You Disappear: A Novel (10 page)

One corner of Morten’s mouth begins to twitch. “Is that what you said when he was with Gitte and Dorte?”

I slam the door behind me, and after a couple of steps down the hallway I break into a run.

• • •

The lights are off in the house, so Niklas and Frederik must have gone to bed. The fire on the lawn has burned out, leaving only a black circle behind.

I let myself in and sit down on the bed next to Frederik, who’s sleeping heavily. When he’s lying like this, I can see bits of the long narrow scar that runs beneath his hair in a half-moon. My index finger gently traces its course. The real Frederik would have been so disappointed in Laust. We would have held each other, figured out a plan, come up with an explanation. We would have done it together. But the real Frederik isn’t here now, no matter how long I talk to the body in this bed, no matter how long I try to hold it or to rest my head on its shoulder.

Driving home on the freeway, I hit on the only possible explanation: that it’s all something to do with his employment contract. They want to fire him, and they can’t while he’s on sick leave. So they came up with this. On the other hand, Laust wasn’t acting, and could Morten and Benny really have staged the whole thing behind his back? I run through all the possibilities, then I discard them. There must be something I don’t know.

“
Frederik
,” I say, very loud.

I am almost shouting.

“Frederik, something’s happened. Frederik!
Frederik!
”

He doesn’t wake up.

I shake him by the shoulder; no reaction. I don’t want to risk jarring his head, so I go down to the foot of the bed and start shaking one of his legs hard.

Slowly he comes to life.

“Whaaat?” he says with a plaintive moan. It’s the way he sounded at the neurointensive clinic; our week there, the despair we felt, Niklas locking himself in the handicapped toilet, and back home Vibeke taking to her bed. It’s terrible, every time he wakes up with that voice. The limp crackers in the visitors’ kitchen; the distant round eyes of the other patients’ relatives.

I try to make him understand what Laust, Morten, and Benny said.

“It wasn’t me.” He sighs.

“No, I know that.” I sit down again on the edge of the bed next to his head; his eyes are still closed.

“It’s all your doing.” He groans.

“What?”

“The two of you.”

“Who?”

“You and Niklas.”

“How could we have done anything?”

“You said I couldn’t use the computers. So the school lost the money.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You installed passwords on the computers.”

I thought that our drive through the Majorcan mountains had been the major turning point in my life. The day everything disappeared. But I was wrong.

I don’t yet know what happened, but I have a premonition that today’ll be the day Frederik’s exposed as the headmaster who destroyed Saxtorph Private School. The day we lose the friends who’ve supported us. The day we lose our house and jobs. Everything. Today.

He wakes up enough that I can get him to sit up in bed. And slowly he tells me what I tentatively have to accept as true.

Frederik secretly borrowed money from the school’s accounts to gamble on international commodity indexes. Of course he was going to repay it, but then he lost a few hundred thousand crowns when copper slumped and coffee spiked. He took more money so that he could recoup the school’s losses. He set up three private firms to siphon the money away from the school in a series of obscure transactions, falsifying documents and sureties and signatures. He lost even more money. And it just grew worse.

“I would have gotten everything back again and earned millions, both for us and the school. There’s no question. It’s only because Laust shut me out. It’s only because you installed passwords on the computers. It’s your fault.”

There’s no way the real Frederik could have embezzled from Saxtorph; it goes against everything he stands for. The tumor had been growing slowly, which the doctors say is normal. Already a year ago it must’ve been changing his personality. Before it occurred to anyone that he’d become somebody else—and that’s normal too, the doctors say.

Laust is still awake when I call.

I apologize, as emphatically as I apologized to Niklas when my stomach was pumped out. More than I apologized any other time ever. I start crying for the school and hope he will cry with me. But he’s silent.

“I’m your friend, Laust! I knew nothing! Nothing! We must be able to find some of the money in his accounts, maybe coffee prices have fallen since then—or copper gone up—whatever it needs to be. There has to be something! Some way or another. I’ll do
anything
I can to help you.”

Laust continues to say nothing.

