They stole away from the city, leaving Stockholm’s waterways and copper roofs at their backs as they headed north on the E4, passing beneath vast green signs and a rosy sky until endless forests of pines lined the route. Linus remained resolutely awake, the novelty of his tablet on his lap keeping him engaged. Conversation between Bell and Hanna was muted.
Bell had so many questions she wanted to ask, but it was impossible with Linus sitting in the back seat. Every so often she glanced across at her boss, seeing how Hanna’s knuckles blanched white on the steering wheel, her gaze set dead ahead with laser-beam focus, even though traffic was light. What must it be like to be driving towards a husband she hadn’t had a conversation with in seven years – a father whose son had almost grown up without him? What would their first words be? Hello? How are you? What’s the weather like out there? You grew your hair? You cut your hair? She frowned. Would the physical changes in Hanna alert him to the time he had lost? Did he know that almost a decade of his life had slipped past?
So many questions, and not one answer. It wasn’t her business and yet, she had been pulled into this story too.
They arrived in Uppsala before eight, Hanna pulling into a car park with an easy familiarity that suggested she knew it well. Bell looked around with mild curiosity as she stepped out of the car. Kris had told her it was Sweden’s fourth city, but there was nonetheless a quaint, small-town feel to the place, the skyline pierced by the dramatic gothic towers of a cathedral to the west. There were immediate similarities to Stockholm: the coloured buildings in red and yellow, every wall punctuated by multitudes of windows to maximize the northern light, barrelled mansard roofs. But unlike the capital’s wide, pale roads, here the streets were cobbled and shaded with a froth of trees; and the city was bisected not by the sea but a rushing river with cafes strung along its banks.
Linus, sensing food, allowed Bell to take his hand, and the two of them followed after Hanna’s brisk steps as she led them directly to a small cafe with a glass room at the back that overlooked the water. They ordered breakfast quickly, Linus eager to pull out his iPad again as soon as they were seated. Ordinarily Bell would have insisted he put it away at the table, but only because Hanna would have insisted on it first – and she wasn’t doing that today. Special rules applied here; seemingly everyone was being cut some slack.
Hanna gazed through the window, watching a couple of ducks swimming beside the riverbank. Two young women jogged past with earbuds in, ponytails swinging.
‘It seems like you know this place well,’ Bell posited, not wanting to intrude on Hanna’s thoughts, but not wanting either to alert Linus to the strangeness of how their day was proceeding. Several times already she had caught him glancing up at his mother with a quizzical look, and he couldn’t have failed to notice their silence on the journey.
It took Hanna a moment to process her words. ‘Yes, I studied here. The university is just over there.’ She nodded her chin vaguely over Bell’s shoulder, her voice so low that Bell had to strain to hear her. ‘It’s where we met.’
‘You and Ma—?’
The almost imperceptible shake of Hanna’s head stopped her.
‘Oh,’ Bell murmured, wanting to kick herself. Hanna and Max were the automatic couple, in her mind.
Hanna’s stare was distant, seeing back into the past, reaching out for a life that had since slipped from their grasp, like a rope in the water snaking away and leaving ripples long after it disappeared.
‘How did you meet?’
‘At a party.’ Hanna shrugged her eyebrows wryly. ‘I was going out with a friend of his at the time.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes, it was a tricky start.’ Her gaze darted like a dragonfly, nervous and flighty, never settling; Bell thought she was like a hologram of herself, there but not there. ‘But you know how university life is. My friends and I fell in love several times a week. I think we were in love with the idea of being in love.’
‘What made him different? How did he stand out for you?’
Hanna gave a tiny smile that seemed to convey only sadness. ‘Oh, it was impossible for him not to stand out. Blending in was never an option; every room he entered, he became the centre of it. Everyone knew who he was.’
Bell saw Hanna’s gaze track over to Linus – his head was bent, immersed in some shapes-logic game Max had picked out for him.
The waitress came over with their drinks. Hanna was looking back out of the window, lost to the past again, and Bell glanced down as her phone buzzed with a new text.
‘Tonight? I want to see your pretty face.’ Ivan. Giving her yet another chance.
