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Like hell she’ll be called Karin, you whispered to nobody, and threw the shoes at the wall. That was the last thing you said for a while. Little ballerina! Your ankles were fat and puffy, the hemorrhoids were riveted between your buttocks, your legs were as blue as an old woman’s, and now you were certainly too big. Too big to dance, too big to run, too big to sleep, too big to speak. You were a gigantic white whale, Elisabet. A gigantic white whale lying quite still on the ocean floor. And you didn’t say a word.

Chapter 14
    Normally, said Laura, who had made the trip a thousand times before, it takes two days to drive to Hammarsö. Two days, with an overnight stop in Örebro. But Erika had set off in a snowstorm, started late, and only got as far as Arvika. She hadn’t stopped for meatballs with mashed potato and lingonberry jam. Isak had been right. It was dark. It was icy. She should never have started out.
    Erika said out loud to herself: “This is how people die. Driving when the roads are like this.”
    She said: “You were quite right, Isak. It was a bad time to come!”
    The mobile phone was on the seat beside her. All she had to do was pick it up and ring the number. She was sure he would understand. He would support her decision to abandon the trip. He would be relieved. She continued along the motorway, planning to stop for something to eat in Boda.
    “After all, we’d just tiptoe around being polite to each other,” Isak had said.

Chapter 15
    And the boy with matchstick legs knocked and hammered and pounded on Isak’s door for what seemed like forever, and the door was at last flung open by Isak himself. Laura, lying on her stomach in the grass, clung tightly to Erika and blurted OH NO OH NO when she saw her father.
    “Shush, shush,” whispered Erika.
    Erika has since wondered whether she really did see Isak tearing out his hair like the mad professor in some comic strip, and whether she really did hear him bellow at the boy DAMN YOU GET OUT OF HERE OR I’LL CUT YOUR EARS OFF AND EAT THEM FOR DINNER YOU FILTHY LITTLE BRAT.
    What Erika does know is that the boy with matchstick legs was so astonished to see the door opening and Isak suddenly standing there that he fell over backwards and played dead for several minutes.

Chapter 16
    She was on her way to Hammarsö, and these were the sounds she could hear: the drone of the engine, the fan, and the snow tires on wet asphalt. Gusts of wind, dark rain, and falling snow, melting in the air and joining the slush on the motorway, and the front windshield wipers swishing to and fro, one-two-one-two-one-two, like black pendulums.
    Erika remembered sitting barefoot on the settee, reading a magazine and waiting for the sun to come back, the grandfather clock in the living room ticking, waiting for the overcast sky to clear so she could put on her polka-dot bikini and sunbathe on the rocks with Marion and Frida and Emily and occasionally Eva. And she remembered Ragnar, who smelled of Coca-Cola and of the sea and was ugly and handsome at the same time. It depended how you looked at him, with eyes open or virtually shut.
    She remembered Isak stomping out of his workroom and stopping short when he saw her. He’ll start bellowing any moment now! He’ll start bellowing because I’m sitting here on the sofa. I haven’t disturbed him. I haven’t made a single disturbing sound—unless…unless…unless turning the pages of a magazine made a sound that Isak could hear. Because Isak could hear sounds no one else could hear. She had read that in the article about him in
Life.
That is, it wasn’t that he
heard
the sounds; he
saw
them on a screen. A throbbing fetal heart. The outline of a brain, looking like a shriveled date. The shadow of two babies instead of one in the mother’s womb. Laura, who knew their father best, used to say Isak could hear
everything.
He could hear what Laura and Erika were saying to each other, even if they were a long way off. He could