Strangers: A Novel(28)

I try to focus on my body. The answer to both questions is yes. The silhouette above me becomes blurry; the room spins. I can breathe, but it still feels like the air I can get into my lungs is far too little.…

“Jo!” Another shake. Then a few soft slaps on my cheek. “Please! Look at me, OK?”

Suddenly the image becomes clearer. Erik, leaning over me. “That’s it. Just look into my eyes. I’m with you, everything’s going to be OK.”

He wheezes. In his right hand he is holding a bundle of … fabric, which he now stuffs into the drawer of my nightstand.

“Did you do this, Jo?” He pulls me into his arms, pressing me against him. The shirt he is wearing is soaked through, just as I am, and slowly the memory of what happened comes back. The shower. The dizziness. Vomiting.

Erik is still holding me. The thought that I should put up a struggle pops into my mind, then goes again. Too little strength. Too little air.

I feel his rib cage rising and falling laboriously, feel his hand entangling itself in my wet hair. His breath on my neck.

Then he lets me go. He supports himself wearily against the bed as he straightens up, and walks over to my wardrobe with shaky steps.

“They’ll be here any minute now. I should put some clothes on you.” Panties, a T-shirt. I’d like to be able to dress myself, but any movement I make worsens the dizziness and breathlessness, so I let him dress me, as if I were a doll.

Then the sirens, moving closer, coming to a halt in front of the house. Erik stumbles over to the window. “The door is unlocked,” he calls out; then he sits down on the edge of the bed and reaches for my hand.

Suddenly the room is full of people, all of them wearing respirator masks. Voices come from everywhere around me. A flurry of activity. Someone pulls Erik away from me, shines a light in my eyes, feels for my pulse.

“Carbon monoxide.” I keep hearing the words again and again. An oxygen mask is placed over my mouth and nose, and suddenly breathing becomes a lot easier.

I turn my head, see Erik sitting on the floor, also with a mask on his face. His eyes seek mine, he nods to me.

They lift me onto a stretcher, place a blanket over my body, and I close my eyes.

“Is this your house?” I hear someone say. “The boiler is really old, when was it last checked, OK, and by the way we need to take you to the hospital as well.”

The stretcher is tilted at an angle on the way down the stairs, then there’s a gust of air as we arrive outside. I open my eyes, see the dark evening sky above me. The stars.

I think I can finally sleep again now.

* * *

A huge, tubular object. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, the doctor explains to me. “After all, you don’t want any long-term damage, do you?”

I weakly shake my head. No. What I want is to turn back time, to the point when my life was still familiar and I didn’t have to be afraid all the time.

Inside the chamber, tubes protrude out of the walls, running into blue masks. One of them is pulled over my face. “Just breathe,” says the doctor. Then he leaves me alone.

I try to remember what happened. I was searching the house, then I took a shower—and collapsed. Erik must have found me and pulled me out of there, hence his wet shirt.

Did you do that? he had asked me. Whatever he meant by that.

After an hour, they bring me out of the tube again. I’m feeling a lot better, but they still don’t want to let me go home. “First, because the fire department is still there, and second, because we need to keep you under observation.”

At least my insurance gets me a private room in the hospital. The oxygen mask is still my constant companion, and it’s a good excuse for staying silent. I stare at the wall and try to block out the cheerful doctor sticking electrocardiogram contacts onto my upper body. “Gas boilers are so dangerous,” she chatters away to me. “You’re lucky that your husband reacted so quickly. Just a while longer, and…”

She leaves the sentence unfinished, but it’s clear what she means.

My husband.

Without a doubt Erik had pulled me out of the shower, he had rescued me—but what would have happened if I had showered half an hour earlier? Would he have been there? Had he just been waiting for an opportunity to be my knight in shining armor?

Or would I be dead?

I lie there, and watch the zigzagging lines that my heartbeat is projecting onto the observation monitor.

Did you do that, Jo?

The pain in my wrist is no longer as acute as it was this morning, but it has spread. It now goes from my knuckles to the tips of my fingers. I can remember clearly the feeling of euphoria that filled me when I hit my hand against the door of Ela’s car. It had been so painful and yet, at the same time … good.

Something isn’t right with me; maybe I should start to face up to it. If I’d recently felt the need to inflict harm on myself, then it was also plausible I had tampered with the boiler in order to do something much worse.

Except that I have no idea how to go about doing something like that. And I don’t remember having even been near the device. But by now I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised by gaps in my memory.

Or maybe I should. It could be that all of this has been staged to bring me to exactly the conclusions I’m drawing now.

But how could someone stage my newly acquired urge to self-harm?