I’m on my way to a party, he says, in almost fluent English, nodding towards the dirt track. It’s an awesome house. Overlooking Playa Hernan Vasquez. My brother and a couple of friends are there. Come and have a few drinks with us.

Trine shakes her head almost imperceptively. Elisabeth says nothing, but looks at you for direction. A glance passes between you, and she knows, she’ll always remember the look in your eyes. At the time, she would have called it the look of desire, or love, even, but much later, she’ll realize it was the thrill of danger.

Yes, says Elisabeth. You coyly break the man’s glance; you know instinctively to leave him wanting more.

How does it make you feel, how his life turned out?

53

Kristina

I close my eyes. I have to. I feel myself disappearing down into the empty spaces inside myself, back in time, back to the place I never allow into my thoughts, there is no point anyway – there’s nothing but a milky nothingness there.

But now it is as though the scene Leah describes colors in the white patches in my memory. Where my brain has always drawn a blank when it comes to him, I now suddenly and distinctly remember the serpent tattoo on his throat, his soulful eyes and deep dimples, the scar on his cheek like a river on a map. In spite of Leah’s extremely limited understanding of dissociative amnesia, it’s true that huge patches of my memory were simply erased. I spent my early twenties in intense therapy to heal and to try to retrieve the memories of what happened in Venezuela – like Leah, I believed back then that remembering would be the only way to move on. In the end, Ingvild taught me that acceptance was more important than full recollection, and besides, we knew what happened because Elisabeth was there.

I open my eyes briefly and they flood with tears. I close them again and now I see him clearly in my mind’s eye. I can’t recall the rest of the scene – the car ride and the words he spoke, what we were wearing and what thoughts might have run through my head, but Leah has succeeded in sending me back there, to Carúpano. The forest that surrounded the futuristic beach house set high above a pristine bay we were brought to was as dense and ancient as the one surrounding this cabin. Instead of being snow-covered and silent, the jungle of Carúpano was sticky warm and buzzing with a plethora of sounds. The sounds of lives lived in the undergrowth, in the trees, in the air above them, a ceaseless chattering of a thousand species. This I remember. And the deafening gunshot.

‘Why?’ I whisper into the cool air of the silent cabin. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ I have to know why. And, Elisabeth – what have you done?

54