Page 96 of The Living and the Dead

Vidar picked up the crossword and enteredit.

That was when he noticed something under the newspaper. A thick photo album bound in burgundy velvet. It looked full. Vidar tentatively picked it up. “Is this yours?”

“Yes.”

“Do you look at it often? You and Felicia?”

“She shows me.”

“May I have a peek?”

Lillemor nodded weakly, and when Vidar opened the album he found scenes from the past, moments from a life that no longer existed. Dinners, parties, holidays. In one of the pictures, someone, probably Karl-Henrik, was dressed up as Santa Claus.

He stopped on one page and paused for a second, perhaps a fraction too long.

“What beautiful pictures,” he managed to say, his voice quaking. “Could I borrow this?”

Long seconds passed. Lillemor’s eyes grew oddly blank. When she finally spoke, her voice was thick.

“Take good care of it. It’s all I have left.”

71

If you asked Felicia about her life in the first few years after the landslide, you would get a peculiar comparison in response.

“It was like being shipwrecked,” she liked to say. “That’s what it was like.”

Shipwrecked.It wasn’t her usual manner of speaking. The description must have come from someone else, maybe one of the many psychologists or doctors she’d encountered over the years. Or one of the men? If it even mattered. One way or another, the word had been offered to her and she had accepted it the way the injured accept painkillers.

“Hi,” she said bluntly when Sander appeared at her door.

No surprise or curiosity, almost as if she had expected him.

Felicia was wearing denim shorts and a T-shirt with a large bird printed across the chest, the kind of shirt you would buy at the market out by the shore at Östra Stranden. One second passed, then two more, as they simply stared at each other. Then, as if on a signal heard only by them, they smiled and met in a stiff but friendly embrace.

Her body, in his arms, was both foreign and familiar. When they let go of each other, the scent of her hair lingered and he resisted the urge to hug her again.

“I figured you would be showing up. That’s why I held off on my walk.”

The air was still comfortable, the worst of the heat yet to gather, and birds whose names he no longer knew soared across the sky. Soon Felicia and Sander were strolling down the gravel path, the mood between them tense and a bit uneasy at first. Although they lived only half an hour apart, on different outskirts of the same small city, they hadn’t seen each other in twenty years.

When they did begin to speak, the words were strained. But after a while, the conversation flowed more smoothly; they relaxed and realized, with some relief, that they seemed to get along. They shared a very particular sense of humor, which was perhaps not unusual for two people who also had a tragedy in common.

“You usually take walks,” he said; he meant it as a question but it didn’t sound like one.

“Yes, that’s my alone time, you know? Good for my well-being.”

He knew she worked at some store in town these days. For a while she had been employed by the clinic as a nurse, until she quit. She’d gotten married, eventually. Sander didn’t know the guy, but he’d heard from his parents that the two of them had gotten a divorce a few years back. By that time, they had two kids.

“They’re up in Falkenberg with him now. We share custody. It works out pretty well. He’s got a new partner up there. Jonathan likes her, Majken doesn’t. I guess that’s how it goes.”

“Jonathan and Majken. Nice names.”

“You didn’t know their names? They’ll be fifteen and seventeen this year. Fall babies, both.”

Children, marriage, divorce. Work. All of this—how had it happened? He understood it determined who she was today, and he couldn’t connect with it except in a general, abstract sort of way. Their story had begun and ended much earlier.

“It’s weird,” she said, “having kids. Don’t you think? You’ve only just made it through your own childhood, and suddenly you’re responsible for someone else’s.”