You Disappear: A Novel (29 page)

“But that won’t change a thing.” Now I’m sobbing into the receiver.

“But I think we’ll both regret it if I take on this case again.”

Now Frederik is standing next to the bed, looking at me with eyes wide. I avoid his gaze as I say, “If Frederik can’t get the best lawyer, he runs a greater risk of going to jail. He
does
!”

Bernard pauses. A pause is a good sign; I keep my mouth shut.

He clears his throat, and then he asks, “Don’t you think you should think this over?”

“No.”

“Hmm.”

Another pause; longer this time. I’m no longer crying, just listening in silence. I want to hear his breathing over the phone, but my own breath is still making too much noise.

“Okay,” he says at last. “But remember that I’m Frederik’s lawyer
—not
yours.”

“I understand.”

“Frederik’s the one I’ll meet with. If he’s amenable to it, you may come along on occasion. But it will be he and I. You and I will not be having any meetings alone together.”

“Of course. Of course. That’s the way to do it.”

“Okay. Good.”

Again a pause. Now I think I can faintly hear the background noise where he is. The cars on the street outside his office; perhaps his breath.

“Thank you so very, very much, Bernard,” I say. “Thank you. It means the world to us.”

“Okay … Yes. Okay. Frederik will naturally want to know as much as possible about the consequences of the new report, and as quickly as possible.”

“Yes.”

“If he could be here in forty-five minutes, I’ll see what I can do.”

“I can’t thank you enough, Bernard. It’ll make all the difference. I’m so glad to have you back.”

His tone becomes formal again. “You mean
glad that Frederik has me back
.”

“Yes. Of course.” I try laughing, but he doesn’t laugh with me, and then I can’t either.

After we hang up, I get up out of bed. It would be natural for me to give Frederik a hug now. But I can’t anymore; I just look at him.

“Now we still have a chance, anyway,” I say.

I put on some clothes and reapply my makeup, while Frederik goes down to make some sandwiches to take in the car—ham, cheese, and tomato, since he no longer eats only jam sandwiches.

I drive fast, staring straight in front of me at the freeway. Neither of us is hungry after all, so he sits with the lunch box in his lap. He says, “I’ve started to think about some of the things I remember from after the operation. Some strange things. Did they really happen?”

“Yes,” I say, “it was a strange time.”

“But I’m thinking—did you use to call Bernard up at night while I lay next to you in bed?”

Figure 23.2. Test for perseveration
.

The subject has been asked to draw a circle
.

If Frederik is going to go to jail because I couldn’t control myself around his lawyer, I’ll never forgive myself, and it simply sucks to be having this conversation right now, heading down the freeway at eighty miles an hour.

But he keeps interrogating me.

“Stop it! God damn it, Frederik, it’s your fault I’m even in a support group. I talk to
all
of them.”

“But you don’t talk to the others in the middle of the night, do you?”

“Yeah, actually I do.”

“No you don’t.”

“Stop it!”

“So which of the others do you call? Do you call up Andrea at two in the morning?”

“Frederik! You’re going to end up in jail and will never get another job if our meeting with Bernard goes down in flames.”

“But what’s all this about Bernard not wanting my case, and then you call him up and he takes it on anyway?”

“Frederik, stop! You’re perseverating!”

That gets him to shut up. He sits there grumbling, staring at the airbag panel in front of him.

• • •

Bernard’s office is situated in an old half-timbered building on Great King Street. The reception area is small, but modernly furnished and bright.
I’ve been here a couple of times and know that all the rooms are like this.

Before we kissed at the apartment viewing, Bernard often alluded to his first year after the car accident, a watershed year when he had to figure out how to deal with everything being different. Till then he’d had a brilliant career in one of Copenhagen’s largest law firms, but if his eight-year-old boys were to have a healthy parent in their everyday lives, and if Lærke were to have the support he wanted to give her, he had to sacrifice his future with the firm.

For a while he tried using a nursing aide and an au pair to help him balance his work and home life. He also got permission to cut back on his hours at the firm, though otherwise he would have soon made partner. But it couldn’t be avoided; he had to make a choice. He chose to quit and join forces with an old classmate to start a small firm that would bring in a lot less money. During law school the friend, Alex, had kept to the periphery of parties and student life; for a few months each year he’d be away paragliding or visiting tropical islands no one had heard of. Yet even though most students seldom saw him, Alex made an impression, for he did surprisingly well whenever he finally showed up for exams with his long sun-bleached hair.

Now Alex lives with four kids and wife number two in Amager, where they share a large rambling house with another family. He still has lots of friends in Africa, and he spends long hours each week doing pro bono work for a fair-trade organization.

As I understand it, they became the subject of intense speculation by old acquaintances when they started the firm seven years ago. Hadn’t the industrious Bernard always been Alex’s opposite? Or were they, beneath the surface, really cut from the same cloth? Some lawyers maintained that they’d always thought Bernard and Alex ought to start something together.

It’s the end of the working day when we arrive, and both the receptionist and secretary have gone home, so Bernard comes out and lets us in.

He shakes hands with Frederik, and afterward with me. Everything in his expression and body language is polite and serious. I wish I could look so composed, but I doubt I do.

Frederik looks at him, then back at me, and then again at Bernard.

Perhaps he sees something that surprises him—but if so, he doesn’t
know how to process it. It’s still a novelty for him to be interested in other people at all, or to think of them as having lives when he doesn’t see them.

Bernard leads us down a short hallway to a conference room with expensive but bland furnishings, where he starts reading through the psychiatric report.

