What She Learned to Do

The Swedish psychiatrist who coined the term did not call it Stockholm syndrome. He called it Norrmalmstorgssyndromet, after the square where it happened, a bank, a bad August in 1973, four hostages who spent six days in a vault with two armed men and came out defending them. Corinne had met the word in a novel, two years before, a police procedural by a woman in Uppsala, and had spent most of an afternoon on the footnote. English gave you a city. Swedish gave you an address, a particular square with a particular bank in it, and she had thought at the time that the Swedes were being rather dry about it, as though to say: we know where it happened, and it was here, and it could have been anywhere.

She thought of the word on the night of the ultrasound, lying in the dark with the thermal print flat on her chest.

She was not stupid, and she was not in denial. She knew what had happened that afternoon in the dim blue room, when she had wept over a small gray comma on a screen and put her hand in the hand of the man who had locked her in; knew that for the better part of ten minutes she had forgotten. She had been happy. It had gone through her like a drink of hot milk. And she lay there afterward in the plain dark, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, and did what she always did with a word that had snagged on something: she took it apart.

The vocabulary was all there. Gratitude. Fear. Dependence. A man who held her hair while she was sick, and a man who nailed up the windows. In the novel, the Uppsala detective had a line about it, a psychiatrist explaining to a rookie in a corridor: the mind has to live somewhere, and if the only room it’s given is the one the captor built, it will furnish it. She had translated that sentence cleanly, in a minute, without a moment’s thought. Now it came back to her and she lay very still.

False cognate, she told herself. That was the term. A word that looks like another word, sounds like it, stands in the same place in the sentence, and means something else entirely. The Norwegian gift means married, and also poison. The English gift means a present. A student who confuses the two can end up in a very odd marriage.

What she felt for him on that bed, when the heart galloped across the speaker, looked like love. It had love’s face and love’s voice and it came, as love does, in through the ribs. But its etymology was different. It was not rooted where the real thing was. It had grown, in the dark, in the only soil available, like a pale thing in a cellar.

Don’t mistake it, she thought. Use it.

She was a little shocked at how cold that was. And then she was not shocked at all, because she was a woman with a child in her, and a lock on her door, and no one in the world who knew where she was, and cold, it turned out, was exactly the temperature she needed.

The rules she assembled in the next hour came from everywhere. From the Uppsala novel, and from a magazine article she’d read on a plane, and from the half-remembered voice of a hostage negotiator on a radio show; and from her mother, who had never been held by anyone, and who had understood, in her tired Worcester kitchen, a great deal about how to stay alive in a world run by men who held the keys. Don’t fight where he’s strong. Make yourself a person to him, not a thing. Ask for small things. Thank him for them. Never, ever, beg for the big one. And last, in her own voice, scratched into the dark: Find out where you are.

Not the address. She knew the address. Where you are: in the building, in the days, in the habits of the one man who held the keys.

* * *

She began with the sun.

She did not ask for it as a prisoner asks. She waited for the next morning, a Thursday, and for the tray, and for the courteous silence while he arranged the cup; and she said, in her ordinary voice, over the toast, “I think I’m getting the winter sads.”

He looked up. “The what?”

“The — I’m sorry, it’s an old family word. My mother used it. You get to October and the light goes yellow and you can’t get out of bed.” She put down the crust. “I’ve been in this room for twenty days, Emory. I’m not complaining. I’m telling you what’s happening to my body. I haven’t had a whole day of sun since the first of September. I think I’m — I’m low on D. It’s a thing, in pregnancy. It’s in all the books, I’m sure you’ve read them.”

“I have,” he said slowly.

“And there’s a literature about mood. About what a mother’s cortisol does to a fetus.” She heard how cool she sounded, how level, and was pleased and a little sick. “I’m not asking you to open the window. I’m not asking for the door. I know what the answer is. I’m just asking whether there’s some way to — let some of the day in.”

He sat with his forearms on his knees, turning the pencil in his shirt pocket with one finger. The half-beat didn’t come. She had been waiting for it, and it did not come, and she understood that this was not a lie to him; it was a request, and requests were a different grammar.

