“I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t help you.”
“He said he knew what happened,” Sven Nilsson says. “He was going to tell us everything. Do you have any idea what he meant?”
“He said the stroller was near the water. The currents are very strong right there. He knew the waters around here like the back of his hand. But Dad always liked to talk a lot when he was drunk. I didn’t hear half of it. The little one was having such a hard time sleeping, so I was mostly with her.”
I dry my tears. I have so much to think about now. My dad is gone. I’m in shock. My poor dad is dead, and my grief is overwhelming. My beloved father. He was the best father anyone could wish for. We had a wonderful relationship.
Sven Nilsson is very understanding. He apologizes and hopes he hasn’t been too much trouble. The police leave.
We got a second chance, Isabelle and I. We got a new life. And now we’re back in the place where it all started.
Isabelle
A ringing in my ears, a light flashing.
The last thing I remember is my head exploding.
It still throbs in pain. I try to move, to get a sense of where I am, but my neck isn’t strong enough to hold up my head. I run my hand over my scalp; something sticky has dried in my hair. I have an iron taste in my mouth, the smell of blood in my nostrils. I’m in a dark room with a blanket over me.
I’m lying on a lumpy mattress; the smell of mildew lingers. Cold moves across the floor and through the walls. The air is raw and moist. A faint light trickles in between the shutters on the window.
I don’t want to think about what happened to Ola, but I see him in front of me. His eyes, the shock and the horror inside them. The blood spraying, pumping out of his throat no matter how hard Hanne tried to stop it. The front of my shirt is stiff from his dried blood.
And I think about Fredrik. What is he doing now? Has he talked to Hanne, and what did she say? Has he called the police? Are they looking for me?
I pull off the blanket and sit up. I stretch out my arms and legs. My joints are stiff and aching. My whole body aches, especially my hip. I’m barefoot, my socks are gone. I’m hungry. Despite a down jacket I’m shivering from the cold.
There’s a rustling sound inside the walls. Is it a mouse? A rat? I pull my feet up from the floor and look around me in the dark. A table, a few chairs, an old chest of drawers, and a bookcase stand against one wall.
There is a tin bucket and a roll of toilet paper in the corner. I get up from the mattress, pull down my jeans, and squat over the bucket. When I’m done peeing I go over to the door. I stand very still, breathe as quietly as I can and listen. Nothing. I push down on the handle.
Locked.
I go back to the mattress. Feel something under my foot. I bend down and pick it up.
A brochure.
Welcome to Strandgården
The Pearl of the Baltic Coast
Sun, Wind, and Water
for the Whole Family
Under the text on the front is a picture of a happy family romping around the water’s edge on a sun-drenched beach. The brochure disintegrates as I try to peel apart its moisture-damaged pages.
After a while I hear steps. Yellow light streams under the door. A key rattles in the lock. The door opens.
Mom is holding a kerosene lamp. Her face is illuminated from below, and I barely recognize her. She’s humming and smiling. Her eyes are as blank and glassy as marbles. I don’t dare ask her what she’s planning to do.
Without a word she takes me by my arm and leads me from the room. We walk through a hallway and enter a kitchen. There’s more light in here than in the locked room; there are no shutters over the windows. I see, in the kerosene lamplight, that it’s just as dirty. Nobody’s been here for many years. But it’s warm. The heat from the woodstove fills the room, and my feet tingle as they thaw.
I look around. The kitchen is large and open; there are windows facing a garden and the sea. There are benches along the walls, pale green cabinets. A wide-planked table stands in the middle of the room with six chairs around it.
Above the sea, the sky is ablaze in colors a child would delight in. Orange and pink and red. It will soon be night.
Mom hums continually. She cleans the blood from my forehead, says all will be well again soon. Poor baby, such bad luck you had. But you were careless, you have no one to blame but yourself.
I recognize how she’s looking at me. That glimmer in her eyes. I saw it every time I hurt myself and she tended to me afterward. She loves to tend to, to care for, to lavish attention. Show everyone what a loving mother she is.
For the first time, I realize this is what she’s always done.
