You’re a doctor. You can handle this. Tell them anything!
Twenty-three expectant faces were turned to her. Monika’s mind was a blank. Only one memory erupted like a boil from the nothingness and made all invented fantasies impossible. The seconds passed. Someone smiled encouragingly and someone else sensed her torment and chose to look away.
‘If you like we can skip to the next person now and you can speak later. If you would rather think about it for a while, that is …’
The woman gave her a friendly smile, but being pitied was more than Monika could stand. Twenty-three people were thinking at that moment that she was weak. If there was anything she had devoted her life to, it was to being regarded as the exact opposite of that. And she had succeeded. She heard it often. How colleagues on the job said that she was so capable. Now she was sitting with twenty-three unknown people and had just been granted special treatment because of her weakness. Everyone in the room viewed her as an ordinary, second-rate person, incapable of carrying out the task that Mattias had executed in such a brilliant manner. The need to reclaim her position was so strong that it succeeded in conquering her indecision.
‘I only hesitated because the memory I thought of also dealt with an accident.’
Her voice was steady and deliberately a bit indulgent. Everyone’s gaze turned back to her. Even those who had turned away in discreet sympathy.
The woman who was subjecting her to this had the bad taste to smile.
‘It doesn’t matter. The point was for all of you to free-associate, and often it’s the strongest experiences that come up first. Please, tell us whatever you like.’
Monika swallowed. Now there was no turning back. All that remained were tiny corrections to the truth if she couldn’t bear it.
‘I was fifteen years old and my big brother Lasse was two years older. He was invited to a party at his girlfriend Liselott’s house while her parents were away, and since I had a small crush on one of his friends who was going too, I managed to convince him to let me come along.’
She was aware of her own heartbeat and wondered if anyone else could hear it.
‘Liselott lived some distance away, so we decided to sleep over. Our mother probably wasn’t entirely aware of what went on at parties like this, that we drank a lot, I mean. And even if she suspected it, she wouldn’t have thought that my brother and I would be involved. She had quite a high opinion of us.’
There was no danger yet. So far it was possible to meander cautiously alongside the truth.
Because so far, it was possible to live with it.
‘Some of the kids took a sauna that night. Quite a lot of drinking was going on, and afterwards no one shut off the sauna heater.’
She paused. She remembered it so well. She even remembered Liselott’s voice although it was so long ago now and she never heard it after that night. Monika, could you go down and turn off the sauna? And she had said yes, but all that beer was whirling round in her head and the boy she had had a secret crush on for so long was finally showing some interest and she’d promised to wait there on the stairs while he was in the bathroom.
‘Then all of us who were staying over decided to go to sleep. There were three others besides Lasse and me. We slept wherever there was room to lie down, on sofas and beds and everywhere. Lasse slept upstairs in Liselott’s room and I was downstairs.’
Her newly won boyfriend had gone home. Lasse had already fallen asleep in Liselott’s room. Monika, dizzy with infatuation and beer, went to lie down on the sofa right outside their closed door.
On the second floor.
On the hallway at the top of the stairs.
She had never admitted to anyone where she had slept that night.
‘I woke up around four, I think, because I couldn’t breathe, and when I opened my eyes the house was already in flames.’
The terror. The panic. The terrific heat. Only one thought. To get out of there. Two steps over to the closed door but she hadn’t hesitated. She simply rushed down the stairs and left them to their fate.
‘There was smoke everywhere and even though you think you can find your way around a house, it’s a whole different matter when you can’t see a thing.’
The words gushed forth in a desperate attempt to finish this task as quickly as possible and escape.
‘I crept over to the stairs and tried to go up but it was already burning too fiercely. I tried to scream to wake them but the noise of the fire was deafening. I don’t know how long I stood there by the stairs trying to climb them. Time after time I was forced to retreat a couple of steps and then try again. The last thing I remember is a fireman carrying me out of there.’
She couldn’t go on. To her dismay she could feel herself blushing, felt the colour of shame spreading across her cheeks.
She had stood there in safety outside on the lawn and watched how the heat made the glass in Liselott’s window explode. As if turned to stone, she had slowly but surely realised that he would never get out. That he would remain inside in the trap she had set. She had stood there, alive, and watched the malicious flames destroy the house and those who were left inside. Her handsome, happy big brother who was supposed to be so much braver than she was. Who never would have hesitated to take those two steps to save her life.
Who should have lived instead of her.
And then all the questions. All the answers that even then were distorted by her despair over the truth. She had been sleeping in the living room on the ground floor! Liselott had promised to turn off the sauna heater! Weeks of terror that one of the kids who had gone home might have heard her promise to turn off the sauna or seen her upstairs on the sofa. But her statement was allowed to stand unchallenged, and with time it had become the official story about what happened.
‘What happened to your brother?’
Monika couldn’t get the words out. She hadn’t been able to then either, when her mother came rushing across the lawn with only a robe over her night-gown. The top floor had collapsed and the firemen did their best to extinguish the flames that refused to be brought under control. Someone had called her and she had rushed out and jumped into her car.
The clearest image that remained in Monika’s mind was her mother’s face when she spat out her question, her eyes wide with terror because of what she already knew but refused to comprehend.
‘Where’s Lasse?’
It was impossible to answer. Impossible to utter the necessary words. It couldn’t be true, and as long as nobody said it, it was still not reality.
She felt her mother’s hands on her shoulders, the fingers making her sick to her stomach as her mother tried to shake an answer out of her.
‘Answer me, Monika! Where is Lars?’
A fireman came to her rescue and it only took him a couple of seconds to say the words that made everything irretrievable, that meant nothing would ever be the same again.
‘He didn’t make it.’
Each syllable slashed down between then and now, irrevocably. The past, so unsuspecting and naïve, was forever sliced away from the future.
And that was when she saw it. She could sense it in her mother’s eyes as she stood there in her night-gown, desperately trying to protect herself from the merciless words. She saw what would become the greatest sorrow in her life, and what she would spend her whole life trying to change.
But never could.
Her mother’s grief over Lasse’s death was deeper than the joy she was able to feel that Monika was still alive.