A House Without Mirrors (10 page)

A
t first he was just lying there, face down across the bed, fully dressed, his arm trapped underneath him. His body rested like a dead thing on the mattress, and I tried not to think about death while I pulled at his hand.

“Dad,” I said, shaking him hard. “You’ve got to wake up!”

I swallowed the fear that burned in my throat. Dad wasn’t dead, just sleeping, and if I continued pulling he would wake up.

“Please, Dad, wake up!”

And then suddenly he turned over on his side, lifted his head and was fully awake.

“Is it Henrietta?” he said, in his normal voice. “Is she?…”

“She’s sleeping,” I said. “But you have to come with me.”

I had planned it like that, just to get him out of bed and drag him through the corridor to the octagonal room before he had time to think. I didn’t want any questions.

It worked. We were already inside the wardrobe when Dad had woken up enough to start asking questions.

“But why are we here?” he mumbled. “Thomasine, what are we—”

“Shush,” I whispered. “Don’t talk!”

Dad coughed, the way he always does when he gets unsure.

“What do you mean?” he said carefully. “Am I not even allowed to ask what—”

“No, you are not.”

The shift in the light had come and gone and I pushed open the door impatiently with my bum.

“You can come out now, Dad,” I whispered. “Come on, get out!”

He followed me out of the door, and I was uncertain whether the transformation had actually occurred this time. The room looked almost the same
as the one we had left behind: empty of furniture and with muck along the walls. It was not until I noticed that the windows were on the wrong wall that I knew we were really in Hetty’s house, not Henrietta’s.

Something told me that we would not meet Hetty this time. Even if I had suspected it as I entered the wardrobe, I was still disappointed. There were so many things I had wanted to ask her. About myself and about her; about the people in the photo albums. How did they became strangers to each other?

But this was not the right time for that kind of thing. I was going to bring Dad to the conservatory, and the only question I was going to ask was the one Henrietta had whispered in my ear.

As we walked through the house I felt Dad hesitating, but I couldn’t let him stop. Not until we entered the glass doors of the conservatory. It was impossible to drag him any further.

“Thomasine, what have you done?”

Dad was standing dead still on the cement tiles next to the lily pond, looking around. He pulled away his hand and crossed his arms over his chest as if he was cold.

“What do you mean, ‘done’, Dad?”

Dad pointed at the lush vine above us and at the pond, which was full of water.

“I haven’t done anything, Dad,” I said. “It just happened.”

He lowered his hand and looked around, but he didn’t say anything.

“Dad,” I said, trying to collect myself. “I’m going to ask you a question and you have to give me the honest answer.”

He just stood there looking at the plants winding around the cast-iron pillars above the still surface of the pond.

Then he blinked.

“If I can,” he said.

We stood in silence, facing each other in the moonlight. I felt like you do just before you jump off a very high diving board; perhaps Dad did too.

Then I took a deep breath and let it out.

“Dad,” I said. “What do you wish for most of all?”

Dad’s gaze slid away, and even before he opened his mouth I knew he was going to lie.

“Well, you know,” he said evasively. “An end to all wars. That everyone could enjoy good health, things like that.”

I didn’t say a thing. I just stood there and let his words fall to the ground without even trying to catch them. He could tell, of course, and I saw him slump. Now he knew that he wasn’t going to get away so easily.

“What do you mean, then?” he said at last. “Wishing for things? Money? Well, I don’t.”

“I know that,” I said. “But what do you wish for most of all?”

Dad looked at me and suddenly something glinted in his eyes. It was only there for a moment, but I felt my back prickling with anxiety and expectation. I hadn’t seen that determined, almost stern gaze in Dad’s eyes for years.

Not since Martin died.

“Forget it, Thomasine,” he said, turning around. “I don’t want to play this stupid game.”

He went and sat down on a bench, the same one Wilma and Signe had been sitting on, and I let him sit by himself for a while. Then I went over and sat down cautiously next to him.

“I don’t think it’s a game,” I said.

Dad sighed and threw up his hands. “But it’s completely pointless,” he said. “Why should we go around making wishes?”

“Why not?”

“Because they’ll never come true!”

There it was again. The spark that went out long ago lit up in Dad’s eyes for several seconds before it died out again.

“Life’s not like that, Thomasine,” he said. “I know that you don’t understand, and perhaps the point is that you shouldn’t. Yet.”

He grew silent and looked down at his worn-out slippers for a long time before going on.

“But life’s not like that,” he repeated, more quietly this time. “It turns out the way it does, and all you can do is try and do your best.”

I was silent too for a while. Not because I didn’t know what to say, but because sometimes you need to leave silence between the words.

