THE STORY RAN on a loop feed on the TV 2 News at six-minute intervals. The young anchorwoman’s face took on concerned furrows, while her older male colleague informed viewers about the case.
“The Copenhagen Police are searching for ten-year-old Lukas Bjerre. The boy disappeared today from Nyholm School in Copenhagen, and the police are now asking for assistance from anyone who might have information on the case.”
A photo of Lukas and a silhouette of a boy’s body filled the screen and then, with gloomy authority, the anchorwoman’s voice relayed:
“Police describe Lukas as small for his age. He is four feet six inches tall, with blue eyes and blond hair. He was last seen at the Nyholm School at eight o’clock this morning wearing a dark-blue down jacket, black snow pants, and an orange-colored backpack.” A computer-generated sketch of the jacket and backpack appeared. “The down jacket Lukas Bjerre was wearing has artwork stitched on the back depicting Canadian pop star Justin Bieber, and the boy’s orange school bag is LEGO Ninjago brand with a Stormtrooper reflector dangling from it, like the one pictured here.”
The male anchor nodded somberly and added:
“The police request that anyone who might have seen Lukas during the day or has any other information about the case please contact the Copenhagen Police by dialing 114. Once again, the number is one hundred … fourteen.”
The stylized pause in the middle of the phone number marked that the story was over for now. The newscasters packed up their sad expressions and sashayed onward into their program.
“And now, the weather forecast. What do you say, Michael Sjøll? Any chance that we’ll be seeing slightly warmer weather?”
“No, Poul, unfortunately there’s no sign of that. The next few days are expected to bring temperatures as low as twenty degrees as well as plenty of snow.”
“Who does he look like, this weather guy?” Heloise asked, getting up sleepily from the sofa as Gerda came into the living room.
Gerda cocked her head and studied him for a moment.
“The man in the yellow hat from Curious George, maybe?” she said, flopping down onto the soft sofa cushions.
Heloise smiled.
She went out into Gerda’s kitchen and got a bottle of chardonnay from the fridge. She didn’t ask for permission, and she didn’t need to, either. Gerda was family. Sure, not by blood but in every way that mattered. She took two stemmed wineglasses from the cupboard over the sink. Then she returned to the living room and crawled under Gerda’s soft plaid blanket. Gerda was absorbed in the clip, which had started over again from the beginning.
“Man, this is just awful.” Gerda put her hands up to her cheeks and shook her head. “We should still be out there looking for him. It feels wrong to just sit here.”
Many of the parents who had been at the Nyholm School when the police arrived had immediately set out searching for Lukas, both inside the school building and in the neighborhood. They had activated phone trees, assigned streets to different groups of volunteers, eager, like people with donation buckets collecting for the Red Cross.
Heloise, Lulu, and Gerda had searched on and around Bredgade and in the restaurants and bodegas in Nyhavn. No one they talked to had seen the boy. Eventually Lulu’s lips had started turning blue and they had decided to go home. But there were still tons of volunteers walking around out there, and the flashing blue police lights were making their silent way around the neighborhood for the fifth hour in a row now.
Heloise poured the wine and handed Gerda one of the glasses. Gerda took it without taking her eyes off the screen, and Heloise observed her for a moment. It hit her that Gerda had lost weight. Her collar bone was more clearly pronounced than usual in the neckline of her T-shirt, and her arms looked thin, sinewy.
“Say, have you not been eating lately?” Heloise asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve lost weight.”
“You think so?” Gerda looked down at her arms. Then she shrugged. “Maybe a little. It’s because Christian is off traveling so much these days. So meals end up being whatever’s easy, something Lulu will want to eat, and after three days of spaghetti and meatballs I just lose my appetite.”
“Where is he this time?”
“Denver.”
“Denver?” Heloise wrinkled her forehead. “Isn’t that one of those places where people wear cowboy hats and leather chaps?”
“No, maybe you’re thinking of Dallas. Denver’s in Colorado.”
Heloise was used to hearing about Christian’s trips, and they were almost always to the same small handful of cities: Hong Kong, New York, Shanghai, Paris … fashion centers. She’d never heard Denver come up before, not in connection with Christian’s job.
“His firm acquired a company over there, so now Denver’s on the list too. As if we didn’t have enough destinations.” Gerda gave Heloise a sleepy look. “How about Martin? Where is he tonight?”
“At Bryggen. Almost as exotic as Denver.”
“Is he spending the night at your place later?”
“No, I’m not really up for it today.” Heloise got up and looked out the window. On the other side of Olfert Fischers Gade, one floor higher than Gerda’s, she could see her own living room window and balcony. The green windbreak had come loose on one side and hung, flapping in the wind so that it banged each time it hit the metal bars in the railing. It had woken her up several times in the last few nights, and she reminded herself that she needed to fix it before she went to bed.
She thought about the pill and contemplated when to take it. The doctor had said that she should set aside a whole day for it, but he had also said that she had plenty of time. Still a few weeks before it became critical. Maybe get the PTSD article out the door first and then take one day off next week?