She quickly switched off the screen and turned the phone over, not wanting the distraction. But Hanna didn’t want conversation either – or at least, she wasn’t up to it – and they sat in distracted silence, the minutes dragging, until the food came. Bell ate as if in competition with Linus, both of them feeling ravenous after the early start and car journey, but Hanna nursed her coffee like she was just using it to warm her hands, her unseeing gaze fixed on the river rushing past outside.
‘So where shall we meet you?’ Bell asked her, as they all walked back to the car afterwards. The hands on the church clock were nudging nine.
‘I don’t know yet. Keep your phone in your pocket. I’ll call you as soon as I know what’s what.’ Hanna’s eyes slid warily over to Linus again. He was leaning against the car, his cheek pressed against the window tiredly. He looked bored. He’d been promised an adventure, after all. ‘You may need to take a cab to the clinic,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Or else I’ll meet you back here again. Either way, we’ll speak.’
‘Sure,’ Bell nodded.
Linus automatically opened the back door as she bleeped the locks.
‘No, Linus,’ Hanna said, stopping him from getting in. ‘Not yet. I want you to go with Bell for a bit and be a good boy for her, okay?’
His face fell. ‘But where are you going?’
‘I’ve just got a couple of things to do first, but I’m going to meet up with you in a little while.’
‘But I want to stay with you.’
‘Well, you can’t,’ Hanna said curtly, her body stiff as he reached for her arm. ‘Not yet.’ She looked like she was about to burst into tears.
Bell crouched down on her heels beside him. ‘Linus, you know that saying “Spoiler Alert”?’ He looked back at her sullenly and she wrinkled her brow, tapping a finger thoughtfully against her lips. ‘Well, isn’t it someone’s birthday coming up soon . . .?’ His eyes widened. He’d been counting down to ten for the past nine weeks. Double figures, at last. ‘And wouldn’t it be a shame if a special surprise got ruined . . .?’
A delighted smile spread across his lips as he got her point and she smiled back, inwardly cursing that this meant she was going to have to set up some sort of surprise on Hanna’s behalf for his birthday.
Hanna shot her a grateful look as she squeezed Linus briefly. ‘I won’t be long, okay? You be good for Bell, and I’ll see you in a bit. Quick as I can.’
They watched as she got into the car and drove away, her face pale behind the glass.
‘Mamma looks sad,’ Linus said, watching the car pull into the rush-hour traffic.
‘No, she’s not sad,’ Bell said, thinking the same. ‘She’s just tired, that’s all.’
‘Because we all just woke up?’
Bell looked down at him as he slipped his hand into hers. ‘Exactly. Because we all just woke up.’
He was staring straight ahead, but the view kept disappearing every few moments, his eyes opening but always closing again too, as though the darkness that had claimed him was something sticky, unable to quite let go of him. He felt a dread he couldn’t explain, a fear that crept through him on hands and knees, circulating to every crevice and nook inside him. He knew what they had told him: this body that now moved at will and responded on cue had been a prison – his prison – for years. It had been a testing site, a laboratory, as they cut and excised, prodded, poked, manipulated, bathed, turned, experimented, tweaked . . .
He was lucky, they said, but it didn’t feel like that. Black shadows lingered not just around the periphery of his vision, but inside him too – a hole that threatened to grow and swallow him whole. Something was missing. He was alive, he was awake, and yet . . .
No one was speaking. After all the fuss and the shouts and the lights and the beeps and the faces, now everything was quiet and still. He didn’t like it. Silence held threat for him – it was the land of the sleeping, the unconscious, the dead.
He wasn’t dead – was he?
But then something came to his ear – a sweep, like the hiss of a wave – and to his eyes, a light. It was a light that grew brighter as it drew nearer, something pale and golden filling his blurry field of view. Two eyes, pale as Arctic ice, linked with his, reconnecting him to the world and blotting out the shadows. Filling him up.
No, he wasn’t dead. This was life. She was life. She was his life.
His wife.
They were in the Stadstradgarden, watching the skateboarders and chasing pigeons, when the call came an hour and ten minutes later. Hanna’s voice was like porcelain: thin, fragile, but with light shining through. ‘Come now.’
