She took out the vacuum cleaner and made the floor spotless in fifteen minutes, did a far better job than I did in over an hour the night before. She put it away and sat on the stool in front of me.
“What kind of condition are you in?” she asked.
I didn’t understand why she asked me this. I had explained my condition and prognosis to her during previous visits. I repeated them to placate her.
“I’ll recover. My limp will be worse, and I have some nerve damage in my face. It’s impossible to say whether the nerves will heal or how well, if further surgery will be required, and if so, whether it will help. My main problem at the moment is that I’m in a lot of pain. I feel like I’m getting worse instead of better. I think it’s my imagination, just the pain wearing me down.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She looked like she meant it, but she wasn’t sorry enough to come home and help me when I needed her the most. But I wasn’t worried about myself for the moment. Grave concern about her mental health took precedence.
“Have you been to see Torsten lately?” I asked.
Torsten Holmqvist, her psychotherapist. One of the best in the business. I was also once one of his patients.
“What passes between my therapist and myself isn’t your business.”
“I agree,” I said. “I only asked if you’ve been seeing him.”
“Yes, your crazy fucked-up wife has been a good girl and attended her therapy regularly. Are you satisfied?”
Now sarcasm. She was sprinting through a gamut of emotions so fast that it was impossible for me to keep up with them. I could think of a thousand reasons, but I wanted to know specifically what had caused her feelings toward me to become so harsh, and why it happened so quickly. “Kate, why are you so furious with me? Why won’t you come home?”
She smiled and slowly shook her head, as if I were an idiot and failed to understand the most simple and evident truth. “You’re the detective, why don’t you figure it out?”
I ignored that. “Do you remember the island and the events that led up to you becoming ill?”
“I don’t want to discuss it.”
I didn’t think she remembered, or at best, her memories were fragmented, or she wouldn’t question why I sat with a pistol at hand. I didn’t push it.
“Did I ever tell you how much I hate Finnish windows?” she asked. “What the hell kind of windows are hinged at the side and only open to forty-five-degree angles?”
“The kind where life revolves around winter and you need triple-glazed glass.”
“Except for the one big window,” she said, “which opens wide, but can’t be left open because it sits so low to the floor that someone would tumble out of it.”
“Because it gathers all the light possible in a place where there’s precious little of it much of the year, and if it didn’t open wide, you couldn’t clean it.”
“You have an answer for everything.”
“No. Just for some practicalities.”
“Windows are supposed to open upward and wide, so you can safely air out the goddamned house.”
“I’ll speak to the building commission about it.”
She seemed not to hear me. “I have some errands to run. Are you able to care for Anu for a few hours?”
A sarcastic tone had crept into my voice. I replaced it with an affectionate one. “Yes, darling, I am.”
The use of an endearment threw her off kilter and she didn’t know how to respond. It sometimes seemed she wanted me to be angry, as if she needed my anger to validate her own. But I wasn’t angry, only frightened and sad. She paused to regroup, and when she finally spoke, her tone had changed. Reason, perhaps even some affection, had crept into it. “Please get someone in here to clean the place.”
“I’ll call someone today and have it cleaned so that it’s presentable when you and Anu come back next time. I would like it if I could have regular times with Anu, maybe two or three times a week, instead of this system of you just showing up with her.”
She ignored what I thought a reasonable request. “There are eleven pizza boxes in the kitchen. I didn’t count the beer cans. You have a right to see Anu, but this isn’t a proper environment for a child.”
“I’m doing the best I can.”
“That’s the problem. Your best is bad because of your injuries. I’m concerned that you’re not up to taking care of her.”
“I’m capable,” I say.
“Do I have your word about that?”
“Yes. You have no cause for worry.”
“Let’s try it now and see how things go,” she said. “I’ve brought all her necessities.”
An odd thing to do for a short visit. And, of course, Anu had a lot of things here as well.
I wanted to ask her questions.
“That’s great,” I said. “Thank you.”
She said nothing. She stood, did an about-face with military precision. Her heels clicked on the floor as she marched out. I got up, went to the balcony to smoke and watch her walk away, down the street toward the tram stop. My intuition told me something was drastically wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Kate loves candles. I lit one, put it on the dining room table and promised myself I would keep one lit until she came home for good. I had an ominous feeling of foreboding, certain that I was going to burn up many more candles before my family situation was resolved. If it ever would be.
I tried to decipher the subtext of our conversation, could think of little else, but I was clueless. I called Torsten to ensure she had told me the truth about attending therapy. He said that she had. Patient-doctor privilege precluded further discussion, but he asked me why I was checking up on her. I said her condition worried me. After a thoughtful silence, he thanked me for calling and rang off.
I was powerless to do more. I had the window replaced and the house cleaned, fretted, and watched Animal Planet with Anu and Katt.
4
My intuitive fear proved correct. Kate didn’t return for Anu. She, Katt and I slept in my armchair together. I was equally thrilled to be reunited with my daughter and frightened about the well-being of my wife.
Anu woke me in the middle of the night. I went to the kitchen to warm some formula for her. I looked at my wristwatch. It had stopped. The battery was probably dead. It was a TAG Heuer that Kate gave me for an anniversary present. I took it off, laid it on the counter, removed a meat hammer from a drawer and pounded the shit out of it. Tiny gears and springs zinged and sproinged around the kitchen. I decided it was properly tenderized and tossed it in the garbage.
The banging scared Anu and made her cry. I took her the bottle, comforted her, quelled her tears and fed her. I needed to work on the anger issues I kept telling myself I didn’t have. I realized that I didn’t know what Anu should be eating at six months. I wasn’t sleepy and checked Wikipedia. It was time she began with some solid food. I would buy some baby food, or, with so much time on my hands, maybe make it for her myself.
In the morning, I changed Anu, had coffee and cigarettes. I was worried sick about Kate. Was she putting me through some sort of test? Was she safe? I thought about calling the hotel, about hunting for her, but this might be a failure of the test, if it was one. I promised myself I would wait a few hours, then do whatever it took to find her.
As I had for weeks, I turned the course of events that led up to this family disaster over in my mind, tried to
