Redemption aka A Conspiracy of Faith

7

Whenever she looked in the mirror, she always thought she deserved better from life. Nicknames such as Peach and Thyregod School’s Sleeping Beauty were still part of the way she saw herself. When she took off her clothes, she could still be pleasantly surprised by her body. But what good was that if she was alone?

The distance between them had become too great. He never saw her anymore.

When he came home, she would say he wasn’t to leave her again and that surely there had to be other job opportunities. She wanted to be close to him, to know about his work and to watch him wake up beside her in the mornings.

That’s what she was going to say.

In former times, there had been a little rubbish tip at the bottom of Toftebakken, used by the old mental asylum. Now the tatty mattresses and rusty bed frames were long gone and in their place was an oasis of showcase residences, all of which enjoyed an unspoiled vista of the fjord.

She loved to stand here above the windbreak of trees, gazing out over the marina at the blue fjord in all its splendor, gradually allowing her eyes to drift out of focus.

In such a place, and in such a state of mind, it was no wonder that a person should feel defenseless when confronted by the randomness of life. Perhaps that was why she had not declined when the young man got off his bike and suggested they go somewhere for coffee. He lived in the same neighborhood as she did, and on several occasions they had acknowledged each other with a nod in the Føtex supermarket. Now they were standing here.

She glanced at her watch. There were still a couple of hours before her son had to be picked up. Surely there was no harm in a cup of coffee?

On that point, however, she was terribly wrong.

That evening, she sat like an old woman, rocking in her chair, clutching her belly as if that might relax the tension in her muscles. What she had done was unfathomable. Was she really that desperate? It was as though this handsome young man had hypnotized her. After ten minutes, she had switched off her mobile and had begun to tell him all there was to know. And he had listened.

“Mia, that’s a nice name,” he had said.

It was so long since she had heard anyone speak her name that it sounded almost foreign. Her husband never used it.

This man had been so easy to be with. He had shown interest in her life and told her about his own when she asked. He was in the army, and his name was Kenneth. His eyes were kind and it hadn’t felt at all wrong when he had placed his hand on hers, even though the café was full of customers. And then he had drawn it toward him across the table and held it tightly.

And she had done nothing to stop him.

Afterward, she had dashed off to the day care, his presence lingering all around her.

Now, neither the darkness nor the hours that had passed since then could settle her breathing and make things normal again. She bit her lip. Her mobile lay accusingly on the coffee table in front of her, still switched off. She was stranded on an island and could see no escape. With no one to ask for advice. No one from whom to seek forgiveness.

Where could she go from here?

When morning came, she was still in her clothes, her thoughts still racing in bewilderment. The day before, while she had been with Kenneth, her husband had called her mobile. It had only just occurred to her. Three missed calls on the display would require explanation. He would call her and ask why she hadn’t answered, and the story she would be forced to concoct would surely give her away, no matter how plausible it might seem to her. He was older and wiser and more experienced than she was. He would sense her deception, and the thought made her entire body tremble.

Usually, he would call just before eight, before she cycled with Benjamin to his day care. Today, she would try to leave a few minutes early. She wanted to speak to him, but she mustn’t let him stress her out. If he did, things would go wrong.

The boy was already in her arms when the treacherous mobile began to rumble and spin on the table. Her little porthole to the outside world, always within reach.

“Hi, darling!” she said, trying to keep herself in check, her pulse pounding in her ears.

“I called you. Why didn’t you call back?”

“I was just about to,” she blurted. She knew it was a mistake as soon as the words left her mouth.

“You’re on your way out with Benjamin, how could you be about to call? I know you.”

She held her breath and put the boy down carefully on the floor. “He’s a bit off color today. You know when they’ve got a runny nose the day care says to keep them at home. I think he’s got a temperature.” Cautiously, she allowed herself to breathe. Her whole body was screaming for air.

“I see.”

The pause that followed worried her. Was he expecting her to say something? Was there something she had forgotten? She tried to focus. Stared out through the double glazing at the garden gate opposite. The bare branches. People on their way to work.

