Anja

HER HUSBAND’S been working too much lately. Even into the night. He sits in his office under the bright light and draws. Anja tries to get him to make something to eat, to rake the yard, to go to the store, the theatre, the movies. He refuses.

“I’m working, can’t you see that?”

“I see,” Anja answers.

“This has to be done very soon,” he says, bending over his drawing again. “I have a deadline. Next week.”

A deadline. He always has a deadline. Every week. This is how it happens, Anja thinks. This is how couples grow distant from each other, how they sit at the same breakfast table — if they even do that anymore — and don’t speak. Share a newspaper and sip their coffee, mutter a few words about the weather and the headlines and then hurry off to work. If only they had a child. Then they would talk more, about the child’s school and piano lessons and summer vacations and allowance. As it is, all they have is this stale twosome, silence at meals, turning away from each other in bed at night.

Anja tries to peek over his shoulder at what’s on his desk: what exactly has he been up to all these evenings?

“What is it?” she asks.

“Stop it. You’re bothering me,” he answers.

Anja doesn’t give up. “What are you drawing?”

“This is a confidential project.”

Anja’s suspicions are aroused. Confidential? Since when did the architecture firm’s projects become confidential? He covers his work with a large tablecloth and glares at her. Where did he get a tablecloth — from the linen closet? Why? She looks at her husband, not knowing what to say. Something is troubling him, an annoyance, or some sudden worry, she can’t tell which.

“I’m sure you can show it to your wife,” she coaxes. “No project is that confidential.”

He resists, pushing the cloth to the edges of the table to ensure that nothing shows. The whole idea of the tablecloth seems ridiculous, melodramatic.

“Show it to me,” she insists.

“No,” he says.

“Come on, show me.”

“Well, if you don’t tell anyone else about it. You can’t blab.”

“Who would I blab to?”

“This is top secret,” he says again.

“I understand,” Anja answers.

He takes hold of the edge of the tablecloth and pulls it away with a magician’s flourish. Anja looks at the drawings. Her first reaction is an involuntary laugh. Is he teasing her? He pouts like a child and looks at her expectantly, holding the white tablecloth in front of him like an apron. Anja’s laugh fades. She looks at the drawings again. Sketches. Rough, arching lines that form something like a building. It resembles a child’s drawing, the kind of thing a child would draw on a long, rainy day. It’s carefully done, though, detailed, clever even. But childish, helplessly infantile. It can’t really be a commission.

Anja looks at her husband, aghast.

“Well?” he says.

“Well, what?”

“What do you think of it?”

“Are you serious?”

“Serious?”

“Yes. Are you serious, or is it some sort of joke?”

“Are you calling my work a joke?”

“Honey …”

“What?”

Anja starts to cry. The tears flow silently. He looks at her in shock, then down at his drawing. Doubt shows on his face, surprise and a shadow of fear: like a child who’s been caught misbehaving.

He sits helplessly in his chair.

Anja goes to him and kisses his forehead, smooths his hair. He wads the tablecloth in his hands.

“I think they’ve been talking at work. Saying that I’m not doing well.”

“Have they?”

“I’ve been having trouble with my lines lately. My strokes. That’s what old age does. I can’t draw a straight line anymore. I’m losing my grip somehow. I can’t design anymore. I don’t know how.”

Anja takes him in her arms and holds him tight. Sometimes it feels like she can’t get close enough to him, her beloved, like she ought to be able to get inside him, into his inner space, and even that wouldn’t be close enough. Her husband extricates himself from her embrace and looks her in the eye.

“I couldn’t remember a client’s name last week. An important customer, a big design contract. I had completely forgotten about the project. How could I forget something like that? Is that normal? The client asked me about the designs, and I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what he was talking about — I didn’t remember.”

“You’re absentminded. You’ve always been absentminded. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

How long will she lie to herself, deny what she sees, just to be protected a little longer? The drawings lie on the desk like a silent shout. She’s careful not to look at them, not to say anything more about them.

Just so they can be here together a little longer.

THE CRIME THAT her sense of responsibility told her must be committed had to be planned precisely. It was important that her plan have a backup plan, and that her backup plan have a second, emergency backup plan.

Anja had made a list of various ways of dying when she was planning her own exit. Now she opened the locked drawer of her desk and took the list out again. The first choices — hanging, slitting your wrists, throwing yourself under a train — were out of the question, of course. She crossed them out.