She texted the address and Bell booked an Uber, running with Linus through the park together in a race, back to the street, to catch him in time. Bell pipped him to the post, just. ‘Where are we going?’ Linus panted, worn out but excited as they slid onto the back seat.
Bell hesitated, a twist of anxiety in her gut. It wasn’t her place to tell this child the full truth that was awaiting him. ‘We’re meeting up with Mamma now. There’s something she wants to show you.’
‘You’re fast,’ he sighed, dropping his head back on the seat as the driver took them across town. ‘Considering.’
‘Considering what?’ Bell asked in mock outrage. ‘That I’m a girl?’
‘That you’re a grown-up. Most grown-ups can’t race.’
‘I’ll let you into a secret,’ she said, dropping her head back against the seat too. ‘I’m not really a grown-up.’
He frowned. ‘But you’re old.’
‘I’m twenty-six!’ she laughed, tickling him by squeezing his thigh.
‘That’s old.’
‘Yeah, fair enough. I’ve still got stride length on you, though. See?’ She extended her leg and pressed it against his. ‘A good six inches, I reckon. You’ll be overtaking me soon, and then it’ll be game over.’
‘Do you think I’ll be taller than you?’
‘I know it. You’ll take after your parents and they’re both t–tall, aren’t they?’ She stumbled, realizing she had no idea how tall his biological father was. And he had no idea Max wasn’t that man.
It was still such an unbelievable shock, even to her. She put her hand on his head and ruffled his hair. The poor child. He had no idea what they were driving towards.
They sank into an easy silence as they wove through the city, past a pink castle and garden squares. Bell checked her phone for new messages again – one from Kris reminding her he was working tonight and to finish the chilli in the fridge for dinner; one from Tove asking if she wanted to meet up for a run – and she went back to Ivan as well, reluctantly having to decline meeting up tonight too. Even if she was back in time, she was going to be wiped out by the early start this morning. She finished the text with sad face emojis, hoping he’d understand but already half expecting him to give up on her. He had three nightclubs in Södermalm, but when she’d told him she was a nanny, he probably hadn’t banked on it being her job that would make it so hard for them to meet.
She was just pressing send when the taxi pulled to a stop and she looked up to see they had stopped outside a modern, glass-fronted building, with ‘Larna Klinik’ engraved in a vast granite column.
‘What are we doing here?’ Linus asked as they walked through the automatic sliding doors into a minimalist atrium, softened only by feathery potted trees.
Bell scanned the stark space, her gaze skimming over the dark-suited receptionist tapping a keyboard behind a walnut desk. She was looking for Hanna’s distinctive berry coat amidst the smartly dressed professionals standing, talking, in small groups and hushed voices, or reading on the leather chairs. It looked more like the lobby of a corporate hotel than a hospital.
‘Bell. Linus.’
They both turned at the sound of Hanna’s voice, and saw her waving to them excitedly from the mezzanine. She pointed to the staircase off to the far side, and Bell jogged after Linus as he took off to join her. Hanna had taken off her coat to reveal a camel turtleneck jumper and trousers which, from a distance and against her light hair and pale skin, gave her an impression of being indistinct and amorphous. But there had been energy in her movement, and as Bell got to the top of the stairs she saw an intensity in Hanna’s blue eyes as she hugged her son.
Bell felt her own anxiety lift a little. ‘All okay?’ she asked lightly.
‘Better than okay. Incredible,’ Hanna said breathily, taking Linus by the hand and patting Bell’s arm warmly. ‘More than we could ever have hoped. It’s a miracle.’
‘Wow,’ Bell beamed. ‘That’s so great.’ After the scene she’d been greeted with last night and again in the kitchen this morning, she’d been braced for the worst, worrying what the hell Linus was going to see here today.
They walked briskly down a wide, all-white corridor that was lined on one side with vast glass windows looking onto the main thoroughfare in and out of the town. Although it was busy with sluggish traffic, no noise permeated here, a muffled hush maintained by murmuring voices, soundproofed walls and soft-close doors.
