You Disappear: A Novel (34 page)

Niklas looks up at us happily, and it’s obvious that Frederik really enjoys the attention too. He sounds a little shy when he asks, “Now what have I done to deserve this?”

But I don’t know yet. I only feel the warmth, the joy of the three of us together.

Frederik’s tipsy and quite silly now, the way he can get after a party. He says, “Did either of you notice I have an extra willy?”

I lean around him and see a large, oddly shaped bulge in his trousers.

He says, “I got it when I was out peeing.”

Then he takes out of his trousers an empty beer bottle that he must have stuffed down there. He laughs happily; he finds this funny.

We continue taking things out of the dishwasher and putting them away. In the living room, we wipe the tables and set the chairs back in their usual places.

And in the meantime I begin to weep, for I’m slowly analyzing this dream as I dream it. I’m dreaming that I understand why our dinners and parties are now a thing of the past. Why we can never be together again as a family.

I dream that I’m drying off glasses the dishwasher didn’t get completely dry, that I don’t utter a word, that the tears just run down my cheeks. At some point Niklas sees me. He asks what the matter is, and I say, “He’s dead, of course! This isn’t real at all! We’re having such a lovely time, but of course he’s dead. In reality he’s no longer here. Tonight he’s just visiting.”

• • •

The teachers’ break room at my school was furnished in the ’70s. The walls are still covered in burlap, the cot’s still a captain’s bed, and the poster next to the door even depicts a pyramid. Who in the last twenty-five years would even think of buying a pyramid poster? It’s as if the room was simply forgotten by the administration. But it certainly hasn’t been forgotten by amorous colleagues when the annual Christmas party takes place upstairs, or by the odd teacher who seeks refuge here after a bad class. There are so many downward-spiraling fates bound up with this room, so many teachers who failed to get a grip in the months before they were fired or quit, or who did their best to reconcile themselves to a disability pension on psychological grounds.

Since Bernard and I are here every day, now that summer vacation’s begun, I brought in a vase yesterday and a bouquet of flowers I picked by the ditches beside the bike paths. Last week I took thumbtacks and hung up some unused postcards of fine photographs. And in the closet I’ve hidden a locked suitcase with linen and a quilt of our own, so we don’t have to lie directly on the old spread.

Here we lie, naked and still a bit sweaty, Bernard resting his brow against my cheek. And he tells me once again about Lærke.

I doubted before whether he really understood how serious her brain damage was. But he knows. He’s fully aware how little of her remains.

During these past months, he’s described the real Lærke as a remarkably charming and generous woman. Every single weekend, she’d take the family on some new adventure. Treasure hunts in the woods that took as their theme the last cartoon the boys had seen; long songs with lyrics of her own invention; forts they built together of old cardboard boxes for the boys’ toy monsters. I have a hard time believing that anyone could be so relentlessly full of fun and passion for family; it must be an idealized memory. Yet what can I say? Perhaps I do the same thing myself in the way I conceive of the Frederik I once knew.

“I still enjoy being with her,” he says. “It’s difficult to explain exactly why. But she’s still my Lærke.”

“I understand that,” I say, though it’s not true.

He lifts his brow from my cheek and rolls over beside me on the narrow foam mattress, staring up at the ceiling.

“It’s odd how one can find people who make really clever remarks so terribly boring. And yet love to spend time with people who speak only in banalities. So what is boredom anyway?”

We discuss this. We have the strangest long conversations while lying half on top of each other and eating the pastry and fruit we bought on our way here. And then we look again into each other’s eyes, not talking, or we explore each other’s bodies.

It’s hard to say which classroom lies directly above the break room, as there are no windows here, and you can only get here through the maze of shelving in the textbook storeroom. But as far as I can tell, we’re lying entangled and sweating right beneath one of the eighth-grade homerooms.

Ten days after Bernard and Lærke’s accident, Lærke still hadn’t come out of her coma. Bernard sat by her side. The nurse he confided in most told him he should lavish all that attention on their eight-year-old boys instead. They needed every hour he could give them, while for the time being, Lærke wouldn’t notice the difference.

