The Seventh Child (53 page)

He should have never let her go. It was the biggest mistake of his life. She never returned. Not at 3:00 p.m., 4:00 p.m., or 5:00 p.m. He didn’t have her phone number or address, and when he screwed up his courage to ask Ms. Müller where Susanne lived, the tall head nurse looked at him for a long time and finally said, “I think we’ll have to leave it up to her to come back.” Seeing the magnitude of this situation for Asger, Ms. Müller seated herself on his bed and said gently, “Maybe her parents decided that they want her at home tonight.” Her eyes shone with the same luminous gray as the water in the fjord.

When he awoke, his mother was at his bedside, and his father stood behind her. Farther back was Ms. Müller with her white nurse’s cap sitting atop her silver hair.

That night—and the following night and the night after that, and for a thousand more nights—he tried to understand the events that had changed his life in only a few minutes, but he couldn’t organize them logically, couldn’t identify quantifiable phases the way he was accustomed to doing when he studied the origin of stars and planets. No formula could explain the forces that had been unleashed by an unknown power.

In less than a second,
he’d
been cut off from the people
who’d
been his parents.

And then, a few days later, from Susanne.

October, November, and December came and went, and finally he gave up waiting for her. He had no doubt that the girl
he’d
loved—loved the way only an eleven-year-old boy can love—was gone forever.
She’d
been a fairy tale, a fable, a dream made manifest by his own longing. The strangest dream
he’d
ever had.

Susanne Ingemann had tears in her eyes, and that was a rare sight—because in her experience sentimentality had quite literally proven deadly.

Asger put his hand on her arm, and I imagined, a little absurdly, that this was how they’d sat as children. When he touched her, it seemed to contain the comforting weight of forgiveness.

Knud Taasing, who in his profession had learned to distance his emotions, said, “But that gives us no new knowledge of Eva
…
or Eva’s child. I told you about Marie being the letter writer, and she doesn’t know any more than we do.” It was a question without a question mark.

Peter Trøst sat silently on the other side of the table, his eyes glazed as if
he’d
just woken from a long sleep.

“I’ve tried to locate Eva Bjergstrand,” Taasing said. “It’s impossible.”

I bent my head and tried to hide my relief. My left eye began to water again.

Asger spoke, his deep voice was almost soothing. “If anyone else is looking, they haven’t succeeded either.”

“Of course not,” Taasing said sharply. “Because they are looking for a ghost.”

I held my breath.
How could he have learned what no one but me knew? What no one but me could have known?
Desperately, I looked down at the table again, then closed my eyes.

Then, mercilessly, he dropped the bomb: “Because as far as I can figure, the person who wrote the letter Marie snatched up died”—he paused and smiled faintly—“seven years before that letter was written.” And then he spoke directly to me: “Can I have another look at that letter, Marie?”

I had tears in my eyes, and I didn’t dare raise my head to meet his gaze.

“Why do you want to see the letter?” Susanne asked.

“Because either the dead have started writing letters
…
or this letter was written when the person was alive.” His voiced dripped with sarcasm. “According to the date, the letter Marie showed me was written only a few days before Marie sent the anonymous letters—in April of this year—but of course that would be impossible.”

I stood, both eyes still closed, and left the group. It was an odd retreat, but no one moved.

A moment later, I stood by the desk in the King’s Room, drying the tears from my face. I made a decision. This time I left Eva’s petition to Magna in the blue airmail envelope, the one I hadn’t shown Taasing the first time
he’d
visited.

When I returned, everyone was silent and in the same position.

Asger’s hand still lay on Susanne’s arm.

Without a word I threw the letter on the patio table in front of the shrewd journalist.

“The missing envelope!” he said in a lighter tone and smiled. “Yes, I had it quite right—postmarked in Adelaide where the mysterious woman lived and died. And look at the date
…I
t’s actually postmarked in April of 2001
…
seven years ago.”

Everyone looked at him, mystified.

He removed the first sheet and held it against the sunlight. “And the date
…
that Eva wrote
…
in this light it’s very obvious
…
” He turned to me, and now I felt the insistent stares of Asger and Peter as well. “The date has been almost undetectably changed. You changed the 1 in 2001 to an 8, simply by adding a couple of curls on each side of the 1. It’s not particularly pretty, but I fell for it. So Eva’s seven-year-old letter was dated to the present. But why
…
?”

Susanne pushed Asger’s hand away. I hadn’t confided in her about this part of my enterprise, and she wouldn’t be able to understand why.

“You’re right. The letter did arrive then,” I said. “I tried to find Eva, but I wasn’t able to.” I kept Susanne out of it. She sat motionless, and I could tell that she was mystified. But I also knew that she wouldn’t correct me as long as she didn’t know what was going on.

“Instead,” I said, “I found a trace of the child in Mother’s Aid Society’s old archives. That’s where I found the form with John Bjergstrand’s name.” I raised my head, trying to ignore that my deformed left shoulder had almost sunk to the level of the table, and that my left cheek was flushed and streaked with tears. If my heavy lisp had them puzzled, they didn’t say so—and no one tried to interrupt me.

“But after that, I got no further. That was seven years ago.”

Asger wrinkled his forehead, as though
he’d
caught sight of a mysterious supernova but couldn’t quite believe the phenomenon existed. I understood why. Because, of course, I still had to leave the most important pieces lying in the dark. At that moment, I was balancing at the edge of the abyss, just like the elephants in Magna’s song, and could only hope for a certain amount of luck and the strength of Magdalene’s advice from the Other Side:
the finest web, the most cautious gait.

