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her ears and screwed up her eyes. Erika knew that it would not be long before Isak opened the door, but that it was too late to get up and run after the boy to save him.

Chapter 13
    Erika crossed the border between Norway and Sweden. No one pulled her over and asked her to explain her business in Sweden.
    “They never do,” Laura told Erika on the phone.
    It was five o’clock and Erika had decided to stop somewhere for Swedish meatballs and mashed potato. She said out loud: “Why don’t I stop the car and have meatballs and mashed potato. With lingonberry jam.”
    Erika had a feeling Isak might not have long to live, and that was why she had embarked on this journey, which she was now regretting. The truth was that he lived on and on and on. Isak never died. His grief at the loss of Rosa remained unbearable, and he would occasionally speak of his suicide, planned down to the last detail but never carried out. The pills had been procured and lay ready, interminably, in the drawer of his bedside table.
    Elisabet would say, in one of her few moments of insight, that if they were the same pills he had been talking about for the last twelve years, they had no doubt passed their sell-by date, in which case he ought to get some new ones if he was serious. Like Erika, Erika’s mother spoke frequently to Isak on the phone.
    Elisabet would say: “Your father and I are good friends. We once sat on a rock out on the sea when we were in love, and he said we were
painfully
bound to each other.”
    Talking to each other on the phone every other Saturday from twelve to half past one was a ritual they had had ever since their divorce in
1968
. They had divorced because Rosa’s belly had swollen past any point denying she was pregnant or that Isak was the father.
    Now Isak had grown old. Elisabet, to be sure, thought eighty-four was no great age. Elisabet’s friend Bekky was over ninety and
bright as a button,
Elisabet said, so eighty-four was really nothing to speak of.
    And vocal cords do not decay at the same rate as the rest of the body. When Elisabet and Isak spoke on the telephone, they were not two bodies, a source of concern and embarrassment to themselves and each other. Two bodies moving ever more slowly and often hurting. Mamma and Father, thought Erika. Isak with his painful hip and cramps in his legs, and Elisabet the dancer with her aching back and feet.
     
    As a child, Erika would sometimes overhear part of their telephone conversation. Elisabet’s voice when she was talking to Isak was bubbly and happy and as light as a length of pink silk ribbon before it has been measured out, cut, and threaded into a shoe.
     
    When Elisabet Lund Lövenstad was a young and promising ballerina, a member of the Swedish Opera Ballet (which was grander than the Norwegian Opera Ballet), one of her boyfriends said that if he had only one day left to live and had to choose between seeing her dance or hearing her laugh, he would choose the day of her laughter. Erika’s mother laughed often and loudly. There are women who giggle and women who laugh; Elisabet never giggled. She opened her whole mouth, bared her teeth, tongue, and throat, and uttered sounds that came from someplace deep down inside her. But the exact source was unclear. Her chest, her stomach, her pelvis, her abdomen? Isak must have pondered such matters. He wanted the whole of Elisabet. Not just the beautiful part everyone else saw onstage, the perfect beauty—no, he wanted all the other things as well. Everything that ran out of her. The sounds she made. Her sobs when she cried. The painful cough that kept her awake at night. The rumbling of her stomach, her groans and low snores. It was not enough for him that she stripped naked. She had a fantastically beautiful body. As a ballet dancer she was a vision onstage. Admittedly, she was too big for the international stardom her talent merited. Too tall, too broad, too heavy. There was far too much of her. Too much for the