26

“What are we looking for?”

Magnus was holding his joint out the driver’s seat window. He had been dragging his heels ever since I called him that morning. There were rules for the kind of relationship we had, and I had broken them. The fact that he was willing to use his athletic tongue between my legs didn’t mean he would be willing to do me any other favors; he wasn’t my boyfriend. I knew this well enough, but he had a car, and his company wasn’t nearly as demanding as Thomas’s or Barbara’s would have been. Having him tag along was the closest I could come to doing this the way I preferred: alone.

“Number twenty-two Forest Road.”

He snorted. “There isn’t a single tree within miles from here.”

He was right about that. The town and its immediate surroundings were everything but picturesque. The main road leading into the center of town was flanked by claustrophobically narrow sidewalks and low-slung houses painted in screaming colors. The range of shops included a hairdresser, a suntanning salon, a bakery, and a grocery store that was dumped in the middle of a deserted parking lot.

I was struggling to make sense of Magnus’s GPS.

“You have to take a right at the next crossing. Then take the fourth road on your left.”

“Are you going to tell me what this is about? Is there something you need me to do for you?”

He wedged his joint between his lips, slipped a hand between my thighs, and starting working his long, strong fingers. I got his hand off me and pulled away. Magnus had parked in front of a yellow-brick house on Forest Road.

“No, and no.”

He sighed dramatically, took a final puff on his joint, and flicked it onto the sidewalk.

“Perfect surfing weather today,” he said, squinting up at the sky. “And here we are, fifty miles inland. How long did you say this was going to take?”

I shrugged. My body felt relaxed for once. The internal trembling had abated as soon as I had lifted the first file of my case history out of its box that morning:

Girl, 8 years old. Till now, well-adjusted. Has been institutionalized with a view to finding permanent foster care after a recent family tragedy . . . registered mental illness in the family.

Apart from the notes made by the social worker, there were two private letters: one from my grandmother requesting custody of me, and one from my aunt renouncing all contact.

 

. . . I was sorry to learn of the circumstances befalling my sister’s daughter, but as we have not had contact with either the girl or her mother for several years we are unable to offer her a home in familiar, secure surroundings. Furthermore, taking in the girl would be directly opposed to the wishes of my sister, and this we have chosen to respect . . . Birgit Højer.

The only Birgit Højer close to Thisted was the woman living on Forest Road in this town with no forest.

The house itself was an anonymous, yellow-brick building with lilacs and rhododendrons in the garden and brown patches on the lawn. It was located at the end of a blind alley and beyond it lay open, newly-harvested meadows. The door onto the roofed porch stood open and in its shade I could see a glimpse of a hammock and a table covered with a plastic floral-print tablecloth.

Magnus took out two fresh joints out of the glove compartment and offered me one with a quirked eyebrow. I shook my head. I was stone cold sober for a change, and glad of it.

“Wait here.”

Magnus cast one more rueful glance at the blue skies above and another at his watch. “Can you wrap this up in half an hour? Then I can still get a session in this afternoon.”

I slammed the door of the van behind me, my mouth suddenly bone dry, and walked up to the garden gate. One of those awful miniature dogs was barking hysterically in the yard next door. It was spurting energetically up and down the other side of the hedge, looking for an imaginary hole to scoot through. There was still time to turn back. If my mother had felt the need to get a restraining order against her own sister, there probably wasn’t a lot of sense in my looking her up at all; she must have hated my mother.

“Hallo? Can I help you?”

An elderly woman had appeared on the porch. She stood peering at me, one hand shading her eyes against the sun.

I took a step back involuntarily, suddenly aware of the fact that I was dressed in a T-shirt and flip-flops and now desperately wished I’d thought to change. And my hair reeked of Magnus’s joint.

“I’m looking for Birgit Højer.”

“Yes, I’m Birgit Højer.” She stepped off the porch and came towards me purposefully. Not in a gesture of congeniality, but more like I imagine a goalie would meet the rush of a striker in the penalty area. She stopped in front of me and braced her arms across her chest. No trace of a smile about either the eyes or lips. Just grim determination.

“My name is Ella Nygaard, and I am . . . ”

“I know very well who you are. You look like your mother.”

We stood staring at each other in silence for a while. If my aunt also resembled my mother, I failed to see how. She was old, probably well over seventy, and neatly dressed in a pink short-sleeved shirt, white Bermudas, and sandals with a moderate heel. Her thin white hair was pulled severely back into a knot at the nape of her neck, mercilessly exposing the hard lines of her face. If there had ever been anything soft about it, time and life had shorn it off; only bare cheekbones, eye sockets, and the jawbone remained.

“I’m ill,” she said, as if reading my thoughts. “So if you could keep it brief.”

I shot a glance over her shoulder. My aunt had put a jug of ice-water on the table under the shaded porch. There wasn’t a breath of wind on the sundrenched lawn.