‘Mamma, why are we in a hospital?’ Linus asked her curiously, ogling a tray of filled specimen pots being wheeled past on a trolley.
Hanna stopped outside a door and crouched down so that they were eye to eye. She fiddled with the collar of his jacket and smoothed his hair behind one ear, gazing at him lovingly but seeming to see beyond him somehow too, as though searching for another face within his. ‘Because they serve the best – the very best – ice cream in town. Right here.’
Linus blinked back at her. His expression was complacently blank, but Bell knew he was perplexed as to why anyone – even a nine-year-old boy – would want ice cream at ten o’clock on a cold December morning. ‘Oh. Okay.’
‘Do you want an ice cream?’
He nodded unenthusiastically. ‘Sure.’
The door to their right opened and a nurse came out, smiling over at them perfunctorily as she began walking down the corridor, carrying various utensils on a tray. The door immediately began to swing closed on its hinges, but not before Bell glimpsed a narrow montage of the scene within: several doctors were standing around a bed. There was the usual array of high-tech machinery banking the room, and – rather less usual – a large contemporary abstract print on the wall.
‘But, before we do that –’
Bell turned back to them, hearing the tension flex in Hanna’s voice again. How was she going to do this? How was she going to reintroduce her son to his long-absent father?
Hanna took a big breath. ‘There’s someone I thought you’d like to meet.’
Linus blinked back at her, perfectly still. ‘Who?’
Hanna froze momentarily. ‘. . . An old friend.’
‘Of yours?’
‘Of both of ours. But you were very little the last time you met, so you may not remember.’ Hanna tipped her head fractionally to one side, as though it was a question, a nudge to remember a long-forgotten face.
Linus glanced over towards the wide door, as though sensing the mystery friend was behind it. ‘Did I like her?’
‘Actually, she’s a he. And yes, you did, very much. You were the –’ Her voice faltered suddenly. ‘You were the best of friends.’
‘What’s his name?’ Linus asked.
Hanna blinked, her smile stuck on her face but the fear gathering in her eyes again. Bell could see her courage slipping away like a tide; her body seemed to stiffen in the pose, becoming implacable and defensive. ‘. . . Well, why don’t we go in and you can introduce yourself?’
What?
Bell frowned. Hanna wasn’t going to leave it to Linus to work out the connection on his own, surely? But though her mouth opened in protest – like Max’s – he wasn’t her son, and she had to stay quiet as Hanna rose up, holding his hand. They turned to go in.
The door opened with a swoosh, the faint suckering of the draughtproofing brushes punctuating the quiet, and the group of doctors surrounding the bed turned as one. Their gazes swept over Hanna and settled downwards, on Linus.
‘Ah, Hanna, you’re back,’ one of them said from the far side of the bed, and Bell recognized the woman’s voice from the phone call yesterday. Dr Sorensen. Her voice had a pointed quality to it, as though her words carried hidden meaning.
The door closed, clamping down on any leaky audio from the outside world, hermetically sealing them in a pristine environment. Bell hung back against the wall, casting a curious gaze around the room and immediately feeling her own past reattach to her with sticky fingers. She was, sadly, no stranger to hospital rooms, but this was unlike any she had ever seen. She could still see at night, when she closed her eyes, the metal bed frames, the linoleum floor, the smell of antiseptic, the blue-tinged strip lights. But in here, there were framed photographs on a cabinet by the bed, expensive bed linen with a camel-coloured Hermes ‘H’ cashmere blanket, a potted weeping fig tree in one corner, a comfortable red linen armchair, and artwork on the walls that looked like it required insurance certificates. Was this the reality of long-term care? Personalize the environment in case he wakes up, disoriented, confused? She would have been overjoyed if this was her bedroom, full stop, much less in a hospital.
Hanna and Linus were standing by the bed, the doctors flanking them like bodyguards so that all she could see was the line of a leg beneath a sheet, a glimpse of an almost-shaved head, dark stubble grazing the shockingly white scalp. She saw the head move as the doctor in charge touched his arm – responsive, alert, functions which had seemingly been impossible even the day before yesterday.
