The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [61]
She locked the doors and turned on the car radio. There might be something on the news about a missing child. Something that proved that the boy existed, that someone was looking for him. She got the bread out of its bag and offered a slice to the boy. He accepted it and took a careful bite, without looking at her. They sat like that, silently eating, the boy with his eyes lowered in quiet reserve, she with her hand cradling the back of his pale, downy neck. When he had finished, he curled up next to her, and Nina carefully folded one end of the blanket over him like a duvet. She let herself slide a little lower, drawing up her knees until they rested against the seat in front of her, and closed her eyes again. Instantly, a flickering wave of sleep threatened to sweep her away. Sleep. God. She really had to, sometime soon. Tomorrow she could find a phone somewhere and call Morten. Perhaps his voice would not be so cold and hostile, then. His mood was always better in the mornings, and she might even be able to tell him about the boy.
She forced her eyes open once more to look at the child. He had fallen asleep with his eyes still slightly open, a soft glitter of wariness beneath the lowered lids, but his breathing was soft and regular, his lips slightly parted. Like Anton’s, when he lay with his head resting limply against the Spiderman web of his pillow.
Nina’s own eyes closed.
FINALLY, PEACE REIGNED in the flat. Anton had refused to go to sleep, and had sulked and peeved until nine o’clock so that Morten had missed the news, and Ida had played her music defiantly loud instead of using her headphones the way the house rules dictated. He hadn’t had the energy to call her on it. Apparently, she was now done with that particular outburst of teenage rebellion, and the weird, irregular clop-clop pata-pow sounds from her computer game were muffled enough that he could ignore them.
He had opened both the kitchen and the living room windows in the vain hope of catching a breeze, but the air seemed to have congealed, and the long day still stuck to him like the damp back of his shirt. He considered taking a shower, but this was the first time since he had picked Anton up from daycare that he had been able to sit down quietly with a cup of coffee and the newspaper. He would save the shower for later; it might make it easier to fall asleep.
There were days. There were days when he just wanted to pack all this in a time capsule and come back and open it in, say, four years’ time. Imagine being able to do something; God, how he longed to go prospecting for minerals in the tundra, or go to Greenland again, or Svalbard, and return only when he had had his fill of mosquitoes and polar bears, and quite ready to take up family life exactly as it was, with all the pieces in the same positions on the board. Or nearly the same—there were one or two moves he would like to rethink.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want all of this, the children and the flat and the mortgages and the securely salaried job he had. He just wished he could have the other things as well. Once he had imagined that he would be able to do both—go to Greenland for three months, perhaps, while Nina held down the fort at home. But that was before she had run away the first time. Running away was exactly what it was, he had never had any doubts about that. And it had happened just as abruptly as if she had simply left him for good. He would never forget that day. It remained under his skin like a poison capsule, and every once in a while, something would prick a hole in it so some of the poison leaked out.
It had happened five months after Ida was born. They lived in Aarhus then, in an uninspiring but cheap two-bedroom flat near Ringgaden. Nina had just graduated from nursing school, and he was doing a Ph.D. at the Department of Geology. Coming home from the department one day, he had heard Ida crying—no, screaming—the minute he came into the stairwell. He took the terazzo