Mommy left. I thought she was just going to fetch something, a bathrobe for me, maybe, or a clean towel, or something to drink or eat, but then she was just gone. Because Daddy was still out there, I’d forgotten that. I’d forgotten the thing the two of them shared, the big, ugly thing, and I couldn’t stop it: the rising voices, the yelling. I wasn’t a part of it—there wasn’t anything I could say, nothing that helped. I wished it could be stopped, but if it was just going to continue, at the very least I wanted to be a part of it.

The bathwater slowly turned lukewarm and then cold. My body got wrinkled, my toes turned red, soon fins grew between them. I became a water creature in the bathtub while they were screaming at each other outside, a tiny little water creature, in a snow globe full of sticky, shiny fluid and plastic snowflakes. Sometimes they lifted me up, looked at me for a moment, shook me, but then they put me down again and went away, back to one another, to sharing what they had in common—the big, evil, ugly thing, which was only between them, the two of them.

A few days later we heard about the explosion. It was Daddy who told us about it, Mommy had just come home. She had been away for a while—maybe she’d gone to Bergen, she went there often, to purchase supplies for the hotel. When she opened the door and came inside, Daddy was standing there waiting for her with the news.

“Svein Bredesen came by this morning,” he said. “The chief engineer.”

“Hi, Mommy,” I said.

“I know who Bredesen is,” Mommy said.

She stroked my hair quickly, without looking at me.

“He wanted to speak with you,” Daddy said.

“I can call him right away,” she said.

“But since you weren’t home, I took a message.”

“Yes?”

“Somebody destroyed the bridge over the haul road. Last night. It was blown to bits.”

“What?”

“There’s nothing left of it. It will take weeks to repair it, maybe months.”

Mommy just stood there. At first she didn’t say anything and I tried to give her a hug, but she asked me to wait. Then she said that she didn’t understand how something like that could happen, how somebody could do something like that.

“The bridge and the road have to be there,” she said. “The power station and the pipes are going to be installed. It’s going to happen anyway.”

Daddy didn’t say anything.

She stared at him for a long time. “Do you know something about this?”