We could see the church clearly from a distance.
It was perched on a lonely hill surrounded by an otherwise flat landscape of farmlands. The narrow road we were driving along was deserted, the asphalt was light grey, burning hot, and riddled with cracks. I sat in the passenger seat with the rifle on my lap. Thomas had loaded his rifle for me and showed me how to use it. His hair was drenched in sweat.
“If something goes wrong, Ella . . . ”
Things already had fucking gone wrong, but I bit my tongue. Barbara had my son, but that’s not what he meant.
“If things go wrong, Thomas, I am the one with the gun. You could say I threatened to shoot you if you didn’t come with me,” I said. “Everyone will believe you.”
Thomas pulled over at the foot of the long chestnut alley leading up the hill. If Barbara was in the church with Alex there was no reason to tip her off to our arrival.
The sun was sharp and white through a thin veil of clouds, but there were no larks swooping over the fields. No buzzing of insects. I imagined a farmer sowing chemical fodder in the soil and leaving the rest up to wind and solar powers. It felt as though Thomas and I were the only breathing beings left on earth as we set off at a jog up that endless alley.
Right in front of the graveyard entrance Barbara’s green van was parked with the doors gaping wide. Music blared from the speakers, just like it had done on the yard at my grandmother’s house. Glenn Miller. Alex’s favorite CD. “Take the ‘A’ Train.”
“You check out the grounds,” I said. “I’ll try the church.”
The rifle lay comfortably in my hand, as if it had always been there. Thomas scanned the graveyard.
“What do you think she wants? Why do you think she came here?”
I shook my head. I didn’t have the energy to ponder Barbara’s motives, nor anything else she might have planned. If I allowed my mind to think of either, I would fall apart. There were certain scenarios I couldn’t contemplate without going insane. I couldn’t risk losing my mind. That would have to wait.
“You take the graveyard,” I said.
I walked along the white-washed walls, found the entrance to the transept and tested the door carefully. It was locked, and I abandoned all attempts at being discreet.
“Alex!”
I yelled his name as loud as I could, but I wasn’t at all sure that my voice could penetrate as far as the nave within. The solid walls gave the impression of a fortress, and the high, narrow windows were several yards over my head.
“Nothing.” Thomas had appeared from the other side of the church and shrugged in resignation. “If they’re here at all, they’re in the church.”
I kicked the door in front of me. It didn’t budge a millimeter.
“The windows,” said Thomas. “Windows can be smashed. You wait here.”
He spun on his heels and disappeared behind the massive wall, Shortly after, I heard Barbara’s van crunching over the gravel. Thomas parked the van parallel to the wall, just below one of the windows. The sun blinked through the glass mosaic Madonna above.
“After you,” he said, bending down on one knee so he could give me a leg up onto the warm roof of the van. There was still a fair distance up to the window ledge, but I could just reach it, and pull myself up. The inner arches of the vault were visible through the red and yellow stained-glass window. Thomas passed up one of the stones he had nicked from the border of the nearest grave and I smashed it through the pane, hearing the rain of colorful splinters crashing to the floor below. Then I heard Barbara. She was singing. Peace I leave with you . . . It was the psalm the congregation sang at my mother’s funeral. I remembered sitting between two strangers, the white coffin directly in front of me. This I could remember, and I remembered the voice of a beautiful, fair-haired woman ringing clear above all others. And just as I remember the voice was light and soft in the fractured acoustics of the church, the tones all wrong, tripping and tumbling over false scales.
Barbara did not react to the crash of glass behind her. She kept on singing. The rifle lay heavily against my shoulder. I could see her sitting in the first pew, she was facing the altar, but Alex was nowhere to be seen. A combination of relief and renewed fear pulsed through my body. I wondered whether he was in the church at all. He could have made a run for it, escaped down to the harbor. He was a strong boy, and she was an old woman. She could hardly do him any harm.
But still my heart froze. The stone floor was a good couple of meters below me, so I swung my legs over the window ledge, easing myself down the wall, the tips of my toes just reaching the back of the last pew. I had not been in a church since my confirmation, but as soon as my feet touched the nave floor, I recalled the smell of ancient masonry, candles, and charred electric radiators. The altar was small and sparsely decorated. The pews were carved in a dark, polished wood, the carvings dusted in a rust-colored pattern. I recognized some of the faded paintings on the walls from Barbara’s murals. The Devil loomed large and fat and self-satisfied.
