Chapter 66
The investigation is so intense right now that Daniel shouldn’t be setting aside time to see Jovanka, but Hanna’s words are ringing in his ears. He wouldn’t be able to look her in the eye if he turned down the opportunity to speak to his therapist now she’s found a slot for him.
His reaction earlier in the day frightens him. He didn’t think that stress would affect him so strongly. Somewhere deep down he was convinced that he had finally learned to control his temper, but that persistent reporter had almost made him lose it completely.
He can’t go on like this.
He doesn’t want to.
Jovanka smiles warmly at Daniel when he walks into her consulting room at six o’clock in the evening. She is already seated in a gray wing-back armchair, looking relaxed. Opposite her there is an identical chair upholstered in blue, which is where Daniel usually sits.
There is a box of paper tissues on the small table between them. Daniel hopes he won’t need them during the next hour.
“How are you feeling today?”
Daniel has learned that this is her standard opening phrase. Progress is always slow at the beginning of each session; it takes a few minutes for the conversation to start flowing.
The first time he came here he said virtually nothing for half an hour.
“Thanks for seeing me at such short notice,” he mumbles, then takes a deep breath. “I’m working on the hotel homicide—I’m sure you’ve read about it. It’s very intense. Today another murdered woman was found at Copperhill. My colleague and I had just visited the crime scene when . . .”
He pauses, gathering strength before he gets to the tricky part.
“Something happened. Something I should have handled much better, but it really got to me, and I’d slept very badly. I lay awake for far too long, brooding over childhood memories.”
“So what happened?” Jovanka asks in her normal gentle tone.
It goes against the grain to put the incident into words, but eventually he manages to explain how the aggressive journalist, who reminded him so strongly of his father, triggered a wave of rage.
How he reached a point where he was on the verge of resorting to violence, even though such a reaction goes against everything he stands for.
He dare not even think what it would have done to his career if he’d crossed the line.
“I understand. How did you feel?”
“It was tough. If my colleague hadn’t stepped in, I don’t know what I would have done. She was the one who insisted I should contact you.”
He can’t meet Jovanka’s gaze. “I was so ashamed afterward.”
There is a brief silence, but it feels okay, as if Jovanka is giving him the chance to come to terms with what he has just told her.
“On Monday we talked about your anger toward your father,” she says after a moment.
“Your perception that he chose his new family over you. You said he didn’t take care of you properly when you went to visit him in Ume?, that you were often mad but didn’t dare say anything. You had to hold back your anger.”
Daniel doesn’t remember exactly what he said, just that it was a challenging hour and that he felt exhausted when he drove away.
“Is there a particular memory you can tell me about, something that’s stayed with you?”
Daniel can barely sit still. He feels increasingly ill at ease, he doesn’t want to stir up those emotions, it’s too painful, too hard to talk about.
The bitterness wakes up, like a writhing snake in the pit of his stomach.
“Try to tell me,” Jovanka prompts him. “I think it will help.”
He closes his eyes, remembers how unwelcome he felt in Ume?. How relieved he always was when it was time to return home to his mom in Sundsvall, a place where he was secure and loved.
He still has a problem when people talk in glowing terms about stepparents, as if it’s a positive.
He has never regarded his stepmother as anything other than his father’s wife.
The stepmother from hell.
Jovanka is looking encouragingly at him, and he searches for something concrete to talk about. He really wants to get up and walk out, but that’s not an option.
“When my half sister was born,” he begins tentatively, “they took my room.”
“Your room?”
He pictures his old bedroom in Ume?. It was light and sunny, right next door to the bedroom his father shared with his new wife.
But when he came to visit after his half sister’s birth, everything had changed.
The room had been painted pink, and his bed was gone.
It had been replaced by a crib, and there was a white changing table by the window.
All of his toys had disappeared.
“They’d turned my room into a nursery.”
“So where were you supposed to sleep?”
“In the attic.”
Jovanka raises her eyebrows.
Daniel realizes that the memory still hurts. He will be thirty-eight in September, almost thirty years have passed, but it still hurts. He can’t work out if he is embarrassed at his own reaction, or whether this is about his father letting down the little boy he was back then.
“Dad told me to follow him; then he opened the door to the stairs leading up to the attic.”
He remembers how steep the staircase was, and how cold, as if the heat in the rest of the house simply couldn’t reach that far.
“There were two rooms in the attic. The first was my father’s study, but if you went along a narrow corridor, you came to another room, and that was where they’d put my things.”
He closes his eyes again, recalling the detail. His father had explained that he was old enough to sleep up here all by himself—as if it were something fun and exciting. Daniel had noticed the dirty window—it was so high up that he couldn’t see out.
After a while his father had fallen silent, but he had kept his gaze fixed on his son as if he was waiting for a reaction. A thank-you, perhaps, or a cry of joy over the new furniture from IKEA.
Even though Daniel was so young, he realized that his father was expecting praise.
His heart contracts with the pain. He was only eight years old.
He stood there in front of his father, wanting to ask what he should do if he woke up in the middle of the night and wanted to pee. The corridor leading to the stairs was dark and scary.
But the words stuck in his throat.
He didn’t dare to complain.
It was impossible to tell his father that he was afraid to sleep on his own up in the attic. He was angry and upset, but too frightened to explain.
He wet himself on the first night.
“Tell me how you felt at that moment,” Jovanka says, bringing him back to the present.
He looks down at his lap. A hard lump has formed in his throat. He glances at the box of tissues, he doesn’t want to reach out and take one.
“It’s fine, Daniel. This is a safe place. You can say whatever you want when you’re with me.”
When Daniel opens his mouth he can almost hear the high voice of a little boy.
“I hated him. And her. Both of them. I wished they would die.”
“And how do you feel now, after so many years?”
He tries to analyze his emotions. They are complicated and messy, hard to put into words. It feels like a sharp stone deep in his chest.
“What does grown-up Daniel think today?”
“How can someone do that to a child? It was so obvious that they’d chosen their family over me. It was cruel and unfeeling.”
Daniel’s greatest fear is that he will repeat his father’s mistake.
“What if I do something like that to Alice?”
“I don’t think you need to worry about that.
That’s why you’re here, to work through your problems, the issues that still affect you today, both personally and at work.
” Jovanka tilts her head to one side, her expression is warm and understanding.
“It’s completely natural that you’ve carried so much rage over what happened, and that you feel deep frustration.
You were only a little boy—it’s hardly surprising that you didn’t dare to show your anger. ”
She pauses, as if she wants to give him a chance to take a tissue before she goes on.
“Today you are a grown man. No one can do that to you again. You have every right to get mad, but you can decide if and when to do so.”
His eyes fill with tears. He manages a wan smile, reaches for a Kleenex.
Something inside him has eased.
He actually feels better.