He knew that the nurse was right, yet he couldn’t keep himself from staring all day long at Lærke’s unmoving face behind the oxygen mask.
He held her hand, he stroked her forearm where there weren’t any tubes or tape. And also where there were tubes and tape. He spoke to her, trying to say calming, cheery words.

Jonathan and Benjamin weren’t with us in the car
, he’d say, since she probably wouldn’t be able to remember what happened right before the accident.

They’re doing well
, he’d tell her.
Your mother’s taking care of them. You’re in the hospital, sweetheart. We’ve been in a car wreck. We weren’t the ones at fault. He suddenly changed lanes. There was nothing we could do. I’m well—and you will be too. It’ll all work out. We’ll be fine
.

And when she still showed no signs of life, he’d say,
Yes, that’s good. You shouldn’t let me wake you. That makes the most sense. Just rest. That’s the best thing you can do
.

But in fact it hadn’t been going well for their eight-year-old twins. The fourth time they visited their mother in the hospital, Jonathan screamed so convincingly about stomach pains that the nurses called a doctor in. Jonathan was positive he was going to die, and when the doctor’s examination didn’t calm him or get rid of the pain, Bernard had to take him down to the emergency room, while his father-in-law drove Benjamin home and Winnie stayed with Lærke.

The consultation in the emergency room didn’t turn anything up either, and when Jonathan continued to yell about his stomach, the older female physician asked Bernard if she could give Jonathan a sedative on top of the painkillers.

At that, Bernard’s brain seized up. He couldn’t say
yes
or
no
or
I don’t know
; he couldn’t utter a single word. And he wasn’t able to give his son any of the support he needed either. The emergency room staff had to ring up to the neurointensive ward and ask to speak with Winnie. She immediately told them to give Jonathan the sedative, then rushed down to the emergency room, got Bernard and Jonathan into a taxi, and rode home with them.

There were so many decisions to make about the boys during those long days: Should they return to visit their unconscious mother again? Where should they stay when they weren’t at the hospital? What was the best way to protect them from the desperation that everyone around them
was feeling? All decisions that depended on whether Lærke was going to die in the next few hours. Or whether she might wake in the next few hours. And every one of them, a decision that made Bernard miss terribly being able to consider it with Lærke.

The doctors had told him waking from a coma doesn’t happen like in the movies, from one instant to the next. It’s a sluggish affair, and every single patient must fight their own way back to life.

“Look forward to it—it’ll be an amazing moment,” said a nurse, who appeared to be completely convinced that things would be looking up for Lærke now.

Half past five in the morning. Not a sound to be heard on the ward except for the faint hum of machines. The sky outside the tall windows beginning to lighten a pale blue. It was Day Thirteen, and in the last couple of days Lærke had had recurring convulsions while still comatose. Now her right leg and arm went into spasms. Bernard held her hand as it twitched between his hands. He whispered that there was nothing to fear, that he was there to take care of her; that he loved her. For she always looked so terrified when she went into convulsions.

“Can you hear me?” he asked, just as he did every single time he was there. “Can you? Lærke, can you hear me?”

Her head lay still upon the pillow, turned toward him, and then her eyelids trembled. He was on the point of shouting; this was so major, so unexpected. Her eyelids trembled and they opened and suddenly, for the first time in almost two weeks, he was looking straight into his wife’s blue eyes.

“I’m right here,” he said. “Your husband.”

Her eyes regarded him for what felt like several minutes.

“Can you hear me, Lærke? Can you understand me?”

Her eyes that were only half open; that were far, far away. He sensed that she had no idea where she was.

“I’m Bernard,” he said. “Your husband.”

“Watch out!” she said—or in any case that’s what he heard it as, her speech nearly unintelligible, as well as muffled by the oxygen mask.

And then she disappeared again.

Bernard wanted to call everyone he knew, he wanted to get up and
run out to the nurses, he wanted to squeeze Lærke’s hand. Everything. He could feel his body shaking, just like hers. He wanted to jump up and run into the corridor, but he couldn’t leave her; she might open her eyes again.

