It was as if he didn’t find people scary at all. And no one wondered if he was a dwarf.
“Who won?” I asked when the contest was over.
“Jenny actually did.”
Jenny raised her hands over her head in triumph, but immediately received a punch on the arm from Kai, who had only managed to finagle his way to second place.
“Ow,” she complained.
“Oh . . . but Jenny can’t win the grand prize, because it’s something we already have. Maybe we could give it to Kai since he came in second?”
“Yes! Give it here!”
I handed him one of Jenny’s books. She crossed her arms in front of her chest and gave me the evil eye.
“A book?” Kai whined. “I don’t want that!”
“What’s my prize?” Alva wondered.
“I don’t have anything for you, honey,” I explained gently. “You’re not actually in the friendship group, you know. These are Jenny’s classmates.”
“You didn’t buy anything for the other kids, either?”
Bj?rnar looked at me with his eyebrows raised before taking Alva into his arms and giving Kai clear instructions to stop hitting Markus on the thigh.
“You should bike over to the grocery store and buy prizes,” he instructed. “And a consolation prize for Alva.”
“I don’t want a consternation prize,” she sobbed. “I want a real prize.”
“Yes, yes,” he corrected himself, “a real prize.”
“But what am I going to buy at the grocery store? They don’t have anything. Should I get them candy? That’s not going to go over well with the parents, is it?”
“I guess you’ll find out!”
A few exhausting hours later I was sitting on the edge of Alva’s bed, looking at Alva, who was lying on her side, breathing heavily, her mouth open and a little bit of vomit still on her cheek. The friendship-group kids had left with their candy prizes, which had resulted in a text message from Matilda’s mother letting me know that on principle she was opposed to the practice of handing out candy at events that weren’t birthday parties and that took place on school days.
I wiped Alva’s cheek, tucked her in nicely under her covers, and tiptoed out.
“Can we take a little walk over to that house and then have a glass of wine?” I asked Bj?rnar, who was at the sink washing cookie cutters.
“No to the first and yes to the second.”
“Come on! It’s just a quick walk.”
“I’m not up to it.”
“Oh, please. I’ve been thinking about it all day.”
“You can go for a walk.”
“I don’t want to do it alone. Come on. Just a quick walk to take a look and decide if we want to see the inside. They’re having an open house on Saturday, you know.”
He sighed.
“Fine.”
We went upstairs to tell the kids.
“We’re going to go for a quick walk. Could you guys get in bed and just read? We’ll be back soon. Daddy has his cell phone.”
“Can we put on an audiobook?” Jenny asked.
“I don’t want to listen to an audiobook,” Ebba protested.
“Put on the audiobook, but not too loud. You have to be able to hear Alva if she wakes up.”
Jenny nodded seriously, and I stared into her unreadable blue eyes and again felt the thread slowly being pulled through my heart.
We bundled up in our scarves and heavy jackets and walked in silence. I loved the feel of the evening air on my skin. It washed away all the grime the day had stirred up. Made everything smooth and clear again.
I took Bj?rnar’s hand and we moved so effortlessly and harmoniously through the world that I almost forgot the purpose of the walk, until he suddenly stopped and pointed.
He was pointing at a house, one that shone so radiantly that it almost took my breath away.
And I knew I’d been right all along.
This was our home.
There couldn’t be any doubt. There sat the house we were going to live in. Not just this year and next year, but when we were so old we couldn’t read the paper without a magnifying glass and had to put our dentures in water before we turned off our reading lights.
“Ours,” I said.
“It’s going to go for way more than the asking price,” Bj?rnar said, “and we can’t afford it. But it is a nice house.”
“Ours,” I repeated.
“Not ours,” he corrected me, “but it is nice.”
We stood there in silence for a little while before continuing down the hill.
I saw a woman in the kitchen of the house doing the dishes. A warm light shone behind her. Yet again I had the thought that it was a model home. Something that didn’t exist in this world. Something that was too good to be true.
It was dangerous to want things like that, things that actually don’t belong anywhere other than fiction. Besides, a little voice inside me said it wasn’t wise to rock the boat, reach for too much, fly too close to the sun. But, as so many times before, I didn’t really listen.
8
In the days leading up to the weekend, my suspicion was confirmed: the house we were living in now wasn’t a proper home.
We had been lying to ourselves this whole time.
And once a fantasy is revealed as fantasy, there’s no going back.
Once you’ve escaped from the chains down in the cave and crawled out into the sunlight, going back in is simply not an option.
The shadows in the cave are just shadows.
Truth and light are in the other direction.
All you have to do is go for it.
There was a knock on the door.
“Yes?”
Ingvill poked her head in, and I rolled my eyes—on the inside.
“Do you have five minutes?” she asked in that plodding way of hers.
“Actually, no,” I mumbled, “but you can have twenty seconds?”
She smiled hesitantly and sat down on the chair I kept for visitors.
“It’s about this course revision,” she began. “I don’t think we should accept them.”
“We don’t really have much choice, do we?”
“I think we do. We’ve set up a committee to oppose it.”
“To oppose what?”
“The course revision.”
“What kind of opposition are we talking about?”
“I can’t tell you today. Our first meeting isn’t until Monday.”