The Seventh Child (70 page)

I took a deep breath—just one—as I waited for the words to come. Then I said, “I removed all the files from Magna’s office
…
when I was only ten or eleven. They are in a secret place, but it makes no difference
…
because there was nothing whatsoever in them about biological parents
…
about your biological parents
…
nothing at all. All of that was missing.”

I’d leaped into uncertainty.

He stood, and the wheelchair rolled backward a few inches. “Nothing?”

“No.”

“But
…
my
mother
…
” He paused at that word, and I could see panic appear in his eyes.

“No,” I said, mercilessly. “She wasn’t your mother. I just found a woman
who’d
put her child up for adoption at Kongslund—a boy—but it wasn’t you.” The swift confession made me lisp so strongly that Magdalene must have heard it high up in the celestial space among the clouds. But she didn’t come to my rescue as she had in the old days. “I also gave Severin a telephone number when he called Kongslund to find his parents. That, too, was fake.”

“But for all those years I’ve
…
”

“Yes, I made sure she lived in Brorfelde, close to the old observatory so
you’d
understand everything. I knew
you’d
appreciate that.”

Behind his thick lenses, Asger’s eyes still contained no anger—just a deep astonishment.

“You offered me everything when I visited you
…
without reservation. Why wouldn’t I want to give you a biological mother who was better than any other, and one who even lived next to Denmark’s most famous observatory?”

“When you visited me?”

“Yes,” I said. Now there was no turning back. “At the Coastal Sanatorium. You offered me the galaxy—and the neighboring galaxy—and all the stories you told me. Said I could visit you in Aarhus sometime. But of course I never did.”

Asger slowly removed his glasses. They weren’t of use now anyway, now that
he’d
begun to understand what I was saying. At the last minute, he sought refuge in a fog as deep as the Milky Way—or as distant as his beloved Andromeda—but it was too late.

“You’re
the blind girl
?” he said. For some reason he used the present tense.

“Yes
…
well
…
of course I wasn’t blind—it was just a disguise. It was an excuse I could use with the nurses so they’d let me in. What was the harm if I was one of the kids from the School for the Blind up the road, a poor lonely girl?” I bowed my head. My lisp returned, so strong
I
barely understood what I was saying. “I was probably insane already then—maybe crazy to meet someone
…
some of the ones I’d known. The only ones I’d known.”

“But how did you know where I was? How did you know to find me there?” Asger again looked stunned. Probably, he already understood, but he was more reluctant than ever to acknowledge the truth.

I didn’t answer. My lisp would have rendered even words not containing
s
’s incomprehensible anyway.

“Good God,” he finally said. “Did you track down all of us? Did
you
…
”—he couldn’t find the right words for what I’d done—“
spy on u
s?”

“Susanne visited you too,” I said, dodging the accusation. It was a skill that came easily to me.

“What about her?” The mention of her name disoriented him.

“Wouldn’t you have done anything for her back then?” I could tell
he’d
already lost the thread. That was the effect mentioning Susanne’s name had on him. “She left you—but I was there when you were in need. You were an upset little boy. You weren’t a scientist in control of everything. You lay there staring out over the water and the sky, and finally someone brought you comfort. Isn’t that what matters?”

“Good God,” he repeated—as though he really didn’t believe in anything but measureable and visible particles.

“What she did was very dangerous,” I said.

“What she did
…
?”

“Yes. Susanne. That morning she let all the birds out. She never should have done that. She claims she didn’t, but there’s no other logical explanation.”

Asger didn’t reply.

“Before she left the day before yesterday—to see her adoptive parents at the cape—she told me about her mother,” I explained. “She said, ‘Even though she wasn’t my biological mother, we were very alike in important ways, the uncompromising mind, the rage. Samanda needed to be protected from someone as strong as me. That’s why she bonded with my mother. My father was much too weak. I think all three of them feared what was going on inside me—and they just waited for the catastrophe to happen. And then the birds flew away.’ Those were her words.”

It was all true. Susanne had been standing beside me on the doorstep, waiting for a cab.
She’d
whispered so only I could hear, her face close to mine. “I knew,” she said. “Back when I left Våghøj, I knew who it would hurt the most. Not Josefine, not Anton, but Samanda. She was already guilty. She was the real daughter, and I was the illegitimate child, the pariah. I’d spent my childhood making her feel that guilt because I sensed it unconsciously the way kids do. When the truth finally came out, it didn’t destroy me—it destroyed her. And by the time Josefine recognized this, it was too late. That day, in that room, when she called my biological mother a whore in Hamburg, she didn’t destroy me—or herself or her husband—but her own daughter.”

I stiffened then, having no doubt that she was right. And then she made her final point—one that I couldn’t bring myself to tell Asger—about Samanda drowning in the lake. She said, “I had often talked about that lake when we were really little—about how it would be our way out if things got too hard—and that that’s where I once saw a little girl’s face in the darkness
…
far down in the depths, in the peace and tranquility that exists only there. I had even described the two of us together there, like two little Thumbelinas who would paddle out into the world on a lily pad
…
she’d
given me a strange, gleaming look and said: ‘But a lily pad can’t hold us both, can it? That’s the point of the fairy tale, isn’t it? The fake Thumbelina sinks to the bottom while the real one floats?’ I knew the ending, but Samanda had never been anywhere except her home. She didn’t understand the ferociousness that exists
…
or the evil that rules the world. So she drowned in the lake—as I always knew she would.”

