“I felt like I’d swallowed poison and all I could do was wait for the effects. I would look at her every day and think, Maybe tonight. Maybe this will be the night she dies. And when I woke up the next morning and I found her there, I wasn’t happy. I was shaking. I wouldn’t let her near me. I stopped eating. I barely made it through school. And then, months later. It did happen. The moment I learned it, I understood I should have said something. I should have run to her and screamed and told her not to. I should have told her how much I loved her. I should have used every single moment of time with her to express that, and I should have traced her face with my fingers and memorized every curve and every line from every emotion—in her eyes and the corners of her mouth. This knowledge came like a wind through my soul the moment she died.
“I blamed Dad, of course. He must have given her the drugs or at least condoned it. I blamed him because I couldn’t blame her. I couldn’t mix the anguish with the hate. I needed to separate them. But it wasn’t until I was older—when I’d moved away—when I realized the worst part of all. The real truth, Sigrid, is that I actually made her do it. It wasn’t their fault. It was mine. Do you see it? She was going to take the morphine at night to save us from the pain, but she was on the fence about it and that’s why it took so long. What happened was that I pushed her into it. Every day she must have woken up and seen my own pain getting worse and worse and she must have thought to herself that she needed to do it now. Do it faster. To save her son from suffering even longer. Of course, it was the opposite that was true. I needed to know she wouldn’t do it. I needed her to tell me she’d stay with us as long as she possibly could and fight to the end, and be there to say goodbye. She didn’t know that I knew her plans, though. And she never said goodbye.
“All I had to do was say I knew. I’m certain of it. They couldn’t have gone ahead with it if we’d known. It would have been too cruel. It would have undermined the point of it. She wouldn’t have lasted long, but she would have lasted longer. But I said nothing. I killed her. So that was the first woman I killed.”
Sigrid had not noticed before that Marcus’s feet were in the water. He was still wearing shoes, now submerged to the ankle. Above those, a faded pair of jeans, a blue and white striped button-down shirt that seemed too big for him or else was an “American cut,” wide across the back for what they euphemistically call an athletic build. His arms look thinner than she’d remembered. He seems gaunt, physically withdrawn even from himself. He is sweating terribly.
Sigrid stands in the shadows, where it is cooler.
“Even if you heard that, Marcus,” she says, “even if they considered it, there is no reason to believe they went through with it. Five months later? It makes no sense. She might have been despondent,” Sigrid says, “on hearing the prognosis. I can imagine that. I can imagine a couple of Norwegians in a farmhouse drinking too much and discussing cancer and suicide. Anyone who’s been to Norway can imagine that. But actually doing it? No. That isn’t how the world works. It is, however, how a little kid makes sense of it.”
“She died,” Marcus says, emphatically, “because I kept my mouth shut out of cowardice. But this time—with Lydia—I tried talking. My failures with Mom were at the forefront of my mind. So I did the opposite. I pleaded. Argued. I used intellectual words, emotional words, appeals, admissions. I begged her not to leave me. This time I stood too close and said too much. That’s how I killed my second woman.”
“You didn’t kill anyone, Marcus. Lydia killed herself.”
“What? That’s what you think happened?”
There is a sharp snap behind Sigrid and she turns to see Irving making his way across the forest floor with his eyes to the ground to avoid a misstep. Glancing up he notices her and smiles before wiping his head.
“I should arrest you immediately for what you did back there. I realize we don’t have exactly the same legal systems, but I’m pretty sure that arson and destruction of government property is just as illegal in Norway as it is in New York. Am I right or am I right?”
“Yeah. Listen, Irv . . .”
“Did you manage to find . . . hey! There he is. The man of the hour himself! Marcus Odegard, you have put us through quite a bit of trouble ever since . . . Drop that fucking gun right now!”
The Edge
Irv plasters himself behind an oak, unbuttons his collar, and breathes. The wool and polyester sheriff’s duds aren’t helping with the flop sweat. Sticky, grumpy, and in slow pursuit, he’d spent twenty minutes imagining a nice dip in the lake after finding Marcus and the joy of drip-drying in the sun while waiting for Alfonzo and the rest of their team to join them.
Now, though, Marcus has ruined all of that; ruined a chance to cool
