Chapter 53
One Sunday, years ago, Isidor Enoksson had stood before everyone in the chapel and described existence in all its plainness: how the world, as it truly is, is immense. “Close,” that’s what we can reach out and touch. That’s all we mean by the word close.
But even the parts we cannot reach are created with wisdom and intelligence.
The Earth is full of natural laws, and everything has its place.
The grass grows for the creatures and the grain for man, so that the farmers can work until night falls.
People are reliant on—or maybe he said at the mercy of—one another, just as birds are to the air.
Peace and order sprout from the soil and flow over man like rain.
Sander had, as usual, been dragged to church by his parents. It was a duty he had to suffer during the year of his confirmation. But after Isidor’s sermon, he, too, felt a strange warmth in his body. Whatever awaited him, it would be suffused with meaning.
Close, Sander thought now, is what we can reach out and touch. He was only a body now, a body that had given what it could.
On the way to the hospital, Sander saw the newspapers.
They featured a new young face today, a teenager who had vanished over the Christmas holiday.
It didn’t even have to do with the landslide.
An intense search was under way. Killian had been supplanted by yet another tragedy, and Sander felt robbed, somehow.
He went through the main entrance and to the reception desk, hesitation seeping through his bones.
When he spoke, he heard the hollowness in his voice. “I’m here to visit Felicia Grenberg.”
The receptionist consulted the clock on the wall behind her, then looked at her computer. She typed in Grenberg with her index fingers.
“All right.” She pointed at a long corridor. “Take a right at the end of this hallway. Then it will be the first door on your left.”
The hospital windows looked onto a dark sky. December was the strangest month; soon it would be over, and with it an entire millennium, but it didn’t feel that way.
Sander had heard from Felicia’s mother that she was still in the hospital. On the morning she was supposed to be discharged, they had discovered an infection and she had to stay.
He walked to the end of the corridor. Nurses and doctors passed him, glancing discreetly his way. He found the room and peered inside. Felicia was lying on her back in bed, dressed and under a blanket. A TV droned at low volume.
When she saw him, she reached for the remote and muted the show.
Next to the bed was a chair. Sander tentatively sat down.
“Hi. How are you feeling?”
“My fever is gone. It doesn’t hurt all that much either. I think I’ll get to go home tomorrow.”
“Where will you go? When you leave here?”
“To an apartment here in town, over by Nyhem. We’ll have to see what happens after that. I don’t know if there’s any saving it.” Her voice sounded strange, as though she were talking about a lost jacket rather than an entire home. “How about you?”
“Our house is higher up. So it survived. We’re staying in Andersberg right now, but I think they’ll let us move back home soon.”
He’d prepared so many words, but none of them would come to him in the moment. His head was full of fog.
“Killian…” he began.
“I know.”
Everything became blunted. Sander was nothing but the sound a hand makes against a brick wall, a sack of dirt landing on a lawn.
“I’ve been lying here for so long,” Felicia said, “with so much time to think, watching the fucking news over and over again. And all I can come up with is…part of me is so glad I lost the baby, because that way I won’t have to explain to him that his father is dead.”
This didn’t hit Sander the way one might have expected. There was no shock, no physical sensation of a slap or a bang. It reached him like a piece of information he already knew.
Of course. His best friend was going to be a dad.
Sander looked down. “Did he know?”
“Who?”
“Killian. Did he know he…”
Felicia shook her head.
Did he know. Past tense. That was the first time.
Until now he had persisted in using the present tense, as though language were a tool with which he could force reality to conform.
As long as he spoke about Killian as though he were alive, it was possible to imagine that he really was.
Even so, Sander knew: this bluntness inside him was the confirmation that his best friend was gone.
“Do you know how his mom and dad are doing?”
Sander shook his head. He couldn’t bear to think about it.
Instead, he saw his hand move as though controlled by someone else.
He placed it gently atop Felicia’s. It was strange—he’d spent a lot of time imagining what her palm would be like, in so many different ways.
How it would feel against his skin, how it would smell and taste.
But he had never imagined it like this. Dry and rough, just skin and bone.
She took his hand and squeezed it the way a sister hugs a brother, then let go of him and placed her hand on her belly again, over the emptiness inside, as though that were where it still belonged.
She observed his hand, the bracelet.
“That’s nice,” she said. “Is it new?”
He didn’t reply. He thought about telling her about the page of Filip’s notebook, what it had said, how he had handed it over to the police. But why would he? What did it matter now?
He wanted to ask Felicia if she had liked him the way he had liked her. Back before Killian came into her life, had she felt anything when they kissed, the way Sander had? But he didn’t dare. He could guess what the answer would be, so why bother? Anyway, that didn’t matter anymore either.
“It’s so insane,” he said, “that I’m still here and he’s gone. It was supposed to be the other way around.”
There was a glass of water on the table next to the bed. Half-full. He looked at it and didn’t understand. It was so simple to keep on living, to simply take the glass in hand. Clasp it gently and pick it up. Bring it to your mouth. Drink in the water and swallow. Swallow.
From a distance it would probably look like he was drinking, and that was accurate.
He had just broken it up into tiny steps.
Life was a series of steps, jags in a stream.
Anything can be divided up that way. You just tackle one thing at a time, and if it’s still too big you can divide it into smaller parts.
Is there a limit to how small? If there was, Sander hadn’t found it yet.
Incredible to think that it was so simple.
“Was it really an explosion?” she asked.
“The dynamite at the Soderstroms’ place ignited. Or that’s what they think, anyway.”
“It’s so crazy. I’m sure they told me that, I just don’t remember. That fever I had, it made me so loopy for a while. Who set off the dynamite?”
“No one knows. But I heard the police think it was Sten.”
“Killian’s dad?” She looked surprised. “Why would he do that?”
Sander hesitated. “I actually don’t know. But they had a fight, him and Karl-Henrik. I guess he was at Linda’s house for a few hours after that. But he took off that night. No one knows where to. He says he went home, but no one can confirm that. Did you see him?”
Felicia shook her head.
Mikael had forced himself on her. He had hurt her.
Knowing this had burned inside Sander before, but for some strange reason it didn’t now.
Mikael was dead. His father, who had perhaps made Mikael the person he was, had lost his house and his life was ruined; he probably wouldn’t recover.
He couldn’t cause any more harm to anyone.
Sander didn’t know how it had come about, but when he thought about it he could see a greater, deeper sort of justice in the situation as it stood now.
Like the murals in the chapel: being forced to see the whole picture at last. That was justice.
This time, it had struck the Soderstroms.
“Have you been back?” she asked. “After what happened, I mean? Have you seen it?”
“Only the pictures on TV, in the paper.” And only then, as the words were coming out, did he realize what he was about to say, realize it was true: “I don’t think I’m going to go back.”
“Me neither.”
But she wasn’t as certain. Sander could tell. As though it mattered now, who was certain of what, who wanted or did what, who would stay and who would leave.
He thought of the brilliant white chapel, the dark wooden bell tower. He could hear the bells ringing in his mind. Something inside him had become distorted.
He reached out again and placed his hand near her side. Sander started it, but there was no choice, really. At last she placed her hand in his, more purposefully this time. There was no one else there, they were in the middle of a frigid winter, and she probably needed someone to hold on to.