Chapter 71
If you asked Felicia about her life in the first few years after the landslide, you would get a peculiar comparison in response.
“It was like being shipwrecked,” she liked to say. “That’s what it was like.”
Shipwrecked. It wasn’t her usual manner of speaking.
The description must have come from someone else, maybe one of the many psychologists or doctors she’d encountered over the years.
Or one of the men? If it even mattered. One way or another, the word had been offered to her and she had accepted it the way the injured accept painkillers.
“Hi,” she said bluntly when Sander appeared at her door.
No surprise or curiosity, almost as if she had expected him.
Felicia was wearing denim shorts and a T-shirt with a large bird printed across the chest, the kind of shirt you would buy at the market out by the shore at ?stra Stranden.
One second passed, then two more, as they simply stared at each other.
Then, as if on a signal heard only by them, they smiled and met in a stiff but friendly embrace.
Her body, in his arms, was both foreign and familiar. When they let go of each other, the scent of her hair lingered and he resisted the urge to hug her again.
“I figured you would be showing up. That’s why I held off on my walk.”
The air was still comfortable, the worst of the heat yet to gather, and birds whose names he no longer knew soared across the sky.
Soon Felicia and Sander were strolling down the gravel path, the mood between them tense and a bit uneasy at first. Although they lived only half an hour apart, on different outskirts of the same small city, they hadn’t seen each other in twenty years.
When they did begin to speak, the words were strained.
But after a while, the conversation flowed more smoothly; they relaxed and realized, with some relief, that they seemed to get along.
They shared a very particular sense of humor, which was perhaps not unusual for two people who also had a tragedy in common.
“You usually take walks,” he said; he meant it as a question but it didn’t sound like one.
“Yes, that’s my alone time, you know? Good for my well-being.”
He knew she worked at some store in town these days.
For a while she had been employed by the clinic as a nurse, until she quit.
She’d gotten married, eventually. Sander didn’t know the guy, but he’d heard from his parents that the two of them had gotten a divorce a few years back. By that time, they had two kids.
“They’re up in Falkenberg with him now. We share custody. It works out pretty well. He’s got a new partner up there. Jonathan likes her, Majken doesn’t. I guess that’s how it goes.”
“Jonathan and Majken. Nice names.”
“You didn’t know their names? They’ll be fifteen and seventeen this year. Fall babies, both.”
Children, marriage, divorce. Work. All of this—how had it happened? He understood it determined who she was today, and he couldn’t connect with it except in a general, abstract sort of way. Their story had begun and ended much earlier.
“It’s weird,” she said, “having kids. Don’t you think? You’ve only just made it through your own childhood, and suddenly you’re responsible for someone else’s.”
“Yeah.”
He missed Albin and Josefin the minute he was away from them for more than a few hours.
He always had, and he wondered if it would ever stop.
Parents of adult children often said you never got used to it, you always missed your kids.
It was just that the way you missed them changed.
Or maybe that was only something they said, and you really did get used to it?
A person can get used to just about anything. He’d learned that much.
Now he remembered. Their life together was coming back to him.
Both of them had studied at the college; teacher education for him and nursing for her.
They saw each other every morning and evening, spending nights together in their student apartment on Bolmengatan.
Hours of desperate intimacy, as if they were trying to free themselves from chains neither understood, followed by arguments and silence, absence.
She took a part-time job at Hemkop, working the cash register, ringing up groceries. She found it pleasant, only having to say one thing, and saying it over and over.
They had been bound together, Sander and Felicia; when Killian died, Sander made a promise to himself always to stay by her side.
It was a salve for his conscience; he could pay off his survivor’s guilt by filling the hole left by the dead.
No one else knew about this promise, perhaps not even Felicia.
He’d never mentioned it, after all. The most fervent and significant promises are seldom spoken aloud. But he figured she knew anyway.
She glanced at his wrist.
“You kept that. The bracelet. I can’t believe it’s held up.”
“It’s pretty worn by now, but it would feel strange to take it off.”
“He’s the one who made it, right? For a Christmas present?”
“Yes.”
“He told me you threw the package at the wall. You must have changed your mind.”
Twenty years, he thought. Twenty years since they’d last walked side by side. So bizarre. His arm naturally brushed against hers now and then.