“What aren’t you up for?” Gerda asked. “Martin?”
Heloise blinked her thoughts away. She sat down on the windowsill and rubbed her eyes so the black mascara rubbed off onto her fingertips.
“Mm-hmm,” she nodded.
Gerda furrowed her brow. “Why not? Are things not okay?”
“No, they are, but … He keeps talking about the future.” Heloise put air quotes around the word.
“So what?”
“The future,” she repeated, as if the very use of the word were equivalent to putting her in checkmate. “I think he’s somehow decided that I’m the kind of person you start a family with.”
“And that’s a problem?”
“Uh, yeah. That’s a problem! The only family I’m interested in being part of is yours. You, Christian, and Lulu make sense. The rest of the world?” She shook her head. “Not so much.”
The previous weekend, Martin Duvall, whom Heloise had been dating for the last year and a half, had invited her to a rented summer home up in Rørvig. Up until then, she had believed that he understood who she was and that he accepted her this way: Broken. And thus different. But in Rørvig he had taken every opportunity to draw dreams in the sand and toss out future plans like you cast a fishing line.
This is the kind of place one can imagine growing old in, right? Here by the water! Somewhere where you could enjoy your old age. Teach your grandkids to fly a kite. Grill fish on the beach. That kind of thing.
Heloise had stared at him in speechless terror, paralyzed by the thought of this peach-colored old age in the distant future that Martin seemed to be picturing, like some montage from a German chocolate commercial.
What do you say, Helo? You and me, old and gray. Right here!
He had taken a deep breath, inhaling the fresh, frosty scent of wet moss, pine forest, and the ocean. Then he had looked at her through lenses that were completely fogged up from contentment and smiled.
You make me happy, you know that, right?
Heloise had evaded all his questions with a noncommittal smile and well-choreographed dodges. She lied about work calls she needed to answer so she could get away from the house, out into the orchard by herself. She had taken long walks in the woods and had been better able to imagine a life of solitude in one of the battered old cabins she had seen deep in the woods than see herself as part of a nuclear family in a top-of-the-line architect-designed summer home.
Happy?
What Martin called being happy was nothing more than a mirage to Heloise. An electric current that might hum through a person’s body without warning, giving you a feeling of well-being. Deceitful impulses in the brain, whose purpose was to obfuscate the feeling of meaninglessness that had become the foundational condition of her life.
“Mommy?”
Lulu called out from her bedroom at the other end of the apartment for the eighth time since she had been put to bed. Gerda had been back and forth ad absurdum and had brought her a glass of water and fluffed her pillows until she was bug-eyed with weariness. Her head lolled backward now to rest on the back of the sofa as she responded, the patience in her voice strained.
“Yeeeees?”
“I think I heard something,” Lulu called. “Could you just come check the back door again?”
“Everything is closed and locked, honey. It’s just me and Heloise, and it’s time for you to go to sleep now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“No one can get in here?”
“No one can get in here!”
“Okay … goodnight.”
“Goodnight, sweetie.”
Gerda looked exhaustedly over at Heloise. She raised both eyebrows and then mimed wringing her own neck. Then she raised her wineglass in a silent toast with Heloise.
Heloise caught herself swallowing twice before she removed the glass from her mouth. For a split second she contemplated whether she should be drinking alcohol at all and then instantly decided to have another glass.
“Goodniiiiiight!” Lulu called out again.
“Goodnight, Lulu! Settle down now!” Gerda looked at Heloise and whispered, “Oh my God already … Go to sleep, little girl!”
“No wonder she’s having trouble falling asleep, what with everything that happened today.”
“That’s not why.” Gerda shook her head. “At least that’s not the only reason. She’s been like this for weeks now. I don’t know where it came from. She’s just suddenly so afraid of everything.”
“Are they friends, she and Lukas?”
“No, he’s a good bit older than her, but he’s in her friendship class.”
“What’s that?”
“When they start in kindergarten, they get paired with a class a couple of grades ahead of them, so the youngest kids get to know some of the bigger kids. That way they have someone to go to on the playground if they need help. It’s a really nice setup, and Lulu’s class has been paired with class 3X. They’ve had classes together once a month for a year and a half. But I don’t think Lukas made all that much of an impression on her. Right now she’s mostly into a fifth-grade boy named Tristan who plays basketball.”
“So Lukas isn’t the boy you told me about recently? The one who was acting up and ruining class for the other kids?”
“No, that’s Toke. He’s in Lukas’s class too. It’s the same fuss every time, and the staff say they can’t do anything about it. They’ve set up this screen now in the classroom that separates him from the rest of the students so he can’t see them. It’s totally nuts.”
“A screen?” Heloise raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“I mean a big old screen! Like in an old locker room. I guess the idea is that it’s supposed to keep the peace during class time, but as soon as recess comes along, boom, he’s hitting the other kids, pushing them down the stairs, kicking them …” Gerda shook her head. “Welcome to public school in Denmark in the twenty-first century, where the buzz words are inclusion and conflict resolution.”
“But a screen doesn’t help anyone.”
