More Bitter Than Death: A Novel Part 32

He doesn't react, just disappears into the snowfall.

I collapse onto the floor next to Tilda. Even with the window open, the cramped little room is starting to fill with smoke. Tilda coughs and I take her cold little hand in mine. I hear her mumbling something.

"What did you say, honey?"

"Mama," she says. "I want my mama."

I squeeze her hand again without responding and we sit there for a few seconds. Then I feel the kick. It's so incredibly faint, as if a baby bird just did a somersault inside me, bouncing off the inside of my abdomen. I put my hand to my stomach and feel it again, clearer this time, another little kick. Another life.

And I know we have to get out of this d.a.m.n house.

I look around the room again. Maybe I can make some kind of a rope out of old clothes and we can climb down?

"Wait here," I say, and push myself up. I walk through the crowded room, picking up clothes from the floor. I avoid looking at the woman's body slumped against the wall. Smoke seeps up through all the cracks. I can hear the fire roaring like a hungry beast below us.

I quickly tie the clothes together into a makes.h.i.+ft rope, attach it to one of the beams above the window and hang from it to test its strength. It breaks right away. A pair of jeans in the middle rips from my weight. The cloth is brittle after having lain around for countless years in this damp attic.

I take out the jeans from the makes.h.i.+ft rope and tie it back up again, then pull on it again to test its strength.

Rip.

The coat splits in two and dust swirls around in the air, mixing with the increasingly thick smoke.

"d.a.m.n it."

Tears well up in my eyes. I don't know if it's because of the smoke or the situation. I sink down next to Tilda.

"Mama will be here soon," I lie.

She doesn't respond.

We sit still on the floor, listening to the windowpanes exploding downstairs.

Then I hear a voice from somewhere. At first I think the voice is coming from inside the house, but then I realize it's coming from outside.

When I lean out the window, I see him down below, in the dense snowfall. He's standing with his legs apart, looking up at the attic window.

"Help!" I scream. My plea comes out hoa.r.s.e and weak, but he can still hear me.

He rushes over and I notice something familiar about the way he moves, his big strong body, his shaved head.

"Jump!" he hollers.

"I can't! There's a bunch of junk under the snow!"

I rack my brain and recall that I saw something by the front door before I came into the house. "A ladder!" I yell down to him. "There's a ladder by the front door!"

Immediately he turns around and runs to the front of the house, disappearing into the snow. There's a cracking sound behind us, as if the entire house was about to collapse. Suddenly the floor shudders beneath me and I almost lose my footing, because it feels like the floor is disappearing. But it doesn't disappear; it just turns into a slope. Now the whole floor is slanted, as if we were standing on one side of a sailboat, and I'm forced to hold on to the window frame to keep from sliding away toward the stairs.

"Mama!" Tilda cries out.

Without a moment to spare, I grab Tilda's arm to stop her from sliding away. The little body that I carried so easily not long ago is now heavy as lead. With the last of my strength, I pull her back up to the window.

"You have to hold on here, do you understand?"

She looks at me, gla.s.sy-eyed, without responding, but obediently grabs on to the windowsill.

The cardboard boxes, bundles of newspapers and junk slide down the sloped floor into the fire. Out of the corner of my eye I see the woman's body and the suitcases on either side of her slowly glide away and disappear into the flames with a sizzle.

Then he's back. He moves several bicycle frames out of the way and props the ladder up against the facade. Without saying anything he starts climbing up. The first rung gives out under him and he falls backward onto the ground, cursing. He lies there on his back, looking at us hanging halfway out the window.

And that's when I see who it is.

Henrik.

The nausea returns with a force I didn't think was possible and I sink down onto my knees on the slanted floor in front of the window.

And suddenly I understand how it all fits together.

I realize why the car with the broken headlight was following us in the storm. Henrik was following Kattis, who he thinks killed Susanne and kidnapped Tilda.

