Just as quickly, his smile returns and he’s folding his hands over his stomach, and interlacing his long, manicured fingers.
“How long do you think Victor will be gone?” I ask.
Fredrik shakes his head. “Until the job is done.”
I knew he’d give me the same answer that Victor gave, but it was worth the shot. What I really want to know is more about Seraphina, but I’m too afraid ask. I feel like Victor told me what he did about Fredrik and Seraphina, in confidence. And I don’t want to let Fredrik know about our conversation.
But it’s killing me.
I unfold my legs from the sofa and let my feet drop on the floor. I stand up and cross my arms, looking across at Fredrik who watches me with mild curiosity. I pace once down the length of the coffee table and then stop.
“How did you…well, what made you the way you are?” I ask, carefully tiptoeing around the things I already know and hoping he’ll tell me himself.
He looks at me from the side, cocking his head thoughtfully.
“What you really want to know,” he says, “is how Seraphina made me the way I am. Or, did Victor not get around to telling you about her yet?” He grins, knowing.
For a moment, I can’t look him in the eye. I run my hands up and down the softness of my arms a couple of times and then sit down on the edge of the coffee table, directly in front of him. I bury my hands in the loose fabric of the bottom of my gray t-shirt.
“He told you?” I ask.
Fredrik nods. “He asked me if I minded that he tell you. He respects me enough to ask first. It’s a very delicate conversation.”
“She must’ve hurt you pretty bad,” I say carefully.
“Despite what Victor thinks,” he says, raising his back from the chair and draping his loosely-folded hands in-between his knees, “Seraphina was only part of the reason I turned out like I did. A small part. She was, as my shrink appointed by the Order said, the trigger. The spark in a room full of gas. But I was ruined long before I met her.” He laughs lightly, but I find no humor in it. Something tells me that he really doesn’t, either.
Suddenly, Fredrik gets up and walks toward the opened window behind the couch. I stand up, too, allowing my eyes to follow him to keep him in my sights, but I remain standing by the table. I can’t be sure because his back is to me now and I can no longer see his face, but I sense the mood in the room has darkened significantly. He stands with his arms down at his sides, the light breeze from the window brushing through the top of his dark hair.
But he divulges nothing and I’m left only wondering what terrible images are torturing him, what unbearable memory is haunting him in this moment. And all I can do is stand here and let it run its course.
Fredrik
Twenty-five years ago…
The man with the wiry red hair, whose name I was unworthy of knowing, slapped me across the face so hard that a flash of white covered my vision. I fell against the cobblestone slab, my bare legs so bony and malnourished collapsing beneath me. Blood sprang up in my mouth the moment the tip of his boot connected underneath my chin.
“Foolish boy!” he hissed through spit and hate. “You cost me more than you’re worth! Insolent boy!”
I cried out and doubled over when the pain seared through my ribs.
“What are you doing?” I heard Olaf say sternly from somewhere behind me.
I couldn’t move, other than holding my emaciated arms over my ribs, hoping to guard them from any more blows and trying to stifle the pain. I could hardly breathe. Bile churned in my stomach and I tried so hard to keep from vomiting because I knew, just like before, that it would only make my ribs hurt more intensely.
“You’ll never sell him if you damage him,” Olaf said.
I hated Olaf as much as I hated all of the men who kept me in this place, but I was always glad when he came. He would stop the other men from beating me. From raping me. Olaf also had his way with me, but he was gentle and never hurt me. I hated him and I wanted him dead, just like the rest of them, but he was my only comfort in the hell that was my life.
The man with the wiry red hair spit on the floor beside me, so close that I felt a trickle on my cheek as it lay pressed against the cool stone.
“Then you deal with it,” he barked. “I wash my hands of this one. He is a stupid boy! Not so much defiant as he is stupid. Four months and he has learned nothing!”
I refused to open my eyes. I wanted only to remain on the floor, curled in the fetal position and left alone to die there. I could smell feces and urine and vomit coming from the lavatory down the hall. I could feel the humid breeze from the broken window nearby, filtering against the stones and onto my face. I thought about my mother, though she wasn’t truly my mother. She was a horrible beast of a woman who ran the orphanage that took care of me. The orphanage that sold me to these men three months previous, two days after I apparently turned seven. Like Olaf, I hated Mother. The way she would beat me across the buttocks with the switch until I bled. I hated how she sent me to bed without food three, sometimes four nights in a row. But I would give anything to be back in her care than to be with these men.
“Perhaps it is the teacher,” Olaf accused in a calm voice. “You are too rough on him. He is more fragile than the others. The runt of the litter, as Eskill calls him.”
“He will not eat!” the red-haired man shouted.
I could picture him throwing his hands up in the air around him, his large nostrils flaring with anger, aggravating the scar on the left side of his nose. I could picture the bright red flushing of his cheeks that always looked like a splotchy rash when he’d get angry.
“He cannot hold food down,” Olaf said. “Dr. Hammans looked the boy over yesterday before you got back. He said the boy is emotionally stressed.”
“Stressed?” The red-haired man cackled loudly.
“Yes,” Olaf said, retaining his calm demeanor. “I think it is best that I take over from here on out.”
My eyelids broke apart a crack, just enough to see the look on the red-haired man’s face hovering over me. He was smiling, but it frightened me. I shut my eyes again quickly when I noticed his looking my way.
“You just said you no longer wanted to deal with the boy,” Olaf said. “Is there a problem?”
A few seconds of silence ensued.
“No,” the red-haired man said. “Take him with you. Perhaps you can succeed where I have failed.”
No more words were spoken between them.
Olaf carried me to his car and laid me down carefully across the backseat.
“I will take care of you,” Olaf said softly from the front.
I shook uncontrollably from the pain of my ribs and my head. Tears and snot and blood seeped into my mouth.
“I will be kind to you, boy,” Olaf said as the car pulled away from the building, “until you give me no choice.”
He drove me to someplace I had never been before. And I remained there in his care, learning to overcome my fear of him and the other men and of the life that I was forced to live. Until I poisoned him in his sleep five years later and escaped.