Фредрик Бакман - Anxious People

When her daughters had gotten up, the mom had breakfast with them, trying to act as if nothing were wrong. She dropped them off at school, then walked all the way back, out onto the bridge, and stood there in the middle of it, holding on to the padlock as tightly as she could.

She didn’t fight her ex-husband for her old home, she didn’t argue with her former boss about her job, she didn’t clash with their lawyer, didn’t fire any weapons, didn’t cause chaos. For the sake of the children. She did all she could to prevent any of the adults’ mistakes from affecting them. That doesn’t explain why she tried to rob a bank. It doesn’t excuse it. But maybe you’ve had the occasional really bad idea, too. Maybe you deserved a second chance. Maybe you’re not alone in that.

On the morning of the day before New Year’s Eve she left home with a pistol. That same evening, right now, she is walking back. A few hours after the hostage drama that the town will be talking about for many, many years to come, the mom picks up her daughters and asks: “Have you had a nice time at Dad’s?”

“Yes, Mom! How about you?” the youngest daughter asks.

The mom smiles, thinks for a moment, then shrugs: “Oh, you know… nothing much has happened. Everything’s been the same as usual.”

But as they cross the bridge the mom puts one hand gently on her eldest daughter’s shoulder and whispers quickly into her ear: “You’re my princess, and my warrior, you can be both at the same time—promise me that you’ll never forget that. I know I’m not always such a great mom, but the fact that your dad and I are getting divorced isn’t you… you must never think, even for a single second that this is… your …” The eldest daughter nods, blinking away tears. The younger calls to them to hurry up and they run after her, their mom wipes her face and asks if they’d like pizza for supper, and the younger one cries out: “Do bears poop in the woods, or what?!”

Just after they fall asleep that night, in their mom’s new home in the apartment of a kind and just-crazy-enough old lady called Estelle, the eldest daughter takes hold of her mom’s hand and whispers: “You’re a good mom, Mom. Don’t worry so much. It’s okay.”

And there they find it, at last: peace for the realm between the two kingdoms. All the magical, wonderful, made-up creatures can sleep safe and sound. Monkeys, frogs, elks, old ladies, everyone.

72

The new year arrives, which of course never means as much as you hope unless you happen to sell calendars. One day becomes another, now becomes then. Winter spreads out across the town like a relative with slightly too much self-confidence, the building on the other side of the road from the bank changes color in line with the temperature. It doesn’t look like much, of course, a gray building under its temporary white covering in a place where no one seems to choose to live but merely tolerates being stored. In a few years no doubt one of the locals will point to the door and tell some smug visitor from one of the big cities: “There was a hostage drama in there once.” The visitor will peer at the building and snort: “In there? Yeah, right!” Because things like that don’t happen in a town like this, everyone knows that.

It’s a few days after New Year, and a woman is coming out of the door. She’s laughing, her two daughters are with her, and they’ve just said something that’s made them all laugh so hard that their noses are dripping amid the swirling snowflakes. They walk to the trash bin and dispose of a pizza box, then the woman suddenly looks up and stops mid-stride. One of her daughters starts to climb up her while the other one bounces up and down.

It’s getting late, the sky is January black and the falling snow is obscuring visibility, but she sees the police car on the other side of the street. Inside it are an older and a younger police officer. She stares at them, her daughters haven’t noticed her terror yet. All she can think is: Not in front of the girls. This takes a matter of seconds, but she manages to live two lifetimes. Theirs.

Then the police car rolls slowly toward her.

Past her.

It drives on, turns right, disappears.

“I’d understand if you want to bring her in,” Jim says quietly in the passenger seat, worried that his son’s changed his mind.

“No, I just wanted to see her, so there were two of us in this,” his son says behind the wheel.

“Two of us in what?”

“Letting her go.”

They don’t say any more about her. Either the woman outside the building or the one they both miss. Jim saved a bank robber and deceived his son, and Jack might perhaps never quite be able to forgive him for that, but it’s possible for them both to move on together despite that.

They drive through their town for several minutes until the father eventually says, without looking at his son: “I know you’ve been offered a job in Stockholm.”

Jack looks at him in surprise.

“How the hell did you hear that?”

“I’m not stupid, you know. Not all the time, anyway. Sometimes I just seem stupid.”

Jack smiles shamefacedly.

“I know, Dad.”

“You ought to take it. The job.”

Jack signals, turns, takes plenty of time to come up with a reply.

“Take a job in Stockholm? Do you know how much it costs to live there?”

His dad taps the plastic door of the glove compartment sadly with his wedding ring.

“Don’t stay here for my sake, son.”

“I’m not,” Jack lies.

Because he knows that if his mom had been there, she’d have said, you know what, son? There are worse reasons to stay somewhere.

“Our shift’s over,” Jim notes.

“Would you like coffee?” Jack asks.

“Now? It’s a bit late,” his dad yawns.

“Let’s stop and get coffee,” Jack insists.

“What for?”

“I thought we could pick my car up from the station and go for a drive.”

“Where to?”

Jack makes his answer sound obvious.

“To see my sister.”

At that, Jim’s eyes lose their focus on his son and slide off toward the road.

“What? Now?”

“Yes.”

“Why… why now?”

“It’ll soon be her birthday. It’ll soon be your birthday. There are only eleven months to go before Christmas. Does it make any damn difference why? I just thought she might like to come home.”

Jim has to stay focused on the road, the white line running along the middle of it, to keep his voice under control.

“That’s at least a twenty-four-hour drive, though?”

Jack rolls his eyes.

“What the hell, Dad? I said we’d stop for coffee!”

So that’s what they do. They drive all night and all the following day. Knock on her door. Maybe she’ll go home with them, maybe she won’t. Maybe she’s ready to find a better way down, maybe she now knows the difference between how it feels to fly and how it feels to fall, maybe she doesn’t. That sort of thing’s impossible to control, just like love. Because perhaps it’s true what they say, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and uncontrollably for one simple reason: you’re theirs. Your parents and siblings can love you for the rest of your life, too, for precisely the same reason.

The truth. There isn’t any. All we’ve managed to find out about the boundaries of the universe is that it hasn’t got any, and all we know about God is that we don’t know anything. So the only thing a mom who was a priest demanded of her family was simple: that we do our best. We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow.

We save those we can.

73

Spring arrives. It always finds us, in the end. The wind sweeps winter away, the trees rustle and birds start making a fuss, and nature suddenly crashes through with a deafening roar where the snow has swallowed every echo for months.