“You can still make a wish,” I said. “Perhaps it doesn’t even matter if it comes true. Perhaps it’s the wish itself that is important.”

Dad was looking at me now, and his gaze was full of doubt. I knew it meant that he was thinking about what I had said, and I knew that was good.

“What do you wish for most of all, Dad?” I said so quietly that it was almost a whisper. “Most of all?”

He slumped again, shaking his head.

“No, I can’t say.”

“Yes, please say it!”

My voice was still no more than a whisper, but now it sounded eager and childlike. I could hear it myself.

Dad shook his head again without looking at me.

“It’s no use,” he said. “I can’t.”

Suddenly a tear fell from the tip of his nose and without a sound landed on the cement between his slippers.

Dad was crying.

I couldn’t remember the last time he had cried without hiding it from me.

“Dad, you can do it. Say it.”

He cried harder now, really weeping. There was no noise, but his whole body was shaking. As carefully as I could, I placed a hand on his arm.

“Say it, Dad.”

“I wish—”

He didn’t get any further before his voice broke, but he tried again.

“I would really like to hold him again. Just for a little while.”

The words were no more than a whisper, but I understood.

“Martin?” I said. “Do you mean Martin?”

Dad nodded, but by now he was crying so hard he could no longer speak.

I don’t know how I happened to look at the pond, I just did.

And there he was.

Martin, my little brother, was lying just below the surface. He was wearing his red waterproof trousers and a knitted jumper. I remembered the jumper, and I remembered the feeling of Martin’s small round hands.

But although he was lying under water, nothing was like it must have been that awful day when Dad found him in the pool. This was not an ending.

Martin was lying there smiling at me, just as I remembered him.

“Dad,” I said, nudging his arm cautiously. “Look, Dad.”

Dad lifted his head and looked towards the pond. At first he was completely still; he stopped crying in the middle of a sob, stopped breathing. Then he flew up from the bench and before I could stop him he had stepped into the pond.

“Martin!” Dad shouted. “No, Martin! No!”

He crouched down, fumbled for the child’s body under the water and lifted it out. All the time he screamed, and the screams cut like thorny poles right through me.

Dad must have screamed just like that on the day that no one had heard him. But this Martin was not floppy and lifeless in Dad’s arms. He wriggled and his hands held onto Dad’s cardigan. Then he laughed.

Martin’s laughter. The sound was like an echo from another life, something that another Thomasine had heard. But I recognized it.

Oh, how I recognized it!

“Martin,” Dad said, clutching him tightly. “My God, how you scared me, Martin.”

I stood behind Dad’s back and saw how Martin threw his arms around Dad’s neck. He smiled with his tiny rice-grain teeth, like he always did when he played a trick on us, and hugged Dad hard, hard.

“Thank God,” Dad whispered. “Thank God.”

Martin pressed his face against Dad’s neck, and Dad’s hand stroked his back outside the wet jumper. I remembered when Mum knitted that jumper and how impatient I’d been for Martin to grow into it.
They were exactly his colours; the same blue as his eyes and the same sun-bleached wheat yellow as his hair.

Suddenly I saw the stripes in the jumper turn blank and merge into one. Martin’s downy neck lost its colour, his hands around Dad’s neck turned transparent like water. For a moment Dad held a body of water in his arms; a perfect, transparent sculpture of Martin.

Then the surface broke and the water fell to the floor in a shower of glittering drops, and when they fell against the cement tiles they sounded like rain. A still, warm spring rain, washing the world clean.

Dad just stood there with his eyes closed, his clothes soaked, his arms bent as if he were still embracing a child. I watched his closed eyelids, frightened of what I might see in his eyes when they opened. Would he be the same as he had been just after Martin’s death? Back to those weeks when he couldn’t get out of bed?

Neither of us spoke. Dad kept his eyes closed and I kept watching. And then he opened his eyes, and in that instant I knew that it was all over.

The grief that had been in his gaze for so long was still there, but I saw something new as well. Or rather, I saw something that had been missing for so long that I almost had forgotten what it looked like.

Life. There was life in Dad’s eyes again.

H
enrietta died at dawn, between night and day. A window was open in her room, and the air that sifted in was cool. The first blackbird of the new day started singing in the garden, and I thought I saw a smile on her sleeping face as she heard it.

Dad and I held Henrietta’s old hands in ours and watched life seeping out of her for almost an hour. There was nothing fearsome in it. On the contrary: it went so slowly and still, so completely without pain. Her breathing became weaker and weaker, until it stopped altogether.

Dad pulled the sheet carefully over her face, and then we went downstairs together to get something to eat. The first ray of sunlight broke through the mosaic in the stained-glass window on the stairs just as I passed it. I stopped and let it shine on my closed eyes for a couple of seconds.