Barbara had not turned round, even though she must have heard me coming, but she had stopped singing, her shoulders twitching slightly instead. Her hair had not been gathered into her usual knot at the back of her head, it hung lifelessly down her back, exposing the curve of her cranium, the grey roots at the base of her scalp.
“You’re back early,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d get back from Copenhagen before this afternoon. And I would never have expected to see you here. But that’s just how you are, Ella. Out of sync. Always in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
I approached her carefully from behind, as if approaching a wild animal. Let my hands trace along the back of the pews, the plastic ornamental roses displayed there, and caught my breath when I reached the front row. Alex was lying with his head in her lap. She was stroking his hair. His eyes were closed, his lips parted, slightly askew. A damp shimmer at the corners of his mouth.
Barbara didn’t turn to look at me. She remained intent upon caressing Alex’s forehead with one hand; in the other, she gripped a kitchen knife.
I had stopped dead in my tracks, one hand resting on the finely carved half-door of the front pew. The thought of dying had always terrified me, but the idea of losing Alex, from one moment to the next, was petrifying. Barbara could so easily stick the knife between his ribs and pierce his heart. Simply sever the pipes of his supple neck. I could see his soft pulse beating, just below the skin.
I lowered the rifle off my shoulder slowly and aimed it at her face, knowing I knew it was pointless. She had Alex, and she had a knife. And my hands were shaking so badly I was afraid I’d shoot Alex by mistake.
“Take a seat and look around you, Ella,” she said. “This is my favorite church. It has been for many years. Even when I lived in Århus I would come out here sometimes. Nobody ever comes here. They want to tear it down.”
I opened the little gate obediently and slid down onto the bench. I still had the rifle trained on her face, but it was an empty gesture, and she seemed to sense my desperate lack of alternatives.
I was so close I could’ve reached out and touched Alex’s feet, but I didn’t dare. I just wanted the world to stop turning, everything to slow down. I needed movements so slow they became imperceptible. I wanted time to stop, and wind slowly backwards. Back to when Alex and I stood on the yard in front of my grandmother’s house in waves of lyme grass. Back to us walking in the park in Hvidovre, a plastic Netto bag filled with cans dangling between us, enough loot for cupcakes from the bakery. Further back. To the time I destroyed my foster mother’s greenhouse and called her the fattest cow in the world. Further and still further back. To the dark, and the night the world went under.
“What have you done to him?”
She smiled, and all at once I could see the drug addict in the tired, unmade face of the woman before me. The teeth she had lost that had been replaced with a new set, white as chalk. The tear-drop tattoos on the insides of her elbows that were meant to disguise the pitiful state of her lacerated veins.
“Angel dust for my angel,” she whispered, turning to meet my gaze for the first time. She’d been crying. “A little for him, and a little for me. Just enough to blunt the edge. And a little to sleep on.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Barbara,” I hissed. “He’s eleven years old.”
She nodded. “I never wanted to hurt you or Alex. When I saw you on the beach that day, I was just . . . happy . . . hopeful.” She savored the words in her mouth, smacked her dry lips. “I had tried to find you before. I wanted to say I was sorry. I never meant things to end the way they did. That you should be left without a family. But you were such a slippery little devil, weren’t you? I never found you. Every time I thought I knew where you were, you moved to a different place, and you left nothing behind but broken glass and beaten up kids. I lost track of you after foster family number four.”
I could hear Thomas crawling through the broken window, yet another wave of shattered glass crashed to the floor, but I didn’t see him. All I saw was Alex and Barbara’s hands. The one gripping the knife, the other fondling his bangs.
“And then what, Barbara?” I said. “What happened?”
“I wanted to start over,” said Barbara. “I thought we could be a family, just like Helgi and I had wanted. You had lost your mother, and I had lost my children. But you kept holding onto the past. Kept digging yourself deeper down. There was no need to do that, was there? We could have had a good life together, you and I, if only you had been able to let it go. But now I don’t know if we can be saved anymore. I just don’t know, Ella.”
“Put down the knife, Barbara,” I rasped. I was having great difficulty keeping my voice steady. I pointed the rifle in her face once more.
