Henrik had come between them. That was how he explained it. Edvin sipped from his drink, nodded along with all Jacob said. Joel kept his eyes on the television above the bar. A soccer match was on. Of course, it wasn’t true that Henrik was the problem. That was the easy answer. Henrik was a symbol for something else. The more complicated answer was that Jacob himself had come between Jacob and Jenny. He knew that it was unfair for him to be angry with his wife. She’d witnessed a terrible accident and felt linked, intractably, with the victim of that accident. He didn’t understand it exactly, but none of it was unreasonable. That he was angry, on the other hand, was completely unreasonable. And it was because he understood this — because he wanted to allow his wife this simple thing and could not — that he was afflicted. This was a word he’d been using privately for roughly a week and knew was far past the appropriate register for whatever his problem exactly was. When Edvin pressed him on the issue, Jacob took a piece of ice from his drink with his fingers, put it in his mouth, and said, “She’s being unfaithful to me.” They’d long since finished the meal, plates cleared, a second then third round of drinks ordered.
Edvin was the head of the human resources department at a very large corporation and for this reason often gave unsolicited psychological advice. “If you’re upset about Jenny visiting this man,” he said, “you should visit too. Face your fear.”
Just after this the soccer match that had been playing silently ended in victory for the Swedish side against a team Jacob thought might have been Latvia, and all around them applause erupted and the conversation was lost. Later that night, though, when Joel was in the bathroom and they were all quite drunk, Edvin put his arm around Jacob’s shoulder and said, “I’m serious, Jacke. Visit.”
The course was beautiful. Skirting the fairway along the sixth hole, the lake rippled with a light wind. He watched a heron land on the water. The bird nimbly waded into the tall grass at the shore to observe the golfers. Jacob regretted having told Joel and Edvin about his wife and Henrik. His left arm was numb and he thought, when he’d first woken up, hungover and sweaty, that it was because he’d slept funny on it. But as the morning progressed, the numbness had not gone away but only moved up his arm to his shoulder, and he started to worry that the pain in his arm was an early sign of a heart attack or stroke. He was young for both, of course, but Leif a friend he, Edvin, and Joel all shared, had died the year before. A heart attack at the Friskis and Svettis gym at Hornstull. He was only forty-three. None of this would ever be resolved. If it wasn’t Jenny and Henrik, it was his health, or his children, or improvements to his house. There was no shortage of things to worry about. It infected everything in his life, a counterweight to all that was pleasurable.
He was out. Edvin had just shot, placing the ball wide of the green on a narrow thumb of rough that hugged the lake. Jacob lined up for his shot, swung, and watched his ball land short, bounce high twice, and then skip onto the green, rolling to a stop just left of the pin. Edvin raised his club above his head, shouted, “Jacke!” The heron took off and for one very calm moment, Jacob didn’t think about Henrik or Jenny or the shame of having admitted his fears to two friends he didn’t particularly care for, and even when he focused his thoughts directly on it, he could not feel anything unusual in his arm. He saw only the white bird flying low above the water and the light blue morning sky.
V
Halloween had suddenly become a thing. He held a piece of a fabric that would soon be transformed into a wizard’s cape and tried to think of when Halloween had arrived. He set the itchy brown piece of cloth down beside him on the couch and picked up his drink. Halloween wasn’t a holiday when he was a kid. It wasn’t even a holiday when his daughters were younger. Not that he could remember anyway. Three years, four tops. His wife, his daughters, everyone lately was acting like Halloween had always just been there. And it hadn’t. He took a sip of his drink. It was late and he was helping Jenny make costumes for the girls. They needed them for school. Alex was going to be a wizard from Harry Potter and Kristina was going as a ladybug or a butterfly or something. He couldn’t quite tell what the mess of fabric next to his wife was going to transform into.
He picked up the cape, kneeled on the floor with the fabric spread out in front of him, and measured out a rectangle like Jenny had asked him to. “When did this happen?” he said, waving his glass over the fabric.
“Halloween?” she said. “I think it’s nice.”
“When we were kids we went to the cemetery to light candles. It meant something. How does this look?” He sat back on his heels and looked at Jenny.
“Maybe even a touch longer,” she said. “All Saints’ is a little morbid, don’t you think? And the church part of it bothers me.”
He’d never been the type to raise the Swedish flag or celebrate the King’s Name Day or anything. He knew a couple of the old songs but he had no particular attachment to any of it. This was no culture battle, but Halloween seemed so fake. It was like trying to live in an American television program. It bothered him. “Doesn’t it bother you?” he said.
“Why should it? The girls love it. Costumes, candy. All their friends dress up.”
“It’s stupid,” he said.
“Sometimes, Jacob,” she said.
“We don’t have to do everything they want,” he said. “It’s our job to give them the experiences they need to have. I don’t think I’m wrong.”
She pushed the fabric into a pile on her lap. Without looking up at him, she said, “I can do the rest. I don’t need your help.” He felt his own anger hardening, pushing him further into a position he didn’t particularly care to occupy. He got up and left before the fight could start.
VI
Jacob spent the afternoon online, looking up information about comas. A woman in Florida was in a coma for thirty-seven years. Her name was Elaine Esposito, a name he liked because it sounded strange when he said it out loud. If they ever bought a dog, he let himself think, even as he knew it was a terrible thing to think, Esposito would be a good name. Next he read about a man in Alabama who woke up from a coma after twenty years. Like Henrik, the man had been in a car accident.
Jacob’s fears always manifested as physical pain. For six weeks in the summer, he’d been convinced his heart was failing. Then it was a sharp cramping pain in his stomach, just behind his belly button, that had him thinking ulcer, possibly cancer. A swollen lymph node in his neck brought him through the fall into early winter with thoughts of leukemia. None of it corresponded directly with Jenny’s visits to Henrik, but Henrik had become a kind of physical pain for him, a throbbing reminder that something was wrong, something that he was too scared to check.
Outside, an early storm bore down on the house and Jacob felt warm and safe indoors. Jenny was at the hospital. She’d met Henrik’s wife, Lisa, on one of her visits and they’d become close. Jenny often cooked Lisa meals, took her out for the evening or else shopping in town. To keep her mind off Henrik, Jenny said, though she never qualified this statement with an explanation about how, exactly, these things prevented Lisa from thinking of her husband. In any case, they were close and whenever Lisa was at the house, Jacob had strict orders from his wife not to bring up Henrik or the accident.
He watched the snow through the window. Henrik wouldn’t wake up. The doctors had been clear about this. His brain was too damaged. It was going to be a difficult winter. The weather reports called for heavy snow every year, but this year Jacob had a feeling he should believe it. He set his computer on the crowded little table beside the couch where he’d been sitting for the past hour and got up to look out the window. By the height of the snow against the hedgerow along his front walk, he estimated how much had so far fallen. If the cold stayed, they would have snow for Christmas. The sun had set and the light on the walk had come on, turning the snow in the driveway and on a little less than half of his front lawn a sickly orange color.