“I don’t blame you for how things turned out,” she said. “I used to, of course, but not anymore.”
“You mean…”
“Olivia. You don’t even have to say anything.
” She laughed as though an absurd thought had come to her.
“Oh my God, what were we? Nineteen? Twenty? We were doing the best we could. How long does it take to cheat on someone, a second? Two? And it’s done.
But the path there, leading up to that moment, it’s a lot longer.
I was angry because you didn’t mention anything during that time.
I was wrecked. But after a while, I realized it was about me too.
About us. How we couldn’t talk about the important stuff. ”
Words she got from someone else, Sander thought.
“I suppose that’s true,” he said.
He had other memories as well. They showed up like phantom pains.
And then he thought of his recurring dream.
It must mean something: the landslide debris, the pressure in his chest, something unfinished.
The sound of his own voice as he called out for his dead friend.
Then the impulse to dig, all the dirt and muck coming up, the pain in his hands, and he finds something.
The shirt Kjell ?stholm’s dog took a bite out of.
He stares at a mask of a face, but not a real face.
Suddenly the eyes fly open, and he recoils under Killian’s terrified gaze.
“You’re at Vall?s School, I heard,” Felicia said.
“Yes. I ended up staying. Where do you work again?”
“?hléns.”
“That’s right. I think I heard that somewhere.”
They were walking along the edge of the old landslide. If you forgot about it for a moment, you could see it in the foliage, the growth younger and more tender. Like a scar.
“I thought you were supposed to head back yesterday,” she said then.
“Right after the funeral, was the plan. But…now Filip, you know? I had to call Olivia this morning to tell her I have to stay another day, to talk to the police and stuff. It’s just weird that it’s happening all over again, somehow.”
He was walking around with a feeling in his chest, a sense of something unfinished. He couldn’t quite grasp where it came from, but he knew he didn’t want to subject Olivia to it, much less the kids.
“That’s why I quit nursing, I think. I wanted to help people, thought I would be good at it. And I probably was. But I couldn’t handle it.”
“I never believed it was him.”
Felicia looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“That Killian killed Mikael. For a while I told myself it was him, because it was easier. But really…do you think he did it?”
Felicia’s voice was suddenly weary, like before.
“We went over this so many times. We can’t—does it matter? Like, maybe? Back then, I really didn’t think he did it, but then again, I was so in love with him. The kind of love that only happens when you’re a teenager. I don’t know. If it wasn’t him, then who was it?”
That question had nagged at Sander for so many years now. Who had killed Mikael, if not Killian? He had never found an answer, really, and maybe that was an answer in itself. The only option left was Killian.
Right?
“Jakob came to see me last night,” Sander said.
“Did he?”
“He brought a shirt.”
Felicia listened. When Sander finished his story, he looked at his hands, flexing them as though they were brand-new, or had just been holding some foreign object. Was it going to feel like this every time?
She placed a gentle hand between Sander’s shoulder blades and stroked his back slowly. In that moment, he understood why he’d once fallen so hard for Felicia Grenberg.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “Are you going to tell the police?”
“I already did.”
“But, what, you think he also killed Mikael?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
During their time together, Sander had tried to bring up the topic of Mikael on several occasions.
How he’d treated Felicia, the assault. She never wanted to talk about it.
But it linked Killian to Mikael, it gave him a motive.
And Killian had been driving the car that night; the blood on the steering wheel was his. Sander knew that.
“You know,” Felicia said slowly. “I don’t really blame Mikael either.
I mean, for what he did to me. Not anymore.
He was only doing what Karl-Henrik did to my mom.
That was how he was raised to treat women.
It took becoming a mother myself to realize that.
Isn’t that strange too? It’s like you become more forgiving when you have your own kids.
Killian was the one who realized it, that it all started with Karl-Henrik.
Well, and you did too, of course. You were always so clear-sighted when it came to all that. ”
Sander didn’t respond, didn’t know what to say.
“But still, I regret…I mean, I never should have let Killian go,” he said, all in the same breath, as though he were both confessing to and denying a serious crime. “That night, when I was at his house. I should have stopped him.”
“Sander, you can’t put that on yourself.”
“I know that. Everyone says so, they always have.”
“Then what’s the matter?”
He opened his mouth but found, to his surprise, that he didn’t know what to say.