Then suddenly he's there outside the window, at the top of the ladder. His face is level with mine. His eyes are open wide, his arms outstretched.

"Pa.s.s me Tilda. I'll carry her down first."

"Henrik!" Tilda shouts and stretches those small arms out to him, but I hold her back. How do I know he's planning to rescue her? I watched this man kill a woman right in front of me.

Henrik can tell what I'm thinking. He looks at me like I'm crazy.

"Oh my G.o.d, how could you think that?" he says. "Tilda's like a daughter to me."

There's desperation in his eyes now. Yet another ma.s.sive cracking sound comes from inside the house and the sloped floor becomes even steeper. Now I feel the heat radiating up from below as if we were atop an enormous oven. And I realize that's exactly where we are.

"She's all I have left. I love her, don't you get that?" Henrik pleads.

Henrik and I look into each other's eyes and I let his words sink in. After everything that's happened, he loves her. Love again. What does that word mean, anyway? Can I trust him? What's the alternative? Certain death in a burning house? A twenty-foot fall onto a heap of sc.r.a.p metal?

I help Tilda up and through the window and he carefully receives her little body. He tells her to hold on tight around his neck, and then he climbs down. I wait a few seconds and then start climbing out the window backwards, legs first. I ease myself down the teetering ladder, collapse onto the ground below, and lie there on my back in the freezing snow.

Breathing. I hear voices behind me in the storm.

Someone is crying. It's Henrik. And the little girl is comforting him. Tilda tells him that everything will be okay, that he shouldn't be scared, that she checked all over, and there aren't any lions here.

Excerpt from the Forensic Psychiatry Report

The neuropsychological examination showed that Tobias Lundwall suffers from a moderate developmental disability. In practical terms this means that Lundwall's behavior more closely resembles that of a child in the latency phase than that of an adult.

He has limited intellectual faculties, so his ability to engage in abstract reasoning and a.s.similate information is impaired. It is surprising that Lundwall's disability was not detected sooner.

In addition, Lundwall has certain autistic tendencies, but they are not considered severe enough to merit an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. His psychiatric evaluation also revealed some antisocial, schizoid, and paranoid characteristics, but the patient does not meet enough of the diagnostic criteria for any of these disorders.

Nothing in his files suggests that Lundwall, despite his mild developmental disability, should have had a delusional conception of reality, an impaired ability to make judgments, or an inability to differentiate between right and wrong. Thus, despite the very brutal nature of the crime he committed, the patient cannot be said to be suffering from a serious psychiatric disorder and there is therefore no basis for sentencing Tobias Lundwall to forensic psychiatric care pursuant to Chapter 31, Section 3, of the Swedish Penal Code.

Antonio Waezlaw, MD, forensic psychiatrist

UNIVERSITY OF STOCKHOLM.

FIVE MONTHS LATER.

"Yowza!" Vijay says, eyeing my belly.

"Don't say it!" I say, flas.h.i.+ng him a warning look. He grins, exposing two perfect rows of white teeth, and then pats me lightly on my enormous belly with his right hand. He's holding a cigarette in his left hand. He quickly puts it out in a vase of wilting flowers when he sees my glare.

"Sorry! There's a h.e.l.l of a lot of stuff you're not supposed to do around pregnant women," Vijay complains.

I carefully remove a stack of papers from the visitor's chair and wipe the sweat off my forehead. Even though it's only April, it's been warm for a week now.

"How are you doing?" Vijay asks, c.o.c.king his head to the side, studying me as he plops down into his chair. It creaks. Then he puts his big feet up on his desk. His tennis shoes are green and orange and look like they're straight out of the seventies. When he spins his chair around to put a few books, each one as thick as a brick, back on the shelf behind the desk, I see that his curly, gray-speckled hair is gathered into a little ponytail at the back of his neck.

"Good, I'm feeling good," I say. "But I'm starting to get really sick of this." I gently pat my belly, which is stretched taut, like an inflated beach ball inside Markus's old denim s.h.i.+rt.