“Can you remember me from that night, Ella? I thought you saw me, but perhaps I was mistaken.”
“What night?”
I couldn’t take my eyes off Alex. His breathing was deep, peaceful.
“The night your mother died. Did you see me?”
I looked at her and knew she was the kind of liar that lied not only to others but especially to herself. A woman who has lost her children on account of her own abuse must have formidable powers of self-deception to go on living with herself. Even so, I couldn’t let it be.
“Were you there?”
She nodded. “Yes, I was there. I heard her die, Ella, and it didn’t take long. It was painless, and for her, death was a salvation. In fact, I think it was the best thing that could have happened for Anna. But the circumstances were . . . unfortunate. You shouldn’t have been there, Ella. It was supposed to be different. Anna was supposed to sleep, drift away from it all.”
“You were friends, before you started seeing my father. Did he know? Did he know who you were?”
“No. I didn’t think it was necessary for him to know. It had nothing to do with us, with Helgi and me—and you. And your mother . . . I thought we were friends, once. But because of her, I lost my boys. She betrayed me to social services, to my ex-husband, to Jehovah’s fucking Witnesses, even though it had always been us against them. I asked her to come and help me with the boys—and she did come—but she took my boys away from me. I haven’t seen them since. Only from a distance. And in pictures. You never become quite human again, once you’ve lost your children. Your mother deserved what happened to her.”
It sounded like a story she’d told many times before. The words fell into place like the lines of a poem she was reciting. My mother’s fault—not hers. I remembered the yellow rose I’d found in the dunes where my mother had died, and for the first time, I felt a stab of sympathy for Barbara, for no matter how many times she had come to the conclusion that my mother had deserved to die, there was still a part of her that succumbed to doubt. And doubt hurts.
Barbara smiled, leaned her head on the back of the pew, and gazed at the murals above.
“I was banished from the church because I was a drug addict,” she said. “It all started with morphine. I had dislocated my shoulder and was prescribed morphine for the pain. I became fond of it. Dependent. And then there were so many other options at my disposal, pills available from the same supplier. I have always believed that life is like walking on a tightrope suspended between birth and Judgment Day. You have to be so terribly careful not to stumble and fall into the abyss, and the faster you come to the other side, the better. I was a very talented tightrope walker, Ella. Always in control. But then came the morphine, and afterward, there was heroin and cocaine. I let go long enough to look at the world around me, and I realized that I had been wrong. I wasn’t balancing on a wire suspended over an abyss, I was walking along a line of chalk my parents had drawn in their backyard. It was . . .”
Barbara rotated her arms in the air above her head in a gesture of silent explosion.
“I tried to explain this to my husband. I wanted to get away, and I wanted to take my boys with me, of course. I was so completely, so vividly awake. My life was meant to be about passion and love, it was meant to be filled with beautiful things. I wanted to learn how to paint . . . And then I met your mother in that hopeless support group for people excluded from our church. The group itself was sickening, but your mother was wonderful. She became my first and only friend outside of the congregation. This is the part of her I miss once in a while.”
I heard the dull echo of Thomas’s steps coming down the aisle, the dust shimmered and danced in the tall pillars of light from the windows above the altar. A thought struck me, and it was so simple and so pure in its logic that I was amazed I hadn’t thought it before.
“Did you kill my mother?”
Barbara’s forefinger was resting on the edge of the knife, still without looking at me. “You really can’t remember anything at all from that night, can you?” she said, shaking her head. “Amazing. But then again, we all have our way of warding off the dark.”
She looked up and nodded at the Devil on the ceiling above, as if she were talking to him.
“I wasn’t the one who killed your mother, Ella.”
“You’re so full of shit, Barbara.”
She laughed drily. “I don’t know anyone who isn’t, but you, my girl, are right up there with the best of them in the bullshit-league. You just don’t know it, and that’s worse. Especially for you.”
She raised the knife, her knuckles white, the thin hand shook ever so slightly. I didn’t think. I cocked the barrel, leveled the gun, and pulled the trigger.
Rain. The rain is ice-cold, the smell of gun-powder is burning in my nostrils. My fingers hurt, my father is screaming into the dark like a wild animal. Like a wild animal gone mad.
The details flood in. A white glare, stark, and still.
My body remembers.
I remembered.