A Blessed Child by Linn Ullmann Page A

stank was all
her
fault. Erika could have been in Örebro by now: in her hotel room, or in the restaurant having dinner. Erika rang Magnus’s number. She got his voice mail. She listened to her son’s voice, no longer clear and singsong as it had been when he used to lie beside her in bed to have stories read to him. His voice was like the rest of his body: everything was growing, darkening and deepening. Magnus would be asleep in his bed, and when she came into his room to tuck him in she would see a strong, hairy, man-size foot sticking out from under the cover. And now he was on a school trip, in Poland. She said: “Hello, love. It’s Mum. I’m taking a detour via Sunne. I’ll be staying the night there, not in Örebro. I’ll ring you when I get to the hotel.”
    She hung up. She should have sent a text. Magnus hated it when she left him voice mail messages. It cost money to check messages on your mobile, he said, and it was pointless paying just to hear a message from your mother. He didn’t mean anything unkind by it. Or hurtful. It was simply a point of information. Erika sent him a text message.
Hi Magnus. Left you a voice mail, no need to check it. Staying in Sunne, not at hotel in Örebro like I said. Speak soon. Love Mum.
    Erika studied her face in the mirror, which amazingly enough was unbroken and even quite nice and clean. The mirror. Not her face.
    “It’s not the one in the car who’s haggard,” Erika said to her reflection. “It’s you! It’s me! The one in the driver’s seat. It’s Erika! Here in this hellhole of a gas station, in this stinking shit!”
    Tomorrow she would ring Isak and tell him she wasn’t coming after all. She didn’t want to ring him from her mobile; it just made him nervous, and if he was nervous, it made her nervous. She wanted to sit quietly and calmly on the edge of the bed and use the hotel phone. She wanted to say she couldn’t come after all, because something had come up at work and she needed to sort it out. She combed her hair and applied some lipstick, vivid red. She studied herself. Now she looked as if somebody had hit her, as if she had a gash in her face instead of a mouth. Erika rubbed off the red with her hand.
    And then it struck her that the woman she had picked up on the road was pregnant. She saw her in her mind’s eye, in her coat and boots. The belt pulled tight around her waist. She was pregnant but didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t want to think about it. Maybe she was going to have an abortion? Maybe she was about to lose it? Maybe she was bleeding?
     
    When Erika was pregnant with Magnus, she had felt sure it would destroy her. She had felt she would never be able to see the pregnancy through to term. She had felt she would get ill and not have the strength to give birth. She or the child would die. She had survived bringing Ane into the world. A little girl had forced her way out of her, drawn breath, and found the breast.
    They had both come through that unscathed.
    “God has blessed you,” Isak had said on the phone, as if he were not a doctor but a minister like his father.
    But this time it was different. With Ane, everything had been so easy. At least, she remembered it as easy. The pregnancy, the birth, the breastfeeding. Erika wasn’t ready for this other thing. This blackness. She dragged herself through the nausea, the nausea that never relaxed its grip on her, the nausea that mixed in with everything she ate and drank, everything she wore, the places she went and everything she touched. The nausea in her nostrils, under her nails, in her freshly washed hair. And even all these years later, she sometimes felt a touch of that nausea. It took no more than the scent of lilac to make it well up inside her, because the lilac had been in bloom when she was twelve weeks pregnant. Yet simultaneously, the terror of damaging this child that was not yet a child. She had given it a name. Not a proper name. Not the name that it would