"When are you due again?" he asks.

"They say I'll deliver next week."

"They say?"

"We'll see, won't we? I've been talking to junior here and I told him to hurry it up already."

"You know, there's an acupressure point in the hand-" Vijay begins.

I raise my palm in protest. "Please, I don't believe in any of that stuff."

But he's already standing beside my chair. He sits down on the desk in front of me, loosely grips my left hand, and presses hard between my thumb and index finger.

"I guess it can't hurt," I mumble, wiping more sweat from my forehead. "How are things at home?"

He doesn't respond for a bit, doesn't look at me, just keeps ma.s.saging and pressing on my hand. Then he says, "Empty." Nothing more, just that single, miserable, lonely word.

I nod and refrain from pointing out that the city is full of attractive men, that it's springtime, that he's good-looking and desirable, because I know he already knows all that. The man he loves left him, and he's ent.i.tled to his grief. It would be wrong to demand that he should leave that behind too, like some article of discarded clothing.

Vijay clears his throat and lets go of my hand but remains seated on the desk in front of me.

"What about Markus?"

I shrug. "Same old, same old."

He nods and changes the topic. "You heard the verdict came back yesterday?"

"It was hard to miss. It was pretty much front-page news in every Swedish newspaper. I don't understand how you can sentence a developmentally disabled person to ten years in jail."

"Ten years is the standard sentence for murder. You can get life too, if the crime is particularly heinous, although the bar is pretty high. I mean, Susanne Olsson's murder was horrifically brutal, and then there was that woman, the neighbor he killed, the woman they found in the burned-out house. But I'm no judge, just a shrink."

I lean back; the powerful kicks in my stomach almost take my breath away. I try in vain to find a comfortable position.

"But Tobias is developmentally disabled. Okay, it's a mild disability, but his IQ is maybe fifty-five, which means he has the intellectual capacity of a ten-year-old. You can't just send a guy like that to jail. How's he going to fare in there? What kind of a society are we to sanction that?"

Vijay shakes his head and smiles cryptically. "Sometimes I don't get you."

"Why?"

"That so-called ten-year-old almost took your life and that of your unborn baby, and you want him free and out on the street again?"

"I didn't say that. I just don't think it's right to send mentally disabled people to jail. It's barbaric, uncivilized. We might as well legalize the death penalty then."

Vijay looks contemplative for a moment and I know he's working up to one of his little lectures.

"As I'm sure you know, the Swedish legal system doesn't actually draw any distinction between whether a criminal is healthy or has any sort of mental disability. There used to be the option of special sentencing guidelines for the mentally disabled, but that no longer exists. The specialized hospitals disappeared in the nineties, when they got rid of the legal concept of 'unaccountable.' Now the only alternative is forensic psychiatric care, and to receive that, the offender needs to be suffering from a serious mental illness. Most criminals who fall into that category are psychotic. Some are suffering from dementia too, or have some severe form of brain damage. Being a little slow is absolutely not enough to qualify you for forensic psychiatric care. A developmental disability doesn't const.i.tute grounds for forensic psychiatric care, either. So the only option is incarceration."

"Doesn't that violate the UN's rules?"

"Sure it does. And sure, we Swedes are very quick to criticize Americans for executing developmentally disabled and mentally ill people. But we still throw them in jail here. You know they did a study a few years ago that showed that between five and ten percent of the Swedish prison population was developmentally disabled, meaning they had an IQ of under seventy. That means that several hundred developmentally disabled people are sentenced to prison every year in Sweden. There are prisoners who have the mental capacities of preschoolers. The darker your skin, the more likely you are to end up in jail in Sweden too, since our system has a notoriously hard time a.s.sessing the mental health of immigrants. Our nifty little questionnaire doesn't work if you only speak Kurdish, right? Anyway, there's probably many more examples than we even know about."