Johan Theorin - The Darkest Room

She had sounded wide awake, despite the fact that she was lying in bed like a motionless shadow. He turned slowly to face her.

“Why not?” he asked quietly.

“Stay here,” said Livia.

Joakim didn’t reply. He held his breath and listened. She had sounded awake, but he still thought it seemed as if she were asleep.

When he had been standing there, silent and motionless, for a minute or so, he began to feel like a blind man in the dark room.

“Livia?” he whispered.

He got no answer, but her breathing was tense and irregular. He knew she would soon call out for him again.

An idea suddenly came into his head. At first it felt unpleasant, then he decided to try it out.

He crept out of the door and into the dark bathroom. He groped his way forward, bumped into the hand basin, then felt the wooden laundry basket next to the bathtub. The basket was almost full; nobody had done any washing for almost a week. Joakim hadn’t had the strength.

Then he heard the call from Livia’s room, as expected:

“Mom-mee?”

Joakim knew she would carry on calling for Katrine.

“Mom-mee?”

This was how it was going to be, night after night. It would never end.

“Quiet,” he muttered, standing by the laundry basket.

He opened the lid and started burrowing among the clothes.

Different aromas rose up to meet him. Most of the items were hers; all the sweaters and pants and underclothes she had worn in the final days before the accident. Joakim pulled out a few things: a pair of jeans, a red woolen sweater, a white cotton skirt.

He couldn’t resist pressing them against his face.

Katrine .

He wanted to linger there among the vivid memories the scent of her brought into his mind; they were both blissful and painful-but Livia’s plaintive cry made him hurry.

“Mom-mee?”

Joakim took the red woolen sweater with him. He went past Gabriel’s room and back into Livia’s.

She had kicked off the coverlet and was waking up-she raised her head when he came in and stared at him in bewildered silence.

“Sleep now, Livia,” said Joakim. “Mommy’s here.”

He placed Katrine’s thick sweater close to Livia’s face and pulled the coverlet up to her chin. He tucked her in closely, like a cocoon.

“Sleep now,” he repeated, more quietly this time.

“Mmm.”

She mumbled something in her sleep and gradually relaxed. Her breathing was calmer now; she had placed her arm around her mother’s sweater and buried her face in the thick wool. Her sheep from Gotland was lying on the other side of the pillow, but she ignored it.

Livia was asleep again.

The danger had passed and Joakim knew that next morning she wouldn’t even remember that she had been awake.

He breathed out and sat down on the edge of her bed, his head drooping.

A darkened room, a bed, the blinds pulled down.

He wanted to fall asleep, to sleep as deeply as Livia and forget himself. He just couldn’t think anymore; he had no strength left.

And yet he couldn’t sleep.

He thought about the laundry basket, about Katrine’s clothes, and after a couple of minutes he got up and went back into the bathroom. To the laundry basket.

The thing he was looking for was almost right at the bottom: Katrine’s nightgown, white with a red heart on the front. He took it out of the basket.

Out in the corridor he stopped and listened outside both the children’s rooms, but all remained silent.

Joakim went into his room, put the light on, and remade the double bed. He shook and smoothed the sheets, plumped up the pillows, and folded back the coverlet. Then he got back in, closed his eyes, and breathed in the smell of Katrine.

He reached out and touched the soft fabric.

Morning again. Joakim woke to the stubborn beep of the alarm clock-which meant that he must have slept.

Katrine is dead , he said to himself.

He could hear Gabriel and Livia starting to move about in their beds-and then he heard one of them padding barefoot over the wooden floor to the bathroom-and he realized that he could smell the scent of his wife. His hands were holding on to something thin and soft.

The nightgown.

In the darkness he stared at it with something close to embarrassment. He remembered what he had done in the bathroom during the night, and quickly pulled up the coverlet to hide it.

Joakim got up, took a shower, and got dressed, then dressed the children and settled them at the breakfast table.

He glanced at them to see if they were watching him, but they were both concentrating on their plates.

The darkness and the cold in the mornings seemed to make Livia more lively. When Gabriel had left the kitchen to go to the bathroom, she looked at her father.

“When is Mommy coming back?”

Joakim closed his eyes. He was standing at the counter with his back to her, warming his hands on his coffee mug.

The question hung there in the air. He couldn’t bear it, but Livia had asked the same question every morning and evening since Katrine’s death.

“I don’t really know,” he replied slowly. “I don’t know when Mommy’s coming back.”

“But when? ” said Livia more loudly.

She was waiting for his answer.

Joakim didn’t speak, but eventually he turned around. The right time to tell her would never come. He looked at Livia.

“Actually… I don’t think Mommy will be coming back,” he said. “She’s gone, Livia.”

Livia stared at him.

“No,” she said firmly and decisively. “She has not .”

“Livia, Mommy isn’t coming-”

“She is too!” screamed Livia across the table. “She is coming back! End of story!”

Then she went back to eating her sandwich. Joakim lowered his eyes and drank his coffee; he was beaten.

He drove the children into Marnäs at around eight in the mornings, away from the silence of Eel Point.

The sound of joyous laughter and screams met them as they walked into Gabriel’s nursery school. Joakim had no strength whatsoever. He just gave his son a tired hug as they said goodbye. Gabriel quickly turned away and ran off toward the cheerful voices of his friends in the soft playroom.

But the children’s energy would disappear with time,

Joakim thought; they would grow old and their faces would become gray and sunken. Behind those bright faces lay pale skulls with empty eye sockets.

He shook his head to push the thought away.

“Bye, Daddy,” said Livia when he left her in the cloakroom at preschool. “Is Mommy coming home tonight?”

It was as if she hadn’t heard what he had said at the breakfast table.

“No, not tonight,” he said. “But I’ll come and pick you up.”

“Early?”

Livia always wanted to be picked up early-but when Joakim did turn up early, she never wanted to leave her friends to go home.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll come early.”

He nodded, and Livia ran off to join the other children. At the same time a gray-haired woman looked out of the cloakroom.

“Hi there, Joakim,” she said, her expression sympathetic.

“Hi there.”

He recognized her; it was Marianne, the head of the preschool unit.

“How’s it going?”

“Not so good,” said Joakim.

He had to be at the funeral director’s office in Borgholm in twenty minutes, and moved toward the door. But Marianne took a step toward him.

“I understand,” she said. “We all do.”

“Does she talk?” said Joakim, nodding toward the other rooms.

“Livia? Yes, she-”

“I mean, does she talk about her mother?”

“Not much. And nor do we. Or rather, what I mean is…” Marianne stopped for a second or two, then went on: “If it’s okay with you, the staff are no different with Livia now than they were before. She’s just like all the other children in the class.”