Henrietta had lived a long life, and now she was gone. The earth kept turning, leaving behind an empty space in the world. What else can you say about the life of a human being?

I lean back and look at the words I have written. It feels like a kind of ending, but it’s too early to know. Perhaps I’ll recall something that I’ll want to add in due course.

I’m writing this sitting in my special study. It’s dark around me, but the screen on Dad’s old laptop—which is mine now—lights up my face. I know that it’s just a computer screen, but I can’t help thinking of it as a window, or perhaps a door. A shining opening into all the days I have not yet lived.

It has been almost two years since the morning when Henrietta died, and I’m fourteen now. Older than Wilma was then, and we are still living here. In the end it turned out that no one apart from Kajsa wanted to sell Henrietta’s house, so we divided it into flats instead. Mum, Dad and I live on the second floor, and Daniel, Signe and Erland live on the floor below. The ground floor is divided into a shared sitting room and a flat, which Kajsa sold. A young Iranian family lives there now, with a little
girl who Mum says looks exactly like me when I was that age.

Mum turned up at Henrietta’s house after only a couple of days, and she and Dad took care of all the practical matters. There was a lot to be done, of course. Mum said that there usually is when somebody dies. A lot of everyday things that no one has thought of suddenly turn up and have to be dealt with. In the evenings I lay under the table in the dining room and listened to their calm voices. They made phone calls, found solutions. After a while Dad started writing again, and then he bought a new computer. In the afternoons I’d write my diary on his old computer, while I listened to him tapping on his keyboard in the next room. It was so like everything I’ve ever dreamt of that sometimes I couldn’t be sure it was for real.

Daniel came back too, with Erland and Signe. Signe was pleased to see me, and Erland was just an ordinary little boy. He read a lot, and that’s something I had never seen him do before. Daniel had got some new clothes and glasses and for the first time I heard him speak of Erland and Signe’s mum. She lives in Germany with a new man, and Erland and Signe visit her in the school holidays.

I didn’t see Wilma again until a year after Henrietta died. I didn’t even speak to her on the phone, and I thought that perhaps she was angry with me. At first I tried to understand why, and then I tried to be angry as well.

But then one summer morning when I came out into the garden, Wilma was sitting on the steps talking to Mum and Dad. I shouted out and threw myself around her neck. I couldn’t stop myself.

We talked all day, and Wilma told me that she wasn’t angry at all. At least not with me. But she had quarrelled a lot with Kajsa and her dad. They wanted her to study economics at college and go into sales like they had, but Wilma refused. When the time came to choose a new school, she picked an art college, which was a long way away, and now she lives in a completely different town.

Wilma comes and stays quite often during her holidays, and I think she sees us more often than her own parents. She says that she loves Kajsa and Kjell, but that she has to be allowed to decide for herself. She says that she always felt like that, and she probably believes it is true.

I have tried to talk to Wilma about everything that happened with Hetty in the house of mirrors, but it is as if she has forgotten. Everyone else seems to have forgotten, too. But I remember.

I look through Henrietta’s albums sometimes, and sometimes I still play hide-and-seek with Signe and Erland. It’s just an ordinary game now, and the wardrobe with the mirrors has been furnished with wallpaper, a rug, a chair and a table.

It’s like a real little room.

My study, actually.

The mirrors from the wardrobe hang in various rooms around the house, and when I stop in front of one of them I can sometimes see that I look older. My eyes are as dark as ever, but I can see a hint of Hetty’s gentle gaze underneath. They look into me saying: wait a while, it will get better.

It’s good to think about, but I don’t have any great desire to grow up, like Wilma does. Life is what it is, and there is no specific day when it starts, is there?

Well, yes. Sometimes there is, actually.

The day we all long for most of all, Dad, Mum and me, is the eighteenth of August. Or at least some time around then, towards the end of the
summer. That’s when the baby who’s growing in my mum’s stomach will be born, and I will be a big sister again.

As soon as the baby is old enough I’m going to take it out into the conservatory and we can sit on the bench and see how nicely Dad has fixed the pond, with new tiles, a new water-treatment system and plenty of water lilies. We will sit there, the baby and I, and I will tell the baby about our brother Martin, who disappeared.

I will show the baby the photo albums and talk about all the people who have lived in Henrietta’s house before us. I will point at their faces and speak their names, just as Hetty wrote them down.

And who knows, if the baby wants me to, I may make up stories about all the people who will live here after us. There won’t be any magnificent adventures about princesses and wars and magic, just stories about being born and living and dying. Adventures get no greater than that, I think.