The Fire Witness

62

Elin has a vivid memory of the day Vicky arrived. The girl was standing inside the hallway, with a closed face and yellowing bruises on her arms. She’d never even fantasized about having children, but the minute she saw Vicky she realized how much she longed for one. Vicky was the daughter she’d always wanted.

Vicky was her unique self, just as a child should be.

In the beginning, she would run into Elin’s bedroom at night and stare at her before turning away. Perhaps she hoped to find her real mother there; perhaps she regretted that she’d come in at all or couldn’t risk being turned away. Elin still remembers the patter of her small feet running over the parquet floor as she disappeared back to her room.

Sometimes Vicky would sit in Jack’s lap while watching TV, but she never wanted to sit in Elin’s lap. Vicky didn’t trust her, didn’t dare trust her, but Elin noticed that she often glanced at her furtively.

Little Vicky, the silent girl who would play only if she was sure no one was watching her. Little Vicky, who didn’t dare open her Christmas presents because she thought that such beautiful packages couldn’t be hers. Little Vicky, who shrank from every hug.

Elin bought her a little white hamster and a large cage with ladders and tunnels of red plastic. Vicky took care of the hamster during Christmas vacation, but when school started, the hamster vanished. Eventually they found out that she’d let it go in a park on the way to school. When Jack explained to her that it might not survive the cold, Vicky ran to her room and slammed the door maybe ten times. Then she downed a bottle of burgundy during the night and threw up all over the sauna. Later that week, she stole two rings that Elin had inherited from her grandmother and refused to say what she’d done with them. Elin never got the rings back.

Jack was beginning to reach his limit. He started saying that their lives were too complicated to give a child security, especially one who needed as much as this one did. He spent less time at home and stopped engaging with the girl.

Elin realized she was going to lose him.

When the social workers said they wanted to try placing Vicky temporarily back with her real mother, Elin welcomed the news. She felt that both she and Jack needed the break to find their way back to each other. Vicky refused to take the cell phone Elin offered her so they could keep in touch.

The day Vicky left, Elin and Jack had a late dinner at the Operakällaren restaurant, went home and made love, and then slept through the night undisturbed for the first time in months. In the morning Jack said he’d leave if Vicky came back. Elin let him call Vicky’s case manager to explain that they couldn’t cope with the child and were not able to take her back.

She learned later that Vicky and her mother ran away from their placement at an open care facility in Västerås and were later found hiding in a small playhouse at a playground. The mother started leaving Vicky alone at night, and, after she’d been gone for two days, Vicky walked the 110 kilometers back to Stockholm.

Jack was not home the night Vicky rang their doorbell. Elin had no idea what to do. She pressed her body against the wall by the door, listening to the girl ring the bell and call her name over and over. Finally Vicky started to cry. She opened the mail slot and called, “Please? Can I come back? I want to stay with you. Please, Elin, open the door. I’ll be a good girl. Please… please…”

When Jack and Elin had met with Vicky’s case manager after they told her they were dropping out of the program, she’d said, “Do not explain to Vicky why you can’t take her in any longer.”

“Why not?” Elin had asked.

“Because,” the case manager had said, “the child will blame herself. She’ll assume it’s her fault.”

So Elin had stood silently in the hallway and after what seemed like an eternity, she’d heard Vicky’s footsteps fade away.