“What would you give for it?” said Emory.

It was the first time he had ever bargained with her. She felt a small cold click inside, like a key going into a lock.

“I’ll eat everything you bring. The whole tray, even the liver, God help me. I’ll take the vitamins on my own without being asked. I’ll let you do the scan on Wednesdays.” She watched his face. “And I’d like to do some work. Not today. Just — when you think it’s right. I’d like to be myself for an hour a day. A person who has a job.”

She had not meant to add the last. It had come out on its own, from some deep, true place, and she saw it land in him like a coin in a well.

“I’ll think about it,” he said.

It took two days. On the Saturday morning she woke to the sound of a plane. Not an aircraft; a hand plane, a long soft shushing, somewhere below the window, on and on, with the sweet dry rasp of wood curling off a blade. She lay and listened to it for an hour. She knew the sound. She had listened to it all spring from the porch steps with a mug of tea, the boy at his sawhorses with his sleeves rolled and a pencil behind his ear. It was the most tender sound in the world, and she lay in her bed with her eyes closed and hated how much she loved it.

At noon he came up with a drill and a bag of screws. He took down two of the center planks from the bay window, and the light came into the room in one great sudden shout, and she shut her eyes and put her hands over her face.

When she opened them there was a shutter. A fixed one, in white oak, the louvers set at a steep angle, so that from outside no one could look in, and from inside, if she stood at the right height, she could look out: down, between the slats, at an inch-wide slice of the world. He had planed them himself. He had cut the housings. He had oiled the wood, and the whole room smelled of linseed and sun.

She stood at the shutter in her bare feet with her forehead against the cool slat.

There was the lawn, going silver. The long grass in the meadow, the dried asters, the gray line of the cliff. There was the cove, in its cup of rock, and in it, small and white and perfect at the end of the stone pier, with her brass shining, the Marigold. And beyond, all the way to the end of the world, the sea: dark blue, wrinkled, enormous, with a line of lobster buoys going out in a scatter of red and yellow flecks, and a gull. A boat, a long way off, going somewhere with a purpose.

She wept without a sound. She had not known she was going to.

He stood behind her, three feet away, very still. He did not touch her. She could hear him breathing.

“Thank you,” said Corinne.

It came out of her whole. No gap. No catch. And she realized, with a sort of horror, that this was because it was true; that she was grateful, honestly and entirely, to the man who had locked her in a room for letting her see the sea. She turned her wet face and looked at him, at the sawdust on his forearms and the shy hopeful set of his shoulders, and saw that he had heard it, the whole clean note of it. He lowered his eyes. A slow color came up his throat.

“You’re welcome,” he said, very low, and went out, and drew the bar.

She stood alone with her face in the light and thought: That’s one.

She hated that she was counting.

* * *

The pencil was the second.

He brought it that same evening, a single Blackwing 602 from the walnut box she’d been given in June, the one with SKRIV burnt into the lid, with the point newly sharpened, and a notebook to go with it: a plain green spiral steno pad, the kind with a stiff cardboard back, from the rack at the Port Ellis drugstore. He handed them to her at arm’s length across the tray, like a man feeding a bird.

“I’ll collect the pencil at night,” he said. “And I’d like to see the notebook. Not to — I won’t read it, Corinne, if you don’t want. I just want to know you’ve got it. That it’s there.”

“You can read it,” said Corinne.

She said it at once, easily, with a small tired shrug. She had decided on this in the night. He would read it anyway; she was sure of that. A man who had read her texts since June would not stop at a diary. But there was a difference between a thing taken and a thing given, and she had begun to understand that for him the difference was everything. He needed to be let in. If he were let in he would stay at the door.

“But I’m going to write in Swedish.”

“Swedish?”

“It’s what I think in when I’m not performing.” That was true. She had not known it was true until she said it. “I’ve done twelve books in it, you know. When I write for myself it comes out in Swedish. It’s — it’s quieter than Norwegian. My grandmother was Swedish; she had some of it. I want to keep something that’s mine, Emory. Just the language. You can have the rest.”

