Dead Women
“Marcus,” Sigrid says, trying to place the person she is looking at into a frame of reference she can comprehend.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he says to his sister in Norwegian.
“You’ve said that three times. Throw that gun in the water.”
“I need it.”
“Marcus,” she says, stepping into the clearing by the lake’s edge. “Do you have any idea the hell you’ve put us through? You can’t be seen with a gun. There are police coming.”
Marcus does not move.
“I’m here to make sure that you don’t get shot. You’re making that more difficult right now.”
“I want you to know what happened,” Marcus says. “I’m tired of you not knowing. I think that’s why I haven’t . . .”
“First the gun. And then we can talk all you want.”
“You look tired, Sigrid. And also changed. Killing someone can do that to you, can’t it?” Marcus turns from her and looks at the lake. “I look tired too.”
“Gun in the water.”
Marcus considers his .38 revolver. He moves it up and down. The weight and balance are a revelation, the product of centuries of refinement.
“Do you remember when I broke my arm? We were kids and Mom was still alive.”
Sigrid glances back to the woods at birds and bugs, shadows and breeze. There is no one there. She probably has a few minutes before she has to charge him and wrestle the gun away, which she wants to avoid because when Marcus retrenches into an oppositional mood he can stiffen up and there’s no telling how well he might—or might not—handle a loaded weapon. She has no reason to believe he has any experience with them.
“Yes, I guess I do. I remember the color blue. Why?”
“Maybe you didn’t know this, because you weren’t old enough or tall enough, but if you were in the downstairs bathroom, like I often was, you could hear Mom and Dad talking in the bedroom through the vent above the toilet.”
“Why are we talking about this in upstate New York in 2008?”
“Because your life—the entire world as you know it, Sigrid—is a lie.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You grew up strong and self-confident, and determined, and you became a success. I didn’t.”
“You teach at a—”
“Please don’t. Don’t. Just don’t,” he says, waving the gun carelessly, his voice agitated. She can see he has no real consciousness of the weapon. No sense of its power or the immediacy of its consequences. There is no stepping forward to take it. The gun could go off at any time. The bullet could go anywhere.
“I never had a serious relationship,” he says. “I’ve been in love but only from a distance. I didn’t gain the confidence to let someone in until I met Lydia. In my midforties. Can you believe it? She was different enough from me to let me feel like she wasn’t intruding. She was a foreigner, but she spoke the same language, and she laughed at the same jokes and I couldn’t figure out why. She also had this . . . glow. The way nice people make you feel at ease when you’re around them. You know how you can pass someone on the street and—unlike the hundreds of other people you passed that same day—that one person looks at you and you feel a connection? Like you could be friends? Like in another life you were friends. There’s some . . . recognition. Because that feeling is clearly mutual. She was like that. And it calmed me. We could sit in a room and read and sip wine and not talk and it felt good. And the sex . . .”
“Marcus . . .”
“The sex was sort of . . . friendly. It started off friendly and cute and only in the middle did the need kick in, but that felt life-affirming because it seemed to prove that even people who liked each other could grow intense sometimes rather than needing to start that way, and I felt so completed . . . assured . . . from that. And she was so damn pretty.”
Sigrid thinks she hears something in the woods. A quick scan reveals nothing but she does not take this as proof. Would she have heard Norway’s Beredskapstroppen? This is an American special weapons and tactics team. Even with Irv stumbling along beside them, there is every likelihood she and Marcus are surrounded already. There is no way to know.
“I heard Mom and Dad talking,” he says. “You were sleeping. I went downstairs because I wanted a piece of chocolate and they said I couldn’t have one because I’d already had an ice cream earlier, but I was feeling defiant so I went to get some anyway. The Freia kokesjokolade. I think that’s what I miss most about Norway. That and the brunost.”
“Marcus. They’re coming.”
“Mom only let me have a single square of it each time, but this time I broke off four squares . . . a whole row. I felt like I was making off with the Crown Jewels. No one had ever been so bold. I went into the bathroom to eat it so I wouldn’t get caught. And that’s when I heard them talking.”
“About what?”
“Mom killed herself, Sigrid. And Dad helped. Or let her. Either way. I don’t know.”
“Marcus, you’re imagining this. This was thirty-five years ago. You are distraught now, and you were a little kid then.”
“Mom had come home from the doctor. She found out the results of her biopsy. This was the early seventies. No chemotherapy. No realistic surgery that wouldn’t have been devastating. The chances of survival now are only forty percent at stage three and that’s for five miserable years. I don’t even know what they would have been then. The doctor told her she was going to die. It was a matter of when. Mom and Dad decided that if she died sooner, you and I wouldn’t have to watch her suffer and we’d get through it all better. That’s what really happened, Sigrid. You were five and I was eleven. And you did get through it better. That’s what you never knew. And you still don’t understand. She sacrificed her
