16. Anne-Risten
ANNE-RISTEN
1985
How long had it taken for her to start wishing the baby away? Not long. It was hardly more than a sprouting seed, but her belly remembered the first two pregnancies and began to prepare, swelling after just a few weeks.
Anne-Risten sighed and pulled on her jacket. That was enough, she had to stop wallowing in the past. But her thoughts were more persistent than these gnats and, alone in the forest like this, it was hard to keep them from invading her mind.
She had ended up with two heavy pails of cloudberries and now stood by the edge of the road, an ache running from one shoulder and past her ear into her temple. It might turn into a migraine. She checked her watch; Isá was late, should have picked her up fifteen minutes ago. She needed to pee but had held it to keep from baring her bottom in the wind. But it was a bad idea to hold it, surely the bacteria were thriving now. Wasn’t that an ache just above her pubic bone? Her belly felt heavy. Why had she drunk so much coffee? If she got a UTI from this, well, Isá would have to drive her into town. There was a risk that she might start peeing blood and develop a fever. This had happened once before, but Enná told her it was just the beets she’d eaten. What did she know? The doctor had needed to prescribe an extra-strong dose of penicillin. The thought made her restless, and she paced the gravel road, walking circles around the cloudberry pails and trying to breathe normally, but her lungs forced the air back out in shallow bursts, wouldn’t let anything reach her belly. If there was blood in her urine it could be a kidney infection. She placed a hand on Enná’s black utility pants and gently pressed low down on her abdomen; yes, it hurt. She felt her back and the lower part of her rib cage, knowing just where her kidneys were, and squeezed, but so far it didn’t hurt there.
“Focus on that now,” she said to herself.
She knew just when and where she had seriously wished the third baby gone for the first time. After dropping Cecilia off at Gun-Britt’s, she’d gone to Tempo and found herself sitting in a dressing room with flared jeans she couldn’t button. She tried a size up, but then several inches of fabric covered her feet like bells. She couldn’t look at herself in the mirror when she admitted she didn’t want a third child, that she was wishing a life out of existence. It had become easier to get an abortion in Sweden, she’d read, by then you could access care without having been raped or being seriously ill. But there was no way Roger would agree to it, and she would never dare bring it up. How could she even think of killing their child? But she hardly had the energy for two kids, how was she supposed to manage three?
She regretted saying anything to him, she should have kept her pregnancy a secret and gone to the midwife to make an appointment. There hadn’t been any kicking yet, but she knew as soon as she felt a tiny drumroll below her navel that she wouldn’t be able to get rid of the fetus.
She had trembled in a cold sweat there inside the dressing room, incapable of changing back into her own clothes and leaving. It hadn’t been very busy at Tempo, and of course most of the people there were women. Housewives like her, but also the ones who walked over from City Hall, women with important jobs who popped in for a minute over lunch. Anne-Risten thought there was a different sort of look to them, a confidence as they walked around purposefully, knowing what they were looking for and shopping efficiently. She had just started thinking about getting a job, had pictured it; both kids would soon be in school. It wouldn’t have been much longer. If not for the third one.
She was good with numbers, had gone to secretarial school. Sometimes she took out her class photo from the school in Kiruna and ran her finger over herself in the front row with a hairdo as tall and teased as the other girls’. She looked like any one of them—the same polo shirt, short skirt, and that hair. To think that she had even been brave enough to leave the village and move in with relatives in town. Staying in the village had never been an option, though. She was going to become someone. Something different. But then Roger saw her. He was attending KPU. A tall man with warm hands, he proposed early and saw to it that everyone knew she was his. He got a job in the mine straight out of school. No job for her; instead the children arrived.
She had tried to distract herself behind the curtain at Tempo, pretending she, too, was on her lunch break, returning soon to a very important job at City Hall. The great open foyer in the brick building had a dizzyingly high ceiling, and she knew the sound of clacking heels echoed up to every floor. She had stood on one of the balconies, looking down at the miners during the strike of ’69. Held Niklas tight to her chest and saw Roger sitting alongside the others, his arms crossed, ready for battle, a grim look in his eyes. She was the one who had convinced him to finally leave the mine and become a train engineer instead. She wanted him aboveground. Those years when he’d been down below, unreachable, had been terrible. All the times she’d held a shrieking Niklas in her arms, bathed in sweat, so sure he was fatally ill. She dissolved some aspirin in water and tried to spoon it into him, but he just spat and sputtered. It wasn’t as if she could call them up and ask them to track down her husband from deep underground in one of the many drifts. It was easier with the train, although sometimes he had to spend the night in Narvik or Lule?. She always counted the hours until he was home again.
Anne-Risten heard a car approaching; it had to be Isá. She wouldn’t let on how annoyed she was that he was late. Best to keep him in a good mood in case she needed a ride to the emergency room in town. She’d have to think up a decent lie, no talking about bloody urine, it had to be something else. The children. Of course. He would never be able to say no.