The pastry-box house stood between the hills at Våghøj as it had for the five generations it had been owned by the Ingemann family—the family that was now called, ever since Anton had married Josefine, the Ingemann Jørgensens.

The two old people sat quietly at the solid oak table behind the house, as was their habit. They mainly communicated about practical matters and could easily pass an hour in silence, as they ate the open-faced sandwiches that constituted their lunch. It was as though they’d made a pact to stay together for reasons that no one knew but them.

Their daughter had arrived two days earlier, unannounced, in a cab from Kalundborg. Though Anton and Josefine sensed that there was something Susanne wanted to tell them, they said nothing. It was as though the prolonged silence was in preparation for an event neither dared consider. If they knew about the newspaper and television coverage of the Kongslund Affair, they didn’t say.

Since Samanda’s funeral more than three decades ago, their other daughter had only visited them a few times. Typically every three or four years, and probably only because she still loved her father, whom she didn’t resemble but with whom
she’d
nonetheless felt secure as a child during the years Josefine and Samanda grew close.
She’d
never stayed for more than one night.

On the third day, they had lunch on the patio together; and from where they sat, they could see the thin white cross that marked Samanda’s grave on a dark-green knoll behind the house.

The cross was about three feet tall, no more. As always, it had been Anton’s practical hands that had fastened the two narrow boards with a twist of white steel wire—just like when
he’d
built the aviary that had housed Josefine’s and Samanda’s twelve singing canaries, as well as the thirteenth.

Susanne lifted her napkin from her lap and set it down on the table. Then she pointed at the cross, finally breaking the long silence. “She wasn’t the one who broke all my things.”

Anton put his fork down, and then his knife, but didn’t reply. Josefine seemed to have frozen in midmovement. Every day, since she was very young and first made lunch for herself and her husband, Josefine ate two half slices of rye bread with salami, another with liver pâté, and one piece of white bread with cheese. Now, all four slices sat untouched on her plate.

“Everyone thought she did it, but she didn’t.”

“She wasn’t the one who
…
what?” Anton hesitated.

“I did it myself. The vandalism
…
back in school
…
I was the one who kicked the bicycle—I was the one who made you all feel sorry for me. I made sure everyone blamed Samanda, even though no one dared say it out aloud because it couldn’t be proved. Even you, who were closest to her, you thought she did it. Everyone did.”

Josefine put her hands on the table, palms down, and looked away from Susanne, shaking her head faintly. She gazed at the lonely cross on the knoll as if expecting some sort of contradiction of this story to issue forth. But all that could be heard was the wind from the fjord whistling in the oak trees that surrounded the little lake where Samanda had drowned.

“We don’t know what you’re talking about,” Anton said. It was very rare that he used the plural form to include his wife, and it seemed to take enormous effort.

“Who are my real parents?” Susanne said.

“What do you mean?” Josefine said.

“Who is my mother—my real mother—the one you called a whore from Hamburg?” Susanne now looked directly at Josefine, who was studying the sky over the cross with great intensity. Again she shook her head so subtly that a casual observer of their little gathering would not have noticed.

“I tried to locate my real parents when Samanda died, but I didn’t find them—because all the papers were gone.” Susanne spun toward her father. “Where are they?”

“We never had any papers. All we know is what the matron told us, and that was next to nothing.”

Susanne believed him.
He’d
never lied to her.

“It’s
your
fault,” Josefine said, still without turning. It was hard to tell whether the accusation was directed at Susanne or her husband of half a century.

“Is it
my
fault?” Susanne said. “Look at me, Mom. Is it
my
fault?”

“I don’t think this is the right time—” Anton began, but it was too late.

Josefine finally turned to her daughter, and the words resounded so clearly from her mouth that rarely spoke. “You took her from me.”

“Do you mean
…
Samanda
…
or Aphrodite
…
that stupid bird? You remember the time it laid that monstrous egg
…
I laughed for three weeks afterward.
That’s
when it all started.”

Josefine whimpered and closed her eyes. Her husband sat silently at her side, his mouth agape.

“That’s when it started, Mom—with those birds—and you were the one who brought them. I know what they symbolized.”

“But you still shouldn’t have let them out!” Anton suddenly caught his tongue as he put his large hand on Susanne’s arm. “But it’s all right. We forgave you a long time ago.”

“You forgave me?” An astonished expression washed over Susanne’s face. “Forgave me—for what?”

“For the birds.” The large man hesitated. “It must have been you
…
it couldn’t have been Samanda
…
” He stopped, confused. To his right, Josefine sat motionless.

Susanne leaned toward her. “Do
you
want to tell him the truth, Mom—or should I?”

Josefine didn’t move.

“The truth
…
” his father’s voice trembled a little. He should have long ago escaped into the air above Våghøj.

With a sudden movement of her left arm, Josefine swept her plate off the table, and a hunk of thin toast thinly smeared with liver pâté landed in Anton’s lap. He picked it up in a strangely mechanical way and set it back on the table.

“You’re the one who let them out!” Josefine yelled. “You who
…
if you hadn’t hated your sister so much, it would have never happened!”

“In a way that’s true, Mom. I let them out. But you were really the one who did it. And you know it. That morning
…
I saw you. I heard you walk down the stairs, and I followed you. I watched you open the cage door and the kitchen door and then go back to bed. It was you—and all these years I’ve been wondering why.”