“I called more than once yesterday. Do you hear what I’m saying?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m sorry, darling. The phone just went dead on me. I think maybe it needs a new battery.”

“I only charged it on Tuesday.”

“Yes, I know you did. That’s what I mean. Only two days and it was flat. Strange, don’t you think?”

“So you charged it yourself, then? Could you work out how?”

“Yes.” She forced herself to giggle in as carefree a manner as possible. “It was easy, I’ve watched you do it loads of times.”

“I didn’t think you knew where the charger was.”

“Of course I do.” Now her hands were shaking. He knew something wasn’t right. Any second now he would ask where she had found that damned charger, and she had absolutely no idea where he kept it.

Think! Think fast! Her mind raced.

“Listen, I…” She raised her voice a notch. “Oh, Benjamin! Don’t do that!” She gave the boy a little shove with her foot, provoking him to make a sound. Then she glared at him harshly and nudged him again.

When the question came-”Where did you find it, then?”-the child finally began to cry.

“We’ll have to talk later,” she said, sounding concerned. “Benjamin’s hurt himself.”

She snapped the mobile shut, crouched down, and pulled off the boy’s romper, showering him with kisses and comforting noises. “There, there, Benjamin. Mummy’s so sorry, so sorry. She didn’t mean it. Would you like a piece of cake?”

The child sobbed and forgave her with a heavy nod, his big, sad eyes blinking. She thrust a picture book into his hands as the full extent of the catastrophe slowly manifested itself in her mind. The house they lived in was enormous, three hundred square meters, and the mobile charger could be in any place the size of a fist.

An hour later, not a single drawer, cupboard, or shelf on the ground floor was left unsearched.

And then it struck her: What if they only had the one charger? And what if he had taken it with him? Was his phone the same kind as hers? She didn’t even know.

She fed the little boy, her brow furrowed with concern, and became convinced that that was indeed what had happened. He had taken the charger with him.

She shook her head and scraped the boy’s lips clean with the spoon. But no, when you bought a mobile there was always a charger to go with it. Of course there was. Which meant there was a good chance that somewhere in the house there was a box that had come with the phone, containing a manual and most likely an unused charger. It just wasn’t on the ground floor, that’s all.

She glanced at the stairs leading to the first floor.

There were places in this house she almost never went. Not because he forbade her, but because that’s how it was. Correspondingly, he hardly ever entered her sewing room. They had their own interests, their own oases, and their own time to spend alone, albeit his freedom was the greater.

She sat the child on her hip and went up the stairs, pausing at the door of his office. If she found the box with the charger in one of his drawers or cupboards, how would she then explain her presence in his domain?

She pushed open the door.

In contrast to her own room across the landing, his was devoid of all energy, lacking the zest of color and creative thought so characteristic of her own space. This was a place of gray and off-white surfaces, and very little else.

She opened the built-in cupboards one by one, staring in at what amounted to nothing. Had the cupboards been hers, she would have been overwhelmed by tearstained diaries and accumulated mementoes, collected and saved to remind her of happy days in the company of friends.

But on the shelves here were only a few books piled up in small stacks. Books to do with work. Books on firearms and policing, that sort of thing. And then a pile on religious sects. On the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Children of God, the Mormons, and others she had never heard of. Odd, she thought briefly, before standing on tiptoe to see whatever might be on the top shelves.

There was hardly a thing.

She opened the desk drawers one by one. Apart from a gray sharpening stone of the kind her father always used to hone his fishing knife, nothing caught her attention. The drawers contained paper, rubber stamps, and a couple of unopened boxes of floppy disks for the computer, the kind no one used anymore.

She closed the door behind her, all her emotions frozen. At this moment she knew neither her husband nor herself. It was frightening and unreal at the same time. Like nothing she had experienced before.

She felt the child’s head loll on her shoulder, his breath steady against her neck.

“Oh, Mummy’s little boy. Did you fall asleep?” she whispered as she laid him down in his cot. She had to be careful not to lose control now. Everything had to proceed as normal.

She picked up the phone and called the day care. “Benjamin has a cold; it wouldn’t be fair to the others if I brought him in today. Sorry for leaving it so late,” she said mechanically, forgetting to say thanks when the day-care assistant wished him a speedy recovery.

