Shame

next to Åse and leaned her forehead on her shoulder. In Åse’s lap all their hands met: mother, father, child. A close-knit family. They would stick together through thick and thin, all their lives.
    ‘There’s no danger, but she isn’t quite able to talk about it yet. They gave her a sedative.’ Börje’s voice was calm and low but his tenderness radiated from his hands as they rearranged the blanket that had slipped down from Åse’s shoulders. Then he stroked Ellinor’s hair.
    Monika was kicking and biting inside. Throwing herself again and again at the fragile shell that held her captive. Doctor Lundvall was having a hard time breathing, and things were starting to get urgent, very urgent.
    ‘If it’s all right with you I’ll be leaving now.’
    It was there in her voice. At any rate she could hear it herself. But maybe the people on the sofa were too immersed in their own gratitude to hear it. Börje got up and came over to her.
    ‘I don’t know what else to say but thank you. It’s a bit hard to find the words right now.’
    ‘You don’t have to say a thing.’
    She took his outstretched hand and pressed it fleetingly, then turned to Åse, who was looking at her with a bottomless sorrow in her eyes.
    ‘Goodbye Monika, thanks for coming.’
    When she heard her name the façade cracked, but she managed to make it out to the car before the scream came.

    The car knew the way better than she did. Incapable of making any decision at all, she suddenly found herself parked outside the cemetery. Her legs walked the familiar paths and the flame that had been lit in another time flickered in its holder. She sank to her knees. Rested her forehead against the cold stone and wept. For how long she didn’t know. Darkness had fallen and the cemetery was empty; she and a headstone and a candle flame were all that were left. All the tears that had been stifled with such obedience and restraint over the years came welling up in a frenzy. But they gave her no comfort, they only drove her deeper into despair. There was nothing she could do. A woman had lost her beloved and a child had lost her father, and she just sat there, alive and of no use to any human being. Once again she was the one who had survived and had managed to kill someone who should have been allowed to live. If there was a God, his ways were truly inscrutable. Why take Mattias and let her go? Two people depended on him. His new job would have been their salvation. And Monika herself was expected to continue on as if nothing had happened. Just drive home to Thomas with all her opportunities in safe custody and begin to build her future. Return to her expensive possessions and her well-paid job and pretend she was caring for human lives, when the truth was quite the reverse.
    She straightened up and read the words she had looked at thousands and thousands of times.
    My beloved son .
    So natural, always so present. And always so out of reach.
    She placed her palms over his name on the cold stone, and in the depths of her heart she had only one desire.
    That she once and for all might trade places.

14
    M aj-Britt was sitting in her easy chair and the TV was on. Programme after programme rolled by; as soon as any thought managed to penetrate the images flickering past, she would click to another channel. The only thing she hadn’t managed to do was escape the pain in her back. After she read Vanja’s words it was more pronounced than ever.

    Before she retreated to what the TV had to offer, she had managed to confirm the conspiracy. She hadn’t said a word about her sore back, yet Ellinor had seen through her with her prying eyes. And she was the only one who could have told Vanja.
    Everything would have returned to normal if it hadn’t been for Ellinor. If Vanja sent any more letters, Maj-Britt could escape by refusing to read them, and what she had already been forced to read she could stifle with TV and food if she just made an effort. But then there was Ellinor. Pleasant little Ellinor, who in reality was in league with Vanja; it was no accident that they had both forced their way in at the same time and almost succeeded in overturning her world. Behind her back they had forged their evil plans; what they were after was incomprehensible. But hadn’t life always been this way? Against her. And she had never understood why.
    And then there was the shame. The fact that Vanja knew that she had lied about her life and knew that she was sitting