She had read somewhere in a detective novel about an insulin overdose. It was fourth on the list. It was a good idea, and even gentle, according to Anja’s understanding of the physiology of dying, but acquiring the necessary materials was problematic. Insulin wasn’t available without a prescription. Anja tried to think up a story to get her sister to write her a prescription for it, but rejected the idea quickly. Marita was too curious: she would demand to know what she wanted the insulin for.

Of course she could always break into the nursing-home drug supply. But that wouldn’t be wise: they would keep an exact account of all the drugs. Anja put a question mark after insulin overdose.

An air embolism was a possibility. She remembered reading a crime novel where that was the murder method. The simplicity of the idea seemed brilliant. Air in the bloodstream was usually an accidental cause of death, the result of carelessness. A person on an intravenous drip would get air in their veins from the IV for one reason or another, and the air would move through their veins and end up in their heart or brain.

It was important that the death be peaceful and painless, gentle, as only a considered, deliberate death could be. It was also important that her own role in the death be a passive one. It would be less like a crime somehow if she just sat by and watched the life slowly drift out of her husband’s body, the slim frame of flesh and bone that had already started to dissolve along with his memories.

An embolism seemed smart for practical reasons, too. Because of his medication, her husband regularly suffered dehydration, which was treated with an IV drip. He was given intravenous antibiotics for various infections. An air embolism was a genuine risk with these treatments. If it happened it might not arouse as many questions among the staff as some other indeterminate cause of death.

But then Anja started thinking about the air moving through his veins. How could you steer it? And what if it moved through them in some disastrous way that wasn’t fatal but caused unbearable pain, pain that would make him scream in anguish and bring the nursing-home staff running? She couldn’t take that risk. She rejected the idea of an embolism.

She thought about his regular medication. He’d been prescribed Ebixa. It affected the chemical transmitters in the brain and had been used to treat Alzheimer’s for a long time. What were Ebixa’s effects in combination with other drugs? Was there a drug that wasn’t recommended for those taking Ebixa because the two drugs were dangerous when taken together?

ANJA TOOK the Fennica pharmaceutical guide from the drawer and laid it on the desk. Her sister hadn’t noticed it was missing; Anja had taken it from her office the last time she visited. It was last year’s guide — her sister might happen to need this year’s, and Anja couldn’t risk having her notice it was gone.

She glanced at the door. She’d locked it, just in case. She opened the book and started flipping through the pages. She was trying to stay calm, but her breathing was shaky.

Ebixa. She searched for the section where they talked about drug interactions. Ebixa had strong interactions with some drugs that affected the central nervous system. There were other warnings as well, but nothing that was fatal. It warned about changes in plasma levels. Anja wasn’t sure what that meant.

She looked up from the book and sighed. She would have to know a lot more about pharmacology to be able to develop a discreet method, something that couldn’t be connected to her.

She leafed aimlessly through the pages. A drug catalogue is of no use if you don’t understand the vocabulary of the profession. What kind of drug was she looking for exactly? Something with an effect that was potent and quick, something that would work when combined with other drugs, and be eliminated from the body quickly, without leaving a trace.

She turned another page. Suddenly there it was, quite by accident. Dormicum. The name had an ominously placid rhythm, fateful, and Anja held her breath, shocked that she’d found what she was looking for. She scanned the rest of the entry:

A short-acting sleep medication, with midazolam as its active ingredient. Should not be used in combination with drugs containing erythromycin. Reported interactions with some antifungals (Nizoral). Maximum recommended prescription 20 tablets.

There were also warnings about the use of Dormicum when pregnant or breastfeeding and in cases of organ failure, but she didn’t need to read those. She knew enough already. This was it. She knew that erythromycin was an active ingredient in antibiotics. Her husband had frequent infections. Did they treat him with drugs containing erythromycin?

The most important thing, though, was that the drug was “short-acting.” That meant that it would take effect quickly and disappear from his system quickly. Just like she wanted: untraceable.

She looked up from the book again and stared out the window at the bustle of people on Aleksanterinkatu. Drops of sleet were falling. The day folded into evening, the sleet fell, Anja breathed silently there before her discovery and felt the triumph of it breaking through the thin thread of her sadness. Now she had to carry out her plan. There was no excuse for backing away now. All she had to do was make up a story to get some from the pharmacy.

