JACK: What do you mean by that?

LENNART: I was just surprised. I thought all police officers liked dogs.

JACK: I didn’t say I didn’t like dogs!

LENNART: Most people would have said that dogs don’t like fireworks. But you said dog owners.

JACK: I’m not particularly fond of animals.

LENNART: Sorry. A peril of the profession. You learn to read people in my job.

JACK: As an actor?

LENNART: No, the other. Are the others still here at the station, by the way?

JACK: Who?

LENNART: You know, the others who were in the apartment.

JACK: Are you thinking of anyone in particular?

LENNART: Zara. For instance.

JACK: For instance?

LENNART: There’s no need to look like I asked something improper. I mean, I’m only asking.

JACK: Yes. Zara’s still here. Why do you ask?

LENNART: Oh, just wondered. You get curious about people sometimes, that’s all, and she’s the first person in a long time who I haven’t been able to read at all. I tried, but I didn’t get her at all. Why are you laughing?

JACK: I’m not laughing.

LENNART: Yes you are!

JACK: Sorry, I didn’t mean to. Something my dad says, that’s all.

LENNART: What?

JACK: He says you end up marrying the one you don’t understand. Then you spend the rest of your life trying.

56

“Death, death, death,” Estelle thought in the closet. Many years ago she had read that her favorite author used to start telephone conversations with that. “Death, death, death.” Then, when that was out of the way, they could discuss other things. Otherwise, after a certain age, no phone call ever seemed to be about life, only the other. Estelle could understand that point of view these days. The same author once wrote that “you have to live your life in such a way that you become friends with death,” but Estelle found that harder. She remembered when she used to read bedtime stories to the children, and Peter Pan declaring: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” Maybe for the person doing it, Estelle thought, but not for the one who was left behind. All that awaited her were a thousand sunrises where life is a beautiful prison. Her cheeks quivered, reminding her that she had grown old, her skin was so thin now that it moved the whole time in a breeze that nobody else could feel. She had nothing against old age, just loneliness. When she met Knut it wasn’t a love story, not the way she had read it could feel, theirs was always more like a story of a child finding the perfect playmate. When Knut touched Estelle, right up to the end, it made her feel like climbing trees and jumping from jetties. Most of all she missed making him laugh so hard he spat his breakfast out. That sort of thing only got more fun with age, especially after he got false teeth.

“Knut’s dead,” she said for the first time, and swallowed hard.

* * *

Julia was looking down at the floor in irresolute silence. Anna-Lena sat and tried to think of something to say for a while, then leaned toward Estelle and tapped her on the shoulder with the wine bottle instead. Estelle took it and drank two small sips, before handing it back and going on, half to herself: “But he was very good at parking, Knut. He could parallel park in tiny spaces. So sometimes, when it’s most painful, when I see something really funny and think ‘He’d have laughed so hard his breakfast would have covered the wallpaper’—that’s when I fantasize that he’s just outside, parking the car. He wasn’t perfect, no man is, God knows, but whenever we went anywhere and it was raining, he would always drop me off just outside the door. So I could wait in the warm while he… parked the car.”

A silence forced its way between the three women, and gradually emptied their vocabularies until none of them knew what to say at all. Death, death, death, Estelle thought.

When Knut was lying in his sickbed those last nights, she asked him: “Are you scared?” He replied: “Yes.” Then his fingers ran through her hair and he added: “But it’ll be quite nice to get a bit of peace and quiet. You can put that on the headstone.” Estelle laughed hard at that. When he left her she wept so hard that she couldn’t breathe. Her body was never really the same after that, she curled up and never quite unfurled again.

“He was my echo. Everything I do is quieter now,” she said to the other women in the closet.

Anna-Lena sat for a while before she opened her mouth, because, although she was starting to get drunk, she understood that it wouldn’t be good form in the circumstances to appear greedy. They were wasted seconds, of course, because when she spoke the thought out loud, neither good intentions nor wild horses could hide the hopefulness in her voice.

“So… if your husband isn’t parking the car, can I ask if it was true that you’re looking at this apartment on behalf of your daughter, or was that…”

“No, no, my daughter lives in a nice row house with her husband and children,” Estelle replied sheepishly.

Just outside Stockholm, in fact, but Estelle didn’t say that, because she didn’t think this conversation needed to get any more complicated.

“So you’re just here… looking?” Anna-Lena asked.

“Seriously, Anna-Lena, she’s not competing with you and Roger to buy the apartment! Stop being so insensitive!” Julia snapped.

Anna-Lena stared down into the bottle and mumbled: “I was only asking.”

Estelle patted them both gratefully on the arm, one at a time, and whispered: “Now don’t fall out on my account, dears. I’m too old to be worth that.”

Julia nodded sullenly and put her hand around her stomach. Anna-Lena did the same with the wine bottle.

“How old are your grandchildren?” she asked.

“They’re teenagers now,” Estelle said.

“Oh, sorry to hear that,” Anna-Lena said with feeling.

Estelle smiled feebly. If you’ve lived with teenagers, you know they only exist for themselves, and their parents have their hands full dealing with the various horrors of life. Both the teenagers’ and their own. There was no place for Estelle there, she was mostly something of a nuisance. They were pleased that she answered the phone when they called on her birthday, but the rest of the time they assumed time stood still for her. She was a nice ornament that they only took out at Christmas and Midsummer.

“No… I’m not here to buy the apartment. I just haven’t got anything to do. Sometimes I go to apartment viewings out of curiosity, to listen to people talking, hear what they’re dreaming about. People’s dreams are always at their grandest when they’re looking for somewhere to live. Knut died slowly, you know. He lay in a care home for years, I couldn’t start living as if he was dead, but he… he wasn’t alive. Not really. So my life was on pause, somehow. I took the bus to the care home each day and sat with him. Read books. Out loud at first, then to myself at the end. That’s how it goes. But it was something to do. And a person needs that.”

Anna-Lena thought that yes, that was how it was, people needed to have a project.

“Life goes so fast. Working life, anyway,” she thought out loud, and looked very taken aback when she realized that Julia had heard her.