Death In The Family

Chapter 5

The little bedroom in the back had an entirely different quality to it from the rest of the house. In this country manor that had been reworked and refinished according to the tastes of the architects who lived in it, everything had been designed with open space and sumptuous aesthetic in mind. However, this room could have been mistaken for a large closet, if not by size then by the lack of attention it had gathered. The musty carpet bequeathed an everlasting stuffiness within the four yellowed walls and only a simple wooden dresser occupied the small space aside from the narrow bed. Simone picked up the strange little plastic robot figure from the dresser, turning it in her hands as she tried to envision what life for her father had been like, taken from his mother and brothers in Norway and stuffed in this neglected little space until he had grown enough to fit more appropriately in the imposingly elegant house. The shy smile and uncomfortable gawkiness of the boy she recalled in the photo album had seemed like an entirely different species than the honed predator he would become beneath his mask of normalcy. She didn't need to see the photo album to recall the hints of his transformation over time in those pictures. Whatever had happened to him, it had happened in this house.

"What happened here?"

Simone ignored Gladwell's looming presence in the doorway, shutting out the world to focus on the image of the boy from the photos and placing the toy in his hands. His skin was tanner then. He'd spent his time outside when he could. Einar was always fair-skinned even for a white man, but Bjørn's gaunt face was as weathered as a sailor's. There they were, one boy displaced from his home and one man displaced in his existence, finding common ground in the woods. She felt the fondness Leif had radiated as he'd spoken of his reclusive uncle and touched the reverence of the emotions inside that glowing sphere marked as Bjørn within him. This forgotten space did not hold enough of her father for her to find him here.

"Nothing important," she answered Gladwell, rising from her kneeling position on the old carpet.

She shut the door behind her as she stepped back into the cavernous hallway, her numbed feet dragging toward the nearby archway of the dining room. Little yellow folded signs with black numbers on them marked several places along the floor where she remembered blood had spilled from her, Anders, and even Leif on the night of that dreadful dinner. A deep, sinister anger had steeped into the high walls of this majestic room, but not from that night. The heaviness in the air had been pressing down for decades. She'd seen that gravity weigh on her father whenever they'd sit and eat in there. Even in his most convincing performances, his false cheer had a glaze of tension, like an old injury had started aching again. This was the room where his father had most obviously reigned and he was not always a kind man to those in his domain.

"Why are we in here?" Gladwell asked.

"Just a moment, please," she whispered, walking toward the chair at the head of the table and sinking into the ghost that occupied it.

She knew the unspoken signs of abuse like a distinct perfume that marked its wearers and had scented that pain in Leif whenever he'd been forced to think on his father. She'd never allowed herself to trespass into that so private piece of him, having felt a disquieting awkwardness at stumbling upon that guarded secret, but now she reached into those moments and rooted around in them. Her recently acquired firsthand perspective on being physically abused by a parent muddled her insight and she wondered in a horrified moment if Leif had perhaps been hurt the same way he hurt her, but he did not harbor the signs for that breed of pain. His violence had been inspired by the violence done to him, but the sex was his own infected wickedness. The distraction of her fiercely conflicting feelings on their incestuous lust for each other tugged at her concentration, but this room was only a stage on which her father had tried to rewrite his own painful memories in a resentful fantasy of control.