The Dinosaur Feather (13 page)

When they reached the parking lot, she tried again: “We’ll be fine from here. Thanks for walking us . . .”

Troels’s father stopped and made a half turn. Anna couldn’t see his face very well.

“Get in,” he ordered them and opened the door to the back seat. Anna was about to protest, when she saw the look in Troels’s eyes. Just get in, they pleaded. The car smelled new, of chemicals, as though every fiber had been cleaned. She helped Karen put on her seatbelt. The car glided through the darkness, away from the forest and out onto the main road. Troels sat, small and dark, on the passenger seat next to his father.

Cecilie opened the door, a towel wrapped around her head. She was in the process of dyeing her hair; Anna could see tinfoil sticking out over her ears. Cecilie was wearing a faded robe. Music was coming from inside the house, and it smelled of mud.

“Hi, kids,” she said cheerfully. Then she noticed Troels’s father behind them. A deep furrow appeared on her brow.

“What’s happened?” Cecilie’s eyes widened. Had the man hit them in his car? Were they all right?

“Good evening, ma’am,” Troels’s father said. “In the future, I suggest you keep a closer eye on your children. I found them in the forest, playing under fallen trees.” He paused, then he clapped his massive palms together. “It’s a dangerous place to be.”

“Get inside, girls,” Cecilie said to Karen and Anna. Something Anna didn’t recognize flashed in her mother’s eyes.

“Thanks for your help,” she said in a monotone voice, and closed the door.

When the car had disappeared, Cecilie started pacing up and down in the kitchen, and she didn’t stop until Jens came home.

“What are you accusing him of?” Anna heard Jens say in a low voice. “Giving the girls a ride home and staring at your robe?”

After the summer break, Troels started in Anna and Karen’s class. It was five months since their meeting in the forest, but they hadn’t forgotten him. Their teacher introduced him, and Troels’s face lit up a little when he saw them. He had grown taller, but his expression was the same, and his eyes were still very dark.

During recess Karen asked him anxiously, “Did your dad get really angry last time?”

And Troels smiled broadly and said, “Oh, no, not at all.”

That afternoon Anna and Karen walked home together from school. The golden wheat swayed in the fields. At some point they stopped and decided Troels would be their friend.

A week passed. They spent every recess with him, walked home from school together, and one day, when they were about to say good-bye, Anna asked if Troels wanted to come to her house. He looked at his watch and smiled. Yes, please, he would like that very much. They played in the garden and when it started to rain, they went inside and made themselves sandwiches. The girls swapped stickers, and Troels handled the pictures very carefully and examined them closely. He, too, liked the ones with glitter babies and puppies the best.

Cecilie came home and Troels got up politely to shake her hand. The telephone rang at that moment, so Anna wasn’t sure if Cecilie had remembered who Troels was. When Troels went to the bathroom and Cecilie had sat down with a cup of tea, Anna whispered that he was the boy they had met in the forest last March. Cecilie paled.

“You can visit us anytime you like,” she said, when Troels came back. “Anytime you like.”

“Thank you very much,” Troels replied.

Cecilie bought a scrapbook and ten sheets of stickers for Troels. Anna felt so jealous she wanted to cry. Troels unwrapped his gift as though he had been entrusted with a blanket full of precious eggs. His face lit up, then he looked miserably at Cecilie.

“I can’t accept this,” he said and carefully pushed the present away. Anna picked up the scrapbook and admired the pictures. Big cherubs on clouds, glitter babies, animals, and baskets of flowers. If Troels didn’t want them, she certainly did.

“Of course you can,” Cecilie said warmly. “Now you can swap, can’t you? They’re a present.”

“No,” Troels said, still wretched. “I really can’t. I’m not allowed to accept presents.”

Cecilie narrowed her eyes and studied him.

“Hmm,” she said. “Well, you can’t take them home, obviously. They need to stay here.”

Anna stared at her mother.

“They’ll still be my stickers, you understand, but I’m not very good at swapping, so I would like you to do it for me. Extend my collection. Do you think you can do that?”

Troels nodded and opened the scrapbook with awe. With the same deference, he removed the wrapper and gazed at the stickers. Later that afternoon, when it was time for him to go home, he placed the scrapbook on the bookcase in the living room, where it remained until his next visit. The scrapbook lived there for years.

