“Stay where you are.” His voice, so full of emotion just moments ago, is now like ice. And it’s no wonder, I understand it, understand him, but …
The first thing I can get my hands on, that seems to make sense, is a roll of paper towels. I move forward to press it onto his upper arm to make a dressing, but this time he yells at me. “I said, stay where you are! Come any closer to me, and I won’t be held responsible for my actions!”
The blood has already seeped through his sleeve and is now dripping to the floor. Erik presses a hand over the wound, and it seems as though the pain is now kicking in.
“I’m so sorry,” I repeat, and hate myself for the fact that I also start to cry. For the fact that I seem incapable of uttering anything but this laughable, completely worthless apology. As if my words could make up for what I just did. As if anything could ever make up for it.
And I don’t understand. I don’t understand myself. There was no reason to do that, everything was going well between us …
“You’re completely insane.” Erik shakes his head in emphasis to every word he says. “Insane and dangerous. No, don’t come any closer.” The iciness in his tone has been joined by something else. Disgust?
I could understand that, of course. If I say what’s on the tip of my tongue right now, which is that I have no idea why I did this, because I was actually in the process of falling in love with him, it would only make things worse.
Insane and dangerous.
He’s right. It’s now glaringly obvious, if it wasn’t before, that I have to get myself admitted to a clinic. As quickly as possible.
But first Erik needs help. “I’ll get the first-aid kit. We have to make sure that we stop the bleeding and—”
“We don’t need to do anything at all, not anymore.” He fixes his gaze on me. “You were going to stab me right through the back with that knife, weren’t you? If I hadn’t turned around, I’d be dead now. You would have … stabbed me in cold blood.”
Everything he says is true, despairingly true. And, at the very least, he has the right to know it. I nod.
“Why, Jo?” Now, for the first time, I see something resembling grief in his eyes. Grief for how things once were, maybe, even if I can’t remember. Grief for what we could still have had.
“I don’t know.” My sobs swallow my words. “I really don’t know,” I repeat. “It just happened. I barely knew what was happening myself, and I know how that sounds. Even to me. But that’s how it was. Like I was outside of my own body, watching myself doing it. I never wanted to harm you and yet I almost killed you. You’re right. I am crazy.”
He doesn’t disagree, but he doesn’t say anything to reaffirm it either. My attention goes back to his arm; the bleeding has slowed now, but not stopped.
I gesture hesitantly toward the kitchen roll, then walk past Erik, out into the hall and up the stairs. My legs are shaking so hard that I can barely manage the steps.
In the bathroom, the first thing I see is the boiler, the cover of which hasn’t been replaced yet. Yes, so I guess that was me too. It must have been, if there was any logic at all behind the past few days.
If he hadn’t turned around, then—
Then I would be sitting over his dead body right now, covered in even more blood, the knife sticky in my hand. Without the slightest idea how it came to that.
The image squeezes the air from my lungs. I squat down on the floor until the black spots in front of my eyes gradually clear.
Close. So close.
With clammy fingers, I get the first-aid kit from the cupboard, find the disinfectant spray and sterile swabs. I bring everything downstairs.
Erik is now sitting on one of the barstools. He’s taken his shirt off and is pressing it against his arm. His face is pale. I place the first-aid kit down on the bar and move to tend to the wound, but he shakes his head. “Don’t even think of touching me.”
“But you can’t do it by yourself—”
“Yes I can.” He jerks his chin, silently telling me to back away, then begins to clean the wound.
A deep, gaping cut; blood is still seeping out of it. It needs stitches.
Struggling a little, Erik puts a dressing over the wound and tries to wrap an elastic bandage around it, but it’s practically impossible with only one hand.
“Let me help you. Please.”
He doesn’t answer; instead he intensifies his efforts.
As I step closer to him and take the roll of bandage from his hand, he finally relents. He holds the dressing as I secure it.
“Please let me drive you to the hospital.”
He laughs. “Not a chance.”
“But you have to get stitches.”
Erik moves his hand over the bandage, checking it. For now, it’s holding. “Yes, I know. But the last thing I’m going to do is get in a car that you’re driving.”
He glances over at the torn, blood-soaked shirt on the floor. “I’ll change clothes, and then I’ll go. Alone.”
When he stands up, he teeters a little, but then regains his balance.
I step into his path. “Let me come with you.”
“No.”
“In the passenger seat. Please. I can’t let you drive like this.” I’m fully aware of how ironic my concern must seem in light of the situation. But I want to do something; I’d undo everything that happened if I could, but as that’s not possible then I at least want to … be of help.
“I’m going by myself. I don’t want to have you next to me and constantly be afraid that you’ll grab the steering well and drive us into a wall. Or pull another knife out of your sleeve. Or off yourself in front of my eyes, jump out of the car while we’re doing a hundred or something like that.” He looks at me. “It’s over, Joanna. I hope you get help, for your own sake. But there’s no way I can be with someone who I can’t turn my back on without having to worry they might stab me.”
He slowly makes his way over to the stairs. “I’ll come by in the morning and pick up my things. The little that’s left of them, anyway.”
I follow him, and try to take his hand, but he pulls it away. “I mean it,” he says sharply. “Don’t touch me. Stay away.”
And so I let him go. I retreat back into the far corner of the hall, wondering why this good-bye feels so painful. No chance of an answer, though. And I should probably hand the task of figuring out the inner workings of my mind over to the experts as soon as possible.
Five minutes later, Erik comes back downstairs. The new shirt he’s put on is already beginning to turn red above the stab wound.
I say nothing else.
He says nothing else.
He leaves the house without turning around even once.
22
I sit down carefully in the car. Waves of white-hot pain are surging through my entire upper body from the wound on my arm.
What’s just as painful, perhaps even more, is the bitter disappointment, the crushing realization that Joanna’s lost her mind once and for all. That she’s beyond recovery. And that there’s nothing she, or I, can do.