I could still feel the carpet on my feet, the different textures of the two acrylic weaves, and the new smell of rubber carpet pad and harsh, foreign cleaning fluids.
“The phone was on the pass-through counter between the dining room and the kitchen. It felt slippery and big, difficult to hold in my left hand. A voice at the other end said, ‘Is this Aud Torvingen?’ and I said yes, and he went on to say that he was Lieutenant Wills, of the Duluth Police Department.” I closed my eyes again. “‘Please listen carefully,’ he said. ‘We are aware that you are probably speaking under duress. We are in control of the situation. Please remain calm.’ It was a very soothing voice. ‘Now, if you can, ask him to talk to us on the phone.’
“‘He can’t talk to you,’ I said. I felt dizzy. Blinding light filled the apartment. Then there was another voice from outside, with a bullhorn, harder, eager, you could hear the adrenalin in it, shouting that the building was surrounded, that he should pick up the phone. ‘No, you don’t understand,’ I said, but then realized I wasn’t holding the phone anymore. The receiver dangled from its cord, near the floor. I picked it up. ‘You don’t understand. He can’t talk to you because he’s dead.’
“There was silence, then a faint muttered conference on the other end, then, ‘Ms. Torvingen? There have been no reports of gunshots in the last half hour.’
“‘What?’ I said. I had no idea what that had to do with anything.
“‘Ms. Torvingen, if he shot himself we certainly would have heard it.’
“‘He didn’t shoot himself,’ I said.
“‘No,’ said the soothing voice, only now it was full of the there-there syrup of a parent talking to a child. ‘Ms. Torvingen, can you speak English well enough to understand what I’m saying?’ I said yes, then thought: Haven’t I just been speaking English? ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now, are you all right, Ms. Torvingen? Can I call you Aud?’
“‘No,’ I said, and then he got all urgent.
“‘How are you hurt?’
“‘No,’ I explained, ‘you can’t call me Aud because I’m eighteen and you’re treating me like a child and not listening to anything I’m saying. The man is dead. I killed him with my flashlight. He had a gun and I killed him. He’s in my bedroom. He had no right. He still has his gun but he’s dead. I’m fine.’
“This time the silence on the phone was longer and I wondered if I’d been talking in Norwegian after all. ‘Aud, Ms. Torvingen,’ he said, then sort of trailed off. He cleared his throat and started again. ‘You say he’s dead, that you killed him. Are you quite sure?’ At least he didn’t sound patronizing anymore.
“‘Well,’ I said, ‘his eyes are open and his neck’s bent, and he hasn’t moved from my bedroom floor,’ but all of a sudden I thought: What if he isn’t dead? What if this is like one of those horror films and he’s lurching to his feet, covered in blood, and bringing his hand up with that gun, with an evil lopsided grin. I dropped the phone and ran back to the bedroom. He was still there, of course. Still dead.”
Julia’s hand crept across my stomach to find my hand.
“The police arc lights had bleached his face white and a pool of urine and faeces spread under his body. The whole scene was grainy, like an old black and white newsreel. I noticed that his hair was thinning on top but in that light I couldn’t tell the colour of his eyes. It bothered me. Then I thought: the gun, they’ll believe the gun even if they don’t believe me. So I squatted by his gun hand, but the weird thing was I couldn’t make myself let go of the flashlight first. I tried, but my fingers wouldn’t move, so I had to fiddle for a while with just my left hand before I could pull the gun away. I went back to the living room, all bright now with the police lights, put the gun down on the pass-through and picked up the phone. ‘I’ve got his gun,’ I said. ‘I’m going to open the sliding glass doors in the living room, step onto the balcony, and toss the gun down onto the grass.’
“‘Aud, I think—’
“This time I put the phone firmly back in its cradle—I was getting sick of that syrupy voice—and picked up the gun. I walked towards the sliding doors and would have stepped out there naked if I hadn’t seen my reflection in the glass. Oh, I thought, I’ll have to do something about that. The police lights didn’t reach inside the bedroom closet and I tripped over one of my suitcases just inside the closet door. I had to put the gun down on the floor to pull on jeans one-handed. The flashlight wouldn’t fit through sleeves, so I chose a vest. When I was done, I stuck the gun in my back pocket. It felt good. The flashlight felt better.
“The glass doors slid open easily. The balcony was one of the reasons I’d chosen that apartment. Three hours earlier the night had been quiet, soft with fountain spray drifting over the lake. Now the night gleamed with light and metal and well-polished boots. I stood up there and looked at the revolving lights, at the trees and lake beyond them, and thought: This is my new country, new apartment, new life; all stained, like my bedroom carpet. I took the gun out of my pocket and threw it into the crowd below. Then I leant over the rail and vomited on their heads.”
Julia put on a towelling robe and made us blackberry tea. I drank mine in the bath, she sat on the floor and stroked my arm, shoulder to elbow to wrist to fingertips and back again.
“You’ve never told anyone about this before, have you?”
“No one. I suspect my mother was briefed on the situation via the consulate, but we’ve never spoken of it.” I remembered the ambulance ride, being met at the hospital by overly polite administrators, and knowing that someone somewhere had gone beyond the call of duty and found out who I was, or at least who my mother was.
“Take me there.”
“To Northwoods Lake Court?”
“Yes. Take me there when we get back.”
It was such a private thing. No one even knew I had ever lived there, never mind what had happened, or how it looked. Such a beautiful place. “I was only there a few days.”
“Take me anyway.” Her hand came to rest just below my triceps. “Promise me we’ll go when we get back.”
“Very well. I promise.”
Her hand resumed its stroking. “So who was he? How did the police know he was there?”
“The police had had a call from the apartment complex half a mile down the road, an intruder. Apparently they had a car in the area and followed him to Northwoods Lake Court. They did a foot search and saw my front door ajar. His name was Tim Schultz, an out-of-work carpenter. Married, two children, but separated. He was thirty-four years old. No one could tell me why he did it.”
I soaped myself thoughtfully.
“I thought knowing the details was important, but it isn’t really, because the important part wasn’t what happened at the apartment, it was what I realized later, on the way to the hospital. The police and EMTs came bursting into the apartment and bundled me up in a blanket without so much as a by-your-leave and threw me in an ambulance. I was in a daze. I remember the police sergeant and EMT were arguing about the flashlight—the sergeant was saying it was evidence, the EMT said I was in shock, that if holding it made me feel better he wasn’t going to take it away from me. That’s when I realized: the shivering and vomiting had stopped, and the strange detachment I felt wasn’t shock but the dawning realization that this was real, that I had killed someone. I had taken a life. He had had a gun, I had had a flashlight, but I had taken him, and in the moment of doing so I’d felt faster, denser, more alive than ever before. Killing him had burned me down to a pure, uncluttered core, to my essence. It was all real and it felt…Well, you tell me how it felt when you hit that man at Honeycutt’s house.”