It was not until four months later that Anna and Karen visited Troels. It was at the start of December, and after school they caught the bus to his house, a huge, newly built bungalow a few miles outside the village. They sat on the floor in Troels’s room making Christmas decorations out of paper and were listening to music when Troels’s father came home from work. They heard him speak on the telephone in the hall in a loud voice, then he swore at something before he suddenly popped his head around the door.

“Hello, girls,” he said, showing no signs of recognizing them. Shortly afterward he came back and put a bowl of chips and three sodas on the floor.

“Troels’s mom wants to know if you would like to stay for dinner?”

Karen and Anna exchanged looks.

“Yes, please,” Anna said quickly.

Chips and sodas! For dinner they had pork tenderloin in a cream sauce and for dessert they had chocolate ice cream. Troels’s mother was a petite, elegant lady who worked as a real estate agent in Odense. Troels’s sister was fifteen years old and really pretty. She had very long hair, she wore lip gloss, and she said, “Pass the potatoes, please,” in a terribly grown-up way. Anna felt a pang of infatuation and glanced at Troels. He smiled at something his father had said, replied and laughed heartily when his father expanded on and repeated the punchline. Anna took it all in.

Troels’s father started telling vacation stories. On vacation in Sweden, Troels had fallen off a jetty when trying to measure the depth of the water with a stick, which was far too thin and had snapped under his weight. Troels had wailed like a banshee, he was so scared, but the water was less than three feet deep and rather muddy. The girls imagined Troels screaming and dirty, and they laughed. His father hosed him down in the garden behind the cabin. On the same vacation, Troels’s father recalled, they had visited a traveling fair where one of the stalls had a board with a man on it, and if you could hit a red disc with a ball, he would plunge into a tub of water. Troels’s father had persuaded the stallholder to replace the man on the board with Troels, who had been moaning all afternoon that he was too hot. Troels got dunked repeatedly and had duly cooled down. Anna and Karen laughed again.

“And then there was the time when Troels wouldn’t stop wetting his bed,” Troels’s father began. “Do you remember, girls?” he said to Troels’s mother and sister who had started clearing the table.

“Not that story, please,” Troels’s mother called out from the kitchen where she was scraping leftovers into the trash. “The girls won’t want to hear that.”

Troels’s father leaned toward Anna and Karen.

“Troels wet his bed until he was six,” he announced.

Anna looked uncomfortably at Karen who seemed to be mesmerized by Troels’s father.

“We were at our wits’ end, weren’t we, Troels?” his mother said, still at the kitchen table. “All of us, you included, isn’t that right, darling?”

Anna looked at Troels, and something inside her turned to ice. Troels made no reply, silent, as his half-eaten chocolate ice cream cone slowly melted in his hand.

His mother carried on while she dried a baking dish, “We tried everything. We tried bribing him with candy and toys, we gave him more allowance, we even made him wear his soaked pajamas all day, but it was no good. He just continued wetting his bed.”

Karen was still smiling, so Anna kicked her under the table.

“And do you want to know how it stopped?” Troels’s father asked, blithely.

“Ouch,” Karen exclaimed and sent Anna a furious look. Anna glared back at her. Finally, Karen noticed Troels.

“Tell the girls how you stopped wetting the bed, Troels,” his father ordered him. Troels whispered something.

“I can’t hear you,” his father said. “Speak up.”

“When I pooped my pants on my first day of school,” Troels said in a flat voice.

The girls looked at each other.

“And you can’t poop your pants at school, can you?” his father went on. “The other children will laugh at you. So you have to stop, don’t you? If you ever want to have any friends, that is.” His father gave Troels a friendly slap on the back and roared with laughter.

“Stop it!” Anna burst out. “Stop it!”

But his father had already got up to leave, the dishwasher had been loaded, his sister had disappeared, and his mother was folding clothes in the laundry room; they could see her through the open door.

“That was a lovely meal, thank you,” Anna muttered. “I have to be home by seven.”

When Anna and Karen had put on their shoes and coats and shouted “bye-e!” from the utility room, Troels was still sitting at the table with the melting ice cream cone in his hand.

“Bye, see you tomorrow,” he said and gave them a pale smile.

