We Know You Remember (109)

“You didn’t do it, Olof. I know you didn’t do anything to that girl. It wasn’t you. Dad should never have sent you away. I’m sorry. Can you forgive me?”

Now that he knew she was his sister, he saw her differently. At first she had just been a woman, one who looked pretty different. Nice, somehow. Colorful glasses. He liked the little guitars. Those were fun.

And then Ingela was there, in this strange woman’s face. She was barefoot and small, his big sister, bounding away from him.

Come on, Olof. Come and see what I found.

You can’t catch me, you can’t catch me.

He reached for a tissue from the bedside table and blew his nose. Christ, that was loud. There was half a mug of cordial on the table, and he gulped it down.

“How did you get here?” he asked.

“I took the train. We don’t have a car.”

“From which station?”

“Stockholm. That’s where I live now. I’ve got a daughter. You’re an uncle, Olof. Do you want to see?”

He saw a picture of a child, an image on her phone.

“Dad . . .” Olof began. He felt like he had to say it.

That word. It settled like a boulder on his chest, making it hard to breathe.

“It’s lucky you showed up,” said Ingela. “So you found him. Has anyone told you what actually happened?”

“It was the neighbor woman.”

He had felt a sense of relief when he first found out. An emptiness. They weren’t going to lock him up again.

“Do you think you can manage to talk about the funeral?”

Olof nodded, but it was Ingela who did most of the talking. About the fact that Sven had reserved a plot in the cemetery in Bj?rtr?, but that he probably didn’t want a priest. Olof thought about his mother’s funeral, how he had decided not to go. He had read the card detailing the time and place, the instruction to wear bright clothing, and had tried to imagine what would happen if he showed up and all those strange faces turned to him, faces he might also recognize.

His sister said something about the letters she had found among his things and he felt himself growing angry that she had been there, snooping about.

“Why didn’t you reply to Mum’s letters?” she asked.

“I’m no good at writing,” said Olof. The room fell silent.

The words inside him seemed to clump together, making it impossible for him to get them out. How he had read the letters she wrote, saying that Olof was still her son, that she was still his mother, despite what he had done.

I believe you, Olof. She hadn’t written that.

“The house is gone,” he eventually said. “All Sven’s things burnt. Sorry.”

It was easier to say his name than the word “Dad.”

“Olof,” said Ingela. “You don’t need to apologize because a couple of idiots set fire to the house. It wasn’t your fault.”

“The police told me what happened. They did it because I was there.”

His sister was crying now. That won’t help, Olof wanted to tell her. They can get to you if you cry. He wondered whether the train to Stockholm left soon.

“I spoke to a police officer I know a little,” she managed to tell him, once he had started to wonder whether he needed to pass her a tissue or something. “You’ve actually met her too, Eira Sj?din. I called her to ask how you were doing and she told me that you didn’t kill Lina. You didn’t do it, Olof.”

The evil in his head came flooding back now. All the heavy things, dragging him down and making him think he would never be able to get out of bed, even though the lovely physiotherapist got him up every day, even though he had started walking to her room on his own.

“They don’t have enough evidence to prove it,” Ingela continued, “but Lina was alive when you walked out of the forest. It can’t have been you. This officer, she wanted us both to know.”

Olof turned away so that he didn’t have to meet her eye. He might start crying otherwise. He stared at the button instead, the red one he was meant to press whenever he needed more medicine or to go to the toilet or something.

“The dog,” he said, clearing his throat.

“What was that?”

“Sven had a dog. A black one. I don’t know what breed it is.”

“Did you hear what I just said?”

“Can you stop talking about that stuff?”

“But you’re innocent, Olof, you should be able to claim redress or something. I work for Sveriges Television, not as a journalist or anything, but I can talk to our reporters, I’m sure someone will want to take on your case.”

“Quiet,” he said, pressing the alarm button.

He remembered that it had always been this way. Ingela had to make the decisions: come here, Olof; go and fetch this, don’t do that.

“But . . .”

His head was falling apart. He remembered too much. He saw himself following Lina, catching up with her and killing her in the forest, or was it down by the water? There were so many different images of it in his mind, yet she was also the one who pushed him, who knocked him to the ground before walking away. Shouting at him, disappearing among the trees, gone. His memories shattered. It didn’t make sense. Olof didn’t know what was right, because everything was wrong; no matter what he thought or believed, someone always told him it was wrong, that it hadn’t happened like that.