A Nearly Normal Family(14)

“So you were awake when Stella came home?”

Agnes Thelin’s eyes were large and inviting.

“Mmhmm.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Yes,” I said, my tone sharper. “I was awake when Stella came home.”

“Do you have an idea of what time that was?”

“I know exactly what time it was.”

What is a lie? Just as there are different sorts of truths, there must be different sorts of lies. White lies, for example—I’ve never shied away from those. Better a kind lie than a hurtful truth, I’ve always thought.

But of course, this was different.

“It was eleven forty-five when Stella came home.”

Chief Inspector Thelin stared at me and the Eighth Commandment twisted in my gut like a snake. The Bible says that he who tells a lie must perish. But at the same time: my God is just and forgiving.

“How do you know that?” asked Agnes Thelin. “So precisely, I mean.”

“I looked at the clock.”

“What clock?”

“On my phone.”

There’s a verse in the Gospels that says a house divided cannot stand. I realized I had forgotten about my family. Neglected it. Taken it for granted. I hadn’t been the father and spouse I should have been.

I still knew nothing about what had happened when that man lost his life on the playground on Pilegatan, but I knew one thing with full certainty: my daughter is no murderer.

“And you’re sure that it was Stella coming home?” Agnes Thelin asked.

“Of course I am.”

“I mean, you couldn’t have been hearing something else?”

I smiled with certainty. Inside, I was going to pieces.

“I’m sure. I talked to her.”

“You talked to her?” Agnes Thelin exclaimed. “What did she say? Did anything stand out?”

“Not at all. We mostly just said good night.”

Agnes Thelin refused to take her eyes from me.

The snake twisted in my belly once again. An overwhelming sense that this wasn’t really me, it was someone else saying all these things in the stuffy interrogation room.

In his first letter to Timothy, Paul writes that someone who doesn’t take care of his own family has abandoned his faith in Jesus. I hadn’t taken care of my family well enough. This was a chance to correct my mistakes.

I thought, This is what families do. They protect each other.





14


After the interrogation, I called Ulrika. She had just swung by the house, but the police were still there.

“They seriously think Stella did something,” I said. “This is a nightmare!”

“What did you tell the police?” Ulrika wanted to know.

“I told them I know exactly when Stella came home on Friday. I explained that I was awake and spoke to her.”

Ulrika didn’t say anything for a moment.

“What time was that?” she asked.

I drew in a breath. I hated lying. Especially to my wife. But I saw no other option. I couldn’t drag Ulrika into this. She didn’t know; she had been asleep when Stella arrived home. How could I tell her I had lied to the police?

“Eleven forty-five,” I said.

It didn’t feel as awful as I’d feared. As if my own resistance was worn down a little more each time I uttered the lie.

Ulrika explained that she was on her way to meet a police investigator she knew. There was nothing I could do for the moment. Nothing to do, and so much that needed to be done. I walked briskly over to Bantorget. The sun was sharp and forced my eyes downward. The voices around me seemed shrill and accusatory. I sped up. It was like the whole town was full of staring eyes.



* * *



I am adamant in my belief that nothing could be as difficult as being a parent. All other relationships have an emergency exit. You can leave a lover, and most people do at some point, if love ebbs away, if you grow apart, or if it no longer feels good in your heart. You can leave friends and acquaintances along the way, and relatives too, and even siblings and parents. You can leave and move on and still make it out okay. But you can never renounce your child.

Ulrika and I were young and inexperienced at life when Stella came into the world. I suppose we knew it would be tough, but our anguish was mostly bound to worldly things like lack of sleep, difficulty breastfeeding, and getting sick. It took quite some time for us to realize that the hardest part of being a parent is something completely different.

I grew up in a family steeped in the 1970s values of freedom and solidarity. Rules and demands hardly existed. Good sense and inherent morals were enough.

“Does it feel good in your heart?” my father asked me when, at the age of ten, I was caught pulling my sister’s hair so hard great clumps came out in my hand.

That was enough to make me cry with shame and guilt.

I tried the same thing on Stella a few times.

“Does that feel good in your heart?” I asked when her headmaster called to say she had thrown another girl’s hat up onto the roof of the school.

Stella stared back at me.

“My heart doesn’t feel anything. It’s just beating.”

For almost ten years, Ulrika and I tried to give Stella a sibling. At times, our whole lives revolved around this missing part, taking up all the energy we could spare. We went to war, both of us armed with the worst kind of determination to win. We told ourselves that a little plus sign on the pregnancy test was the solution to everything.