No one spoke for a long time, and then Taasing broke the silence. “You waited for seven years. But finally you decided to send anonymous letters to the people you knew would understand, who would publish them—in the hope that something would come to light?”

I nodded. A few teardrops fell onto my plate, but no one noticed.

“But why did you change the
year
?”

“Because I wanted it to look current, newsworthy.” I had carefully prepared my answer. The journalists nodded thoughtfully. Asger’s eyebrows were raised even farther toward the sky. I couldn’t read Susanne’s expression, but it didn’t matter as long as she kept quiet.

“But why did you wait?” the insistent Knud Taasing asked.

“I wasn’t sure what to do. I spent seven years trying to find my way forward, and I didn’t want to risk having the case dismissed because it was an
old
letter,” I said, dodging his actual question completely.

The journalists nodded again, and I was astonished at their naïveté, even though in a certain sense I’d expected it. Everything in their world needed to be
present
and
current
so it could be connected to reality—and for that reason alone they were duped by my blatant lie.

“But the first time around you didn’t send anyone the letter itself, only the form.” Asger said.

“I changed the date in case anyone saw it someday. After all, it wouldn’t be hard to figure out who sent the anonymous letters.” I stared directly at Asger, looking for the support my ridiculous story didn’t deserve.

Finally he too nodded, and I could tell he found me interesting—and for the first time not only because of my mental quirks and cracked bones. People like Asger have a hard time with lies; they sense their presence much like they sense the mysterious black holes deep in the universe; they sense their presence (even when they are nearly as invisible or camouflaged as mine) and try to approach them without being sucked in by their power. “But that was foolish,” he said. “It could have brought the credibility of the entire matter into question. If Knud had published it
…
”

He didn’t need to finish the sentence.

Taasing looked at the untouched bread basket and then said, “I should’ve seen Marie’s little deceit right way. Because Eva Bjergstrand explicitly stated that she was writing on Good Friday—and that
she’d
just read about a wedding in a Danish newspaper from April 7. But in 2008, Easter fell in March—almost three weeks
before
the wedding was to have taken place. I should have seen it—but I’ve always passed by Easter in silence.” He smiled ironically. “In the first line she also writes that
she’d
departed Denmark forty years earlier, but in 2008 it would have been forty-seven years later, and
she’d
hardly be that imprecise.” He lowered his head as though shamed. “The signs were there, but I didn’t see them. I contacted the Australian embassy in Copenhagen, thinking that the letter had just been mailed, but I was lucky
…
I spoke to a secretary who several years earlier had fielded a similar question.”

Taasing grabbed a piece of bread and broke it in half. “Another person had asked about Eva Bjergstrand, and the inquiry was not recent, but several years ago
…
a
woman
, and I got the description of this woman.” He turned toward me. “And then it clicked
…
Could the letter be much older than I realized? Had I been deceived? A single glance at the calendar was enough. In 2001, Good Friday fell in April—on April 13 to be exact.”

My heart pounded hard in my chest as I awaited his next, decisive words.

He raised the bread to his mouth but didn’t eat. “The embassy secretary also recalled that no one named Eva Bjergstrand existed—presumably because
she’d
changed her name. After going through a list of all the Danish women
who’d
received Australian citizenship in the Adelaide region over the years,
she’d
come up with one whose age fit, but that woman had—at the beginning of September in 2001—left Australia.” He took a bite of the bread. “And traveled to Denmark.”

I didn’t dare look at any of the others. This was what the embassy clerk had told me when I contacted her the second time. But she had likely not told Knud Taasing that
she’d
given me the same information, or he hadn’t ascribed any significance to it.

I sent her a silent thanks.

“She had of course forgotten everything about it, but I asked her to find out where the woman was now. And the answer surprised me. Because she had apparently never returned to Australia. At any rate, they had erased her as a citizen in all their records. As far as they could tell, she had remained in Denmark.”

“In Denmark?” Asger expressed the astonishment everyone felt.

“Yes. But then came the next shock—when I actually found her…” He hesitated.

“What?” they all seemed to say in unison.

“She was dead.”

“Dead?”
Asger repeated.

“Yes. Right here in Copenhagen. Very close by.”

Asger’s glow faded as though
he’d
seen a ghost. And in a way he had. “But how?”

“I sat and read all the big morning papers from the fall of 2001—from front page to back. Maybe something had happened in Denmark that I could connect to her. Like an annual meeting of the Danish-Australian Friendship Association, a conference
…
or maybe
she’d
been in an accident. Maybe the purpose for her trip was to repatriate. This was a complete shot in the dark, of course, but Denmark is a small country after all. When you’re shooting in a barnyard, even random shots sometimes strike the target.”

Taasing looked pleased with himself. Then he put his bread down and delivered the final blow: “The police found an unknown woman on the beach between Kongslund and Bellevue on the morning of September 11, 2001—dead, possibly murdered. Possibly from Australia—judging from her garments.”

He was met with only silence. It was a rather old-fashioned word,
garments
, Marie thought.

Taasing stood. “Does the date ring any bells?”

No one said a word. It was a superfluous question.

“Right. A few hours later, two passenger planes flew into the World Trade Center in New York City. So as a result I only found a few lines in the two small dailies about the woman and her death. They had other things to write about, of course. But I found enough. Because now I knew what had happened to Eva Bjergstrand
…
Now I knew why she hadn’t returned to Australia.”