and one of the big hits of the summer was playing. “Selvä Päivä”—“Sober Day”—by Petri Nygård. The song celebrates the rapture of being shit drunk. Aggravated, I put on Johnny Cash, American Recordings.
I took my morning dope. It knocked the edge off my pain and made my muscles relax, and moving my jaw hurt less. I sucked down a protein drink for breakfast. I was trying not to drop any more weight. Katt sprawled across me while I browsed the daily newspaper. A key turned in the lock of the front door. I took my .45 Colt from under the seat cushion.
Most wives, after abandoning their husbands, would call before visiting and ring the door buzzer when they arrived. In strolled Kate, without warning, to find a pistol trained on her.
I put my Colt back in its customary place under the seat cushion. Kate pointed at it. “Are you out of your mind?” The look in her eyes was one unfamiliar to me.
“Events of late have made me cautious,” I said.
Kate killed a man out of necessity. She saved all our lives. The trauma of what she’d done, though, threw her into a dissociative stupor.
I never should have let Kate leave, but how was I to stop her? Maybe I could have requested that her psychiatrist institutionalize her for a time. Leaving home soon after a psychological breakdown might have warranted it, but the shock of watching her walk out the door rendered me incapable of action. Afterward, for a while, she was distant, uncommunicative, but seemed stable enough. I often asked her to come home. She never refused, just said she wasn’t ready for that, needed some time alone to think. I could accept that, it was reasonable.
When she started sliding downhill, I didn’t see it for what it was: a headlong plunge into post-traumatic stress disorder. She started calling, often late at night. Sometimes she would scream at me for ruining her life. Sometimes she cried and begged forgiveness. Either way, I told her I loved her and asked her to come home. And she did, every third or fourth day, so I could see Anu. The first couple times she sat, often wordless, for an hour or two, while I doted on our child. The third time, she was unresponsive when I spoke to her. She put her arms around me and cried for a long time before she left.
The fourth time was bad. When you know someone really well, they don’t have to speak or even move. Their eyes will tell you everything. The look in Kate’s eyes told me she was in trouble. She had called the night before, at two in the morning. She didn’t speak when I tried to get her to explain why she was so upset. She seemed unable to articulate words other than “I’m sorry.” I listened to her bawl for over an hour, and then she hung up without saying good-bye or good night. This scared me. I tried to call her back. Her phone was switched off. When she showed up the next day, she had found her voice again.
Anu was in her pram. Kate parked it in front of me, placed an overstuffed bag of her things beside it, then gave our apartment an inspection walk-through, as I would a crime scene. The kossu and beer I hadn’t finished before I fell asleep the night before were on the table beside my chair. As luck would have it, the song “Delia’s Gone,” about murdering a lover, was playing at low volume. The booze and music didn’t make a good setting.
She nodded toward the beer and Koskenkorva. “You’re drinking in the morning,” she said, distress in her voice. “Are you drunk now?”
“I’m not drinking. They’re unfinished leftovers from last night.”
This, of course, gave the impression that I’d passed out in a drunken stupor. She looked at the shattered window. It disturbed me that she hadn’t noticed it as soon as she walked in the door. This spoke of some kind of impairment of her powers of observation. Her tone jumped from distress to alarm. “What have you done? Did you break it while you were drunk? You have cuts. Have you harmed yourself?”
“Clearly,” I said, “I did nothing stupid, or the glass would be outside on the pavement, not here on our floor.”
She didn’t seem to process this obvious truth. Her eyes narrowed, disbelieving, and then she switched topics as if the window was forgotten. “You’re Anu’s father