“Oh, you don’t say.”
“I mean, not Toke and not the other kids in the class.”
“Right again.”
“Does he seriously push the other kids down the stairs?”
Gerda nodded and reached for the wine bottle. “He put Lulu in a chokehold last year.”
“You’re joking.”
“No, really. He’s a little shit, but his parents are the real mess. They’ve simply ruined that boy. Lukas, on the other hand …” Gerda pointed at the TV and sighed. “He’s always so sweet when you see him. And polite. That’s so rare with kids that age, that they’re polite. Oh, this whole thing is so awful. Jens and Fie must be scared to death.”
Heloise nodded and then lapsed into thought about what that would feel like, the ultimate fear and powerlessness. She couldn’t imagine anything worse.
Gerda looked at her out of the corner of her eye. “I thought I heard you tell your police pal that you were with Jens today?”
Heloise looked up. “Huh?”
“Were you at the doctor’s today?”
Heloise confirmed it with a nod.
“What for?”
Heloise shrugged. “Oh, nothing, really. I’ve just been feeling a little weird lately. I have this uneasiness in my chest and thought that it might be stress or something like that.”
“Stress?”
“Yeah, you know … My job, my dad’s death, and so on. That could all sort of pile up and come out in a sort of stress reaction, right?”
“Yeah, but you could have just talked to me about that.”
“Well, yeah, of course I could …” Heloise smiled disarmingly. She wasn’t used to lying to Gerda, and the words tasted bitter in her mouth. “But Dr. Bjerre suggested that I should get my metabolism checked instead. He said that an anxious feeling like that could be related to my thyroid.”
“Hmm,” Gerda said and studied Heloise. “Did you do that, then?”
“Do what?”
“Get your thyroid tested?”
“No, because then the school called and …” Heloise pointed to the TV screen. “Then I just hurried out.”
Gerda looked over at the TV again and sighed heavily. “Surely they’ll find the boy soon, right? I don’t know if I can take any more horrors today. The idea is for this kind of thing to stop when I leave the barracks. School is usually the place where life makes sense, but now …” She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
“Hard day at work?” Heloise asked.
“Mm.”
“I tried calling you a couple of times.”
Gerda opened her eyes again and got up. “Yeah, I saw, but I was crazy busy.”
“At the barracks?”
She ran a hand through her long, dark hair. “No, I was at National Hospital most of the day.”
“At the hospital?” Heloise leaned forward on the window ledge. “Why?”
“Because one of my clients is an inpatient over there right now. He is seriously messed up.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s been struggling with PTSD for a long time, but they keep deploying him over and over again. He just came home from a special assignment yesterday and apparently fell asleep on the sofa in his living room late last night.”
Gerda leaned in the doorway and stuck her hands in the pockets of her faded jeans.
“Then he woke up sometime in the middle of the night, jet-lagged and disoriented in the dark, and saw that little red diode light on the TV. And he instinctively thought it was the laser sight from a sniper rifle being pointed at him.”
Heloise’s eyebrows shot up. “Whoa!”
“Yes, a lot of soldiers have thoughts like that,” Gerda nodded. “They’re ever vigilant, always ready for battle. So this soldier, he sees something he recognizes and he follows through, based on his automatic reflex. The problem is just that when you do that, two plus two doesn’t always equal four. So before he even had a chance to think about it, he ran and jumped through a window in his apartment.”
Heloise covered her mouth with her hand. “Please tell me he lived on the ground floor!”
“Third floor.”
“No way!”
“Yeah,” Gerda nodded. “Luckily he landed in the grass, but he broke both femurs and has a deep gash in his right forearm from the window glass. And we’re talking about a man who’s been in war zones I don’t know how many times. He’s been shot at. He’s killed people. He’s seen several of his buddies blown to smithereens, but he himself had never suffered so much as a scratch during a deployment. He’s a real tough guy. And now suddenly one day he gets so scared of his TV that he jumps from the third floor. His TV! I’m telling you, PTSD sucks.”
“That’s why I want to write about it,” Heloise nodded. “About war trauma and delayed reactions. Do you think he’d be interested in being part of my article?”
Gerda smiled. “And talk about his drop roll? Hardly.”
“What about you? Would you be willing to be part of it?”
“I can’t tell you these things on the record. You know that.”
“No, but you could give me a big picture view of PTSD as an expert source.”
Gerda shrugged in agreement. “I think a couple of my other clients might like to talk to you. Or some of their family members. It’s something that affects the entire family, this stuff.”
“Would it be okay if I stopped by the barracks one of these days?”
Gerda yawned and looked at her watch. Then she nodded. “Sure. But now I’ve got to go to bed. I’m beat. Do you want to sleep on the sofa or are you going home?”
“I’m going to go now.” Heloise got up and pointed the remote at the TV to turn off the news.
“Wait,” Gerda said. “Look!”
Heloise looked at the strip of yellow text rolling across the bottom of the screen:
BREAKING NEWS: Development in the case of missing student Lukas Bjerre. Police have blocked off Kronprinsessegade.