The Boy in the Suitcase

SEPTEMBER



THERE WAS FLOUR all over the kitchen. Flour on the kitchen table, flour on the floor, greasy doughy flour on one tap, and even a few floury footprints in the hallway.

“What are you doing?” asked Morten, putting down his laptop bag.

“Making pasta!” said Anton enthusiastically, holding aloft a yellow-white floury strip of dough.

God help us, he thought. Nina must be having one of her irregular attacks of domesticity. And it was typical of her that she couldn’t just buy a package of cake mix and have done with it. He still shuddered to recall the side of organic beef that had appeared in the kitchen one day. The flat had looked like a slaughterhouse for the better part of twenty-four hours while Nina carved, filleted, chopped, packaged, and froze unsightly bits of bullock—or attempted to, because in the end they had to persuade his sister to take most of it. She lived in Greve and had an extra freezer in the shed.

Now here she was, hectic spots in her cheeks, running ravioli through a pasta machine he had no idea they possessed.

“Good job,” he said absently to Anton.

“Hey you,” said Nina. “What did they say?”

“Esben does it this time. But I’ve promised to take his next shift. I have to leave on the twenty-third.”

Normally, his job required him to do a two-week stint on the rigs in the North Sea every six weeks, but this time he hadn’t wanted to go. What he really wanted was for all of them to go on holiday. He had already managed to swap his way to a week’s leave from the mud-logging. But Nina refused.

“What I need is a big dose of normal everyday life,” she had said.

He had finally managed to drag her to the clinic so that Magnus could look at her. Magnus had stitched up the cut above her hairline, probed her battered skull with his fingers, and sent her on to the National for further check-ups.

“At the very least, you are concussed,” he had said, shining his penlight into her eyes. “And you know as well as I do that we have to make sure it’s nothing worse. What the hell were you thinking?” He looked at Morten. “If something like this ever happens again, don’t let her fall asleep. People can slip right into a life-threatening coma without anyone noticing.”

Dry-mouthed, Morten had nodded. Even though the doctors at the National later pronounced her skull uncracked, Magnus’s words stuck in him, and it was more than a week before he could sleep normally beside her. It felt like the times he had needed to look in on the children when they were tiny, just to make sure they were still breathing.

Less than two weeks later, she was back on the job. And he had a strong feeling that Operation Ravioli had a lot to do with her need to prove that she was on top of it all. Could manage the job and her family, could be a Good Mother, could do it all and be here again.

He wanted to tell her that it wasn’t necessary. That it was okay if she was feeling irritable and tired, that it was okay to resort to easy fixes. If she had anything to prove, it certainly wasn’t as a pasta chef.

He had been looking at her for too long. Caught, as he often was, by the sheer vitality and intensity of her eyes. He had once found a chunk of dolorite that reminded him so much of the stormgray color of her eyes that he had dragged it all the way back from Greenland in his pocket.

“Is anything wrong?” she asked.

“No.”

She held his face between her wrists so as not to get flour on his office shirt and gave him a kiss.

“We’re making three kinds of ravioli,” she said. “One with spinach and ricotta, one with prosciutto and emmentaler, and one with scampi and truffle. Doesn’t it sound delicious?”

“Yes,” he said.





MORTEN HAD STAYED up long after she had fallen asleep, and Nina woke to find him kneeling on the bed next to her. She reached for him, and drew him down. He let himself fall. Kissed her deeply and with a certain ferocity, pressing his fingers into her mouth, then down the curve of her neck, over her breasts, her arms, and wrists. His fingers meshed with hers, and he let the full weight of his body push her into the mattress.

His eyes were nearly invisible in the darkness. Nina saw only a vague glitter of reflected light, and she sensed something, some sort of melancholy grief, settle between them. Or perhaps it had been there the entire time, and she hadn’t noticed.

She turned her head to look at the digital display of the clock radio.

“No.” Morten’s voice was hoarsely insistent. “Not now.”

He tilted the clock so that the numbers were no longer visible. Then he caught her face and turned it towards his in the darkness, drawing her leg slowly but firmly to one side.

She let go. She let herself fall into him, into the feeling, into the warm zone where time meant nothing.

