Anneliese
ANNELIESE WAS CURLED up on the sofa in her third-floor walk-up on the Vechtstraat. She was streaming SS Athenia on her laptop—a movie she never tired of because of the popular film score by Louisa Veldkamp. At the same time, she scrolled through her phone, checking emails and messages and downloading the dismal balance in her bank account. She was connected to the world in every way except in the way it mattered. So when her phone vibrated, she paused the movie without thinking twice.
But she hadn’t realized what today’s date was until she saw the caller ID. Her mother. A shivery sensation passed through her.
“Hi Tineke,” she said warily.
“Anneliese? Is this a good time to talk?”
“It’s fine.”
A silence fell.
Then Tineke gave a theatrical sob. “It was eight years ago today.”
“I know.”
“Can you come home on Saturday? Catch up?”
“Sorry, I have plans.”
“For once, couldn’t you take the time to remember your brother?”
My adoptive brother, Anneliese silently corrected; they didn’t have the same blood.
“Dr. Hummel will be there,” Tineke said, as if the doctor were a carrot and Anneliese a donkey.
She usually tuned out during Tineke’s gossipy phone calls, but she recalled news about Dr. Hummel. He had been Daan’s therapist and afterward Anneliese’s. During his career he had lost several patients to suicide. Retired now, maybe bored, he had started visiting the bereaved families on the anniversaries of their loved ones’ deaths, like a murderer returning to the scene of the crime.
“Hang on a sec while I light a cigarette,” Tineke said.
Anneliese heard a clunk, then Tineke’s footstep, and the pop of a cork. A minute passed, then another. If Tineke had forgotten her, it wouldn’t be the first time.
She ended the call. Eight years was a third of her life, though sometimes it seemed as if it had happened yesterday. She had been sixteen, Daan nineteen. When she had left home for university a few years later, she’d resolved never to return to Noorddorp, even for a brief visit. But staying away hadn’t worked. Just last week she had dreamed about him and woken up with a lurch. Her skin prickled whenever she saw a slim figure with curly black hair in a crowd on Dam Square, or buying a salted herring at the Albert Cuyp Market, or sitting alone at the back of a tram. She needed closure by whatever means she could get it.
She picked up the phone and called Tineke back.
On Saturday morning Anneliese took the Intercity from Amsterdam Central Station to Utrecht, where she transferred to the train that would take her as far as Assen. She kept picking up her book and putting it down, unable to concentrate for more than a few lines.
She gazed out the window. Flat green polder crisscrossed by drainage ditches; sheep grazing on top of a dike; poplars lined up along a road running parallel with the railroad track. So different from Noorddorp, perched on the edge of a dying forest that was succumbing to disease and pollution. Would her childhood have ended differently if she had grown up far from a forest? If she had grown up in one of Amsterdam’s crooked houses, the wooden pile foundations rotting in the swampy ground? Or would Daan’s evil have manifested itself anyway, in a dark, moldy basement or in a secret attic room?
From the station in Assen, she boarded a bus, and a half hour later, a second one. She trudged the last half mile to her childhood home on the outskirts of Noorddorp, where the forest began.
Tineke and Ray had tried to sell the house after Daan’s death. While there had been no shortage of people interested in viewing, most weren’t interested in buying, and the serious buyers didn’t want a home where someone had died violently. They just wanted to look. The house became a tourist attraction for the locals, some never going past the entrance hall where the tragedy had played out.
The “For Sale” sign was stolen twice, spray-painted with obscenities, and finally decapitated. After years of suffering Daan’s abuse, his schoolmates felt sufficiently safe to take their revenge, even if it was on the innocent bereaved.
The neighborhood had prayed for years for the Bakkers to move and rid the village of its most hated bully, but once he was dead, they overflowed with sympathy. They brought casseroles and cakes and baskets of fruit. “It’s such a terrible thing to lose a child,” they said. Overnight they forgot the mutilated cats and the excrement smeared on their front doors—wicked deeds attributed to Daan. But he was sly, and nothing could be proven.
They had taken the house off the market after a year. Anneliese helped Tineke scrub the nicotine stains off the walls with ammonia. Ray bought a new living room set in a horrid blue, laid a new tile floor over the old, and recarpeted the stairs.
Anneliese rang the bell; using the key might have sent the wrong message. The tiny front garden was paved, weeds poking through the cracks along the foundation. Tineke opened the door and waved her inside with a cigarette.
Anneliese stepped gingerly over the spot where Daan’s urine had pooled and followed Tineke into the living room.
Her heart jumped into her throat when she saw the framed photo of Daan propped up on the coffee table. She took in his mocking eyes, his dark curls, his smirk. Beautiful, but dangerous.
Ray staggered to his feet like a sleepy bear and drew her into a sweaty embrace. She extricated herself and glanced around, ignoring Dr. Hummel, who was smiling smugly in a chair. The room was sliding back into its former state. The walls and net curtains had yellowed, the cheap sofa sagged in the middle, and the new floor tiles wobbled under her feet.
Something was missing.
“Where’s my piano?”
A look passed between Tineke and Ray.
“We gave it away,” Ray said.
“Why?”
“It wasn’t worth anything.”
“It was just taking up space,” Tineke added.
“Why didn’t you give it to me?”
“When was the last time you played the piano? Or visited? It’s been five years, Anneliese,” Ray said.
Dr. Hummel saved her from replying. He sprang from the chair and pumped her hand. He looked younger than when he had treated her, his eyes clear, his cheeks full. He seemed to burst with energy, as if retirement had lifted a weight from his shoulders. So why did he want to revisit his worst failures? Did he have unfinished business? She felt a twinge of alarm.
Anneliese plopped into a chair, and Tineke poured her a glass of port.
Ray crossed his arms over his chest.
A silence settled.
“Now that everyone’s here, we can begin,” Dr. Hummel said.
“Begin what?” Anneliese asked.
“Tineke and Ray are ready to talk about Daan. They feel that if they’d been better parents, he wouldn’t have taken his own life.”
“I didn’t come here to—” she said, and stopped. Because it was precisely the reason she had come.
“If you’ll let me finish, Anneliese.” He harrumphed, a nervous habit she remembered from before, and said, “We were working through Daan’s problems in therapy. I didn’t consider him a suicide risk. If the signs were there, I missed them.”
Their faces turned toward Anneliese—Dr. Hummel’s glowing pink, Ray’s a deep magenta, and Tineke’s sallow.
Anneliese gulped the port. “What do you want from me?”
“Teenagers might not turn to their parents when they’re depressed. More often to friends.”
“Daan didn’t have any friends,” she said.
Dr. Hummel flashed a professional smile. “Or they confide in a sibling. Is there anything you haven’t told us? Anything at all?”
Ambushed.
She set her glass on the table with a clink. “He was disturbed.”
“If only I’d known how unhappy he was,” Tineke wailed.
The doctor was right; Anneliese was holding back. They hadn’t listened to her when he was alive. Why would they now when they’d placed him on a pedestal? When they had made him the victim? She wondered how soon she could leave.
Ray said, “I worked too much. I should have taken him camping.”
Dr. Hummel harrumphed, a sign he was about to throw his opinion into the pot.
Before he could, Anneliese jumped to her feet and excused herself. She felt three sets of eyes drilling into her back as she stumbled from the room, the sickly-sweet port souring in her mouth. After visiting the toilet, she took a deep breath and climbed the stairs, trailing her hand along the rail. She paused on the landing, her legs shaking, and forced herself to peer over the balustrade at the floor below. But there was only empty space between.