Chapter Fifty-Three
FIFTY-THREE
Louisa has finished her orange soda. She leans back in the kitchen chair and stretches her arms sleepily in the air.
“So all that happened… and then Kimkim won the art competition? That’s a good ending, that is. A sad story, but a good ending.”
Ted and Joar glance at each other, clear their throats uncomfortably, then Ted mutters:
“Absolutely. It’s a… good ending.”
Louisa groans in despair.
“What? Is there more? I don’t know if I can bear to hear more!” she snaps, but then her anxiety creeps out as she asks: “I don’t know if I want to know that not everyone got a happy ending…”
Ted nods and quickly wipes his eyes, looks at the time and stands up.
“I think it’s time for me to go now.”
“Where are you going?” Louisa shouts, as if he had thrown her down a well.
Ted nods calmly toward the box containing the painting.
“I’m going to do what I promised. What we came here for. I’m going to help you sell that.”
Louisa starts to get to her feet to protest, but by then he is already out in the hall and closing the door behind him. He really is surprisingly quick for someone with a limp, Louisa thinks sullenly, slumping back down in her chair.
“Would you like more orange soda?” Joar asks.
“No thanks,” she says.
“Good. Because I don’t have any.”
He grins, but she can’t bring herself to smile, even a little bit. The silence becomes oppressive.
“Well,” Joar says.
“Well?” she grunts back.
He frowns. Hides his curiosity behind irritation.
“Well? What are you going to do with all the money? From the painting?”
“I don’t know,” she mumbles.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You’re rich! You can do whatever you want in life now!”
“I’m sure that would be perfect, if I knew what I wanted to do,” she replies, looking down at the table.
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
He snorts.
“And you don’t know what to do with shitloads of money? Damn, you’re a bad teenager. Buy a sports car! And drugs! Start a zoo! I would have bought a bunch of monkeys. You can’t be in a bad mood if you’ve got a bunch of monkeys. Especially not if you’ve also got drugs.”
He thinks she’s going to smile, but he can forget that.
She just whispers:
“I didn’t even want the painting to start with. You should keep it, you and Ted. You were his best friends, I’m just… I’m just a stupid kid he met in an alleyway. I tried to leave both Ted and the painting on the train, but things just kept happening, and I… I just wanted to hear the end of all the stories about you. But now I don’t even know if I want that!”
“Why not?” Joar says, even though he probably understands all too well.
“Because it doesn’t feel like there are going to be any happy endings at all!”
Joar spins his coffee cup for a long time before he replies:
“You’re the happy ending.”
“What?”
“Kimkim gave you the painting because he saw you paint. You’re the happy ending to his story. The life you live from now on. Everything you paint.”
“I need to go to the bathroom,” Louisa whispers.
She doesn’t. She just needs to be able to fall apart in peace. Surely there should be some boundaries for the sort of thing people are allowed to blurt out when you’ve only just met them? When she finally goes back into the kitchen, she takes her drawing of Kimkim out of her backpack and gives it to Joar.
“I drew this of Kimkim. The way I imagine he looked when he was young. I gave it to Ted, but he gave it back, so you can have it.”
Joar has to lean on the table to stop himself from falling off his chair.
“It looks… exactly like him.”
Then he grunts that he needs to go to the bathroom too, but really he just sits on the other side of the wall taking deep breaths for a long time. When he comes back, he nods to Louisa and says:
“Come with me. I want to show you something.”
He carefully fixes the drawing to the fridge, then leads her through the little house, up some stairs, then opens a window and climbs out onto the roof. Louisa peers out after him and asks suspiciously:
“Is this roof going to hold me? It looks like it’s made from milk cartons.”
“It can hold me!” Joar snorts.
“Sure, but what do you weigh? I’m a normal-sized human!”
“You’re not fucking normal in any fucking way. Stop making a fuss and come on!” he insists.