“I really understand if you’re angry with him,” I say. “I get angry with him a lot too. And then I forget that it’s the illness. That’s what it must’ve been back then too. It’s the illness and not Frederik himself that dictates how he acts.”

Still saying nothing, Laust hangs up the phone.

I’m lying on the air mattress at the foot of our bed. The streetlight through the trees casts a glowing pattern on the bedroom ceiling. The tree branches vibrate and the pattern comes to life: the sign’s the same as the one in the embers on the front lawn.

Thus are we branded everywhere; thus will healthy people walking down the street know not to stop. Here live the sick people. Enter a house marked with this sign, and you renounce all claim to protection and safety. Expect no help if the poor devils savage you and tear you to pieces.

Before I lay down, I decided I wouldn’t wake Niklas, but after I stare at the sign on the ceiling for a couple of hours, I realize I was wrong: his future’s at stake. Will his father go to jail? Will we have to sell the only house he’s known? Will the papers call his father a swindler?

I pull on a pair of sweatpants. I knock on his door but he doesn’t wake up. I go in and sit on the edge of the bed, whisper his name.

“Niklas.
Niklas
.”

He sits up with a start, and I touch his arm.

“Nothing’s happened, Niklas. Easy now, quiet; nothing’s happened.”

This is the worst part: telling Niklas. Because now I have to say it.

“Or actually something has, Niklas. Something
has
happened.”

His pale face; the streetlight’s glowing sign on his cheek.

“It’s Dad,” I say.

“What? Is he dead?”

“No, he’s … they say at the school that he …” And I tell him what I know.

“I don’t believe it!” he exclaims, with the same conviction I had. He lets himself fall back on the bed.

“I didn’t believe it either,” I say.

It takes but an instant for all the thoughts I have when I talk with him to run through my head: Niklas as an old man, grey-haired and distinguished, perhaps a headmaster, perhaps minister of education, in a suit; Niklas as a baby on the changing table, peeing up in the air with his tiny penis, so I have to dry him and table both; Niklas running around in the yard playing with a wheelbarrow; Niklas’s photos on exhibit in the gymnasium library and us so proud.

“But Dad’s confessed,” I continue. “And they think I’m involved too.”

“Confessed? You?” He sits up again.

They aren’t so much thoughts as glimpses, and not individual glimpses so much as a state of mind: he falls on his bike, scrapes his smooth little knees; he plays in the sand on the beach.

“Yes. So the police will probably question us tomorrow,” I say.

“Yeah but of course you guys haven’t … of course
you
haven’t—”

“
I
haven’t done anything. And Dad only did it because he was sick. The police will understand that, and so will Laust, when he’s no longer so angry.”

The air in here is warm and pungent—and the room’s a terrible mess, something I’ve stopped commenting on. In the darkness, I see something catch the light in his pile of dirty clothes; from here it looks like a bra. A white, almost luminous bra among the worn jeans and shirts. I can’t go any closer to be sure.

“You have to stop now, damn it!” he shouts. “Don’t you two ever think of me? You keep doing one crazy thing after the other!”

I must accept his anger, I tell myself. I have to give his emotions room.

“Of course I think of you. All the time. And I’ll do anything. You just have to—”

“You don’t think of me at all, and that’s the truth! Both of you have gone totally whack!”

Room for his anger. It’s a state of mind: he’s overnighting at a friend’s for the first time, but at midnight the parents call, they say he’s crying, and I drive over to get him. His first year of gymnasium, and two girls and a
boy from his new homeroom wait for him out on the street, they’re going to the beach with mats and a cooler bag.

“Niklas, you know it isn’t me who embezzled from anyone. I haven’t done anything.”

“But you’re the one I can never trust!”

I tell myself that it’s important not to yell. I answer him calmly.

“You can trust me now, Niklas. Now.”

“The hell I could! You’re the one who should have been watching out! You! That’s what you should have done!”

I don’t say
Watch out for what?
I say, “I can understand this is hard for you, Niklas.”

“Shut the fuck up! You don’t hear one single …” He shouts, “Get out!”

