More Bitter Than Death: A Novel Part 5

She smiles again, wider this time. The rest of us sit in silence, hands clasped in our laps, waiting for her to continue. Aina nods silently.

Outside the window the autumn sky has grown dark, and a bluish light seeps into the room. The only sounds are the distant hum of traffic and the sound of Sirkka's wheezing. Years of smoking must have taken a toll on her lungs.

"Anyway," Kattis says, suddenly seeming embarra.s.sed and glancing down at the floor. She stops.

"There's no hurry," Aina says. "We've got plenty of time."

Kattis laughs, but this time it's a tired, joyless laugh.

"It's so hard to say how it started. It's like that story about the frog. You know, if you put it in a pot of hot water it jumps right out, but if you put it in cold water and then slowly raise the temperature . . . I guess what I mean is, it was really subtle in the beginning. He would kind of control what I did, who I saw. Then he didn't want me to see other guys, not even at work. He would flip out, accusing me of cheating on him, call me a 'stupid wh.o.r.e.' He said no one would ever want me, that I was ugly, fat, stupid, worthless. So when he hit me the first time, I guess it wasn't particularly . . . surprising. It just made sense. And by then I had taken so much verbal abuse from him, I thought I deserved it, you know? I thought I had brought it on myself, that I needed to learn to . . . change. Improve."

Kattis pauses and sits quietly, staring straight ahead, occasionally at Aina, although she doesn't seem to really see her. She sighs and continues.

"We were together for a year. And during that year . . . I don't know. It's like that year totally changed me, made me into a different person. Sometimes I can barely remember who I was back then, before Henrik. But I miss that girl. I want her back. I want to be the old Kattis again."

She shakes her head and glances down at the floor. She looks ashamed, ashamed and profoundly sad.

"But you've left him now?" Hillevi touches Kattis's knee and I can see how the contact makes Kattis jump, as if it burns.

"Yeah, but the worst part is . . ." Kattis is still looking at the floor, avoiding eye contact as if she were afraid that we are judging her. "Well . . . the worst part is that I didn't want to leave him. I mean, d.a.m.n it . . ." She hides her face in her hands. "I wasn't the one who left him. He dumped me, and it hurt so bad. He stopped loving me and it was like I just disappeared, like I couldn't exist without him. I never imagined it could have hurt so much. I mean . . . rationally I get that he's a pig and that I should be happy it's finally over, but right then . . . I felt like I was dying. Do you know what I mean?"

She looks up, tentatively, her gaze resting almost imperceptibly on each of us in turn, as if she's a.s.sessing our facial expressions for signs of skepticism or disgust. Suddenly she looks a little calmer. Maybe she didn't see what she feared she would.

"That's the worst part, the part I can't forgive myself for," Kattis continues. "That I didn't actually want it to end even though he was so awful."

"How are things going now? Are you still in love with him?" Sofie asks boldly, without thinking. We're all wondering the same thing but don't dare ask.

"No," Kattis says, smiling slightly, looking tired. "No, now I'm so incredibly grateful that it's over. And the most ironic part is that now he's started to follow me around again. He calls when he's been drinking and wants to see me, hara.s.ses me. And when I say no he gets mad, says he's going to kill me and stuff like that. And . . . sometimes I believe him. I actually think he's going to do it someday."

"You shouldn't think like that, you really shouldn't think like that," Hillevi says, her hand still resting on Kattis's knee.

"He has a new girlfriend now, did I mention that? I think they're living together and . . . I don't know. Whenever they have a fight, he calls me, talks about how what we had was so good, so special. He says we had something irreplaceable, something unique . . . And whenever I ask him to leave me alone, well . . . he totally flips out, starts calling me a stupid wh.o.r.e, says I'm going to die. I'm beginning to think that he's an actual psychopath, that he can't feel anything for anyone besides himself and is only looking out for himself. And then there's his new girlfriend. On the one hand, I hope things go well for them. I hope he ends up with her, so he'll let me go. On the other hand, what if he hurts her too? I mean, if he does, am I complicit? Am I?"

