Johan Theorin - The Darkest Room

Joakim Westin’s voice was filled with panic.

“But this is Livia,” he said, looking at Tilda. “But what about Katrine? My wife, where’s… where’s Katrine?”

Joakim was sitting waiting on a wooden bench outside a low building at the district hospital in Kalmar. The weather was cold and sunny. Beside him sat a young hospital chaplain dressed in a blue winter jacket, a Bible in his hand. Neither of the men spoke.

Inside the building there was a room where Katrine was waiting. Beside the entrance was a sign with the words Chapel of Rest .

Joakim was refusing to go in.

“I’d really like you to see her,” the junior doctor had said when she met Joakim. “If you can cope with that.”

Joakim shook his head.

“I can tell you what you’ll see in there,” said the junior doctor. “It’s very dignified and respectful, with low lighting and candles. The deceased will be lying on a bier, with a sheet covering-”

“-a sheet covering the body, leaving the face visible,” said Joakim. “I know.”

He knew, he had seen Ethel in a room like this the previous year. But he couldn’t look at Katrine lying there like that. He lowered his eyes and silently shook his head.

Eventually the junior doctor nodded.

“Wait here, then. It will take a little while.”

She went into the building, and Joakim sat down in the pale November sunshine and waited, gazing up at the blue sky. The hospital chaplain next to him was moving uneasily in his thick jacket, as if the silence were unpleasant.

“Were you married long?” he said eventually.

“Seven years,” said Joakim. “And three months.”

“Have you any children?”

“Two. A boy and a girl.”

“Children are always welcome to come along and say goodbye,” said the priest quietly. “It can be good for them… help them to move on.”

Joakim shook his head again. “They’re not going through this.”

Then there was silence on the bench again. After a few minutes the doctor came back with some Polaroid photographs and a large brown package.

“It took a little while to find the camera,” she said.

Then she held out the photographs to Joakim.

He took them and saw that they were close-ups of Katrine’s face. Two were taken from the front, two from the side. Katrine’s eyes were closed, but Joakim couldn’t fool himself into thinking she was just sleeping. Her skin was white and lifeless, and she had black scabs on her forehead and on one cheek.

“She’s injured,” he said quietly.

“It’s from the fall,” said the doctor. “She slipped on the rocks out on the jetty and hit her face, before she ended up in the water.”

“But she… drowned?”

“It was hypothermia… the shock of the cold water. This late in the year the temperature of the Baltic is below ten degrees,” said the doctor. “She took water into her lungs when she went below the surface.”

“But she fell in the water,” said Joakim. “Why did she fall?”

He didn’t get a reply.

“These are her clothes,” said the doctor, handing over the package. “And you don’t want to see her?”

“No.”

“To say goodbye?”

“No.”

The children fell asleep in their bedrooms every night in the week following Katrine’s death. They had lots of questions about why she wasn’t home, but eventually they fell asleep anyway.

Joakim, however, lay there in the double bed, gazing up at the ceiling, hour after hour. And when he did fall asleep, there was no rest. The same dream recurred night after night.

He dreamed that he was back at Eel Point. He had been gone for a long time, perhaps for several years, and now he had returned.

He was standing beneath a gray sky on the deserted shore by the lighthouses, then he began to walk up toward the house. It looked desolate and completely dilapidated. The rain and snow had washed away the red, leaving the façade pale gray.

The windows of the veranda were broken and the door was standing ajar. Everything was dark inside.

The oblong stones forming the steps up to the veranda were cracked and askew. Joakim walked slowly up them and into the darkness.

He shivered and looked around in the gloom of the

porch, but everything was just as shabby and run-down inside as it was outside. The wallpaper was ripped, gravel and dust covered the wooden floors, all the furniture was gone. There was no trace of the renovation he and Katrine had made a start on.

He could hear noises from several of the rooms.

From the kitchen came the murmur of voices and scraping noises.

Joakim walked along the corridor and stopped in the doorway.

At the kitchen table sat Livia and Gabriel, bent over a game of cards. His children were still small, but their faces had a network of fine wrinkles around the mouth and eyes.

Is Mom home? asked Joakim.

Livia nodded. She’s in the barn .

She lives in the hayloft in the barn , said Gabriel.

Joakim nodded and backed slowly out of the kitchen. His children stayed where they were, in silence.

He went back outside, across the grass-covered inner courtyard, and pushed open the door of the barn.

Hello?

There was no reply, but he went in anyway.

At the steep wooden staircase leading up to the hayloft, he stopped. Then he began to climb. The steps were cold and damp.

When he got to the top, he couldn’t see any hay, just pools of water on the wooden floor.

Katrine was standing over by the wall, with her back to him. She was wearing her white nightgown, but it was soaking wet.

Are you cold? he asked.

She shook her head without turning around.

What happened down by the shore?

Don’t ask , she said, and slowly began to sink through the gaps in the wooden floor.

Joakim walked over to her.

Mom-mee? called a voice in the distance.

Katrine stood motionless by the wall.

Livia has woken up , she said. You need to take care of her, Kim .

Joakim woke up in his bedroom with a start.

The sound that had woken him up was no dream. It was Livia calling out.

“Mom-mee?”

He opened his eyes in the darkness, but stayed in bed. Alone.

Everything was silent once again.

The clock by the side of the bed was showing quarter past three. Joakim was certain he had fallen asleep just a few minutes ago-and yet the dream about Katrine had lasted an eternity.

He closed his eyes. If he stayed where he was and didn’t do anything, perhaps Livia would go back to sleep.

Like a reply the call echoed through the house once more:

“Mom-mee?”

After that he knew it was pointless to stay in bed. Livia was awake and wouldn’t stop calling until her mother came in and lay down beside her.

Joakim sat up slowly and switched on the lamp on the bedside table. The house was cold, and he felt a crippling loneliness.

“Mom-mee?”

He knew he had to take care of the children. He didn’t want to, he didn’t have the strength, but there was no one else to share the responsibility with.

He left his warm bed and moved quietly out of his bedroom and over to Livia’s room.

She raised her head when he bent over her bed. He stroked her forehead, without saying anything.

“Mommy?” she mumbled.

“No, it’s just me,” he said. “Go to sleep now, Livia.”

She didn’t reply, but sank slowly back onto her pillow.

Joakim stood there in the darkness until she was breathing evenly again.

He took a step backward, then another. Then he turned toward the door.

“Don’t go, Daddy.”

Her clear voice made him stop dead on the cold floor.