Cecilie called Troels’s parents one day to tell them she could use some help around the garden and offered Troels fifteen kroner an hour to do the work. While Cecilie spoke to Troels’s father, Anna was in the kitchen, listening to her mother’s high-pitched chirping. Cecilie slammed down the telephone at the end of the conversation and when she joined Anna in the kitchen, she smiled stiffly and smoothed her dress.

“Done,” she said. “Five hours a week. Thank God.” She flopped down on the kitchen bench next to Anna.

“Phew,” she exhaled and smoothed her dress again.

One evening, when Anna was twelve years old, she overheard her parents talking about Troels. It was the late 1980s, and by now Jens had officially moved to Copenhagen but he visited them constantly. They had just said goodnight to her, but before she fell asleep Anna remembered she had forgotten to give her mother a letter from school and got out of bed.

Halfway down the stairs, she heard Jens ask: “What makes you think he hits him? You have to be able to prove it, Cecilie. It’s a serious charge.”

A pause followed. Then Anna heard Cecilie cry.

“I want to help, but I can’t!” she sobbed. “That beautiful, fragile boy. Look at him! He’s suffering, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.”

Jens said something that Anna couldn’t hear, and Cecilie replied: “I know, Jens.” She sounded irritated now. “I’m aware of that. You’ve told me a thousand times. I just can’t bear it that he has to live like that.”

Cecilie blew her nose. Anna was getting cold on the stairs and hoped that one of her parents would notice her. That they would carry her to the living room and let her fall asleep under a blanket while their voices grew muffled, just like when she was little. Silent tears rolled down her cheeks. Right now she hated Troels. Her parents seemed to prefer him to her. She felt alone in the world. They started discussing Jens’s job. Eventually Anna went back to bed.

One summer day Troels dropped by unexpectedly. He seemed happy. His parents had gone to Ebeltoft to pick up a new car and wouldn’t be back until the evening. Cecilie and Jens were entertaining old college friends, and the lawn was teeming with children. The sun was shining, there was iced tea and sandwiches, and swallows were dive-bombing the garden. Troels watched the chaos, rather intimidated; he hadn’t been expecting this. Two boys, Troels’s age, were playing football, but Troels didn’t want to join in. He sipped tea and Cecilie introduced him to everyone.

“This is Troels. He’s goes to school with Anna.”

“He’s gorgeous,” Anna heard Cecilie’s friends whisper.

Jens decided they should all play baseball. Everyone leapt from their chairs; four large stones were found, along with a bat and a yellow tennis ball, and two teams picked. The mood in the backyard was light-hearted and boisterous. Anna and Karen rolled their eyes at the silly grown-ups. They were both wearing makeup, but none of the adults had said anything. It was Troels’s turn to bat. He said, “I don’t want to”—not very loudly, but loud enough for Anna to hear it, and she was some distance away. Troels sent her an apologetic smile.

Jens’s old friend, Mogens, who was bowling, encouraged Troels.

“You can do it,” he said warmly. He positioned himself behind Troels and guided his arms in a horizontal arc through the air.

“Keep the bat high,” he instructed him. “Don’t let it drop.” He tapped Troels’s drooping elbow. “And watch the ball.”

Troels’s arm was still limp.

“Come on! Concentrate. It’s not that hard!” Mogens called out. Anna instinctively glanced at her mother. Cecilie wanted to say something. She raised her hands as if to object. Next to Troels, Mogens was a gentle giant.

“What do you think this is, eh?” Mogens roared with laughter and grabbed Troels’s white, freckled arm and dangled it. “Flab?” he chuckled. Troels looked vacantly at Mogens, who was ducking and diving like a boxer, throwing mock punches at Troels.

“Come on, son, show us what you’re made of!”

Troels raised the bat and hit Mogens over the head.
Clonk
. Mogens clutched his head. Everyone went very quiet.

“What did you do that for?” Mogens gasped.

Troels ran off, and Cecilie chased after him. They had been gone for nearly an hour when Anna decided to look for them. She found them in the back seat of the car. Troels looked red-eyed and lay with his head in Cecilie’s lap. She stroked his hair. He didn’t want to go back to the party, even though Cecilie assured him that it would be all right. That Jens would definitely have explained to Mogens why Troels had hit him. This puzzled Anna. Troels refused point-blank. He wanted to go home. Cecilie hugged him, and she and Anna watched Troels ride his bike unsteadily down the road before his speed increased and he was gone.