The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [36]
He is trying to disappear, thought Nina. Like the baby hare she had once come across as a child, in the back garden, where it had been desperately trying to hide. When she had picked it up, it hadn’t struggled or resisted. It just crouched in her hands, featherlight and downy. In her six-year-old ignorance, she had thought it liked her. But when she put it on her bed, it had already had the same distant look as the boy in the back seat, and later that night, she found it limp and dead in the shoe box she had provided for it.
Was the boy giving up in the same way?
Nina shivered, and not entirely because the day had finally begun to cool. She couldn’t leave the boy in the car, she decided. He was awake, and even though he didn’t know her from Adam, coming with her had to be better than the alternative—being left locked in a car in the gathering darkness, not knowing where or why.
He hadn’t moved a muscle, but as she reached for him now, he suddenly scooted back with such abruptness that the blanket slipped off him and dropped onto the floor of the car.
Nina hesitated.
She didn’t want the child to be afraid of her. She didn’t like that he looked at her as if she might be a monster little different from the man in the railway station, but she had no idea how to win his trust.
“What on earth have they done to you?” she whispered, sinking down onto her haunches and trying to catch his eyes. “Where do you come from, sweetie?”
The boy made no answer, only curled himself into a tighter ball at the opposite end of the seat, as far away from her as he could get. She could see a dark stain on the seat where the blanket had slipped, and the boy smelled unpleasantly of body sweat and old urine. Nina felt a surge of tenderness, just as she did when Anton or Ida had a temperature or threw up, back home in the Østerbro flat. She would bring them crushed ice, berry juice, and damp cloths; the urge to be good to them and make them well again was so overpowering it filled her entire being. So simple to be a good mother then, she thought. It was everything else that got to be so complicated.
She pointed to the house, then put her hands togther like a statue of a praying saint and rested her cheek against them in a parody of sleep.
“First, we’ll get you something to eat,” she said, trying to smile. “And then we’ll find a bed for you to sleep in. And after that, we’ll see.”
The boy made no sound, but she had to have done something right after all, because he uncurled and slid an inch or two in her direction.
“Good boy,” she said. She remembered an article she had read a few years back about children’s ability to survive in even the most brutal of environments. They were like little heat-seeking missiles, it had said, aiming themselves at the nearest source of warmth. If a child lost its mother, it would reach for its father. If the father disappeared, the child would head for the next grown-up in the line, and then the next, seeking any adult who would provide survival, and perhaps even love.
She showed him the clothes she had bought, and when she began to dress him, he helped. He obediently held out his arms so that she could put them into the sleeves of the new T-shirt, and ducked his head so that it was easier for her to pull it on. A clean pair of underpants followed. That would have to do for now, but even that much suddenly made him seem much more like a normal three-year-old. He came into her arms easily, as she lifted him from the car. Again she was struck by the difference between his weight and Anton’s.
Now that he was awake, he didn’t allow her to hold him against her shoulder. He sat warily straight on her left hip as she walked up the gravel path to the veranda.
“Hey, little one,” murmured Nina, softening her voice into a maternal cooing. “No need to be afraid anymore.”
His warm breath came quickly and carried a sour smell of fear and vomit.
On the veranda, someone had arranged a row of large pots containing herbs and pansies; their well-watered plumpness looked odd against