So she clambers out hesitantly after him. He tells her she doesn’t need to take her backpack, and she looks like that’s the most insane thing she’s ever heard. Then he chuckles and mutters, “The world is full of thieves,” and she mutters back, “Exactly!” Then they sit next to each other with their feet dangling over the edge, and only then does Louisa realize that the reason she and Ted had walked uphill on the way there was because the house is on a… hill. With a stunning view of half the town. Joar points toward some houses and says:
“Ali used to have a game. She would point at houses and say, ‘If we lived there,’ and then you had to imagine things about that life. But her favorites weren’t the most expensive houses, but the most normal ones. The boring ones. She would point at them and say: ‘In that house I live a normal life. I’m married to someone ordinary. We have boring jobs and boring friends. I put little stickers on plastic containers in the freezer, like Ted’s mom does, and they say things like chicken soup and vegetable pie and lasagna . You know, I have to do that because I have so much food in the freezer that I’d forget what’s in them otherwise! And I always have spare lightbulbs in the house, and I have two boring little kids who lie in their beds asking strange questions, like why polar bears don’t eat penguins, just so they don’t have to sleep. But they won’t be scared of sleeping, Joar! They’ll never be scared at all. They’ll just get to be ordinary, boring children with ordinary, boring parents all the time. I’d be good at that, don’t you think, Joar? I’d be awesome at being boring!’ That’s what she would say. That was her game.”
Joar falls silent there on the roof. Smiles. Shakes his head. It was a lie, of course, Ali would have been good at a lot of things, but being boring? She couldn’t have managed that for a second, the lunatic.
“Can I ask something?” Louisa says.
“Yes.”
“Why… don’t polar bears eat penguins?”
“Polar bears only live at the North Pole. Penguins only live at the South Pole.”
“Was it Ted who told Ali that?”
“Yes.”
Louisa smiles at that. Then she points to a house with lights on in all the windows and says:
“If you lived there, then?”
Joar thinks for a while.
“If I lived there, I probably wouldn’t have an ankle monitor, I’d have a normal, boring job.”
“Like a high school teacher? Like Ted?”
“Not that boring, calm down,” he snaps.
She laughs.
“Would you be married to someone ordinary? Like Ali would have been?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because that was… her thing. She said people like her and me couldn’t be with each other, because you can’t both be broken and crazy. You need to have one of you who’s ordinary.”
“But you never found anyone?”
“I never looked.”
“Was Ali your first love?”
“My last.”
Louisa blinks out across the town. She points at a huge house with an array of illuminated windows and whispers:
“There. That’s the house I live in when I’ve sold the painting and got all the money. With my friend Fish.”
“Fish?”
Louisa nods, but then she looks embarrassed.
“Yes. Only she’s dead. Can you live with dead people in this game?”
Joar nods.
“In this game you can live with whoever you want to. Has it been long since she died?”
Louisa shakes her head.
“It was… very recent. She liked games. She loved fairy tales! That’s why it’s so wrong that she died and not me, because she was kind of the hero in our story. Do you understand? The main character! You’re not supposed to die first then!”
“That isn’t the same thing,” Joar says.
“What?”
“The main character and the hero. They aren’t the same thing.”
Louisa glares at him as if he’s talking complete nonsense, but she will never forget that. Something very, very small but very important changes inside her then.
Joar points:
“Do you mean that pink house? With the big tree in the garden? Is that where you’re going to live, you and Fish?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then I can live in the house next door,” he smiles.
She looks at him apologetically.
“Forget it. You’ll never be able to afford to live next door to me when I’ve sold the painting. I’m, like, really, really rich!” she informs him. “But maybe you can come and clean my pool, if you need a job?”
He bursts out laughing so hard that it echoes across the town. So does she. Then Joar says, out of nowhere:
“Ted isn’t going to leave you. If that’s why you don’t want to sell the painting, because you think he’ll leave you and you’ll be alone again… he won’t do that. Ted is really, really fucking bad at leaving people.”
Louisa pretends to be very interested in a house in the other direction so he won’t see her wiping her whole face with her shirt. Then she says:
“You’re bad at that too. I saw the wheelchair ramp down there. You lived here with your dad after the accident, didn’t you?”
Joar lies on his back on the roof.
“Yes.”
“You took care of him? Despite everything he had done to you?”
“He became a different man. It’s hard to explain. He could hardly talk, he needed help eating, washing, going to the bathroom… but that isn’t what made the difference. The real difference was in his eyes. There was no hatred in them anymore. Hell, in the end even I didn’t hate him anymore. In those last years I called him ‘Dad’ when I fed him. I’d never called him that in my entire life.”