Hillevi gives Kattis's skinny leg a squeeze but doesn't say anything.

Aina went on ahead to get us a table. I'm alone in the conference room cleaning up after the meeting. Used mugs and dirty gla.s.ses have to be loaded into the dishwasher, the whiteboard erased, the table wiped down. Jeff Buckley's tortured voice is coming from a little CD player. Aina complains that the music I listen to is way too depressing, but I like it. Maybe it suits my mood, perhaps too well.

As I clean up, I pour myself a gla.s.s of wine from the bag-in-a-box left over from when Sven had a few of his former university colleagues over for sandwiches and drinks last week. The wine is cheap and acidic, but it still feels nice when the familiar warmth spreads from my stomach to all the nerve endings in my body.

Whatever does the trick, I think to myself.

Whatever takes the edge off.

Suddenly I hear a strange sound over the music. Anxiety spreads through me like an electric shock, undoing the mellowness from the wine. My fear is immediate, and the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up as I suddenly grasp the situation. I'm not alone. Someone is in our offices.

I turn off the music, interrupting Jeff Buckley's elegy "Grace." I hear the sound again, m.u.f.fled, as if someone didn't want it to be heard. I start looking around the office, trying to figure out where the sound is coming from and at the same time noting which exit is closest.

Escape.

My instinct is to flee.

It's so dark outside, the big windows are black, reflecting the room. I try to talk myself down, convince myself that there isn't any danger, when suddenly I understand what it is I'm hearing. Someone is crying.

The bathroom in the hall is locked. I knock on the door and the m.u.f.fled sniffling stops. The door opens and a red-eyed woman appears.

It's Kattis.

Her eye makeup is smeared down her cheeks like rivers. Her eyes are swollen, her hair is disheveled, and her cheeks are red, maybe from pain and sadness, but also maybe from shame at having been interrupted in the middle of this private moment.

Kattis rubs her face with the palms of her hands, smudging her makeup into a dirty gray field. She looks at me, cautiously, tentatively.

"Sorry," Kattis says. "I didn't know . . . Is the office closing now? I mean, do you have to leave?"

She wipes her shiny nose and sniffles back the snot. I see how she's struggling to pull herself together, to regain control. I do something that I usually avoid. I reach out and touch her arm, trying to calm her.

"Don't worry," I say. "I'm just tidying up a little."

Kattis seems to appreciate the gesture. She smiles hesitantly. "I'm sorry. I mean, really sorry. I scared you, didn't I?"

For the first time she looks directly at me, and I realize how I must appear to her: tense, maybe afraid, holding a half-empty gla.s.s of wine. I look down at the gla.s.s and then our eyes meet and we both start giggling.

"No, you didn't. Well maybe just a little." I smile and feel my body slowly relax. "But, seriously Kattis, how are you actually doing?"

She shakes her head and reaches back into the small bathroom for some toilet paper. I touch her arm again.

"You can't stay in the bathroom," I say. "Come on, let's go sit down."

I lead us toward the therapy room where we'd been sitting across from each other just a half an hour earlier. We sit down and Kattis studies my winegla.s.s.

"Uh," she says hesitantly. "I'm sure this is probably totally unethical or whatever, but can I also have a gla.s.s of wine, please? I just feel so . . . wiped out."

Kattis sniffles and blots her face with some wadded-up toilet paper. She's totally right, it definitely doesn't seem like a good idea for me to offer wine to a patient, but at the same time I can imagine exactly how she's feeling right now. I go to the kitchen and come back with another gla.s.s of red wine. On the way I turn on the music again.

"Here you go, just this once. From here on out, it's going to be coffee or mineral water."

She smiles quickly, grateful. She takes a few greedy swigs and then leans back and closes her eyes.

