I Remember You

Chapter 22

Time went by slower on the flight back to Ísafjörður than it had on the way south. Freyr had barely been able to keep his eyes open when he’d needed to, but as soon as he fastened his seatbelt his fatigue vanished, or rather took a little break. There was no prospect more appealing than closing his eyes and forgetting everything, even if only for a short flight, but it was impossible: he had too much to think about. An odd discomfort and anxiety welled up inside him, and in the end he even ordered coffee from the friendly flight attendant. After that there was no turning back and he lost control of his thoughts. He felt like he did when he couldn’t sleep at night. At those times, everything seemed hopeless and the tiniest problems became insurmountable. His trip south had yielded no real explanation for Halla’s death, and he was surprised now that he’d ever thought the autopsy would provide a definitive answer. There were far too many unanswered questions for that, too many complexities. In addition he was disappointed, though not surprised, not to have got hold of Lárus, the only member of the old group of schoolmates still alive. The man had neither answered his phone nor been at home when Freyr finally took a taxi there. It was possible that he had been there but didn’t come to the door; the apartment was in a block and it was equally likely that the doorbell was broken. Nonetheless Freyr rang it several times, and even circled the building in the hope of finding the windows to apartment 5.03, but to no avail. He thanked his lucky stars that he hadn’t gone into architecture all those years ago, as he’d considered doing for a time; he clearly had terrible spatial awareness. But it didn’t really matter, as Freyr had no idea what he would do if he saw a light or movement in the apartment. He’d hardly planned on bursting in on the man.

But he felt worst about Sara. His disappointment was even greater considering that he’d allowed himself to hope that finally she was showing signs of improvement. Of course he should have known better, evaluated the situation professionally instead of letting himself be influenced by optimism. But he wasn’t the first psychiatrist in history to misjudge a relative’s circumstances. Although he no longer loved Sara in a romantic sense, he was still very fond of her and that fondness would never go away, any more than he could stop loving his parents. Although their relationship had taken a different turn than they’d planned on their wedding day, they still stood in its shadow; in any case, the way things were at the moment they were still a long way from feeling able to look for happiness once more in the arms of other people. If Benni’s fate were never explained, they might remain this way all their lives. His disappearance bound them with slender but strong threads, the web of their shared tragedy.

When the plane landed, he made it his first task to call his ex-wife. It was much colder in Ísafjörður than in Reykjavík and Freyr’s coat flapped in the wind, allowing the cold to bite through his thin shirt. With his free hand he managed to button his coat loosely as he increased his speed across the tarmac. He was about to hang up when Sara finally answered. She wasted no time on a greeting, and instead asked curtly: ‘What do you want?’

‘I just wanted to say goodbye to you properly. It was all a bit weird when I left and I found it difficult to discuss things properly with your friend there.’

‘You don’t have to patronize her like that to me. You made it perfectly clear what you think of people like her. However, you might want to think about abandoning your prejudices and listening to what she has to say. It’s not just mumbo-jumbo.’

‘Maybe not.’ Freyr was striding purposefully through the airport. He lowered his voice slightly as he made his way through a group of travellers that had gathered at the luggage belt. ‘But if I try to open my mind to this, would you at least be willing to look at it with a slightly more critical eye? Maybe we could meet halfway? How about that?’ He was more than ready to play along and pretend to consider a Ouija board and other such nonsense if it would bring Sara a bit more down to earth.

‘I’ve tried it, Freyr. It doesn’t work. I’m still having the same dreams and I’m still haunted by the same feelings.’ She took a deep breath before continuing: ‘I can smell Benni sometimes. I see him at the shops, outside the apartment, everywhere I go. I’m not hallucinating, Freyr. He’s still here. You’ve got to realize that.’ Again she drew a breath. ‘There’s something bad in the air, something that’s getting worse. If you choose to pretend it’s nothing, then so be it. I wish I could say something or do something to get you to take this seriously, but I know I can’t. But I felt obligated to you, which is why I took the chance of having Elísa talk to you and open your eyes to what you don’t want to see. It didn’t work, obviously.’

‘Sara, I’m not sure you ought to have much more to do with this woman.’ He said this as carefully as possible, for fear of her hanging up on him. ‘If you dream about Benni, think you can see him and so on, it’s perfectly natural and it doesn’t have to have any psychic meaning. You must believe me, these things are more common than you think. Your mind is still tied to him, and because he’s always uppermost in your thoughts he’ll keep appearing like this for a long time to come, though it might eventually be less often. Do you think I haven’t experienced these things myself?’ He didn’t want to tell her about the incident at the hospital, when Benni had seemed so real to him that he’d felt as if he could touch him.

