, I see before me Emilie and Niklas. She’s such a beautiful girl, pale and freckled. And Niklas is better looking than Casper was … Are they girlfriend and boyfriend? Niklas lets his hand glide across one of her breasts while she lies on the captain’s bed in Casper’s room. Duran Duran. Culture Club. Niklas’s own music.

He’s anxious to leave the kitchen.

“Did you bring someone home with you?”

He hesitates, tilting his head slightly as he answers. “I might’ve.”

“Is it Emilie?”

The way his face freezes, eyes wide open. He’s in love, I can see it in his fright.

“You’re
not
going up there.”

I find myself smiling. “No, of course not.”

He’s in love. Frederik and I went in for an ultrasound; the heartbeat, his first day of school, the day in the yard when we played badminton. I’ve got to stop myself, to act adult. Niklas is in love; am I smiling too much? He looks so incredibly serious. Theft, responsibility, pregnancy.

“Do her parents know where she is?”

“Of course!”

And then he’s on his way back upstairs.

• • •

Every day, I try to empty my head of thoughts about how different my life would have been if I’d stayed with one of the men I knew before Frederik. Niklas would have had less amazing genes, been less intelligent, less creative, looked different. But perhaps he’d have wanted to play tennis and go running with me. Perhaps we would have been closer.

We’d probably have been something of a sports family, since all the men I was with before Frederik were interested in sports. And maybe Niklas would have had siblings. The fertility specialist said that the problem lay with me, but with another man you never know.

At one time I lived for a year and a half with Søren, who was studying public administration. We were sure that it would be the two of us for life, and we both sobbed on the foam mattress in our dank, noisy apartment
on Pheasant Road when it became necessary for me to tell him I’d met someone else. But I was too obsessed with Frederik to stay—Frederik was so much fun, so attentive, he knew everything, he was so honest and could share his feelings. The problems I’d had with Søren, and which I’d thought were problems with me, weren’t there with Frederik. No one could compete. No one came close.

A few years ago, Niklas and I were standing in line for the duty-free shop on the ferry to Germany. We were going on vacation, and Frederik was standing up on the deck talking with Laust on his cell, just as he’d done in the car. Suddenly I realized that the father in the family in front of us was Søren. I hadn’t seen him since when he wouldn’t stop writing me letters about how he’d never be happy if I left him.

On the ferry, he told me that he still played tennis twice a week. He was working in the Department of Sport within the Ministry of Culture, and he wore his age much better than Frederik. He proudly presented his beautiful fit wife, who had the same blond ponytail as me, and their three lovely girls. And Niklas met the man who would have been his father if Trørød Elementary hadn’t decided that Frederik and I should both attend a school camp in Sweden where it would be raining on a broad deserted beach.

I told Niklas that Søren was my boyfriend before I met his father, and he regarded Søren with a look that was astonished and intensely blank at the same time. I’d never seen such a look before, though since Frederik’s operation it’s become a regular part of my life. It’s the same expression Frederik gets when someone mentions that he’s sick. There’s no pigeonhole in his brain where he can file that datum. It simply doesn’t exist.

• • •

So much would have been different if I’d stayed with Søren. My husband would be healthy. My children’s father would be healthy.

• • •

At twenty past ten, I hear a soft click from the front door. Niklas and Emilie did a good job of stealing down the stairs.

They walk a little ways down the street before she mounts her bike; he
doesn’t kiss her goodbye, doesn’t give her a hug either, and I think I manage to step back from the living room window before he turns around.

I hear him go to bed, and even though I must have napped at least three hours, I’m ready to lie down too. For almost half a year now, I’ve slept alone on the air mattress on the floor, but I usually lie on my side of the bed first and read for a while. I’ve discovered that I have fewer nightmares if I read a women’s magazine just before falling asleep, and there’s no lamp over by the air mattress.

A few hours later, Frederik wakes me as he shuffles around, toothbrush in his mouth, and sets his clothes out on the dresser. The alarm clock says half past two. I’ve fallen asleep in our bed with the night lamp on.

It’s the worst imaginable time to start a serious conversation, but I find myself saying the first thing that crosses my mind. “You shouldn’t try to get Niklas to steal things for you.”

Already as my mouth blurts out the words, I grow apprehensive. Now the rest of the night’s probably destroyed; I might have to listen to him yell at me for hours on end. And I have to go to work in the morning.

But all he says is, “That’s something I could never do.”

He smiles and then suddenly perks up—perhaps because lying stimulates him.

“That would be a terrible thing to do,” he says. “I think that would be utterly, utterly, utterly wrong. And I
haven’t
done it.” He persists with this lie, though I haven’t contradicted him. “You’d have to be a real shit to have your son steal for you. That’s something I’d never do.”

He stands quietly on the floor right in front of me, fixing his gaze upon me with unusual intensity.

I’ve read enough neuropsychology to know the medical term for what he’s doing: he’s
perseverating
—meaning that he continues the action he’s in the middle of, long past what’s necessary.

“Do you really believe I’d try to get Niklas to steal?” he asks. “I swear to you I wouldn’t. You can be one hundred percent certain that I wouldn’t do such a thing. One hundred percent. Because I think it’s wrong. One hundred percent.”

I just want him to forget about it without going berserk. We’ll have to discuss it some other time. “No, I do know that,” I say. “Just come to bed now.”

As he returns to the bathroom to spit out the last of the toothpaste, wearing a T-shirt and nothing else, I think about how easy I find it to shelve my impulse to talk about Niklas. Twenty seconds ago, the words just tumbled out. Was that due to poor blood flow through my frontal lobes as I was waking up? Did the blood start to surge then with fear and stress from the prospect of an argument? From what I’ve read, it seems very likely. Maybe this is as close as I can get to feeling how it is for Frederik all the time.