Frands stands and goes out to the yard. Yellow apples lie in the grass. He walks into the garage looking for something to sit on and finds an old recliner. With some effort he hauls it outside. He sits facing the house and takes a nip from the bottle. He lets his eyes wander over the house’s whitewashed façade. Even in the half-dark it seems stained and porous, and he can see spots where the plaster has been cracked by frost. The real estate agent had talked for a long time about how charming the house was. An artist villa, he’d called it. With space for children. It was exactly what they were looking for, Mette had said.
Frands lets his eyes wander up toward the bedroom, sees the curtains have yet to be drawn closed. Just then there’s a noise in the shrubbery behind the garage. He glares into the tangled darkness. A short while later the neighbor’s cat pops out from the bush further up, near the house. He tries to lure the cat to him by hissing at it, but it crosses the yard and disappears in the tall grass on the other side.
When he glances up again, he sees Mette in the window. She stands completely motionless, her arms resting at her side, gazing out as if she’s in a trance. Frands gets the feeling she’s staring at a point far in the distance. He considers getting up or waving, but the longer he waits, the more awkward it feels. Ten minutes pass, maybe more, then she steps back and draws the curtains closed. Relieved, he sinks back into the chair. He can hear the train rattle toward the city. He lifts the bottle and leans his head back.
Frands has almost emptied the bottle when his eyes slide shut. Immediately, the image of his neighbor’s house appears in his mind. He sees the windows light up one after the other and hears the daughter humming while she walks through the house. Her humming rises in intensity as she walks, grows more disharmonious, uneven; halfway up the stairs she breaks into song. By the time she snaps on the light in the last room, she’s screaming.
The sky is getting light when Frands opens his eyes. With difficulty he rises from the chair. He can feel the cold in his bones and makes his way, stiff-legged, toward the house. He grabs the doorknob and realizes it’s locked. He takes a few steps backward and looks up toward the dormer. The curtains are still closed. Then he remembers which way he came. He walks around to the side of the house where the door of his studio is ajar.
Mette doesn’t react when he crawls under the duvet. He has kept his clothes on and stares up at the ceiling; the light in the room is pale and gray. Slowly he warms up.
—Is it someone I know? Mette asks suddenly.
Frands hesitates a moment.
—No, he says.
—What’s her name?
—Kate, he says.
—Is she beautiful?
Frands hesitates again.
—Yes, he says. She’s beautiful.
Unsettled
Tobias had sent five poems to his old teacher. They were very short and had been published in a literary journal. One of them was about the moon: a man had been unfaithful to his wife and he cursed at the moon because he felt guilty every time he looked at it.
A few weeks later his old teacher called him. He had moved, he explained, and invited Tobias to come visit him.
When the day arrived, Tobias borrowed his sister’s car and drove away from the city. It was in the afternoon. The sun was low on the horizon, and the cars cast long shadows. On the highway he drove west, and after twenty-five miles he changed direction heading north and continued on increasingly smaller roads. He had studied the map carefully and found his destination without great difficulty: it was a little white house that lay at the foot of a hill.
He parked the car to the right of the house, and Erik came out and greeted him. They shook hands and remained standing a moment looking out over the fields. Erik was tall and thin; Tobias only reached his shoulders.