Chapter 115
When Vidar finally returned to his car, Sander watched him go, feeling pensive. Everything had that stillness that follows moments after a thunderstorm. After a while, Sander stood up and looked toward the forest, like he wondered if he should walk straight in and vanish too.
“Was he right?” Jakob asked.
“About what?”
“That you would have liked to go down for the landslide.”
Sander appeared to consider the question, but he didn’t respond.
“Maybe you should tell her,” Jakob said. “Olivia, I mean.” When Sander still didn’t speak, Jakob went on: “You’re not a bad person, Sander.”
“I’m a person. Maybe that’s enough. But why didn’t you say anything back then, if you thought it was me all along?”
Jakob stood up to join Sander. It must have been a difficult question, because he didn’t answer right away.
“I guess I couldn’t really see the point.
It was all over anyway. Mikael was dead, Killian too.
I liked you, and I was pretty sure you got wrapped up in the whole thing by mistake, or maybe just because you wanted to help Killian.
And in some ways I could understand, after I heard about how Mikael went after Felicia and what Karl-Henrik was up to with Madeleine.
Or at least that’s how I thought about it at the time, during all the chaos.
It was extreme, though, what you did. I know you couldn’t predict that the whole area was going to collapse, but you did knowingly risk hurting an awful lot of people. ”
The moment when another person’s image of you crumbles. Sander had experienced it many times now, but it still hurt.
“You’re kind, Jakob. You always have been.”
“So they say. But I’m taking care of myself too. Alice says I’m not on my own side all too often. I didn’t really understand what she meant until now.”
Moments slipped in and out of one another, borrowing features, taking on new faces deep inside Sander.
He threw Killian’s Christmas present at the wall. The small package fell to the floor.
Then Killian died, and Sander lost his true north.
That was how it felt, as if the very structure of his life had fallen to pieces.
In the cover of darkness, he went back to retrieve the present late on Christmas Day, to have one last thing to remember his friend by.
The package was just where they’d left it, as if it had been waiting for him.
In that moment, Sander found the money in the bag from the carpentry shop. Jakob’s money. It was in the hatch he and Killian had built in the floor. The beer bunker.
Alone in the deserted cabin, a switch flipped inside him. Everything was already ruined, and he was going to go away. That was the fate he pictured. He wanted to wipe the slate even cleaner. Take off without leaving anything behind.
As though moral order must also be restored.
Suddenly he could see himself very clearly, as if he were looking at another person. Memory can create its own distance, a sort of separation in the soul. The light of the flash made him look colder than he felt.
The Soderstroms’ house symbolized everything he hated about Skavboke.
Everything he wanted to get away from, everything that had hurt him and the people he loved.
Killian, Felicia, Jakob, everyone. It wasn’t death beaming like a dark sun over the village in that long-ago winter, but the dark cruelty of the Soderstrom family.
His hands, as they lit the dynamite, were steady and sure as a tailor’s. His head was quiet and still.
Sander remembered a barking dog coming after him, jaws snapping at him. He wriggled out of his flannel and ran on. The shirt fell to the ground somewhere out there in the mud.
Then came the landslide.
He did it to free himself from this place, from what had once been. Instead, he became even more tightly bound to all of it.
He could have shared all of this with Jakob, and maybe it would have been true. But he didn’t. Instead, he just said:
“See you around, Jakob. I hope.”
And he began to walk to his car, which wasn’t far down the gravel road; he walked into the darkness and the slowly expanding dawn.