The room grows quiet. I can still feel the way his hand clasped mine a short while ago. A large hand, a dry hand—a bit like Frederik’s, but younger and warmer. I can also feel my buttocks and thighs against the seat of this skinny little Arne Jacobsen chair. Hand, ass, the hand between my legs; the lingering sense-memory of him inside me. Almost as if he’s still there, and I let out a small gasp that he must be able to hear. A brief twitch crosses his face, but he doesn’t lift his eyes from the report.

I wonder what Lærke’s doing now. I can’t stop myself from imagining her at the handicapped center. No doubt she’s sitting with a group of other disabled people at some round table where they’re weaving baskets or painting with watercolors, while she waits to be picked up by her amazing husband whom she’s too brain-damaged to appreciate.

I see them come home from the center in their white Volvo station wagon—Bernard opening the door for her, getting out the wheelchair or the crutches, helping her over to the magnificent yard that slopes down toward the woods. There they sit, contemplating the mild summer evening. It’s true that I don’t know her that well, so in my fantasy she says the same thing as when I visited them:
We like it a great deal
. She smiles sweetly and beautifully beneath her large hat.
Language is so rich
.

And I see how Bernard was standing last night in the orange light with his pants down. His large erect cock; the feeling that every cell of my body is excited and alert.

“The Medico-Legal Council finds that even though you were somewhat impaired mentally at the time of the crime, it shouldn’t have been abnormally difficult for you to resist selfish impulses.” Bernard gazes intensely into Frederik’s eyes, as if I weren’t here. “That’s because before you had the tumor, you were unusually intelligent, structured, and focused in your thinking.”

That might be the only thing that gives Bernard away—the fact that he isn’t sufficiently attentive to me. After all, I
am
the wife of the accused.

He’s kind to Frederik, and he’s always been—also back when Frederik
was much sicker than he is now. Bernard’s shirt lies a little taut across his shoulders; I know how it feels to squeeze those shoulders tight.

“There have evidently been some problems in using the Iowa Gambling Task diagnostically,” he continues. “In brief, people with orbitofrontal damage are not the only ones who exhibit the irrational behavior that the test detects. There are also many healthy people who make precisely the same mistakes when they sit before the stacks of cards. They too will gamble all their money away, flouting common sense—and the strategy they expressly state they should be using. And that certainly doesn’t exempt
them
from punishment.”

Frederik asks, “But then what can we do?”

“Louise was correct in saying that there isn’t any higher court to appeal the ruling to. But the ruling is not a verdict. It’s perfectly acceptable for us to contact the Medico-Legal Council and argue that they’ve overlooked something in their report. But that only makes sense if we can point them to facts that they haven’t been aware of.”

“I’ve told them everything.”

“If for instance your secretary were to declare that your personality underwent a dramatic change—or if others who’ve worked closely with you for a long time were to say so.”

“But they’re all at Saxtorph. They work for Laust.”

I break in. “Are you suggesting that we try to get employees from the school to speak up in defiance of the new administration?”

“Yes.”

He looks at me only very briefly before turning his attention back to Frederik. “If the truth is on our side and you
did
undergo a transformation in the period leading up to the crime, it
may
be that some of your former staff members will acknowledge it.”

In the moment he finally met my gaze, I saw how capable he is of shutting me out of his life. How he’s a noble person who puts his sick wife before anything else.

We do not flirt. I do not try at all to be charming, and he doesn’t try to look good in front of me either. That’s it. It’s over.

“Is there anyone you worked closely with, who you think we could interview?” he asks Frederik.

“There were three secretaries in the office. If we’re going to ask any of them, we should begin with Trine.”

• • •

No longer can any of us—Niklas, Thorkild, Vibeke, and me—avoid understanding what’s happened. Niklas is always out with Emilie and his friends, while the rest of us lie around in our beds or in front of the TV, sprawling like mournful dogs anywhere there’s a little warmth and space.

Since the auction house has taken my most expensive prints and pieces of furniture, I move around our home bumping repeatedly into big patches of empty space—places where there used to be something I was fond of, where now it’s utterly bare. In a way this feels more real. Frederik’s soul has disappeared, and now everyone can finally see what we’ve known for so long: that the contents of our lives have been torn away.

But we need to get hold of at least a couch and a dining table and chairs, so on Sunday afternoon Frederik and I drive the trailer over to Thorkild and Vibeke’s to get some surplus furniture from their basement.

In the old days, Vibeke would have baked a nice cake for our visit, but she’s been lying sick in bed this past week. In the old days, I would have then baked a cake to take along, but I don’t feel up to it either, so I buy one at the bakery.

When we sit down to afternoon tea, Vibeke sets out my cake with one she bought. Hers is much more expensive.

“But you knew that I would buy a cake,” I say.

“Yes, but I fell for this one, it looked so tempting. So we have two.”

Fortunately, my inhibitory mechanism is robust enough that I can behave as if nothing’s wrong. But is this the way it’s going to be now? Am I going to be humiliated the rest of my life just because her son ruined me and not her? We’ve only been in their house five minutes, and already I feel the need for a few moments to myself.

“I’m just going to run down to the basement and look at the dining table,” I say.

Seconds later I’m halfway out of the living room, but in the doorway I hear Frederik behind me. “Shouldn’t we all go down there together?”

I curse his obliterated capacity for empathy as they all troop down behind me.

Easy now. Easy. Easy.

I’m playing tennis, the balls on the clay court, the low sun. I want to enter my daydream. I’m sitting in the hanging sofa, it’s evening and we’ve come from the neighbor’s garden party. We’re happy, me and Healthy Frederik. That’s key. It’s Healthy Frederik I want to be alone with. We go on a walk around the lake. And it’s Healthy Frederik.