It was not until four months later that Anna and Karen visited Troels. It was at the start of December, and after school they caught the bus to his house, a huge, newly built bungalow a few miles outside the village. They sat on the floor in Troels’s room making Christmas decorations out of paper and were listening to music when Troels’s father came home from work. They heard him speak on the telephone in the hall in a loud voice, then he swore at something before he suddenly popped his head around the door.
“Hello, girls,” he said, showing no signs of recognizing them. Shortly afterward he came back and put a bowl of chips and three sodas on the floor.
“Troels’s mom wants to know if you would like to stay for dinner?”
Karen and Anna exchanged looks.
“Yes, please,” Anna said quickly.
Chips and sodas! For dinner they had pork tenderloin in a cream sauce and for dessert they had chocolate ice cream. Troels’s mother was a petite, elegant lady who worked as a real estate agent in Odense. Troels’s sister was fifteen years old and really pretty. She had very long hair, she wore lip gloss, and she said, “Pass the potatoes, please,” in a terribly grown-up way. Anna felt a pang of infatuation and glanced at Troels. He smiled at something his father had said, replied and laughed heartily when his father expanded on and repeated the punchline. Anna took it all in.
Troels’s father started telling vacation stories. On vacation in Sweden, Troels had fallen off a jetty when trying to measure the depth of the water with a stick, which was far too thin and had snapped under his weight. Troels had wailed like a banshee, he was so scared, but the water was less than three feet deep and rather muddy. The girls imagined Troels screaming and dirty, and they laughed. His father hosed him down in the garden behind the cabin. On the same vacation, Troels’s father recalled, they had visited a traveling fair where one of the stalls had a board with a man on it, and if you could hit a red disc with a ball, he would plunge into a tub of water. Troels’s father had persuaded the stallholder to replace the man on the board with Troels, who had been moaning all afternoon that he was too hot. Troels got dunked repeatedly and had duly cooled down. Anna and Karen laughed again.
“And then there was the time when Troels wouldn’t stop wetting his bed,” Troels’s father began. “Do you remember, girls?” he said to Troels’s mother and sister who had started clearing the table.
“Not that story, please,” Troels’s mother called out from the kitchen where she was scraping leftovers into the trash. “The girls won’t want to hear that.”
Troels’s father leaned toward Anna and Karen.
“Troels wet his bed until he was six,” he announced.
Anna looked uncomfortably at Karen who seemed to be mesmerized by Troels’s father.
“We were at our wits’ end, weren’t we, Troels?” his mother said, still at the kitchen table. “All of us, you included, isn’t that right, darling?”
Anna looked at Troels, and something inside her turned to ice. Troels made no reply, silent, as his half-eaten chocolate ice cream cone slowly melted in his hand.
His mother carried on while she dried a baking dish, “We tried everything. We tried bribing him with candy and toys, we gave him more allowance, we even made him wear his soaked pajamas all day, but it was no good. He just continued wetting his bed.”
Karen was still smiling, so Anna kicked her under the table.
“And do you want to know how it stopped?” Troels’s father asked, blithely.
“Ouch,” Karen exclaimed and sent Anna a furious look. Anna glared back at her. Finally, Karen noticed Troels.
“Tell the girls how you stopped wetting the bed, Troels,” his father ordered him. Troels whispered something.
“I can’t hear you,” his father said. “Speak up.”
“When I pooped my pants on my first day of school,” Troels said in a flat voice.
The girls looked at each other.
“And you can’t poop your pants at school, can you?” his father went on. “The other children will laugh at you. So you have to stop, don’t you? If you ever want to have any friends, that is.” His father gave Troels a friendly slap on the back and roared with laughter.
“Stop it!” Anna burst out. “Stop it!”
But his father had already got up to leave, the dishwasher had been loaded, his sister had disappeared, and his mother was folding clothes in the laundry room; they could see her through the open door.
“That was a lovely meal, thank you,” Anna muttered. “I have to be home by seven.”
When Anna and Karen had put on their shoes and coats and shouted “bye-e!” from the utility room, Troels was still sitting at the table with the melting ice cream cone in his hand.
“Bye, see you tomorrow,” he said and gave them a pale smile.
Cecilie called Troels’s parents one day to tell them she could use some help around the garden and offered Troels fifteen kroner an hour to do the work. While Cecilie spoke to Troels’s father, Anna was in the kitchen, listening to her mother’s high-pitched chirping. Cecilie slammed down the telephone at the end of the conversation and when she joined Anna in the kitchen, she smiled stiffly and smoothed her dress.
“Done,” she said. “Five hours a week. Thank God.” She flopped down on the kitchen bench next to Anna.
“Phew,” she exhaled and smoothed her dress again.
One evening, when Anna was twelve years old, she overheard her parents talking about Troels. It was the late 1980s, and by now Jens had officially moved to Copenhagen but he visited them constantly. They had just said goodnight to her, but before she fell asleep Anna remembered she had forgotten to give her mother a letter from school and got out of bed.
Halfway down the stairs, she heard Jens ask: “What makes you think he hits him? You have to be able to prove it, Cecilie. It’s a serious charge.”
A pause followed. Then Anna heard Cecilie cry.
“I want to help, but I can’t!” she sobbed. “That beautiful, fragile boy. Look at him! He’s suffering, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.”
Jens said something that Anna couldn’t hear, and Cecilie replied: “I know, Jens.” She sounded irritated now. “I’m aware of that. You’ve told me a thousand times. I just can’t bear it that he has to live like that.”
Cecilie blew her nose. Anna was getting cold on the stairs and hoped that one of her parents would notice her. That they would carry her to the living room and let her fall asleep under a blanket while their voices grew muffled, just like when she was little. Silent tears rolled down her cheeks. Right now she hated Troels. Her parents seemed to prefer him to her. She felt alone in the world. They started discussing Jens’s job. Eventually Anna went back to bed.
One summer day Troels dropped by unexpectedly. He seemed happy. His parents had gone to Ebeltoft to pick up a new car and wouldn’t be back until the evening. Cecilie and Jens were entertaining old college friends, and the lawn was teeming with children. The sun was shining, there was iced tea and sandwiches, and swallows were dive-bombing the garden. Troels watched the chaos, rather intimidated; he hadn’t been expecting this. Two boys, Troels’s age, were playing football, but Troels didn’t want to join in. He sipped tea and Cecilie introduced him to everyone.
“This is Troels. He’s goes to school with Anna.”
“He’s gorgeous,” Anna heard Cecilie’s friends whisper.
Jens decided they should all play baseball. Everyone leapt from their chairs; four large stones were found, along with a bat and a yellow tennis ball, and two teams picked. The mood in the backyard was light-hearted and boisterous. Anna and Karen rolled their eyes at the silly grown-ups. They were both wearing makeup, but none of the adults had said anything. It was Troels’s turn to bat. He said, “I don’t want to”—not very loudly, but loud enough for Anna to hear it, and she was some distance away. Troels sent her an apologetic smile.