He called a nurse, and after she left, he sat and gazed at Lærke until the first nurse on the morning shift came in, one hour later.

Then he went down to the parking lot, where he was allowed to use his cell phone, and called his parents, who had flown up from Paris and were staying at a hotel in Copenhagen. They’d been very fond of Lærke ever since she’d been a teenager working for them as an au pair. He also called his in-laws, and the parents of the twins’ best friend from school. The twins had been sleeping there so that they’d be as unscathed as possible by the family’s disintegration.

The grandparents all arrived at the hospital an hour later, but nothing more happened that day. To wake up and try to warn Bernard about some unknown peril had required a huge effort from Lærke. She remained completely unconscious for another twenty-four hours.

Because Lærke might be about to wake, the doctors cut back on her morphine and replaced the oxygen mask with a thin tube that ran from her nose. It was odd to see her without the mask; she was starting to look more and more like herself.

The next day she woke again, and this time the boys were in the room too.

“Jonathan,” she said. “Benjamin.”

Her speech was still very indistinct, but there was no doubt she recognized them. Jonathan climbed up into bed with her, and Bernard let him. After his attack, Jonathan had said he didn’t want to go back to the hospital, and now Bernard was glad he’d insisted. Benjamin crawled into the bed too. Lærke said both of their names several times, and then a minute later she was gone again.

Bernard lifted the boys down, explained to them that their mother was very tired now, and took them out into the common room, where he unpacked some of the many lunches that their friend’s mother had packed them.

So Lærke could speak, and she could see, think, and recognize them. Good news. Just that she was
in
there, in her apparently dead body. Yet as Bernard was trying to make the shared meal a pleasant experience, he
was also thinking of something he’d have to ask the doctor about: Lærke hadn’t smiled when she saw the boys. There was no joy on her face when they climbed up to her—only something that looked like wonder. The whole thing felt so new to him that he didn’t yet know what to think about it.

In the days that followed, she woke up for a few minutes every couple of hours. It was clear she didn’t understand where she was, regardless of how many times Bernard explained it to her. But he was patient, and he told her she’d get well, and he told her he loved her. The wonder was still in her face, though without a trace of the gentle smile she would have smiled if it’d been a movie. As if he were some math problem to her; as if she didn’t see him as a person.

Then, late one evening as Bernard listened to the sounds of a family out in the hallway—the family of a teenager who’d just died in the next room—Lærke said her first sentence.

“Ah luh ooh.”

He sat in his chair for a long time and gasped for breath in the half darkness. She closed her eyes again and he kept sitting there, stock-still, even though he’d read enough about brain damage in the last few days to know she was probably just echoing the words he’d said to her.

• • •

In the following months, the whole family began to founder. Lærke’s parents moved in to help take care of the boys.

The doctors at the rehab center were quick to say they didn’t expect Lærke would ever be able to return to her job as project manager at the ad agency. They also doubted she’d be able to walk again. Bernard had to relinquish his career plans and his hopes for the boys and himself.

But everyday life at home with Lærke was more draining than anything else. Her injury was distributed across her entire brain, which basically meant she had less of everything: she lacked emotion and was indifferent to herself and others; she got tired after a few hours of mere conversation and couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a couple of minutes at a time; she couldn’t make decisions or deal with the most ordinary trifles; and she usually couldn’t remember anything Bernard or the kids told her.

She used to pump so much energy into the family, but now her dominant trait was utter passivity. She never took the initiative or said anything of her own accord, and it seemed like she didn’t even think or imagine anything on her own. Her face hung dead from her cheekbones, without those tiny twitches that in a healthy person indicate life beneath the skin.

The boys started getting into a lot of fights, because they felt the other kids were teasing them about their mother. Sometimes it was true, but as a rule it wasn’t. And no matter how much Bernard and his in-laws tried to give them the support they needed, the boys’ close friendships began to fall apart, simply because the twins were fighting their best friends too much.