Christian Jungersen - You Disappear

Bernard lifted the boys down, explained to them that their mother was very tired now, and took them out into the common room, where he unpacked some of the many lunches that their friend’s mother had packed them.

So Lærke could speak, and she could see, think, and recognize them. Good news. Just that she was in there, in her apparently dead body. Yet as Bernard was trying to make the shared meal a pleasant experience, he was also thinking of something he’d have to ask the doctor about: Lærke hadn’t smiled when she saw the boys. There was no joy on her face when they climbed up to her — only something that looked like wonder. The whole thing felt so new to him that he didn’t yet know what to think about it.

In the days that followed, she woke up for a few minutes every couple of hours. It was clear she didn’t understand where she was, regardless of how many times Bernard explained it to her. But he was patient, and he told her she’d get well, and he told her he loved her. The wonder was still in her face, though without a trace of the gentle smile she would have smiled if it’d been a movie. As if he were some math problem to her; as if she didn’t see him as a person.

Then, late one evening as Bernard listened to the sounds of a family out in the hallway — the family of a teenager who’d just died in the next room — Lærke said her first sentence.

“Ah luh ooh.”

He sat in his chair for a long time and gasped for breath in the half darkness. She closed her eyes again and he kept sitting there, stock-still, even though he’d read enough about brain damage in the last few days to know she was probably just echoing the words he’d said to her.

• • •

In the following months, the whole family began to founder. Lærke’s parents moved in to help take care of the boys.

The doctors at the rehab center were quick to say they didn’t expect Lærke would ever be able to return to her job as project manager at the ad agency. They also doubted she’d be able to walk again. Bernard had to relinquish his career plans and his hopes for the boys and himself.

But everyday life at home with Lærke was more draining than anything else. Her injury was distributed across her entire brain, which basically meant she had less of everything: she lacked emotion and was indifferent to herself and others; she got tired after a few hours of mere conversation and couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a couple of minutes at a time; she couldn’t make decisions or deal with the most ordinary trifles; and she usually couldn’t remember anything Bernard or the kids told her.

She used to pump so much energy into the family, but now her dominant trait was utter passivity. She never took the initiative or said anything of her own accord, and it seemed like she didn’t even think or imagine anything on her own. Her face hung dead from her cheekbones, without those tiny twitches that in a healthy person indicate life beneath the skin.

The boys started getting into a lot of fights, because they felt the other kids were teasing them about their mother. Sometimes it was true, but as a rule it wasn’t. And no matter how much Bernard and his in-laws tried to give them the support they needed, the boys’ close friendships began to fall apart, simply because the twins were fighting their best friends too much.

So this is my family , Bernard would think as he headed home from yet another parents’ meeting where the other parents had brought up the issue of his sons. This is what we’ve become .

He tried to be constructive in their new situation, to come up with something that would improve the boys’ lives, and above all to avoid destroying anything else. Jonathan and Benjamin mustn’t notice how he felt like he’d lost his way, every day, though he still lived with them in the same house on the same peaceful-looking residential street.

On one Saturday, around lunchtime, Bernard came home hauling five bags of groceries for the week ahead. Lærke was waiting in the hall. She always was when he came home, though she never opened the front door, even after a ramp was installed so she could roll herself outside.

“Hello,” he said, but she didn’t answer.

He tried to edge his way around her wheelchair in the narrow hallway.

“Do you think you could back up just a little, so I can get past?”

She backed up.

“Now then, Lærke. This bag has only frozen goods, so I thought you might be able to put it away in the freezer.”

No answer.

“Do you think you could do that?”

“Yes.”

“Great.”

She remained where she was, parked in front of him. Her long golden hair fell across her shoulders. Bernard brushed it every morning, a ritual he genuinely enjoyed. And it seemed to him as if her skin had gotten smoother and younger after the accident, perhaps because she no longer tensed the skin in her forehead or around her eyes.

“Then you should go out to the kitchen now, over in front of the freezer,” he said.

So that’s what she did.

“Here’s the bag. Look. Try to set the new things farther back in the freezer, so that the open packages are easy to get at. Okay? Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Bernard put away the groceries in the four other bags and then came back to Lærke and the frozen goods. She still had a long way to go, but it was good for her to do it by herself.

He stood behind her and said, “Try to set the open packages on top. Then they’ll be easier to get at.”

“Oh, right.”

“You understand why, don’t you?”

She didn’t answer.

“Look, sweetheart, this package has been opened. If you set it in front of the unopened package, then we won’t end up having both of them open at the same time. Does that make sense?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

He remained standing there.

After a little while, he said, “Look, this package isn’t open, while this other one is. Now if you set the new one in back … It’d be great if you did the same thing with all of them.”

“Did what?”

“If you set the new packages in back.”

“Yes.”

She did it with the one she had in her hand, but then she forgot to do it with the next one.

“Well, maybe you should just do it the way you want to,” he said. “You’re the one putting the frozen things away, so you should decide where they go.”

She didn’t answer, and he started to perseverate.

“So you should decide where they go, right? When you put them away?”

She looked up at him and said, “First the back ones should go first, because then the first ones … First the new ones should go in back, because then the old ones can first …”

Lærke could usually express herself more clearly, but when she got into a bad rut, she had a hard time getting out again.

She started to scold herself, while at the same time trying to say it correctly. “Not in back — front! By the door! The front ones shouldn’t first … the door.”

He gave her shoulders a little squeeze and said, “Yes, that’s where they should go.”

She didn’t answer.

On Saturdays, Winnie would drive the boys to and from soccer. Ordinarily they were back by noon, and now it was twenty minutes past. Bernard felt a mild unease, which he knew he ought to resist. Otherwise, where would it ever end? But Winnie wasn’t so young anymore; her eyes, the cars, what happens in traffic …

“Did your mother call?”

“I don’t know.”

“But did she call just before I got here?”

“She called.”

“Well, what did she say?”

“I don’t know.”

He went to the phone to see if there was anything on caller ID. Next to the phone was a scratch pad, where they’d tried to get Lærke to write down all the messages.