He thought about it. She saw him think, standing at the end of the bed with the tray in his hands, weighing a hundred small facts: the dictionary, the cousin languages, the evenings he would spend at the desk in the oil room with a lamp and a lexicon.

“I’ll learn it,” he said at last.

“I thought you might.”

He smiled at that, the crooked one, with the snaggle tooth, and she smiled back, and it didn’t cost her as much as it should have.

The first page she wrote in a quick, tidy, self-effacing hand, for him. A passage about the shutter, and the sea, and the quality of the light at four in the afternoon: a pretty passage, full of kindness and nouns. She built it as she built any sentence for a skeptical editor, bone by bone, with the right gaps in it. Tack, she wrote. Thank you for the sun. It was a good page. She knew exactly what he would feel when he read it, a hot, helpless wave of hope, and she let it stand.

The second page, she wrote another way.

She had spent a winter of her life translating a Swedish novel about a locksmith. It had a glossary, one of those long appendices that publishers like to add to crime fiction to make it feel serious: nine pages of terms, with etymologies, in a tidy two-column list. Dyrk (lock-pick). Tumlare (a tumbler in a lock). Regel (bolt). Nyckelknippa (a bunch of keys). She wrote them out now from memory, in pencil, as a tired translator does when she wants to keep her hand in: a page, two pages, in alphabetical order, with their definitions. And among the words she needed to keep her hand in, she let a few others fall, with the mild unremarkable air of a woman who is merely thorough.

Kamera (c.): in the thriller, a security camera. Cf. rökdetektor (smoke detector), where a concealed lens may be placed.

Nyckelknippa: key-ring. See also karbinhake (carabiner). In the book the detective wears it on the left hip.

Bom (c.): bar, as of a door. A pine beam, here, in two iron brackets.

Tisdag och fredag: Tuesday and Friday. The market days. Fifty-two minutes.

It was a list of words. It was only a list of words. If you gave it to a Swedish teacher she would have called it a model of pedantry, a little glossary of every door, every lock, every household object in a detective novel about a house. Anyone could have written it. The book itself was full of such things, which was the beauty of the cover: a thriller about a locksmith was a thriller about a prison break, and no one who read it could say what in it was fiction and what was a map.

She closed the notebook and laid it on the quilt, spiral up, and lay back and looked at the ceiling, and her heart was going like a bird against a window.

Find out where you are.

* * *

It was astonishing, what a person could learn from a door.

She learned that he came at six and at noon and at six, and again at ten, and that he came by the stairs, always the stairs, and never once from the direction of the study. She learned the fourth stair’s complaint, and the six paces to her door, and that he paused outside it for a count of four, and that in that count he did something she could not identify, drew a breath or touched the wood, before the knock. She learned the sound of the bar: a soft heavy scrape, wood on iron, followed by a bolt, then a latch. She learned, with her cheek on the floorboards and her eye against the inch-wide crack beneath the door, that she could see out on a clean slice of the landing, the dark runner on the boards, the pale stripe of a baseboard, and, on certain nights, high up, at the top of the frame, a tiny red light.

It blinked. Once every four seconds. She watched it for an hour on the second night, lying flat with a blanket under her hip, counting. One-one-thousand, two, three, four; blink.

She learned the carabiner. It hung from his left hip: she could hear it, a faint metallic chime as he walked, and in time she could separate the notes. The iron ones, the big ones, the keys for the house. The brass ones, lighter, higher. A little cluster of three on a loop at the end. Eleven keys in all, by her count. She listened for the one she knew best, the old brass one with the long barrel that she had worn on her mother’s chain, with its dull note like a bell in fog; and it was not among them. She filed that away with the rest.

She learned that he did not sleep.

That one came to her slowly, over the nights that followed, and when she understood it she lay with her hand on her mouth. He left her at ten, and at ten past she heard the back door shut, and the faint distant crunch of his boots on gravel as he crossed to the tower. After that, silence. She had assumed that the silence was sleep. But at three in the morning she woke to a sound like a draft in a flue, and lay a long time with her heart going, and it was the lamp. Far across the grounds, a hundred and ten feet of granite away, the old Fresnel lens was turning on its bath of mercury. She could hear it through the stone, the soft whisper of it, a ghost of a sound, like breath. And at five it stopped.