That done, she turned toward the landing and stared at the narrow door between her husband’s office and their bedroom. She had helped him lug box upon box of stuff up the stairs into that little room. The main difference between the two of them had been one of ballast. She had come from her student accommodation with an absolute minimum of lightweight furniture from IKEA, whereas he came with everything he had amassed during the twenty years that made up the age gap between them. That was why their home was a jumble of furniture styles from different periods, and the room behind the door was filled with packing cases whose contents remained a mystery to her.

She almost lost heart as soon as she opened the door and peered inside. Though the room was less than a meter and a half in width, the space was still sufficient to contain packing cases stacked three wide and four high. She managed to peer over the top and could see the Velux skylight at the other end. In total, there were at least fifty boxes.

“Mainly stuff belonging to my parents and grandparents,” he had said. A lot of it could be chucked out once they got sorted. He was an only child, so no one else would kick up a fuss.

She stood staring at the wall of boxes, feeling overwhelmed. It wouldn’t make sense to keep a charger in there. This was a room for the past.

But then again…Her eyes settled on the overcoats that had been thrown into a heap on top of the rearmost boxes. Were they covering something? Might what she was looking for be hidden underneath?

She reached as far as she could but to no avail. Eventually, she pulled herself up onto the cardboard mountain, dug in with her knees, and managed to crawl forward a little. She tugged at the coats, only to discover with disappointment that they concealed nothing. And then her knee went through the lid of the packing case on which most of her weight was resting.

Shit, she thought to herself. Now he would know she had been up to something.

She wriggled backward, pulled the flap up, and noted that no damage had been done.

That was when she saw the newspaper cuttings inside. They weren’t that old, hardly something her husband’s parents had been saving. It was odd that he should have gathered together so many cuttings, but perhaps it was part of some hobby of his that had since been forgotten.

“Just as well,” she muttered under her breath. But what possible interest could he have in articles about Jehovah’s Witnesses?

She sifted through them. The material was by no means as homogeneous as she had first thought. Among articles on various sects, there were also cuttings about stock prices and market analyses, DNA tracking, even fifteen-year-old ads and prospectuses for holiday cabins and weekend homes for sale in Hornsherred. It was hard to imagine what use he could have for it all now. Maybe she ought to ask him if it wasn’t about time they got this room sorted out. The space would make an excellent walk-in wardrobe, and who wouldn’t like one of those?

She slid down from the packing cases with a sense of relief. Now she had a new idea in mind.

Just to make sure, she allowed her gaze to pass over the cardboard landscape one more time, finding no reason to be worried about the slight dent her knee had made in the box in the middle. He wouldn’t notice anything.

And then she closed the door.

The idea was that she would buy a new charger. She would do it now, using some of the housekeeping money she had been putting aside unbeknown to her husband. She would cycle to the Sonofon store on Algade and buy a new one. And when she got home, she would make it look used by rubbing it in Benjamin’s sandpit so that it became scuffed and scratched, and then she would put it in the basket in the hall with Benjamin’s beanie hat and mittens, and produce it next time her husband asked.

Of course, he was going to wonder where it had come from, and she would naturally be perplexed that he should wonder so. And then she would suggest that perhaps it had been left behind by someone visiting, and that it might not be theirs at all.

She would recall the occasions other people had been in the house. It had been known to happen, though not for some considerable time now. There was the meeting of the residents’ association. Benjamin’s health visitor. In theory, certainly, someone could quite conceivably have left a phone charger behind, even if it did seem a bit odd, because who on earth would have such a thing with them in someone else’s house?

She could easily pop out and buy a new one while Benjamin was having his afternoon nap. She smiled quietly at the thought of her husband’s astonishment when he asked to see the charger and she would pick it out from among the mittens in the basket. She repeated the sentence over and over in her mind so as to give it the right weight and emphasis.

“What do you mean it’s not ours? What an odd thing to happen. Someone must have left it behind. One of the guests from the christening, perhaps?”

It was a straightforward explanation. Simple, and so unlikely as to be foolproof.