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I smile at her and kiss her forehead. It’s early enough in the day still that we could go for a hike like she suggested, but right now I could easily drift off to sleep in her arms. Before I can finish another thought, I’m out.
Eighteen
LAILA
I wake up to knocking at my door. I’m still under the covers, wondering for a moment where I am, then throw them back, squinting at the window where gray light comes in through the bottom of the curtains. Did I sleep in?
The knocking continues. Sounds more like pounding from tiny fists, halfway down the door. I grab my phone and peer at the time. I slept in a little but not that much.
“Bjorn,” I hear Ella’s hushed and annoyed voice on the other side of the door, and the knocking stops. Oh boy. Kid woke up full of beans.
I sigh and decide to get out of bed anyway. Even though everyone usually sleeps in here, I should be getting up earlier. It’s funny, just a week away in Todalen and my body has already adjusted to that schedule. In fact, it adjusted to that schedule a little too well. Sex, crying, sex, hiking, sex, drinking, sex…on repeat.
I go to the sink and splash water on my face, hoping that will wake me up and stop my daydreaming. But I can’t help it.
Even though last week was the hardest time of my life—saying goodbye to my grandmother like that—it was also the happiest time of my life. It’s so odd to feel that way, so wrong, and the guilt is strong. I want to just drown in my grief because it really is the most overpowering thing, like it’s changing every single molecule in my body.
But that’s not the only change that’s happening to me. While the sorrow rewrites me, something else is setting another course.
I think I’m falling in love with James.
How can I grieve the loss of the greatest and closest person to me, the one who has been there since the day I was born, while falling in love with him? How does the heart hold that kind of space? How can two opposites exist inside each other like this? Many times over I’ve heard that grief is love, that we grieve because we have all this love and nowhere for it to go. And yet that doesn’t seem to encompass what grief is. It is love, but it’s also fathomless pain. It’s a complex, nebulous thing that makes a home in your chest, and it stays there, letting itself be known every waking second of every day. The loss cuts you so deep that the grief is rooted in the wound.
But then there’s love. And that too has roots. That too slowly takes over your life until it also wants to be known every second of every day. Grief and love; sorrow and hope. They’re both turning my world upside down.
I exhale heavily, patting my face dry with a towel and slathering on moisturizer, my skin flaky from the cold. All I know is that everything is so damn complicated right now.
That’s your own fault for having sex with him again, I tell myself in the mirror.
And again and again. My god, it was like the moment I had James’s body on top of mine, the moment he was inside me, the moment he was drowning me in pleasure, I became addicted to him. I know it’s a cliché thing to say, but it’s true. It was like, for once, I felt myself just giving all my fears and insecurities away. I was letting the walls down and letting him in. Maybe not all the way, but enough to let me feel. To feel what it’s like if I just exhale around him.
The ridiculous part of all this is that I’ve been here before. I’ve fallen for him before.
I brush my teeth slowly, feeling the emotions creep up through me again. The tears come, and I let them. I’m learning not to push the sadness away. I did that as a child, and it only fucked me up.
I cry for a few moments, ugly sobs that I keep quiet, and then it’s over and I feel drained, like I could crawl back into bed. I know Ella and Magnus have been giving me sympathetic looks and winces since I got back. They told me I can have time off, but I just want to get back to work. Thank god my job doesn’t involve anything like writing or important administrative work, because the brain fog is no joke. Half the time I have a hard time remembering my name.
When I glance back in the mirror, my eyes are red, puffy, full of deep sadness, and there are new fine lines around my mouth and eyes. Great. So grief ages you too. Thanks, Grandma.
I reapply my moisturizer, put on some heavy concealer and mascara, then get dressed. Bjorn is up and at them, and I’m sure Ella needs the help.
I step outside my room, hearing Bjorn in the kitchen, with Ella talking to him in hushed tones, the smell of coffee and baked goods wafting out. I poke my head around the door.
“I’m so sorry,” Ella says when she sees me, sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and looking as tired as I feel. “I didn’t mean for him to wake you.”
“It’s okay,” I say, watching Bjorn happily eating a banana.
“I made the mistake of telling the boys last night that today you would finally take them to the Fram Museum, and Bjorn barely slept at all.”
“You wanted me to take them today?” I ask.
She frowns unhappily. “Oh, I’m sorry. I should have consulted with you first. It’s just that I promised them at Christmas we would go, and they’ve been asking ever since. I have some work for my environmental society to do all week long, to prepare for the unveiling of the new boat we got, otherwise I would go with you.”
I raise my hand. “Honestly I would be happy to take them.” I give Bjorn a smile. “When I was little, all I wanted to do was come down to Oslo and go to the museum.”
“You never went?” he asks between mouthfuls of banana.
“I couldn’t. It was just my grandmother taking care of me, and Oslo was so far.” And my own parents never took me anywhere. I never got to do anything fun like go to amusement parks or visit museums or toboggan hills or take pony rides, the stuff that all the kids I went to school with would do. Once my childhood friend Sinova took me along with her family to a play center in Trondheim out of pity, and she avoided me after that.
