The Watcher Read online

  ALSO BY CAROLINE ERIKSSON

  The Missing

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2017 Caroline Eriksson

  Translation copyright © 2018 Tara F. Chace

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Hon som vakar by Forum in 2017 in Sweden. Translated from Swedish by Tara F. Chace. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2018.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503905405

  ISBN-10: 1503905403

  Cover design by David Drummond

  To Mom and Dad

  For what was

  For what is

  For all we have left

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  PROLOGUE

  THE HUSBAND

  So this is how it’s going to end?

  I’m teetering on the edge. I turn around and our eyes meet, hers the same ones that once looked into mine at the altar in that picturesque little village church. They were filled with happiness and emotion then, but now they’re black with the hatred of revenge. And I see decisiveness in her face, a purposefulness that hasn’t been there for a long time. Only now does it occur to me that what’s about to happen is not a coincidence. My wife has been waiting for an opportunity like this. She wants to see me dead.

  This whole time I’ve been worried about her . . . Suddenly I realize that I should have been afraid for myself.

  People say that in your final moments you see your life pass before your eyes, from beginning to end. How would anyone even know something like that? I don’t experience it. No cavalcade of birthdays and celebrations, flickers of failures and successes, or the faces that I held most dear. I see only one thing in front of me, and, oddly enough, it’s that church where we once promised to love each other forever, for better or for worse. I remember everything, every single detail of our wedding day, just as clearly as if it were yesterday—our fingers intertwined as we slowly walked down the aisle, the smiling faces in the pews, the rustling of fancy clothes, the scent of freshly picked summer flowers, our vows that we’d written ourselves, the sun shining through the stained-glass windows, the pastor’s blessing.

  And now? Is this—this church where we swore to love each other until death do us part—where she’ll bury me, or rather, what’s left of me?

  The chasm before me is deep and unforgiving. It contains no uncertainty, no mercy. Everything is happening so quickly, and yet this moment stretches out for an eternity. She comes closer, right up beside me. She raises one hand, then the other. Soon I’ll fall. Soon I’ll be dashed to pieces. Soon it will be over.

  Three, two, one.

  Now.

  1

  Just before four o’clock, I get up and throw on my bathrobe. I’d stopped counting the hours and minutes I lay awake at night ages ago. It’s not even a month since the separation, and I haven’t gotten used to sleeping alone yet. I can’t imagine I ever will. On a purely physical level, I miss Peter. Even the first night we slept together, it was like our bodies had found their way home, as if they had slipped into each other’s nooks and filled each other’s crannies. I’d slept in different people’s arms before, but I’d never experienced anything like this. Peter felt it, too. “We’re like a puzzle,” he whispered into my ear, “with only two pieces.”

  The staircase leading downstairs is shrouded in nighttime darkness. The steps are steep and narrow, easy to slip on if you’re not careful. I close my eyes and lean forward, feel my body’s center of gravity being sucked farther and farther over the landing. If I started walking with my eyes closed, if I let fate have its way, maybe I would make it all the way down, descending calmly and steadily. I lean even farther forward. I don’t actually even need to try taking a step, don’t need to anticipate fate. There’s another alternative: to throw myself headlong into the darkness. I can make sure to land on my head, allowing my neck to break under the weight of my body. One life extinguished in the night, one drop in the vast cosmos.

  It’s not the first time this idea occurs to me. But just as before, the thought leads to my sister. To the realization that she would be the one to find me; she would be the one forced to deal with all the practical matters. Of the family that once existed, only the two of us remain. I can’t do that to her. My hand reaches for the light switch. An instant later, the light pours over the stairs and I descend, step by step.

  I walk through the empty town house in a little development built around a landscaped communal yard. This place is meant to play the part of my home now, although it actually belongs to someone else. I am a shadowy figure in this existence, passing through on my way elsewhere. The rent has been paid in advance for three months. I have no idea where I’ll go after this. Maybe that should worry me, but I feel nothing.

  In the kitchen I pour myself a glass of water and drink it while leaning back against the sink. The unit across the yard is dark. I see no lights on in any of the windows. The people who live there are probably asleep, like all normal, sensible people at this hour. Safe and undisturbed, with the ones they love most in the next room or in bed beside them. My borrowed twin bed awaits in the bedroom upstairs. The bed will be cool when I return. No one is keeping it warm under the covers. There will be no legs to press the freezing soles of my feet against, no one whose neck and back I can nestle up against and shape my body to.

