Page 72 of The Living and the Dead

“My fever is gone. It doesn’t hurt all that much either. I think I’ll get to go home tomorrow.”

“Where will you go? When you leave here?”

“To an apartment here in town, over by Nyhem. We’ll have to see what happens after that. I don’t know if there’s any saving it.” Her voice sounded strange, as though she were talking about a lost jacket rather than an entire home. “How about you?”

“Our house is higher up. So it survived. We’re staying in Andersberg right now, but I think they’ll let us move back home soon.”

He’d prepared so many words, but none of them would come to him in the moment. His head was full of fog.

“Killian…” he began.

“I know.”

Everything became blunted. Sander was nothing but the sound a hand makes against a brick wall, a sack of dirt landing on a lawn.

“I’ve been lying here for so long,” Felicia said, “with so much time to think, watching the fucking news over and over again. And all I can come up with is…part of me is so glad I lost the baby, because that way I won’t have to explain to him that his father is dead.”

This didn’t hit Sander the way one might have expected. There was no shock, no physical sensation of a slap or a bang. It reached him like a piece of information he already knew.

Of course. His best friend was going to be a dad.

Sander looked down. “Did he know?”

“Who?”

“Killian. Did he know he…”

Felicia shook her head.

Did he know. Past tense. That was the first time. Until now he had persisted in using the present tense, as though language were a tool with which he could force reality to conform. As long as he spoke about Killian as though he were alive, it was possible to imagine that he really was. Even so, Sander knew: this bluntness inside him was the confirmation that his best friend was gone.

“Do you know how his mom and dad are doing?”

Sander shook his head. He couldn’t bear to think about it. Instead, he saw his hand move as though controlled by someone else. He placed it gently atop Felicia’s. It was strange—he’d spent a lot of time imagining what her palm would be like, in so many different ways. How it would feel against his skin, how it would smell and taste. But he had never imagined it like this. Dry and rough, just skin and bone.

She took his hand and squeezed it the way a sister hugs a brother, then let go of him and placed her hand on her belly again, over the emptiness inside, as though that were where it still belonged.

She observed his hand, the bracelet.

“That’s nice,” she said. “Is it new?”

He didn’t reply. He thought about telling her about the page of Filip’s notebook, what it had said, how he had handed it over to the police. But why would he? What did it matter now?

He wanted to ask Felicia if she had liked him the way he had liked her. Back before Killian came into her life, had she felt anything when they kissed, the way Sander had? But he didn’t dare. He could guess what the answer would be, so why bother? Anyway, that didn’t matter anymore either.

“It’s so insane,” he said, “that I’m still here and he’s gone. It was supposed to be the other way around.”

There was a glass of water on the table next to the bed. Half-full. He looked at it and didn’t understand. It was so simple to keep on living, to simply take the glass in hand. Clasp it gently and pick it up. Bring it to your mouth. Drink in the water and swallow.Swallow.

From a distance it would probably look like he was drinking, and that was accurate. He had just broken it up into tiny steps. Life was a series of steps, jags in a stream. Anything can be divided up that way. You just tackle one thing at a time, and if it’s still too big you can divide it into smaller parts. Is there a limit to how small? If there was, Sander hadn’t found it yet. Incredible to think that it was so simple.

“Was it really an explosion?” she asked.

“The dynamite at the Söderströms’ place ignited. Or that’s what they think, anyway.”

“It’s so crazy. I’m sure they told me that, I just don’t remember. That fever I had, it made me so loopy for a while. Who set off the dynamite?”

“No one knows. But I heard the police think it was Sten.”