*

“AH,” THE DOCTOR at the health clinic said, glancing at Anja over his glasses. “So you’re having trouble sleeping.”

“Yes,” Anja said humbly.

She was ashamed. It felt even more as if fate were mocking her. It was the same doctor she’d had when she came for the Doxal in the summer. For one horrified instant she thought of her patient information. Would he be able to see her psychiatric consultation and the fact that she was referred because of “suicidal behavior” in her medical record? But the doctor just smiled amiably. Maybe psychiatric information was in a different file, she thought, relieved.

“And what about your depression? Was it helped at all by the antidepressants?”

The doctor tapped his pen on his knee and tilted his head to give her a kindly look.

“Well, I took them,” Anja mumbled.

“That’s good. And what was the result?” he asked, glancing at his papers. “Was it what you’d hoped?”

“Pretty much,” she said, gazing out the window.

He looked at her patient information, then back at her.

It occurred to her that he might refuse to prescribe any medication for her. She had to be careful. She had to lie, if the situation demanded it.

The doctor glanced at his computer monitor again.

“I’ll prescribe Tenox for you,” he said. “It’s a common sleeping medication, effective and reliable.”

Anja shook her head tensely and made a noise of protest. The doctor raised his eyebrows.

“I don’t think it’ll work,” she said. She could hear the nervousness in her voice.

She needed an explanation. In a split second, she thought of a brilliant excuse, held together by a careless lie.

“I’ve tried them. They didn’t work for me.”

The doctor sighed, turned in his chair and looked at her. There was a little bit of doubt in his eyes already. Or maybe it was just weariness.

“What drug were you thinking of, then?” he asked. “Did you have a specific medication in mind?”

Anja fiddled with the hem of her skirt.

“Yes,” she began warily. “My sister is a doctor and she recommended … Dormicum. She said it was … fast-acting. I’d like to take Dormicum, if that’s all right.” Anja could feel the sweat on her hand against the smooth fabric of her skirt.

“Dormicum is an old product,” the doctor said. “It has numerous side effects.”

His doubt was apparent now, and gave his voice an authoritative tone.

Anja strove to sound nonchalant. “I’ve used it before. I’m used to it.”

He peered at her, evaluating.

She lied some more. “I haven’t had any problems with Dormicum. It works for me.”

The doctor pondered a moment. “All right,” he said finally. “If that’s what you want. I’ll prescribe Dormicum.”

He turned to write the prescription.

Anja interjected: “Could you possibly write me a double prescription?”

He glanced up in surprise. She quickly thought up another lie.

“I’m going out of town at the end of the month, to a conference in the United States.”

His hesitance seemed to strengthen again.

She continued in a light, melodious voice. “The time difference and everything. I have an important presentation to give, and it would be miserable if I ran out and couldn’t sleep before my talk.”

The lie glimmered through her explanation. Or maybe only she could hear it, the hint of a tremble in her voice.

The doctor picked up his pen, tapped it on the desk, and looked her sharply in the eye.

“I’ve been in similar situations myself,” he said, speaking slowly and deliberately.

Anja’s heart thumped. “What situations?”

Silence. The lie floated in the air, and the doctor was just about to reach out and grab it. At any moment he might realize it, call the police, report a crime. Anja looked at the door. There was still time to escape if she got up right now and ran.

But a sympathetic smile spread across the doctor’s face. “Conference presentations. Sleepless nights. Anxiety.”

“Oh,” Anja said with relief. “Right.”

“I suppose I can write you a double prescription,” he said kindly. “For the advancement of knowledge, since you’re giving a presentation.”

“For the advancement of knowledge,” Anja said, camouflaging her deception with a forced smile.

The doctor typed the prescription, printed it, and handed it to her with a smile on his lips.

Anja thanked him and said goodbye, gazing at the floor.

AT FIRST SHE THOUGHT she would wait until there was some kind of infection. She quietly conferred with the nursing home about the details of her husband’s medications. She couldn’t ask about it directly, of course — that would arouse suspicion — but it was clear that they were very strict about their treatments for infections; patients with dementia were never given any drugs containing erythromycin. In any case, if she wanted the cause of death to be untraceable it was best not to have a plan that relied on the drug interacting with other medications. The sleeping pills would be eliminated from the body more slowly if they were combined with erythromycin. They would leave traces and suspicion would be directed at her. So she shouldn’t wait for an infection to occur, at least not because of the erythromycin, anyway. But if her husband did contract some virus, or even pneumonia, his death wouldn’t seem as unexpected.