‘I can’t talk to you about this, Freyr.’ There was defeat in Sara’s voice. ‘And I know you lied to me. About what, I don’t know, but you once lied to me about something that makes a huge difference in all of this.’

‘What?’ Freyr’s heart skipped a beat. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I wasn’t going to mention it to you, but it’s been plaguing me and it’s best if I just say it. It’s up to you what you do about it; you can tell me the truth, continue to lie or just say nothing. You decide.’

Freyr was silent for a moment. ‘If you think I have information that could solve Benni’s case, you’re very wrong.’ He was angry; at her and at himself. He’d reached his car, which he’d left in the car park outside the terminal. He allowed the wind to cool him down. ‘Where is this coming from?’

‘When I wake from the dream that haunts me every night, I know it for certain. You can’t say or do anything to change it, so you can spare yourself the trouble.’

‘What is this dream about, Sara? Maybe the feeling it gives you can be explained by its contents.’

‘It’s about Benni. What else? I’m chasing him; I never catch him, of course, but I’m always really close and get closer every time. Everything is green, even the air. It’s difficult to explain but I wake up in a sweat, knowing that you were the cause of all of this. Because you lied.’

Freyr said nothing. The dream seemed startlingly similar to the last one he’d read about in Védís’s dream diary. He was afraid to admit how much Sara’s words affected him, especially the part about lying. There, he knew he was guilty.

‘She wouldn’t stop. I hope you don’t mind, but I thought you would want to know about it even though you were on leave.’ The nurse’s anxiety was plain to see as she stood there with her arms crossed, deep wrinkles creasing her youthful brow. Freyr smiled reassuringly, realizing that his preoccupied state might have been taken by the woman as annoyance at having been called to the nursing home. Nothing was further from the truth; he’d been happy to receive the call, because it meant he could push his own troubles aside for a while.

‘No problem, you were absolutely right to call.’ He concentrated on sounding perfectly normal: ‘You said Úrsúla had repeatedly asked to see me, but did she say why?’

The woman shook her head. ‘No, you know how she is. Not exactly a chatterbox. It actually started on the morning shift but I didn’t come in until the afternoon, so I don’t know for sure whether she was any more lucid then. I doubt it. I thought I’d better get hold of you before we left for the night, in case she needed to be admitted to hospital and monitored. You never know how well sleeping pills will work if a patient’s having an episode.’

‘I’d better see what’s up.’ Freyr put his hand on the doorknob to the woman’s room. ‘Has she been out today?’

‘No. She wouldn’t hear of it. She actually stiffens in fear if you so much as mention even going into the corridor. She’s terrified of something but refuses to say what it is. In the meantime there’s very little we can do to help her overcome her fear.’ The woman stretched her back. ‘I feel like she’s deteriorated. The little progress we’d started to see seems to have gone into reverse, unfortunately.’

This didn’t particularly surprise Freyr; in fact he’d been worried this might happen. For a long time all the signs had suggested that she could regress. ‘I’ll look in on you before I go.’ He opened the door and the heavy air in the apartment was nearly palpable. ‘Oof. Can’t we open a window?’

‘She doesn’t want to. She gets very agitated.’ Although the nurse didn’t describe the woman’s reactions in detail, Freyr was well aware that she was far from easy to deal with and it was unfair to expect the staff to have to insist on opening the window. He doubted he’d even be up to the challenge himself. At least not the way he felt now.

Freyr took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness inside the room. He didn’t want to turn on the light for fear of startling her, feeling it would be better to approach her first on her own terms and then see whether it were possible to convince her that she’d feel better with fresh air and more light. ‘Hello, Úrsúla. I heard you wanted to talk to me.’ He walked cautiously towards the woman, wary in case he fell over something on the floor. She was sitting at the window, as before. The dim light of a streetlamp shone through the thick curtains, making her appear in silhouette. ‘So I decided to look in on you and see how you’re doing. I would have come this morning, but I had to make a quick trip to Reykjavík.’ No response. He was starting to think that Úrsúla had fallen asleep in her chair, even passed out from lack of oxygen, but when he went up close he could see that her eyes were open. She stared straight ahead at the curtains. ‘Don’t you want to open them to see out? Maybe it’ll start snowing again. I always find it very relaxing to watch the snowflakes fall.’