He was awake. He was up there, or down there, in whatever room he had made for himself, doing whatever he did. Keeping the light. Keeping the log. Watching her door on his small gray screens.

Not a man at all, she thought, lying in the dark, with the baby’s print pressed to her ribs. A lighthouse.

It should have frightened her. It did frighten her. But there was something else, too, something she could not afford to examine, a thin bright thread of pity, like a wire pulled tight. A man who never slept. A man with eleven keys and no one to give one to. A boy sitting alone in a stone room at the foot of a tower with a lamp and a pencil and four small screens, watching, all night, for the one person who would never come.

She turned on her side. She put her left hand under her cheek.

Use it, she told herself.

She had not known, until that moment, that she was a person who could think a thing like that and hate herself and go on.

* * *

The Sunday came.

He brought the turntable up at four in the afternoon, the old Zenith from the attic, with its walnut case and its smoked-glass lid; he carried it in his arms like a sleeping child and set it on the dresser under the shutter, and plugged it in at the wall. He had the record in a sleeve under his arm. She did not need to look. She knew the cover by the weight of the silence in the room. Chet Baker Sings, with the coffee ring in the corner.

“Rule seven,” said Emory.

His voice was careful, almost shy. He stood by the dresser with his hands hanging at his sides, in a clean blue shirt, shaved, with his hair still damp. He had dressed for it. He had dressed for it. She looked at him and felt her throat close.

“Sundays,” she said.

“I know it isn’t — I know you didn’t write it for this. But I thought, a Sunday’s a Sunday.” He lowered the arm. The needle crackled, and then there it was, the dry soft trumpet coming up out of the hiss like someone clearing his throat in an empty church, and a voice, a boy’s voice, ruined and gentle, singing something that was not, in the end, about anything but being tired. “May I sit?”

She moved her feet.

They listened to the whole of side one without speaking. The shutter threw a long gold ladder of light across the quilt that shortened as the afternoon went down, rung by rung. Once he shifted, and the chair creaked, and she felt the heat of his attention move over her like a lamp. When the first song ended he said, “Can I do your hair?”

She looked at him.

“It’s gotten knotted. You haven’t been able to — I’ve seen you try. You’ve no brush.” He drew it from his back pocket. It was her own, the old wooden one with the soft bristles and the cracked handle, the one that had stood on her dresser in Cumberland for eleven years, and that she had missed since July and put down to the move. “I took it from your bathroom. In the summer. I’m sorry. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

She had a long, bright, precise moment in which she thought of everything she could say. You went through my things. You stole my hairbrush. You are the man who locked me in this room. Each of them was perfectly true. Each of them would have cost her the sun.

“Please,” said Corinne.

She sat on the edge of the bed with her back to him and he came and knelt on the mattress behind her, and she felt the warmth of his knees against the base of her spine. He began at the ends. His fingers were very careful. He worked the knots out one at a time with his thumb, the way a man teases a snarl from a net, and the brush followed, long slow strokes from crown to shoulder to the small of her back, and the record turned and the boy’s ruined voice went on being tired, and her scalp tingled, and her eyes closed.

It was the most dangerous thing that had happened to her in a month.

She understood that quite clearly, even as the tension went out of her shoulders. She understood that this was the very thing; that the cage was not the bars, or the planks, or the bolt, but this: the small, absurd, merciful fact of a hand in her hair. That nothing in the world had ever made her feel as looked after. That Graham, in twelve years of marriage, had never once brushed it. That her mother had stopped when she was nine.

“Emory,” she said.

“Mm.”

“I’m frightened.”

The brush stopped.

“I know,” he said.

“I don’t mean of you. I don’t mean —” She breathed. She hadn’t planned the next part; it simply arrived, and she let it come. “I mean of all of it. The baby. What happens in March. I’ve done this four times and every time it broke me, and I don’t know how to do it without someone telling me it’s all right. You keep saying it’ll be all right. I want to believe you. I don’t know how.”