  A puzzle with only two pieces. I used that phrase once in a story. When the manuscript came back, I saw that the editor had drawn two red lines through those specific words and written “Kind of cliché” in the margin. She couldn’t have known how special those words were to me. She was just doing her job, and I accepted the edit. But maybe I should have stood my ground. Those words meant something to me. A publisher’s opinions are suggestions—usually prudent ones—but ultimately the author has final say over her own text. I’ll remember that next time. In my next manuscript, I’ll . . . The thought flows into nothingness. I empty my glass and shake my head. Next time, next manuscript, who am I kidding? I haven’t written a line in almost two years.

  I continue moving through the house, following the same pattern I usually do during these nightly ambles, and soon wind up in the living room. It’s not a big room, and yet it contains most of what I brought when I left the home Peter and I shared. The moving boxes stacked along the walls are filled with things I haven’t bothered to unpack—meaningless objects, relics from a time that will never return. There’s only one thing here that means anything to me.

  My steps slow, and I move over to the bookshelf. I reach out my arm and carefully run my hand over the densely packed rows of book spines. There are so many stories between their covers, the fates of so many lives. They relate the joy and pain of being human, the cruelties to which we subject each other. There are certain common themes in all stories, just as in all human life, and I know that I’m not alone in my adventures and experiences, although it feels like it. Oh, Mama, if you could see me now.

  My hands select by themselves, moving as if they belong to someone else, as if they have a life of their own. One book at a time is pulled out and assigned a new place—sometimes on the same shelf, but more often than not somewhere else. At first it happens slowly, almost randomly, then with more and more focus. Book after book is repositioned, ending up higher, lower, closer to the middle or to the edge. Tonight I’m sorting by title, but my actual criteria are unimportant. What matters is having something to do to keep the turbulence below the surface at bay.

  Some of the shelves are crowded, so I hold the books awaiting reshelving in my lap and continue working with one hand. Empty spaces appear and are filled again. One context is undone and a new totality gradually emerges. But it doesn’t help, of course. Nothing helps. When I finally stand in front of the bookshelf and survey the results, everything is different. And yet it’s exactly the same. I slowly back out of the room.

&n
bsp; The next time I become aware of anything, it’s grown so cold. My legs feel cold on the inside. Then something extremely close to my face is beeping, and I wake up. At some point last night, somewhere in the midst of my insomniac wanderings, I must have headed back upstairs to the bedroom and fallen asleep in the bed, because that’s where I am. The blanket fell on the floor and the room is freezing. I forgot to close the window. I pull in my legs and wrap my arms around my knees. If only I could just get out of waking up one morning. There’s another beep, and I lazily reach over for my phone on the nightstand. The screen shows two new text messages from my sister. The first is four words long: You’re coming tonight, right? The second message is just as succinct, but the tone is different: 7PM sharp!

  I force myself out of bed, pull on my bathrobe, and go downstairs. The same motions, bathrobe, and stairs as yesterday and the day before. The same motions, bathrobe, and stairs that await me tomorrow and the day after that. In the kitchen I put on the kettle and make tea, not that it matters whether I eat breakfast, but because that’s what one does, that’s the way a person behaves. Plus it gives me something to fill my time and thoughts with. Something different.

  I sit down and blow on my tea. Between sips, I stare out the window, my gaze roaming across the little landscaped yard between the houses. A few birds are chirping in a bush. In the kitchen of the place across from mine stands a man wearing a suit and tying his tie. At the table in front of him sits a woman with honey-colored hair, drinking something from a cup. The sun hasn’t made it over the rooftops yet. A garbage truck chugs down the street. People hurry along the sidewalk. They’re on their way somewhere. Their steps have direction and purpose.

  I turn my attention to the room I find myself in, and behold its drab, bare appearance: the missing bits of wallpaper, the worn handles on the cupboard doors. The furnishings consist of a table and two simple chairs. Yet another day of empty motions and artificial respiration awaits within these four walls; yet another day of silence and solitude. My sister is my only remaining link to the outside world. This is what it’s come to. This is what I’ve allowed it to come to. You’re coming tonight, right? I get up from the table and dump out the rest of my tea in the sink. I don’t know, I think. I really don’t know.

  2

  My sister squats in front of the oven and peers through the dirty glass.

  “It’s done,” she decides, adjusting the pot holders before opening the door.

  A pan of lasagna lands on the table in front of me, alongside a simple green salad and red boxed wine. It’s the same thing she’s served the last several Fridays. She seems to like lasagna. Or maybe she’s decided that I do? My sister holds up the box of wine and fills my glass first and then her own. After that she sits across from me and offers me the serving utensils.