‘I’ve brought a special visitor for you,’ she heard Hanna say, also in an altered voice. ‘Do you remember I said I would bring someone very special?’
On cue, Linus took a micro-step forward. His head was dipped and even from behind, Bell could see he was feeling shy and reluctant.
A silence billowed through the room, punctuated only by the rhythmic beat of machines monitoring his blood pressure, oxygen saturation levels . . . One of them started flashing, and the nearest doctor turned and began pressing buttons.
In the gap that opened up, Bell saw his profile. He was staring back at his son with a blank look, his skin pallid, the bony nub of his shoulders smooth beneath his hospital gown. She felt herself recoil. He was awake and he was alive, but he was not living. Not yet. His was a body that hadn’t seen daylight in seven years, skin that hadn’t felt sunshine or a cold breeze in almost a decade. For all those years, he had hovered in the realm of the unconscious, with only a hair’s breadth between the sleeping and the dead.
By contrast, Linus was overstuffed with life force – radiant and rosy, glossy and glowing from his run in the park. His curls shone like golden leaves, and there was something about the outward curve of his plump cheeks that seemed a rebuke to the sunken dip of his father’s. There was no mirror in the room, but his father’s hand must have travelled upon his face; he surely knew the hard shapes he made in that bed.
‘Hello, I’m Linus. I’m nearly ten.’ His arm rose like a lever, Hanna standing crooked and immobile beside him, like a twig caught in a frozen lake. The moment stretched out – elastic, expansive – as the small arm stayed pointing towards him until slowly, he lowered it again.
Linus looked up at his mother, a dawning look of panic on his face. ‘Did I do something wrong?’ he whispered. Bell felt a pinch of concern.
‘It’s okay, it’s fine,’ Hanna whispered, placing a hand on his head.
Another doctor, an Asian woman standing closest to them, crouched down and smiled at him encouragingly. ‘Don’t take it to heart, Linus, your father is still very weak –’
Silence cracked like a clap of thunder, a brilliant white light exploding in the room as the mistake was realized, and for several moments, the room was held in a suspended state. No one breathed, stirred, spoke. But then a sound started up – a sound made from fright, the moment before a scream – and the energy in the room shifted like a hibernating bear turning over in its cave, a great immobile mass suddenly moved and unsettled from position.
The sound yawned into the room, a moan that rapidly became a siren wail – and through the gaps, as the doctors suddenly converged, Bell saw the emaciated, atrophied body on the bed beginning to thrash with surprising force.
Linus gave a scream of fright and began to cry, but Hanna was rooted still, unable to tear her gaze from the unravelling scene on the bed.
‘Get them out!’ Dr Sorensen barked as the doctors all grabbed a limb and tried to restrain their patient. There were six of them, and still it was a challenge.
Hanna, somehow, bundled Linus to her and they staggered back two paces from the bed, watching on in horror as bed straps were buckled onto his wrists and ankles, pinning him in place. But it wasn’t enough. His body still writhed, his head banging against the pillow, screams and obscenities crashing around the room with frightening violence. The chaos bloomed into deeper colours, spreading wide its petals so that everything lay exposed and vulnerable, screams echoing in the stark space and raining down on them all, wails and moans and shouts blending into an indistinct maw.
Bell ran over to the mother and son, both of them frozen, Hanna’s body rigid in her grip.
‘We need to leave,’ she said, shaking Hanna firmly, wrenching her attention off the horror in the bed. ‘We need to get Linus out of here. Now.’ And she forcibly pushed them both towards the door, their footsteps stumbling and leaden.
She flung open the door and the screams and curses and profanities and moans escaped into the corridor with them, like a rush of ghouls. A nurse walking by startled at the tumult, silence dropping as suddenly as a velvet curtain again as soon as the door swished shut.
‘Can I help?’ she asked, seeing their ashen faces.
‘We’re fine. But thank you,’ Bell managed, seeing how Hanna was trembling, as white as the walls. The nurse walked on.
‘Come and sit down, you look faint,’ Bell said, tugging Hanna forward by the arm to a leather tub chair. She collapsed into it, staring into nowhere, caught in her own head.