Louisa replies through gritted teeth:
“I haven’t had twenty-five years to stop doing that. So I still hate him. I’ve only just started.”
“That’s kind of you, but there’s no need,” Joar says.
“Yes, there is! Because you just stayed here with him, your whole life, instead of—”
Joar’s laughter interrupts her.
“Instead of what? Becoming a professional soccer player? An astronaut? What the hell would I have become? I didn’t have a future anyway, all the damn adults I met believed I was going to die young. All this is a bonus for me. Besides, I didn’t stay for my old man. I stayed for Mom. They moved here, because staying in the apartment was impossible with the wheelchair, so I had to move with them to look after the house. Mom is… hell, she doesn’t even have a driver’s license. And she cuts the grass in high heels, for goodness’ sake.”
Then Louisa thinks that perhaps life is long, but when that steel beam swung through the air in the harbor that day, it slowed Joar’s time down. Now it is creeping forward. Before the steel beam, he had been in a hurry to get to the summer, in a hurry for tomorrow, in a hurry to love his friends. But during the twenty-five years since then, he hasn’t been in a hurry to do anything.
“Is your dad dead now?”
“Yeah. He passed away a few years ago. There was only me and Mom and a few old guys from the harbor at his funeral. The guys who were left. Men don’t live long in this town, people usually say, they all kill themselves, fast or slowly. With either a shotgun or the bottle.”
“What happened to your mom?”
Joar’s breathing grows more shallow, as if it is sliding about in his throat. It takes a while before Louisa realizes this isn’t because he feels despair, but the opposite.
“Mom met a man. A kind man. Not a mean old bastard and not a fucking monster. Just a nice, boring, sober man. He doesn’t fight, he doesn’t even raise his voice, she always gets to choose what TV shows they watch. He buys her flowers every Friday. They live a couple of hours away from here now. She called me the other day and said they’ve started playing tennis. Who the hell plays tennis ?”
He laughs so hard that summer arrives on the roof, even though it isn’t even May yet.
“A happy ending,” Louisa whispers.
“Yeah. Mom got a happy ending. No damn woman has ever deserved one more.”
“But you still live here in this house?”
“Yeah, what the hell, I could have moved, but… well, I was otherwise occupied.”
He waves the leg with the ankle monitor.
“What did you do?”
“I knocked someone out.”
“Who?”
Joar sighs.
“On the way home from Dad’s funeral, I saw a man hit a woman, next to their car, and inside the car a little girl was screaming.”
He doesn’t have to say more. Louisa understands. One day she will go find the old newspaper article about the assault, and will read that the man was beaten so badly that when he woke up in the hospital, he told the police he’d been attacked by at least five people. If Joar hadn’t gone to the police station to hand himself in, everyone would probably have believed that.
“Was it horrible? Being in prison?”
Joar shrugs his shoulders.
“It was okay. Ted sent books. Really, really boring books, but still… there was enough time to be bored. After a while I got a letter from an old man, he was that woman’s father, the child’s grandfather. He wrote to tell me that they had left that damn man, he hoped that would mean something to me. It did. Not even Ted’s books felt so boring after that. At the end of my sentence there weren’t enough cells, there are so many men like me these days that we have to wait in line just to go to prison, so they let me out with this.” He waves his ankle again.
“Were you in prison when Ted got stabbed by that kid at his school?” Louisa asks, and regrets it at once, because Joar looks so ashamed that she’s afraid he’s going to jump off the roof.
“Yeah,” he whispers, because all the people he loves are still his responsibility, all the time.
“And you were in prison when… Kimkim got sick?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you see much of each other before then?”
“No. We only met one single time after that summer when we turned fifteen.”
“What? Why?”
His grin wanders sadly from one ear to the other.
“It’s a long story.”
Then Louisa makes herself comfortable on her back, takes a deep breath of the town, and whispers:
“Okay. You can tell me the rest of it now.”
“The rest of what?”
“The rest of the whole long story! About everything! About the competition and the painting and… everything. But it mustn’t only be unhappy! It must also be a bit… you know… ordinary too.”
So Joar takes a deep breath as well, and then he begins telling her the end.