And that, finally, is what I do.

Alone in the kitchen, I feel good about letting him give his emotions free rein. I can take it. A glimpse, a state, his little hand in mine as I walk him home from first grade.

Maybe I’ll be able to get a little sleep tonight if I eat something heavy. The best thing now would be some cold oatmeal with skim milk and banana. I look down into my meal. The color of ghosts, I think, of something unreal: semen.

• • •

When I open the front door for them, I feel oddly relaxed. I know it’s not the real Frederik they’re coming for. And it’s as if it isn’t the real me who invites them in either.

The two polite young men walk into the living room, where Frederik is sitting at the dinner table, reading from a stack of advertising circulars.

“Frederik Halling?” one of them asks. “It is 10:15 a.m. You are hereby under arrest, charged with embezzlement and falsification of documents. It would be best if you remained seated while we go through the house.”

Frederik says nothing and, equally silent, I sit down in the chair next to him and hold his hand.

After listening to the front door open and shut a couple of times, I can hear the policemen rummaging around in Frederik’s office. I get up and go in there. His computer lies in a moving box with a pile of DVDs and
two external hard drives. The officers put files and folders and all kinds of papers into boxes, while they allow me to stand there and watch.

An hour later, they turn their attention to Frederik again.

“Now then, sir. We would like to ask you to accompany us to the station.”

Frederik gets up, and I put some crackers and apples in my bag. I put on my coat and am ready to go when the first officer says, “Sorry, ma’am, you can’t come with. Only Mr. Halling.”

“But Officer, they think I helped embezzle the funds. They’ve accused me too.”

“We don’t know anything about that.”

The second policeman takes over. “We suggest you wait here at home. Later today, we’ll call and tell you whether he’s going directly to jail.”

“Directly to jail?”

“Yes ma’am. With a charge like this, one doesn’t go home to sleep.”

Something breaks inside of me. I see Frederik in a fight with other inmates; I see him attacking policemen in an uncontrollable burst of anger and being beaten with batons.

“But he’s
sick
! His brain is sick! I have to come. You don’t know how to talk to him.”

“Sorry, ma’am.”

“But you don’t understand! He gets fits of anger, he’ll start hitting you!”

“We’re sorry.”

“You can’t just do this, the man isn’t well! You’ll end up having to charge him for assaulting an officer!”

“Ma’am, it can’t get any more serious than it already is.”

I make an effort to breathe calmly, but the air comes in long noisy gulps as I plead with them and follow them out to the cruiser. They won’t budge. Meanwhile Frederik sits peacefully in the car, looking blankly at the seat in front of him and eating the package of crackers I gave him.

As soon as they’ve driven off, I run into the house and call Laust, who doesn’t answer. I leave a message on his machine about him being a psychopath who’s killing his best friend.

I call Helena, but she doesn’t pick up either.

I call Thorkild and Vibeke. They’ve had time to digest the news, since I already called them this morning at half past six. Vibeke answers and hands the phone to Thorkild.

“You need a lawyer,” he says.

Of course we do. I call Gerda from the support group and ask if anyone in the group knows a lawyer who’s familiar with brain injuries.

“You should call Bernard,” she tells me.

“He knows one?”

“He’s a lawyer himself, and in that field he’s the best there is.”

Bernard’s the only member of the group that I didn’t feel completely at ease with, but of course I call.

“Your husband has the right to have counsel present during questioning,” he says. “The police should have informed you. If you want, I can be at the station in twenty minutes.”

“I’d be tremendously grateful if you could do that. He might start hitting people, and he’s—”

“Okay. I’ll call you later.”

I collapse on our bed, but it smells wrong—of Frederik’s new smell. I try to rest, but I cannot. So I lie down on the air mattress instead, pull the comforter over my head, and hope I can drift off.

• • •

Niklas comes home from school early; he skipped his last classes. I tell him I understand, and give him a quick, watered-down version of what happened.

“Are you very upset?” he asks.

“Yes.” It feels oddly still here in the entry. “Yes, I am.”

“But not as upset as … that other time?”