Bell crouched down to clasp her arms around Linus. ‘Hey, are you okay?’ she whispered, pulling back to look into his eyes, to smooth his hair back from that beautiful face, to reassure him that it was all okay again. His sobs had subsided, but his eyelashes were glossy with hot tears. He nodded, but the movement was shaky, the movement of a child wanting to make his mother happy again; his eyes kept tracking back to her, fearful.
‘Are you sure?’
He nodded again, but he would only look at his mother.
‘Hanna?’ she asked, turning to her too and touching her arm lightly.
Hanna blinked, her eyes darting everywhere. ‘I’m . . . I’m fine.’
Bell felt the silence expand as they each recovered. Away from the distraction of the confusion and chaos in that room, in the calm of this corridor, it was filled with something heavy – something that had been said and couldn’t be unsaid. She felt a rush of anger that Hanna had allowed this to happen. To have handled it that badly . . . Max had been right. Linus should never have come here; and if Hanna was adamant he must, she should have told him the truth before they’d gone in. She should have explained exactly who that man was, and what had happened to him – and what might happen when he was reunited with the poppy-tall son he had last seen as a toddler. Instead, she’d left it to chance, and it had blown up in the most terrible of ways.
‘She called him my father.’ It was a statement, a question, an accusation.
Oh God. Bell felt her stomach twist as she saw the uncomprehending expression on Linus’s tear-streaked face. He had been told the truth, and now Hanna had to explain it to him. Everything was back to front; it should never have happened this way . . .
Hanna looked back at him, finally, and with outstretched arms, drew him towards her. Her hands were trembling still, her smile sketchy and weak. Bell swallowed. How could she say these words, here, in a hospital corridor? Max, fifty miles away, unable to tell the boy he had raised as his own that he was still his father, would always be that.
‘. . . That doctor was just confused, sweetheart.’
Linus blinked, not so easily fooled. He was nearly ten, almost in double figures, a few years from being a teenager. ‘But she said—’
‘I know, but she was wrong. He’s just an old friend of mine. He’s your godfather.’
Bell stared at her in horror. What the hell was she doing? She could understand why Hanna hadn’t told Linus about his real father before he had woken up: Linus would have been just a toddler when the accident had happened, and if the prognosis had been so poor . . . And Max had been an excellent father to him. There had never been any sense of difference that even she had discerned between his affection for Linus and for his sisters. But all of that was irrelevant now that the man in there was awake and was, in one way or another, going to be back in their lives. Linus had to know the truth. It couldn’t be kept from him. And yet –
‘You know who your daddy is.’
Linus looked confused. Of course he knew his own father. Max. The man at breakfast and dinner, kicking a ball in the park on Saturdays and there at every school concert and play. The man who made the World’s Best BLT and tickled him till he wet himself, who had never yet beaten him at Fortnite and yet still played without complaint, who took him to the Hammarby IF handball games in Eriksdalshallen and went skiing off-piste with him whilst the girls did the bunny runs, who watched all the Bond films in one week with him when he’d broken his leg. He had never even questioned it.
He looked back towards the room, its door firmly shut, no sound escaping from it now. ‘So he’s my godfather?’
Hanna hesitated, then gave another shrug, the action careless and cold. ‘Yes.’ She took his hand in hers and kissed it, her decision made, her resolve growing again. ‘Like I said, just someone I used to know.’
Linus softened, accepting the lie, the tension slackening in his face. ‘So then, can we get ice cream now?’
Another pause, and Bell saw invisible doors to the truth slamming between them and clicking to a lock.
‘Sure,’ Hanna smiled, getting up and – still holding his hand – beginning to swing his arm as they turned and walked down the corridor, as though they were in the park.
Bell stood rooted to the spot as she watched them go ahead, walking without a backward glance from the room where a man lay distressed, withered – and now abandoned. He had spent seven years here on the brink of death, trapped in a half-life, but his injuries had robbed him of far more than his consciousness. He couldn’t know it yet, but, Bell thought as she followed slowly after his wife and son in silent dismay, he was soon going to realize that waking up had been the easy part.