Úrsúla shook her head slowly. ‘No. Absolutely not.’ Her voice was hoarse, almost as if it were dusty. ‘I don’t want to see.’

‘Why not?’ Freyr pulled a stool over. Úrsúla didn’t look at him, but continued to stare straight ahead.

‘Do you think there’s something out there? If so, I can truly promise you that there are just a few cars, including mine.’

The woman suddenly snapped her head towards Freyr. ‘There’s more out there.’ She stared at him, seeming angry, as if he’d tried to convince her of some sort of damned nonsense that she could see through easily. ‘There’s more out there than just cars.’

‘Such as?’ Freyr kept calm, having seen and heard a lot in his time. The woman turned back towards the curtains with the same speed as she’d turned towards him. ‘The boy.’

‘The boy?’ Freyr frowned. ‘Not this late, Úrsúla. Maybe there was a boy out in the car park today, but now all the children have gone home for dinner. And you don’t have to worry about kids, they won’t do you any harm.’ Úrsúla pursed her lips and said nothing. Freyr watched her and considered the best way to keep the conversation going. It was unusual for her to express herself so much, and it would be a shame to waste the opportunity. ‘Did you want to get me here to talk about kids? I can certainly talk about them, and even tell you stories about a little boy I once knew well. He was often naughty, but always good inside. That’s what matters, as you know.’

‘Stories about Benni?’ The woman’s face didn’t change, leaving Freyr to drop his jaw in amazement. Where the hell had she heard his son’s name?

‘No, not about Benni.’ Freyr was careful to keep his cool. ‘But what do you know about him? Can you maybe tell me something about him?’

She shook her head as before, very slowly. ‘No, I know nothing about him.’ She swallowed. ‘I don’t know Benni.’ She shut her eyes. ‘Do you think the blind see things when they dream?’

Freyr had no idea. ‘Probably those who could see at one point but were blinded later on, but not those who were born blind. At least that’s what I’d imagine. Why do you ask?’

‘I don’t want to see any more. It’s better to be in the dark.’

‘You’re wrong.’ Freyr waited for Úrsúla to open her eyes again but she gave no sign that she would; she continued to sit there with her eyes closed, still as a statue. ‘It’s much better to see than not to see. Fortunately, there’s much more beauty than ugliness in the world. If you went out more often for walks you would start to realize that, and to realize that I’m right. Don’t you want to try? If I’m wrong, I’ll stop pestering you about it.’

‘I don’t want to go out. Not here, in this place. I know exactly what I’ll see.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘The boy.’ She screwed up her eyes so tightly again that her short, pale eyelashes were nearly swallowed up by her eyelids. ‘I don’t want eyes any more.’ Freyr watched her hands whiten on the arms of the chair.

‘Which boy is this, Úrsúla? Is he someone I know?’ She shook her head and he tried again. ‘Is he from here?’ She remained silent and didn’t confirm or deny it, either with a head movement or otherwise. ‘What’s his name? Or maybe he doesn’t have a name?’

Her eyes opened and she looked at Freyr. The fear in her face was tangible, a sick hunger that had etched out a new, yet terrifying reality in which she was trapped. As if the true one weren’t bad enough. ‘Bernódus.’ Tears ran down her cheeks. ‘He’s waiting for me outside.’ She wiped her tears with her bony hand. ‘He’s angry at me. So angry.’ She raised her hands to her eyes and stuck her fingernails into her eyebrows, so hard that blood sprang up from beneath them. Before Freyr managed to stop her, she’d scratched the skin open to the corners of her eyes.

Freyr grabbed at the woman and pulled her hands from her bleeding face, calling for help as loudly as he could. When he heard the rapid footsteps of the nurse coming down the corridor he relaxed his grip slightly. His voice even sounded completely calm when he asked her to fetch a tranquillizer immediately. After she’d run off again, he managed with some dexterity to move the woman’s hands to her lap, and held them there. ‘Calm down now, Úrsúla. Calm down.’

She laughed joylessly. It didn’t last long, and afterwards she looked at him, her face streaked with both blood and tears, now running down in streams. ‘He wants to hurt people. Did you know that? Hurt them, hurt them badly.’ She tilted her head as she stared into Freyr’s eyes. ‘Maybe you, too. But first he wants you to find Benni.’ A pair of blood-tinged tears ran down her chin and dripped onto the tired old bathrobe she wore over her nightclothes. ‘He tells me that in my head.’