Death In The Family

Chapter 28

Anders stood in the stifling silence of the attic room. He knew he shouldn't be up there, that he was only torturing himself by being in this space that was supposed to be Simone's own, but he had a reason beyond immolating himself in the misery that it stoked. She wasn't coming back. He had to accept that, and part of accepting it was to stop holding a space open for her that she wouldn't want to fit into again even if she did turn up alive. He'd proven it to himself and to her, time and time again, that he could not change the monstrosity of his own nature any more than he could change the monstrosity of the world.

He sat on her bed, the one she had all too seldom used in the short time he'd had her, and folded the clothes he had bought her before placing them in a storage box. He started with the ones she hadn't gotten the chance to wear, knowing this would only get harder when he began to handle the ones that still carried traces of her scent. He didn't know it would be as hard as it was when he found himself unable to move with the red dress gripped tight in his clenching fists. She was so beautiful in it. He was trying his best to be good to her back then, only to fail so thoroughly and so soon. He'd never deserved to have her. He had to let her go.

With her clothing put away, he moved onto the scarce few personal items she'd had. Her hairbrush still had some of her long, wavy hairs clinging to the bristles and he put it in the box before he did something useless and strange with them. Anyone would think him mad had they seen the impulses he'd indulged under grief's influence, but he supposed he was a little mad now. He knew his sanity and normalcy had become largely performative. As he picked up and inhaled the scent on her pillow, he wondered if perhaps all sanity was a learned performance. He peeled the case off the pillow and placed it in the box.

Standing from the bed to check the dresser drawers, he noticed the edge of a strap sticking out from under it. He crouched down, a maneuver he still met with an anticipation of pain that had since stopped accompanying it, and pulled out a very expensive-looking camera, a wallet, and her sketchbook. A wave of relief and wonder filled him as he opened her sketchbook; he'd thought it completely lost. His heart raced with emotion and anticipation as he flipped through the pages, delighting at the skillful and realistic depictions. The drawing of him and his brothers exactly as they were as children, the smørrebrød sandwich in Copenhagen, him and all his dogs crowding the hallway, Rolf's grinning face exactly as he looked when he expected a treat.

The drawings grew progressively stranger as they went on. A man's head carved open on his father's kitchen counter, Bjørn photographing a body made of static strapped to a chair, a very young Leif staring straight at the viewer as a thick garden of poppies flourished from his opened and hollowed-out torso. He nearly dropped the book at the haunting stare of his oldest brother and the drops of rust that filled the petals of each poppy, not doubting that the pigment was Simone's own once-scarlet blood. With quick fingers, he flipped through the pages to the last drawing she made: the ouroboros coiled within the face of the watch she constantly wore, the arm wearing the watch still only the geometric shapes and curved lines she began her figures with.

She never finished her last drawing. The weight of this fell heavy on him, almost dragging him away from a memory dredged up at the sight of that watch and the mythical symbol of the serpent. The last terrible day at his father's house, just before the FBI agents had knocked on the front door only to be immediately gunned down, he'd taken the watch off her unconscious body to wind it and popped the back of it off. He realized now that the symbol drawn there was the ouroboros.

The snapshot image of that symbol and the three sets of numbers were as clear in the photo album of his memory as they were when he'd held that little gold disc between his thumb and forefinger. In the relative clarity of his mind outside of that chaotic moment, he was now also able to see that the numbers were perhaps latitude, longitude, and what he immediately recognized as the year their odd uncle Bjørn had died. He typed the numbers into his phone while the memory was still freshly exhumed, his curiosity further piqued when the map pulled up a territory in France.