“Tell me about it.”
Barbara was sitting in an armchair with her legs pulled up under her, a glass of vodka balanced on the arm rest. I had slept through most of the day and the better half of the night. Barbara had taken care of dinner for Alex. Rye bread and liver pâté. The same thing she’d fed me on the couch. My legs had refused to carry me anywhere.
“Tell you about what?” I stared at my nails. They were chipped and dirty. Barbara had the long, square kind that clicked against her glass.
She sighed, and narrowed her eyes. The near dark deepened the red of her hair and the wrinkles under her eyes had become black craters.
“I can’t help you, if you don’t talk to me.”
I studied the holes in my socks. I had absolutely no intention of telling her anything. I had already said too much. The shock of the fit, the long sleep, and the vodka had loosened my tongue, but now I had to pull myself together. I leaned back in my chair and took a sip. It was my fourth glass of vodka, which was bordering on the excessive, but still on the safe side of the worst hangovers. The floor dipped under me, I was afloat in a rocking boat—and I liked it. Even the soreness in my muscles felt comfortable and warm when tempered by the right amount of alcohol. It was three o’clock in the morning, and up in my bed, Alex was sleeping like a stone.
“I can’t recall having asked you for your help,” I said. I could hear the words tripping over my tongue. I couldn’t feel my lips.
“Alex called me,” said Barbara. “Not an ambulance or the police or the fire brigade. He called me. Why do you suppose that is?”
“Your number is jotted down on a piece of paper on the kitchen counter.”
“He called me because you’re both on shit row if Welfare gets wind of your panic attacks. That’s what he told me, and right now, I’m the only person you know in Klitmøller. Isn’t that right?”
Barbara’s words were equally slurred, and she refilled her glass. I was glad I wasn’t the only one who was drunk.
“I’m guessing that all that in there . . . ” she pointed a finger at my head and smiled her chalk-white smile. “All that going haywire in there has got something to do with your mom and dad. I’ve heard some talk in town about your childhood.”
“What have you heard?” I said, trying to sound lighthearted; I thought about feathers, and smoke, I imagined being in one of those shithouse-sized hot air balloons that you sometimes saw floating over Damhus Lake in fine weather. I meditated on the state of weightlessness.
“I took a course in hypnosis once.” She smiled weakly.
Of course you did, I thought. Barbara was a classic example of those forlorn souls who were staunch believers in deep breathing techniques, healing crystals, and reincarnation. It was always women. They bathed themselves in soap fabricated from the departed souls of flowers collected in the northern mountains of Norway, and their gurus were always men, whom they worshipped with the same abandon as teenage girls idolized their boy bands. I wasn’t a fan of self-delusion on that kind of scale. On the other hand, my homegrown solution of a bottle of vodka above the sink and Alex dabbing my brow with a wet cloth was hardly sustainable in the long run.
“Perhaps the shaking would go away if you remembered what happened that night,” she said. “Perhaps you would be . . . free.”
I curled myself into a ball on the chair and closed my eyes. If Barbara’s powers of psychoanalysis were comparable with her artistic prowess, I was in trouble. Her drawings were awful, but the most disturbing thing about them was the complete lack of self-awareness looming large behind her vigorous pencil strokes. Somewhere in her mind, she actually believed that she could make a living from her art one day.
But she could have a point about the childhood memories. Doctor Erhardsen and the majority of my psychologists had said something similar. But there was a reason why my brain denied me access to that part of my life. It was looking out for me. And what if remembering it all just made me more fucked up than I was? I was already balancing on the tip of total destruction, as Alex would say.
“I want go to sleep,” I said. “I’ll have to ask you to leave now.”
Barbara lurched to her feet, took a woolen blanket off the arm rest, and spread it over me.
“I can’t drive anywhere right now,” she said. “I’ve had too much to drink. I’ll find a place to sleep.”
I could hear her pottering about in the kitchen as she hummed a Billie Holiday song. “Gloomy Sunday.” Her voice strained until it became hoarse and cooing and smoky. She knew the lyrics by heart. But she was off-key, and the song sounded like an antiphonal dirge from a bygone, forsaken world.
“Can’t you remember anything at all from that night?” she called to me from the kitchen. “It was November, right? So it must have been very cold and windy. What were you doing out in the dunes?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled.
I tried to focus on one of my grandmother’s pictures, which was mounted on the wall next to the window: a black-and-white print of an old painting that depicted a rowing boat in a foaming inferno of water, further out to sea, a glimpse of the stern of a ship at the horizon.
A rescue boat goes out to sea was inscribed below, and all at once, I knew that this was how my grandfather and my father’s brother had died. At sea. My grandfather had been a fisherman, I recalled, and he had fished up my grandmother in Iceland. That was the story I had been told.
“You really can’t remember a thing?”
Barbara was back. She leaned in over me, I could feel her alcohol breath on my face. The exhaustion made her look haggard, her teeth shone even more unnaturally white in her baggy-eyed face.
“No,” I said, and closed my eyes.
•••
When I woke up again, I was still lying on the couch with the woolen blanket draped over me. The house was silent as the grave, even though the sun had already climbed high over the dunes, high enough to fill the living room with a thick and dusty grey light.
The aftereffects of my short, nightmarish sleep lingered in my bones as I crawled up the staircase to the first floor bedroom.
Alex was still sleeping. He was lying on his back and the quilt had slipped down to expose his frail, tan chest. His arms rested by his sides on the sheet, his palms turned upwards, like springtime flowers in bud.
Next to him lay Barbara. Like Alex, she was lying on her back, but she was fully clothed, and her arms were crossed over her chest like a corpse. Her fingers, the long red nails, adorned her collarbones like the wings of a parrot.
“Barbara!”
I whispered hoarsely in her ear, terrified that Alex would wake up and find her lying beside him; he would hate that just as much as I did. The nausea that curled in my stomach since leaving the couch intensified; water gathered in my mouth.
She turned her head and looked at me. Her face was pale, softer without all that make-up. But she looked younger. Stronger. Like a vampire after a solid meal.
I threw up in the toilet as Barbara busied herself in the kitchen and laid the table with cereal, sugar, and milk. The stinking porridge poured out of my throat in generous quantities, consisting mostly of vodka-flavored chunks of rye bread.
Barbara put a glass of water and a cup of scalding hot coffee on the plastic tablecloth in front of me. She reeked of hangover, that particular blend of formaldehyde and formic acid, sleep, and sweat, and my nausea gelled with the intense displeasure I felt in her physical presence. It was a familiar feeling of restlessness, a compulsion to get up and leave the house. I lowered my head, trying to breathe through my mouth.
“I’m going to stay for a couple of days,” said Barbara. “I’ll just fetch some bedding, and my drawings. You can’t take care of him on your own right now.”
There it was again. The brush of an angel’s wing. A human being reaching out to me, even though I was so difficult to love. And all I could think about was getting the hell away from there. Once, I bit Foster Mother Number Three in the arm. The bite was so deep it needed stitches; her arm was yellow and blue for several weeks thereafter. If I remembered correctly, the woman had tried to stroke me on the head. Her two well-balanced daughters called me the Pit Bull until I was reassigned a couple of months later.
“I’m not very good at all that living together business. I’ve tried it before.” I said between clenched teeth.
“And you are good at living alone?”
She put both her hands on my shoulders and looked me straight in the eye. Her face was so close to mine there was no place else to look.
“Come now, Ella,” she said. “For your own sake—and Alex’s. At some point you are going to have to accept help from somebody.”
I tore myself away, but nodded. Just once.
“I’m going down to the harbor to fish with Alex a little later today. And then we’ll see.”