  “Go for it,” she says.

  Soon two steaming helpings sit on the plates in front of us. My sister has a healthy appetite. She says something about the weather, about how waiting for things to warm up in the spring is the worst. After having tried to start a discussion about some new TV show I’ve never heard of, she asks how I like my new place. I answer that I’m sure it will be fine but that I haven’t really settled in yet.

  My words sound stiff and fake. I feel that strangeness again, just like a few hours earlier when I stood in the front hall, just inside the door. I was dressed and ready to go out when this feeling of unreality came over me. This won’t do. I’m not up to this. I realized that I was going to have to call and cancel, that I couldn’t go to my sister’s for our now-traditional Friday-night dinner. Sit there eating and chatting, pretending as if everything is as it should be. No, not again. Never again. And yet, in the end, here I am.

  “Yes, yes,” my sister says. “It’s not like you owe it to me to be happy there just because.”

  The woman I’m subletting the place from is one of my sister’s many friends. She’s traveling around the world right now. That’s the kind of thing my sister’s friends do. They fly places and grab life by the horns. My sister and her husband used to travel, too—sometimes on their own and sometimes with other couples—but it’s been a long time since they’ve done that.

  “I mean, we’re only talking about a few months,” my sister says, and I realize that she’s still talking about the town house, about my existence.

  She rotates her wineglass in her hand, eyeing me thoughtfully. She had previously offered to let me live here, with her and her husband, and now I have the sense that she’s about to repeat the invitation.

  “I’ll figure it out,” I say in answer to a question that wasn’t really asked.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I think I catch my sister eyeing my plate and the food sitting there more or less untouched. I dutifully stuff a bite of lasagna into my mouth and wash it down with wine, not tasting it. Then I ask my sister a question about her job and listen as best I can while she answers. Things go better when we focus on her instead of me.

  I empty my glass and my sister refills it. The alcohol does its part, dulling the sharp edges, dimming and covering. I feel almost real.

  “How about you?” my sister asks after a while.

  “What about me?”

  “Have you started to give any thought to the future?”

  I look down at my plate again, poking at the lettuce leaves. The future? The future is already behind me. That’s what I think, even if I know better than to say it out loud. I make do with a simple shrug, but my sister doesn’t relent. How’s the writing going? Have I started anything new? I moisten my lips and tell it like it is.

  My sister leans toward me.

  “You need to get back to writing,” she says firmly. “Work is the best medicine.”

  I stiffen. “Work is the best medicine” is Mama’s old mantra. The words she smilingly used to counter all our efforts to make her rest, to not overdo it. The words she constantly repeated, right up until the pain made it impossible for her to speak, let alone sit up in bed and read or write.

  My sister says the words so neutrally, as if they don’t have any deeper significance to her. There’s nothing in her voice to suggest that she remembers. Maybe she doesn’t. By the time Mama got sick, she’d already been living away from home for a long time. She lived abroad for so long and rarely came home to visit until the final stage.

  I fill my chest with air and hold it in. Only when my chest feels tight and my ribs ache, only when I no longer have any choice, do I exhale again.

  “Just so you know, I am actually working pretty much all the time.”

  That’s true. I accept as much work as I can as a publisher’s reader and translator.

  “It’s great that you’re busy, but you’re an author, Elena. Authors write, right? They don’t just dink around with other people’s texts.”

  My glass is empty, again. I stare at the box of wine.

  “I don’t have anything to write about.”

  My sister pours me yet more wine and then gets up to fetch some ketchup from the fridge.

  “What’s that thing your publisher always says, that writing advice . . . dig your own grave, or something?”

  A strange sound, which could have been a laugh, hacks its way from between my lips. My sister raises her eyebrows, and once again I look away. I suppose I’m getting a bit tipsy.

  “Dig where you are,” I correct her quietly.

  “Right, that’s the one,” my sister says, picking up her fork and knife again. “Whatever. Anyway, I know you’ve mentioned the saying several times. So are you working on old manuscripts or what?”

  I nod slowly. For the majority of my life, I’ve been a spectator, a person who observes rather than participates. This has benefited my writing. My texts have been based on events and developments I’ve either witnessed or heard tell of. The characters in my four books have all been based on people I’ve known, although that hasn’t been evident to those involved. All an author needs to do is sprinkle in a few smoke screens—maybe change the character’s age or profession—to keep people from recognizing themselves and realizing that the book is about them. I’ve written about friends and coworkers, about people I’ve known intimately but also about those I know only by sight. I’ve written about my mother and father, even my sister. I don’t think she’s aware of it.