She mulled over the alternatives for two weeks. On the sixteenth of November, her husband contracted a case of the common flu. It had begun as a cough over the previous weekend, and progressed as a mild fever. No antibiotics were prescribed. Anja thought the flu would have to do.

There was nothing unusual about the day itself. She just knew it was the right day. A clear sky, temperatures just above freezing, the puddles iced over and the ground covered with frost. It was a Tuesday.

Anja went swimming in the morning. She swam a kilometer and a half and then floated for another fifteen minutes, drifting on the slanting blue water, wishing she’d sink to the bottom but remaining afloat, her hair like sea algae, caressed by the water. When she lowered her head under the water, it was wonderfully quiet. Under the water she felt wonderfully light. Under the water she could forget.

But she got out of the pool and walked across the cold tiles to the sauna and sat down on a bench. A fat woman with breasts that hung to her waist threw half a ladle of water on the sauna stove. In the hiss of steam, Anja could have cried; her sniffles would have been concealed by the sigh of the vapor. But she just sat and watched the steam filling the air, the angles of the benches, and the way the fat water-thrower gradually disappeared into the arms of the mist.

THE DAY WAS CLEAR. The sun shone at a slant and made the frosty bricks of the Stockmann department store sparkle. A workman was unloading a moving truck on the corner, his breath steaming in the sharp air as he laughingly yelled to a partner deep in the cab of the truck. How lucky to be a man unloading a truck on a morning like this, Anja thought.

She caught the bus at Railway Square. Once she was on the bus, numerous reasons to give up her plan came to mind. The day was too beautiful, much too beautiful. On a day like this she ought to be riding her bike along the Vantaa River, stopping now and then to sit on a bench and have a snack, hot coffee from a thermos and a ham-and-cheese sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. She could still do that, she thought. She could still do it if she got off, changed buses, went home and got her bike, packed a picnic. The river with its little inlets, a thin layer of slush on them that had formed during the night, the fresh air and the bicycle tires rasping against the frozen gravel path. There was still time, she thought. She put her hand in her purse and fumbled for the bottle of pills, its small, innocent shape. Dormicum.

The bus slowed, pulled over at a bus stop. Anja was already getting up, pressing her heels against the floor, laying her left hand on the back of the seat in front of her. But just as she was about to stand, she found that her legs didn’t have the strength. Her motion was left half-complete, stalled, and died. She had to carry this out to the end now.

They came to the nursing-home stop and Anja got off. During the short walk, a surprising calm at the fact of it descended on her. She opened the door and walked across the lobby, greeting the receptionist as she always did.

Her husband was sitting in the day room, his head turned to look at something out the window. A bird fluttered from the bird feeder to the branch of a nearby tree, as if it knew it was being watched. It soon flew back, pecked at something in the feeder, turned its head, and flew away again. Her husband coughed.

Anja put her hand on his. He turned his head and looked at her, or past her.

“Wet hair,” he said hoarsely, and tried to lift his hand to touch her hair.

“Yes, it is,” Anja said with a smile. “I’ve been swimming. That’s why my hair’s wet.”

She listened to the sound of her own voice. It sounded strangely ordinary, but like it was coming from someplace far away, from behind a closed door, from another time, an entirely different reality.

“Fish swim and birds fly,” he said with a sigh, and lowered his hand, turning back toward the window. “People don’t have wings,” he said wearily.

Anja helped him stand up, let him lean on her. They walked slowly to his room. When they got there he sat down on the bed, looking away. Anja helped him lie down and sat next to him on the bed.

She waited a moment, then took the pill bottle out of her purse. She’d poured the contents of one bottle into the other, doubling its contents. She realized that it would have been better to grind the tablets up at home: he might not be able to swallow dozens of tablets, since even swallowing one was hard for him.

She thought that this was another, final reason to turn back — the fact that she hadn’t thought to grind up the tablets at home. Perhaps she should go home to do it, wait for a better time. If she ground them up with the mortar, they’d take on a peppery flavor. Wouldn’t that be a good way to leave this world, with the taste of pepper in your mouth?