“I wanted to know if you could tell me a something about my mother.”

It was the soft approach I had prepared. Not a word about restraining orders and harassment. No mention of brain tissue splattered on galoshes.

“What would you like to know?”

“I thought perhaps you could tell me what she was like as a child.”

My aunt shook her head. “She liked to attract attention to herself. Always wore pretty dresses and pearls, that kind of thing.”

The last comment was delivered with a tight smile, and I guessed that Birgit Højer had never attracted attention to herself. Not even at an age that usually calls for princess dresses and diamond tiaras. The two sisters didn’t have any physical likeness either, as far as I could tell. In the photographs I had seen of my mother she seemed like a shy, gentle woman. Her body was frail, slightly bow-necked, as if constantly warding off the world. Birgit, on the other hand, carried herself tall and rigid as a pillar.

“You and your family are Jehovah’s Witnesses . . . ”

The woman standing in front of me didn’t reply, casting an impatient look over my shoulder instead. “Is that your . . . friend . . . over there?”

Magnus had gotten out of the van and was pacing back and forth on the sidewalk. He towered up over the hedge, lost in his own world and the music on his iPhone. His long blond locks had been gathered into a ponytail; his second, loosely rolled joint was dangling from the corner of his mouth.

“I’m really sorry about what happened to you and Anna. About all of it. I wish I had been able to do something for you both before it was too late. But you have to understand . . . ” She squinted into the sun. “Anna had always had something ugly inside her, so in a way, it didn’t surprise us that she died the way she did. Already as a little girl . . . seeing her do up her face like that . . . it was grotesque. She used to paint her lips bright red with a brush, her eyelids light blue.”

The corners of my aunt’s mouth curled in unmitigated disgust.

“And then later, she met him. Your father. We knew he wasn’t the first boy she’d had in that way, but he was the first one who was dumb enough to let her move in. My parents were heartbroken.”

I touched a hand to the heart-shaped amber pendant I always wore around my neck. I wished I could put my arms around my mother; the little girl who liked to paint her eyelids light blue, her lips a dramatic shade of red. I would have told her she was just fine the way she was. My aunt turned on her heel and made for the house.

“You and your father harassed her,” I said quietly. “You persecuted her when she moved in with my grandmother. Why?”

My aunt turned and looked at me long and hard.

“We tried to save her—till there was nothing left to save. The police called it harassment, but it was merely a loving reminder that her family was still there for her, that she could come back to us, if she wished. For a long time, we hoped that we could be reunited after her death. In spite of everything. What your mother said about us was all lies. The evil upon her was too great. It happens. We couldn’t save her, but if she had stayed with us, she would still be alive today.”

“If she had stayed with you, I would never have been born.”

My aunt nodded, and smiled faintly. Clearly she wasn’t deaf to the conversation’s sharp undertones. “It’s purely hypothetical, Ella. You shouldn’t take that kind of speculation personally. Sometimes one has to take a theoretical stance to life. Imagine, for instance, what is lost by choosing one road instead of another. How different one’s life could have been. Anna could have been happy with us.”

“I’m trying to figure out what happened . . . ”

I no longer knew what I wanted from her. She had known my mother, but it was hard to believe that my aunt had ever seen my mother for who she was. Everything my aunt saw was clouded by moral and religious interpretation. Not to mention persistent anger over being deserted. Drops of sweat had collected on the surface of her perfectly pale foundation, and her hands were clasped so tightly together that you would think she was fighting back a suicidal impulse.

“Ella.” She turned and came up to me abruptly, opened her arms, and pulled me close with unexpected feeling. “I am really sorry about what happened to the two of you. You mustn’t believe anything else. It hurts so terribly much. We are flesh and blood after all.”

My aunt was luxuriously perfumed, but below the pall of expensive perfume was her own body odor. Summer sweat and something sharp, like that of an animal, a smell that brought flashes of my mother’s face along with it; their bodies had the same odor, the characteristic scent of my herd. I saw my mother bent over me as I lay in my bed.

Then the two faces glided apart once more.

“She had a friend,” my aunt said into my hair. “I know this, because her friend also fell out with the church. And there was gossip. The friend came from the Faroe Isles originally. Lea Poulsen was her name. She married into our congregation shortly after your mother left the church. She and her husband had two boys together, but they split up, and Lea got mixed up with drugs. Narcotics. Your mother and Lea were seen together a couple of times—they met each other in a support group for fallen members of the congregation.”

An elderly man had appeared in the doorway on the porch behind her. He hadn’t taken the trouble to greet me. My aunt let go of me and seemed to be making a determined effort to shake me off, as if I were an unwelcome burst of rain.

“I would invite you in,” she said. “But I’m not feeling very well today.”

I nodded, and smiled. She had given me what I’d come for after all.

“Farewell, Ella. It was good to meet you.”

The man behind her stood completely still. He just stared at me and his comely wife till she finally turned her back and walked away.