Chapter Fifty-Six
FIFTY-SIX
Ted gets out of the passenger side of the car and looks up at the roof anxiously.
“Why are you sitting up there? You might fall!” he calls to Louisa.
“What about me? I might fall too,” Joar shouts back, insulted.
“You’re old, you don’t have so much to live for,” Ted replies.
The driver’s door opens and a woman in her seventies gets out. She’s short and stern-looking, she looks a lot like the sort of woman who might well end up in prison if a young person asked if she needed help crossing the street. Ted calls to Joar to come down to the kitchen, but of course Joar calls back defiantly that no, they’ll have to come up to the roof! Ted asks if Joar is insane, and Joar replies that Ted should stop being such a little coward. Then Ted looks a little like he might be thinking of saying that the woman next to him is far too old to sit on a roof. And the woman notices, and then she decides that she’s definitely going to sit on the roof. So a few minutes later she’s up there dangling her legs, and that’s how Louisa meets Christian’s mother.
“So, my dear, you’re the one who’s been given the most beautiful painting in the world?” she smiles.
“Yes,” Louisa replies, heavy with guilt.
Then Christian’s mother pats her on the knee, and Louisa doesn’t actually hate it at all.
“Kim must have liked you an awful, awful lot, my dear. I’m sorry you lost him.”
“I’m sorry you lost him too,” Louisa says, and then she adds: “And I’m sorry you lost Christian. Ted told me about him.”
“Thank you, my dear. Ted told me that you lost someone you loved too.”
She holds out her finger and catches a tear as it rolls down Louisa’s cheek, no adult has ever done that for her, so the question just tumbles out of Louisa:
“Did you get over it? Christian dying?”
The woman shakes her head sadly.
“No, no, my dear. You never get over death. Not if you’re someone who loves. But it’s easier if you’re a parent. Then you don’t have a choice. I have another child, Christian’s younger sister, I have grandchildren now. People always say that you should live as if every day was your last, but when you have children you realize that you have to live as if every day was their first. That’s hard for you to understand, you’re only a child yourself—”
“I’m eighteen!” Louisa protests, as if the woman ought to be impressed.
“I’m sorry, you have so much life ahead of you, so many losses,” the woman replies, and then she asks: “Do you see her everywhere? The person you lost?”
“Yes! It’s like I see her out of the corner of my eye, all the time, in crowds…,” Louisa nods.
Then the woman holds Louisa’s hand, and to her own surprise, Louisa lets her.
“The first years, I was angry every time that happened,” the woman says. “I thought I heard Christian’s voice in the supermarket, or saw his favorite sweater disappear around a corner, but when I ran after him it was someone else. Oh, I hated it! I was furious! Until one day I realized that it wasn’t a curse, it was a blessing. Those were little winks from Heaven. It was Christian playing hide-and-seek with me, the way we did when he was little. So every time it happens now, every time I see him out of the corner of my eye, I whisper: ‘Peekaboo.’?”
They are interrupted by a curse. It’s Ted, trying to climb out onto the roof without losing his footing, and of course losing his footing at once. He almost slides over the edge, Joar catches him at the very last second.
“How the hell are you still alive? Everyone else dies, but you’re still here…,” Joar mutters when Ted finally sits down.
“I seem to be more difficult to kill than one might imagine,” Ted admits.
The sun has gone down and the streetlamps have come on, the shadows dance around them. Louisa looks over her shoulder and whispers out into the darkness:
“Peekaboo.”
They sit there in silence for a while. Then Christian’s mother clears her throat authoritatively and announces:
“I’ll make some calls tomorrow, my dear. It won’t be hard to sell the painting, you just need to decide if you have any preferences.”
“What does that mean?” Louisa asks.
“If you want to sell it directly to a collector, or if you want to sell it at auction. There’ll probably be more media attention with an auction, and you might get more money for it.”
Louisa shakes her head.
“No, no. No attention. Please.”
“Well, then,” the woman says, as if discussion of the matter is concluded.
“Can we go down to the kitchen now?” Ted wonders hopefully.
“No! I haven’t finished the story of that night when we broke into the museum yet!” Joar says. “You think you’re the only one allowed to tell stories here?”
But he lets Christian’s mother tell the rest of it, because this part belongs to her. How her phone rang in the middle of the night and she was terrified, because she could never hear that sound without thinking something terrible had happened. And how a scared boy at the other end stammered that he had been given her number by Christian.
She mumbled back drowsily: “It’s… you?”
Kimkim, more than a little confused, whispered back: “What? Who am… I?”
Then she gasped: “You’re the boy my son called me about, that last time, when he said he had found one of us.”
Kimkim got so nervous he slurred his words as he tried to explain, but she didn’t even let him finish. She just asked for the address, getting dressed as she did so, then took a taxi to the museum and threw money at the driver before running inside. There she collided with the security guard. Unfortunately the guard immediately asked if she was all right, but in a tone that suggested she was extremely fragile, and isn’t that typical of men? So the atmosphere wasn’t great to begin with.
Then the guard explained that she had to identify a painting and confirm that it was painted by one of the children, and then she saw it. Dear Lord and all the angels in Heaven, she saw it and almost fell over. How did her heart not burst every button on her blouse? Incomprehensible.
“That’s the one,” Joar said, pointing.
“Yes, I can see perfectly well that it’s that one!” she snapped so sharply that even Joar was lost for words.
“I… was just trying to help,” he muttered, so Christian’s mother softened a little and said:
“I’m sorry for my tone, but I teach art history! So of course I understand that this is the painting. Anyone can see that it doesn’t belong here!”
Then Kimkim said disconsolately behind her:
“I know, I know, it doesn’t belong here, it was stupid, all of this. Can we just be allowed to go now? We won’t cause any more problems, I promise…”
But Christian’s mother swept her hand excitedly around at all the other art on the walls, then pointed at his painting:
“Of course it doesn’t belong here! None of the artists who painted those could paint like this !”
Kimkim was almost crying now:
“No… no, I can’t paint like real artists, I get it! I haven’t been to art school or anything, I—”
Then Christian’s mother clapped her hands together in a mildly frustrated prayer and exclaimed:
“No, thank goodness, you haven’t had any training! No one who’s had any training paints like that! Art doesn’t require training, dear child, art just needs friends.”
Then she crouched down in front of his painting, and when she saw the skulls next to his name she sobbed so hard that no one really knew what to do. The guard cleared his throat.
“So… you can confirm that this painting belongs to the kids?”
“Yes, yes, yes!” she sobbed.
“And… can you drive the kids home too? They have a car parked outside, but I think the shortest one drove them here, because he’s holding the keys, and how old can he be? Eleven?”
“FIFTEEN! And I drive a hell of a lot better than you! How old are you? Sixty?” Joar snapped.
“I’m thirty-seven,” the guard said, a little hurt.
“You look ten years younger,” Ali said quickly, and the guard brightened up.
“Like hell he—” Joar began, before being fully preoccupied with getting kicked in the shin really hard.
“Let’s go, before he calls the police!” Ali hissed, and Ted and Kimkim nodded eagerly.
So Joar stepped forward to pick up the painting, but Christian’s mother asked:
“May I… carry it?”
They let her. She carried it as if it were alive.