The insight makes the pain in my head fade. The fear deep in my body recedes. It’s as if I’m waking up from a stifling, lifelong dream. I’m not terrified anymore.
I’m angry.
“Every time I hurt myself, all those injuries. It was you. It was always you,” I say.
Mom stops. She tilts her head and looks at me.
“My darling,” she replies. “You needed to learn. I thought you understood that.” She bathes the wound again with a soft cotton ball. It stings, and I jerk my head away, look at her.
“And when I wanted to go to Gröna Lund with my class? You slammed my arm in the car door. Many times. You didn’t care that I screamed and begged you to stop. Why? What did you get from hurting me?”
“I couldn’t let you run around down there. Not with her close by.”
“Who? Who was close by?” I want to make her say it. I want to hear the truth.
“I’ve never hurt you, Isabelle. Never. I protected you. I raised you.” She takes out a Band-Aid and puts it on my forehead. “I wanted to make you strong. That’s what a mother does. She cares for you, protects you.”
“Where are we?” I say.
“This is our very own hideout. It might not look like much to the world, but it’s ours. We’re going to have a lovely time here together.”
“At Strandgården? Where is that?”
“In paradise.”
She whirls around, takes a saucepan from under the kitchen counter, and opens a jar of pea soup. “We should start by eating, I think. You must be starving.”
Mom smiles at me and caresses my cheek. Her touch sends a shiver down my spine.
“You’re sick,” I say. “You are completely insane.”
She laughs. Laughs loudly like I’ve just said something very silly. I, too, press out a laugh, just to show her I’m not afraid of her anymore.
“I think it’s time to go home,” I say in a calmer voice. “We can start over at home. It’ll be like before. It’ll be even better. Now that we’ve gone through this together. We are even stronger now. Stronger than ever.”
I’ll say anything to convince her. Maybe it will work, if I just say what she wants to hear. If I pretend that what she did doesn’t matter. If I pretend everything is normal.
“And I really have to call Johanna,” I say. “I’ve missed some mandatory seminars. She’s probably starting to wonder.”
Mom sighs. “She wasn’t good for you, Isabelle.”
“If you want, I’ll move home. We can be together all the time.”
She stares out through the window while slowly stirring the ladle in the saucepan. The reflection of her face in the window reveals a hollow-eyed and twisted creature. Is she even listening?
Mom stops stirring. “It hasn’t been long since you were going to leave me,” she says. “You were planning to meet her.” She says the word with disgust.
“I quit therapy. I will never see her again.”
“It was your fault that her boy was run over. I had no other choice. And that awful umbrella misled me. I thought it was her. And she should be busy with him now. Instead of trying to get ahold of you. Making you snoop around. But she doesn’t care about her other child, either. That’s who she is. Always thinking about herself.”
A wave of nausea washes over me. What has she done? How many more has she killed?
“What are you talking about?” I whisper.
Mom looks at me. She smiles again, puts out a loaf of bread and a knife. “Sorry, my darling. We can’t go home. She won’t give up. She never will. She found us there. She’ll find us here, too.”
“And why does she want to find us? Tell me.”
“It’s her fault that we have to flee. Everything is her fault. Think about it, Isabelle. How have you felt since you met her? You haven’t been yourself. What do you think it’s like for me to see my daughter feeling so terrible, changing so much, and still be unable to do anything about it? You won’t listen to me, either.”
She starts cutting the bread, but holds up the knife and looks at it. It’s not a bread knife. It’s sharp and pointed, a deboning knife for meat.
Her facial expression shifts.
Rage. Sorrow. Bitterness.
“She had everything, but she didn’t deserve it. She never cared about you. Believe me, I did you a favor. Haven’t we had it good, you and me?”
“I’m not your daughter,” I say. “I have the wrong blood type. You’re not my mother.”
“None of that matters. You are my child now. And I’m your mother.”
“Who was the baby in those hidden photos?”
Mom spins around. She raises her arm and throws the knife at me before I can respond. It passes by my arm, and I hear it strike the wall behind me, then land on the floor.