No. That was no excuse. She had to act now.

She picked up a spoon left on the table from some untouched meal, folded a piece of paper she found in her purse, and poured the tablets into the folded corner. Her hand shook a little as she crushed the tablets against the table with the spoon.

Dormicum. The word itself was like a lullaby. Dormi — it meant “sleep”, of course. And cum — “with” or “together.” Sleep together. The name was a direct invitation to sink into slumber. To lay down your head, close your eyes, and drift away from reality. Let us sleep, and never wake again.

Anja looked at the folded paper full of powder. Her husband had turned away from the window and was looking into her eyes now, not past her or through her but straight into her fear and uncertainty. And, in his eyes, Anja couldn’t see the request that she was here to fulfill. She saw a completely different request, the request you usually see when you encounter someone weaker than yourself, when you raise your hand against the weak. It shone from his face, naked, demanding, and suddenly all the power was in that request. It was the same power that shines from the eyes of an animal caught in a trap — not the power to blame or to act, but the power to assign responsibility; and that carried all the power in the world.

Anja didn’t know what happened. She didn’t know how long she stood there, her husband’s naked request there with all its power, but she saw her right hand pick up the folded paper with the powder inside and pour it back into the pill bottle. Her hand shook: the powder fell on the sheet next to her husband’s hand. She brushed it onto the floor. It stood out against the blue linoleum like a streak of ash. She scratched it away with her foot.

She couldn’t look at him now. She hung her head and quickly said goodbye, squeezing his hand hesitantly and taking a few panicked steps toward the door. In the doorway the pill bottle fell to the floor with a clatter and she picked it up and put it in her purse, then opened the door and hurried, half running, down the hall to the lobby and out of the building.

Outside, a wall of cold air met her. It reached into her lungs so suddenly that she felt like she couldn’t get her breath. She felt like throwing up. She wandered toward the wall of the nursing home, stumbled around the corner, and sank to her knees in the snow. It was fresh, still soft, and without thinking she pressed her bare hands into it. The cold was a distant sting. The cold felt good. Tears finally came. She sobbed, there on her knees, with her hands stuck in the snow.

A waxwing was sitting in a rowan tree. Just like the one along her street, she thought. The waxwing watched her from the branch, not judging, not consoling. Just looking at her, watching over the emptiness of the snow.

IT WAS ALREADY EVENING when Anja walked across the market square and past the front of the church and turned onto Pohjoisranta. She wanted to take the same route, although she could have got there faster. Even in the dark, she found the street, as if she’d always been on her way to this place.

Johannes was home, answered the buzzer right away, waited at the top of the stairs.

“Come in,” he said. “Let’s go inside.”

AFTERWARD ANJA THOUGHT that in a strange way it was familiar. One understanding look as he gingerly stroked her neck and ran his fingers through her hair.

He pulled his shirt over his head in one movement. Anja took off her shirt and her skirt, unhooked her bra. Now they were both naked, looking at each other without making a sound. Anja felt the combined weight of sadness and comfort on her shoulders. And, as if he sensed her feelings, Johannes reached out and stroked her shoulders, his thumbs touching her collarbone, the little hollow where her collarbone touched the base of her neck.

Anja sat down on the bed and Johannes stood in front of her. He opened her thighs and brushed his fingers along their inner surface. In a completely natural, eloquent motion, he put his hands on her breasts. It didn’t feel particularly pleasurable yet, but it didn’t feel bad either, just familiar somehow.

He kissed her breasts and had a full erection now. She looked at his penis. It was different from the one she was used to, slenderer somehow. She noticed a funny little birthmark on its lower surface. She reached out and took it in her hand, like she was greeting it. Her thumb touched the birthmark and pressed softly against it, covered it, then she moved her hand so that it was visible again.

Johannes started to get more aroused, and Anja felt something awaken in herself, too. The desire came from a distance, in the shadow of her other emotions. It came to her easily: she could invite it in like an old acquaintance that she hadn’t seen in years. Old and yet new. Strange and not strange. That’s what the desire felt like.

Johannes gently pushed her onto her back and entered her and they made love in silence, with the snow falling outside the window, to the steady rhythm of each other’s breathing.