"s.h.i.t . . . I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. It's just so hard to talk about this stuff. I had no idea that it would be this hard. You know . . ."

She c.o.c.ks her head to the side and looks me in the eye, seeking validation, understanding. I've seen this look before and I just nod sympathetically.

"I've just never . . . I've just never said this out loud to myself before. And now, it's like all of a sudden it just came over me. Like I just realized what a pathetic loser I am. I mean, how could I let this happen to me? I'm really a pretty normal person, you know? I've been in relationships before and they were . . . ordinary, normal."

Kattis looks plaintive, as if she needs my sympathy, my approval, as if she needs to make me understand that she's ordinary, normal, not just a victim. As if the fact that her ex-boyfriend beat her makes her ashamed, as if she were the guilty party.

She quickly looks away and takes a big gulp of wine.

"It's not your fault, you know." I say the words a.s.suredly, because I know it's the truth.

Kattis glances down at her winegla.s.s and rotates it, looking skeptical.

"I should have done something," she says. "I should have left him, but he's not all bad, you know? The world isn't black and white. No person is just good or just bad. And Henrik, he really loved me too. And I . . . I just really wanted it to work out."

My cell phone rings suddenly and I see that it's Aina. I raise a finger to Kattis to ask her to hold the thought, and I pick up. Aina is mad that I haven't shown up and asks pointedly whether she needs to come back and help me do the dishes. I promise to hurry and then hang up. Kattis, who heard the conversation, quickly downs the rest of her wine and sits up straight.

"I'm keeping you," she says. "I didn't mean to. I'm going to go, but thank you for listening. And thanks for the wine."

She comes over and gives me a hug, repeating herself again.

"Thank you. Thank you for listening."

Aina is sitting at a dark-brown wooden table sipping a beer. She's flipping through the culture section of the paper and I can tell she's irritated. It's hot and a little stuffy at the bar and the buzz of people's conversations envelops me. The place smells like food and something else I can't put my finger on. Most of the tables are taken and the customers look as if they're seeking refuge from the cold and darkness outside, like castaways on a deserted island. I walk over to Aina and squeeze through the crowd to take a seat at the table. There is a large, full gla.s.s of wine at my place. Aina glances up. She looks like she's trying to decide if she should be mad at me or forgive my lateness.

"Check this out." She gestures to the open page of the newspaper, where there's a review of a new book by a therapist criticizing the increased focus in recent years on cognitive behavioral therapy and evidence-based methods in psychiatry. "I'm so tired of always being portrayed as some kind of robot therapist without the capacity for empathy or independent thought," Aina continues. "Do they really think it's possible to provide any kind of useful treatment without acknowledging the client's history or previous experiences? Do they imagine that we just memorize some manual or something? It's so weird. When I started practicing CBT, I always thought we were the good guys, that we were the ones who really listened to the patients and took their symptoms seriously, worked on what they really thought their problems were. But when I read stuff like this, I realize that these people think we're the villains, the shallow ones, just in it for the short term and only interested in getting the biggest results in the shortest possible time, as if we don't care about the people behind the results, as if we don't see the suffering."

"Maybe we have only ourselves to blame." I throw out the idea cautiously, curious to see Aina's reaction.

"And just what do you mean by that? Do you perhaps agree with our friend the a.n.a.lyst here?"

"I just mean that we like to talk about results and how long treatment takes, tangible evidence and money, not so much about reducing human suffering-"

"Now you sound just like them," Aina protests.

"I do not. I just don't like the black-and-white thinking, not by the a.n.a.lysts and not by us."

Aina shakes her head and throws the paper aside. "Whatever. I ordered food too, meatb.a.l.l.s. It'll be here anytime. Why were you so late? I mean, how long does it take to load the dishwasher?" She studies me for a long time, without looking away, and then asks, "Have you been drinking? You have red wine at the corner of your mouth."

