She was reminded of the time last summer when she had tried to mend a hole in his shirt with a needle and thread from his hotel. Afterward she had vowed never to try sewing anything again.
“It went to hell, just like everything else,” she said without thinking.
“What? What do you mean?”
He was trying to sound neutral, but she could hear the hope in his voice.
“Oh, nothing. What do you want? You know you’re not supposed to call,” she repeated.
“I couldn’t help myself.”
“But if you don’t leave me in peace, I won’t be able to think,” she said gently.
He tried to persuade her to meet him when he arrived in Gotland on the following day.
She refused, even though her body was screaming for him. It was a battle between reason and emotion.
“Don’t keep doing this. It’s hard enough as it is.”
“But what are your feelings for me, Emma? Tell me honestly. I need to know.”
“I think about you, too. All the time. I’m so confused. I don’t know what I should do.”
“Do you sleep with him?”
“You’d better hang up now,” she said, annoyed.
He heard her light a cigarette.
“Come on, tell me. Do you? I want to know if you do.”
She sighed deeply.
“No, I don’t. I don’t have the slightest desire to sleep with him. Are you satisfied?”
“But how long can you keep that up? You’re going to have to make up your mind, Emma. Hasn’t he noticed anything? Is he that insensitive? Doesn’t he wonder why you’re acting this way?”
“Of course he does, but he thinks it’s a reaction to what happened this summer.”
“You still haven’t answered my question.”
“What question?”
“What are your feelings for me?”
Another deep sigh.
“I love you, Johan,” she said quietly. “That’s what makes everything so difficult.”
“But what the hell, Emma. We can’t keep going on like this for much longer. Wouldn’t it be better to make a clean break and tell him how things stand?”
“What the hell do you mean by ‘how things stand’?” she roared. “You have no idea how things stand!”
“Yes, but-”
“But what?”
Her voice was angry now, and she was on the verge of tears.
“You have no fucking idea what it’s like to be responsible for two young children! I can’t sit on the sofa and cry all weekend because I miss you. Or decide to be with you just because I want to. Or need to. Or have to, in order to survive. Because surely you know that my whole life revolves around you, Johan. You’re the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing I see in my mind’s eye before I fall asleep. But I can’t let this take over everything. I have to keep functioning. Take care of the house, my job, my family. Above all, I have to think of my children. What would happen to them if I left Olle? You go around over there in Stockholm with only yourself to think about. A good job, your own nice apartment in the center of town, and lots to do. If your longing for me starts to get difficult, there are plenty of things to divert your attention. You can go out to pubs, meet with friends, go to the movies. And if you’re feeling sad and want to cry over me, you can do that, too. But where the hell can I go? Maybe I can sneak into the laundry room and cry. But I can’t just go into town if I’m feeling unhappy and find something else to do. Or meet some new people who are fun? Not likely. Sure, there are plenty of people like that out here!”
She slammed down the phone just as she heard the front door open.
Olle was home.
Ann-Sofie Dahlstrom had the driest hands that Knutas had ever seen. And she kept rubbing them together so that flakes of skin came off and fell onto her lap. She wore her brown hair pulled back and fastened with a plastic barrette at the nape of her neck. Her face was pale and without a trace of makeup. Knutas began by expressing his condolences over the death of her ex-husband.
“We haven’t had any contact for a long time. It’s been years since we last talked…” Her voice trailed away.
“What was Henry like when you were married?”
“He was almost always working. There were plenty of late nights and working weekends. We didn’t have much of a family life. I was the one who mostly took care of our daughter, Pia. Maybe it was partly my fault that things turned out the way they did. I probably shut him out. He started drinking more and more. Finally it got to be intolerable.”
How typical for a woman, thought Knutas. An expert at taking the blame for her husband’s bad habits.
“In what way was it intolerable?”
“He was almost always drunk and started neglecting his work. As long as he had a full-time job at Gotlands Tidningar, he managed well enough. The problems began when he started his own company and didn’t have anyone looking over his shoulder. He started drinking in the middle of the week, didn’t come home at night, and lost customers because he either failed to show up or didn’t bother to deliver the photographs he had promised. I finally had to file for divorce.”
As she talked, her hands continued their bizarre massage, making a faint scraping sound. She noticed Knutas’s glance.
“My hands get like this in the winter, and no lotion does any good. It’s the cold. There’s nothing I can do about it,” she added with a certain sharpness to her voice.
“No, of course not. Forgive me,” Knutas apologized. He took out his pipe in order to focus on something else.
“How did his drinking affect Pia?”
“She became withdrawn and uncommunicative. She spent more and more time away from home. Told me that she was studying with friends, but her grades kept getting worse. She started skipping classes and then developed an eating problem. It took a long time for me to realize that it was serious. During the fall semester of her second year, the teachers concluded that she was suffering from anorexia, and she didn’t get over it until she finished high school.”
“But she stayed in school, in spite of her illness?”
“Yes. I don’t think it was the most severe form of the disease, but there’s no question that she had an eating disorder.”
“What sort of help did you receive?”
“As luck would have it, I knew a doctor at the hospital who had worked at a clinic on the mainland-a clinic for patients with eating disorders. He helped me. I managed to persuade Pia to go over there with me. At the time she weighed only ninety-seven pounds, even though she’s five foot nine inches tall.”
“How did your husband react?”
“He didn’t want to know anything about it. This was toward the end of our marriage.”
“What does your daughter do now?”
“She lives in Malmo. She’s a librarian at the municipal library.”
“Is she married?”
“No.”
“Children?”
“No.”
“So how do you think she’s doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“How is she?”
The woman sitting across from Knutas looked him in the eye without saying a word. Her right eyebrow was twitching. The silence was palpable. Finally it got so oppressive that he was forced to break it.
“How would you describe your contact with each other?”