SHE RAN ALL the way home. She couldn’t stop the panic even though she knew she was being hysterical, that he would no doubt be sitting at the kitchen table as usual, with an egg sandwich and a non-alcoholic beer in front of him and coffee brewing on the coffee machine. It was just the way it was—sometimes her father went home even though the school day wasn’t over. It didn’t happen often, three or four times a year at the most, and he was usually back at work the next day. Usually. But sometimes, when it was bad, two or even three weeks might pass by, and then it was “not too good.” That’s what her mother always said when people asked. “No, Finn isn’t feeling too good at the moment.” And then people didn’t ask any more questions, not if they knew him.

EGGS AND CRESS, she thought. He’ll be sitting at the kitchen table, and he has just cut himself a good helping from the somewhat shapeless cress hedgehog that Martin has made in kindergarten. And he is drinking non-alcoholic beer because he has taken his medication.

She looked at her watch. Twenty past eleven. If she could see him at the table, she wouldn’t even need to go in. She could just turn around and make it back to the school in time for her next class.

BUT HE WASN’T at the table. And so she had to go in.

His furry green loden coat was on its peg in the hallway. His shoes were left neatly side by side in the shoe rack, with his briefcase next to them. She eased open the door to the bedroom, thinking he might be taking a nap, but he wasn’t there. Then she noticed that the door to the basement stairs had been left ajar. And she heard the sound.

SHE WAS LATE both for her Danish class and for Geography, and the teacher took her outside and made her explain. At first she didn’t know what to tell him.

“I had to change my clothes,” she finally said.

And it wasn’t till much later that anyone realized why, and then of course they began to ask different questions. Why had she just gone back to the school?

The school psychologist in particular asked that question, and a whole bunch of other questions, mostly beginning with “What were you feeling when.…” or “What were you thinking when.…” Those, she couldn’t answer. She couldn’t remember feeling or thinking anything at all. Or doing anything. It wasn’t that she didn’t remember being in the basement, and she remembered everything else too: her father, and how he had been lying in the bath tub with his clothes on, and that the water had been scarlet. She remembered seeing his mouth move when he saw her, but it was like a film with the sound off, she couldn’t hear what he was saying. She was looking at the red stuff on his arms. And that was when time had disappeared, she thought, but she wasn’t sure how. She remembered going over to Mrs. Halvorsen next door and telling her to call an ambulance. What she couldn’t understand, what simply didn’t make sense, was that more than an hour had passed. That it was now suddenly half past twelve, and that she had changed her clothes. I went over there right away, she kept saying, to herself and to others. I went over there right away.

THE TELEPHONE DREW her from her nightmare. She fumbled for it and managed to take the call before the ring woke Morten. Or so she thought.

At first, there was only a lot of hectic breathing at the other end. She was about to hang up, when finally a thin and panicked voice came on.

“Please come.”

“Who is this?”

“Natasha. Please.…”

Nina sat up abruptly and turned on the light. Still half asleep, Morten muttered something unintelligible. The word “Hell” could be distinguished, but other than that, she had no idea what he was saying.

“Natasha, what is it?”

For several long seconds she heard only the tear-choked wheeze of the girl’s breathing.

“He touched Rina. Touched.…”

“Report him,” snapped Nina angrily. “Or I will!”

“I think maybe he is dead,” said Natasha. “Please come. I think maybe I kill him.”

There was a click as the connection severed. Nina slumped in the bed, remnants of her nightmare a blood-like taste in her mouth. Morten rolled over, away from the light, and went back to sleep. He had never really been properly awake. The sheet that covered him slipped to reveal the top of his buttocks.

Call the police, she told herself. Come on. 911. You know the number. God damn it to hell. The wound in her scalp had only just healed, and she still got random headaches.

She closed her eyes for a moment. Then she let herself slide carefully from the bed, put her arms into yesterday’s T-shirt, and slipped into the bathroom for a quick splash of water to her face. She dressed as quickly as she could, and lifted the car keys from their peg by the door in the hallway. It was still the summer that wouldn’t die. Outside, the September darkness hugged the city in a close and damp embrace, the night hardly cooler than the day had been.

It was 4:32 A.M., she noted.