I instinctively raise my hand to cover my mouth, as if to hide any traces of my sin. Aina notices and smiles wryly.

"Caught with your fingers in the cookie jar," Aina says triumphantly. "You were drinking wine at the office? That is so wrong. Why? Did Sven come in or something?"

I shake my head and realize that I don't actually have any desire to tell Aina about Kattis. I just say, "Something came up, that's all. It's not like I planned it."

"And the thing that came up was . . . ?"

"One of the women from the group," I confess.

"My dear Siri, could you be a little more forthcoming? I don't want to have to coax every single word out of you."

She looks irritated again and I just want to appease her. I'm not up for dealing with an angry Aina tonight. I decide to tell her about Kattis but leave out the wine. I know that Aina won't like it, as well she shouldn't. Besides, I don't want to risk having to listen to yet another lecture about my drinking. It's enough that Markus is always complaining about it. I tell Aina what happened with Kattis, and she listens intently.

"Okay," Aina says. "I get it. Why didn't you just say that? That sounds, I don't know . . . Do you think she's going to have a breakdown?"

I close my eyes and think about it, picturing Kattis, her tense body, arms wrapped around her torso in a straitjacket grip, those tearstained cheeks, but also the look in her eyes, her upright posture.

"I don't know, but I don't think so. There's something about her that's strong, unscathed."

A noisy group of girls sits down at the table next to us. They reek of cigarette smoke and wet wool, and I realize they've been outside smoking. Aina and I exchange glances and change the topic. We can't talk shop if there are other people around who might overhear.

"So how are things going with you and Markus?" Aina asks.

Not exactly the conversation I wanted to have right now. I'm still feeling guilty about our recent argument. It's as if I'm walking around with a knot in my stomach these days, a nagging sense of not being enough, of having done the wrong thing. Sometimes I don't even know what I did, just that I did something wrong. I picture Markus's face, his tousled hair, that faint blond stubble, those full lips, his eyes, the sad, hurt look in his eyes. I sigh.

"I see," Aina says, genuine sympathy in her eyes.

"I'm constantly disappointing him. I can't give him what he wants."

"And just what does he want?" Aina asks.

"The whole shebang, you know? He wants some kind of stupid family idyll, just like his traditional old mom and dad up in Norrland."

I feel even more uncomfortable when I think about his family. How he annoys me by idealizing their happy familyhood, as if that were something anyone could have, something you could just get, like a new table or a couch.

"Markus is young, and sometimes he's so naive," I say, shaking my head and looking down at my winegla.s.s, which is now almost empty.

"What if he isn't? Naive, I mean," Aina says, brushing a strand of blond hair out of her face and searching mine. "What if you're the one who's not giving him a chance because you're too chicken to take that step?"

I look at her, surprised, because she's usually the one who's skeptical of my relationship with Markus.

"I mean, you're obviously very fond of him, but you're still scared. You won't take ownership of your relationship. I think you should figure out what you really want, because you're not being fair to Markus."

I don't understand what Aina is doing. She's usually more loyal than this, always on my side. I'm about to argue but am interrupted by a friendly waiter who sets down a plate with an enormous helping of meatb.a.l.l.s. I sigh and glance up, focus on the playing card that hangs oddly from the ceiling. It's been up there for as long as I can remember. When our eyes meet again, I shrug at Aina and pick up my fork.

The conversation is over.

I'm alone at the office, transcribing case notes and taking care of other administrative matters. It's evening and I ought to go home, eat dinner, and watch some TV with Markus. Instead I eat a gummy bear. I've been feeling vaguely sick all day, like I'm suffering from a mild but annoying hangover, as if some insidious flu were sitting in my intestines, waiting to take hold.

The office is silent, dark, and deserted. The smell of an old banana peel turns my stomach, but I don't know where it's coming from. Finally I locate the brown peel behind the trash can. With a wrinkled nose, I take it to the kitchen and throw it out.