For a long moment there was no sound in the room but the needle in the groove.

Then the brush went on. It went on slowly, and his other hand came up and rested lightly against the back of her head, and she felt his forehead come down, very gently, to touch the crown of her hair. He was shaking. She could feel it, a fine tremor running through his arms and hands, the shiver of something enormous being held very still.

“I’ll make it all right,” he whispered. “I swear to you. I swear on my father. Whatever it takes.”

That, thought Corinne, with her eyes closed and her heart a hard cold stone in the center of her chest, is the other thing I learned to do.

She learned to cry for him. And it did not matter, in the end, that half of the tears were real.

* * *

The reward came on the following Sunday, the fifth of October.

He told her over breakfast. He said it lightly, to the egg, as though it had only just occurred to him. “I was thinking you might like to do some of that work. The Skau. I’ve set your desk up. I thought we could try an hour.”

“Downstairs?”

“In the study. With me there. I’d stay in the room.” He looked up. “If you’d like.”

She put down her fork very slowly, so that he would not see her hand.

“I’d like that very much,” she said. “Thank you.”

He took her down at two. It was the first time she had gone down them on her own feet in a month, and she took them one at a time with his hand under her elbow, as one leads an old woman, with her bare feet on the worn wood and her knees not quite her own. The fourth stair spoke under her. The hall was long and dim and smelled of woodsmoke. Her eyes went everywhere at once. To the front door, with its steel plate and its three bright bolts. To the white smoke detector over the coat rack, with its small steady red eye. To the kitchen, the back passage, the narrow door to the cellar with a new brass hasp. She did not look at any of it long. She looked at the floor, as a woman does who is shy of daylight, and let him lead her; and counted, behind her eyes, in fast clean Swedish, like a clerk at a till.

Front door: three bolts, steel. Kamera over the coats. Cellar: hasp, padlock. Back door: chain.

The study was at the end of the passage. He opened the door, and the room was exactly as she had left it in the last week of August. The desk by the window, her desk, the old oak one with the rolled edge, set square to the sea; the green lamp; the lawyer’s bookcase from Camden, with its leaded doors and its quarter-sawn glow; a spray of dried asters in a jar. On the blotter, squared to the edge, lay a thick stack of paper with a rubber band round it, and she knew it at once, as one knows a limb: Den druknede timen. Three hundred and eighty pages.

She sat down. The chair knew her. She put both hands flat on the desk and looked at the window, at the white eye of the sun on the water, and a great stillness came over her.

“I’ll be in the kitchen for a few minutes,” said Emory, from the doorway. “I’m just putting something on the stove. I’ll leave the door open. You’ll be able to hear me.”

“All right.”

“You won’t —” He stopped himself. “I know you won’t.”

He went. She heard his steps in the passage, easy, unhurried; the clink of the carabiner; the swing of the kitchen door. A moment later, from the far end of the house, there began the low, tuneless, contented hum of a man who is making soup.

She sat with her hands on the desk and breathed.

Then, because she could not help it, because her eyes had been drawn for a full minute to the same spot and had been trained, with an effort of will, not to rest on it, she raised them.

The lawyer’s bookcase had five shelves. On the third, between a brass barometer and a coil of manila rope, in the place where in August there had been a row of paperbacks, sat a box.

It was about the size of a loaf of bread. Dark cedar, carved all over in the shallow chip-carved patterns of Setesdal, rosettes and running vines, with a rim of brass along the lid. On the front, through the clasp, hung a padlock the size of a plum.

Dad’s keepsake, she remembered him saying, on a gray morning in a boat shed, in the fog. Someday. On a day I’m brave.

From the kitchen the humming went on, rising and falling, unhurried, forty feet from her chair.

She did not move. She did not breathe. She sat with her hands flat on the blotter and her eyes fixed on a small brass padlock, and in the notebook that lay open on her knee under the desk, in the tight cramped Swedish of a woman making a list, she wrote a single entry with a pencil that she was not supposed to have carried downstairs:

Dyrk.

Lock-pick.