Фредрик Бакман - Anxious People

Nadia feels like embracing the older woman on the other side of the desk, hugging her, but she doesn’t dare. So instead, while Zara keeps her eyes closed, the psychologist gently slips her little finger beneath the back of the envelope and opens it. She pulls out a ten-year-old handwritten note. Four words.

70

The bridge is covered with ice, sparkling beneath the last few valiant stars as dawn heaves its way over the horizon. The town is breathing deeply around it, still asleep, swaddled in eiderdowns and dreams and tiny feet belonging to hearts our own can’t beat without.

Zara is standing by the railing. She leans forward, looks over the edge. It almost looks, just for a single, solitary moment, as if she’s going to jump. But if anyone had seen her, had known the whole of her story and everything that had happened in the past few days… well, then of course it would have been obvious that she wasn’t going to do that. No one goes through all this just to end a story that way. She isn’t the sort who jumps.

And then?

Then she lets go.

The drop is further than you realize, even if you’ve just been standing up there. It takes longer than you think to hit the surface. A gentle scraping sound, wind seizing hold of paper, the fluttering and crumpling as the letter drifts out across the water. The fingertips that have held that envelope ten thousand times since they first picked it up from the doormat give up their struggle and let the letter sail off toward its own eternity.

The man who sent it to her ten years ago wrote down everything he thought she needed to know. It was the last thing he ever told anyone. Only four words in length, no more than that. The four biggest little words one person, anyone at all, can say to another:

It wasn’t your fault.

By the time the letter hits the water Zara is already walking away, toward the far side of the bridge. There’s a car parked there, waiting for her. Lennart is sitting inside it. Their eyes meet when she opens the door. He lets her put the music on as loud as she wants. She’s planning to do her absolute utmost to get tired of him.

71

They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.

The girl always thought that the weirdest thing was that she could never be angry with her mom. The glass surrounding that feeling was impossible to break. After the funeral she did the cleaning, pulling empty gin bottles from all the hiding places she never had the heart to tell her mom she already knew about. Perhaps that’s the last lifeline an addicted parent clings to, the idea that their child probably doesn’t know. As if the chaos could possibly be hidden. It can’t even be buried, the daughter thought, it just gets handed down.

Once her mom slurred in her ear: “Personality is just the sum of our experiences. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. So don’t you worry, my little princess, you won’t get your heart broken because you come from a broken home. You won’t grow up to be a romantic, because children from broken homes don’t believe in everlasting love.” She fell asleep on her daughter’s shoulder on the sofa, and her daughter covered her with a blanket and wiped the spilled gin from the floor. “You’re wrong, Mom,” she whispered in the darkness, and she was right. No one robs a bank for their children’s sake unless they’re a romantic.

Because the girl grew up and had girls of her own. One monkey, one frog. She tried to be a good mom, even though she didn’t have an instruction manual. A good wife, a good employee, a good person. She was terrified of failing every second of every day, but she did genuinely believe that everything was going well for a while. Fairly well, anyway. She relaxed, she wasn’t prepared, so infidelity and divorce hit her hard in the back of the head. Life knocked her flat. That happens to most of us at some point. Maybe you, too.

A few weeks ago, on the way home from school, the elk and the monkey and the frog all got off the bus as usual and started to walk across the bridge. Halfway across the girls stopped, their mom didn’t notice at first, and when she looked back they were ten yards behind her. The monkey and the frog had bought a padlock, they’d seen people attaching them to the railings of bridges in other towns on the Internet. “If you do that, you lock the love in forever and then you never stop loving each other!”

Their mom felt crushed, because she thought the girls were worried she was going to stop loving them after the divorce. That everything was going to be different now, that she’d stop being theirs. It took ten minutes of sobbing and confused explanations before the monkey and the frog patiently cupped their mom’s cheeks in their hands and whispered: “We’re not worried about losing you, Mom. We just want you to know that you’re never going to lose us.”

The lock clicked as they fixed it in place. The monkey threw the key over the railing and it spun down toward the water, and all three of them cried. “Forever,” the mom whispered. “Forever,” the girls repeated. As they were walking away the youngest daughter admitted that when she first saw that thing about the padlocks online, she thought they were doing it because they were worried someone might steal the bridge. Then she wondered if they might be worried that someone was going to steal the padlock. Her big sister had to explain it to her, but managed to do so without making her little sister feel stupid. Their mom couldn’t help thinking that she and their dad had at least gotten something right, because the girls were capable of admitting when they were wrong, and of forgiving others when they got things wrong.

They had pizza that evening, the girls’ favorite. When they’d fallen asleep on their mattresses on the floor of the little apartment that cost six thousand five hundred a month, and which she at that particular moment had no idea how she was going to pay the next month’s rent on, the mom sat up on her own in the darkness. It wasn’t long to Christmas, then it would be New Year, she knew how much the girls were looking forward to the fireworks. It was tearing her apart that they still trusted her, unaware of how many things she’d failed at. When dawn came she packed their backpacks, and a notebook fell out of her eldest daughter’s. She was about to put it back, but it fell open at a page that began with the words: “The Princess with Two Kingdoms.” At first the mom felt annoyed, because she had spent their whole lives trying to persuade her daughters not to want to be princesses—she hoped they’d want to be warriors. And because the girls loved their mom, of course they did as she wanted, or at least pretended to, then did the exact opposite, because it’s the duty of children not to pay the slightest bit of attention to their parents. The eldest daughter had been told to write a fairy tale of her own for school, so she wrote “The Princess with Two Kingdoms.” It was about a princess who lived in a big, beautiful castle, and one night the princess found a hole in the floor under her bed, and down inside the hole was a secret, magical world full of strange, fantastical creatures, dragons and trolls and other things her daughter must have thought up herself. Things so fantastical that the imagination and flight from reality that lay behind them crushed the mother, because all she kept thinking was: How terrible must your real life feel to require this much… escape? All the creatures were happy, they lived in peace, and there was no pain in their little world. But the princess in the story soon uncovered a terrible truth: that the magical realm she had found, where all her new friends lived, was actually located between two castles in two different kingdoms. One of them was ruled by a king, the other by a queen, and they were fighting a horrible war against each other. They sent their armies to fight and fire terrible weapons, but the walls of both kingdoms were too tall and strong to give way, and in the end the girl realized that the war wasn’t going to destroy either of them. It would just ruin and kill everything that lay between them. And that was when she learned the truth: that the king and queen were her parents. She was their princess, and the entire war was about her, they were each trying to beat the other with the sole aim of winning her back. When the mom read the last words of the story, her daughters were just starting to wake up on their mattresses, and everything that was worth anything inside her shattered. The story ended with the princess saying good-bye to all her new friends and setting off, alone. She disappeared into the darkness one night and never came back again. Because she knew that if she disappeared, there would be nothing left to fight over. That way she would be able to save both kingdoms and the realm in between.