The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [62]
The day after, she had called him from a phone booth in Copenhagen Airport. She was on her way to London, and from there to Liberia, as a volunteer nurse for an organization called MercyMedic. This was not a position she had obtained with just a day’s notice, of course. But although the decision had been some time coming, and the preparations had to have been made at least some weeks in advance, she hadn’t bothered to discuss it with him, or even tell him about it. Now that he thought about it, it had actually been Karin who helped her, back then. Some French surgeon she was acquainted with had been willing to overlook Nina’s lack of job experience. And Morten was left alone with a five-month-old little girl.
Only much later had she succeeded in explaining herself to him, at least to some extent. He had noticed that she was finding it harder and harder to sleep, that she was constantly watching Ida, day and night, that she seemed to be afraid of disasters, real or imagined. He had tried to calm her fears, but facts and rationality didn’t seem to have much effect on her conviction that something horrible could happen to the child.
“I was bathing her,” she had told him, not that day, but nearly a year later. “I was bathing her, and suddenly the water turned red. I knew it wasn’t, not really. But every time I looked at her, the water was red all the same.” Only the severest form of self-control had made it possible for her to lift Ida from the bathtub and strap her safely into the chair. And the fact that she had not actually fled from the flat but had waited there until he came home … he knew now that that had been a miracle of impulse control.
He had spoken occasionally to colleagues of hers who had been stationed with her at various global hotspots. They admired her. They said she was nearly inhumanly cool and competent in the middle of the most horrible crises. When rivers washed away bridges, when a light grenade set fire to the infirmary tents, when patients arrived with arms or legs blown away by landmine explosions … then Nina was the one who could always be counted on. She led a remarkably efficient one-woman crusade to save the world. It was only her own family who could reduce her to abject helplessness.
Ida was standing in the doorway before he realized that the patapow sounds from her room had died away.
“Is she coming home?” she asked. She was wearing neon-green shorts and a black T-shirt that read I’m only wearing black until they make something darker. A small silver sphere in one nostril represented his latest defeat in the teenage wars.
She never says “Mom” anymore, he suddenly thought. It was either “she” or sometimes “Nina.”
“Of course she is,” he said. “But she may have to work through the night.” He was aware that the last statement was a fairly transparent piece of arse-covering, but he wasn’t quite sure whose arse. Was it out of some remnant of loyalty to Nina, or was it just that he didn’t like to sound clueless?
“Oh.”
Ida withdrew, showing neither relief nor disapproval.
“Bedtime,” he called after her.
“Yeah, yeah,” she drawled, managing to suggest that she might be going to bed now, but only because she felt like it.
He put down the paper and stared into space, unable to focus his mind on the words. Nina had lied to him. He had heard it clearly in the pauses,