Page 40 of A Copenhagen Snowmance
“I am so sorry, Jamie.” It feels so inadequate a response, but it’s all she has in the shock.
She gives him the space to pick up the topic, or let it go.
“She was a good mum, but she suffered from depression. Always had,” he says, head bowed, as he stands on the doorstep. “And when she fell pregnant when I was nine, she chose to come off her industrial strength anti-depressants without discussing it with my dad, or her doctor. She didn’t want the baby affected by the drugs, I think. Anyway, it’s all supposition. Gradually, she sank lower and lower, which, being only nine, I thought was due to the pregnancy, and my dad hardly noticed as it was a really busy farming season, and he was rarely home.”
She wants to tell him it isn’t strange that a little boy wouldn’t have been able to spot signs of an illness he probably didn’t even know she had. But Jamie seems to be working something through, and instinctively she knows to simply let him.
“One morning, she waited until I had left for school, took a cottage pie out of the freezer to defrost for us, then took herself out to a small copse away from the house where she swaddled herself in a blanket and swallowed a shit-ton of sleeping tablets. I came home, put the pie in the oven, ate it, watched some TV, and eventually went to bed. My dad came in, ate the leftovers, and only when he went to bed realised she wasn’t there and woke me. It took a day before we found her and that was only because the dog tracked her.”
“Oh, Jamie, that’s awful,” Anna says, putting her hand on his arm. Not touching him right now feels all kinds of wrong.
His voice sounds thicker. “I never thought to look for her around the house. Maybe I could have run for my dad earlier and we could have found her in time.”
“Don’t,” Anna says, her heart bleeding for the little Jamie. “You were only nine, and nothing looked amiss to you.”
“Yeah, logically that makes sense, but I’ll always wonder. And while some people were judgemental about her having done this to us, I see that even through her illness, which convinced her we would truly be better off without her and that she should take the baby with her, she still cared enough to take herself away from the house and keep it as a safe space for us. She didn’t take a messy route, and above all… she left us the bloody cottage pie, so we’d eat.”
Anna simply doesn’t know what to say to him. This poor man, caught in the crux of his mother making such a devastating decision and yet still doing so in a way that showed she cared about them. How did you square that?
Instead, she throws her arms around him in the biggest hug she can manage.
“She was ill, Jamie, but she was clearly kind.”
He is still for a long time, until she feels him nod against her head.
“She was. But I would give anything to have one minute with her.”
“What would you say?”
“I’m tied,” he says, clearly having thought about it infinite times before. “Do I use the minute to beg her not to go, or do I use it to make her help me understand her need to remove herself?”
The use of the wordremovescratches at her, but she lets it. It’s nothing in comparison to the pain he’s experienced.
“Thank you for telling me, Jamie,” she says, releasing him.
He shakes himself and nods towards the door. “I need chocolate. And maybe some cookies. Turns out I crave comfort food when coughing up my past.” And as she casts him yet another sideways glance, she senses she might just be the first person he’s ever voiced this to.
* * *
Anna follows Jamie quietly up the stairs, him with the teapot and mugs, her with the plate ofpebernødder. She senses he’s a little raw from having bared his history, and she wants to give him the space to come back to them. The jigsaw seems the perfect way, and without conversation, they each move around thehyggekrogspace, lighting the candles, creating a gorgeous glow, both around the room and in the dormer window, the raised sill holding more candles, and Jamie’s mementoes. The light from the streetlamp outside shows snow beginning again. The flakes fall leisurely, in time with the piano music Jamie has arranged to play low on the speaker pod. This, Anna thinks, is what he needs; the comfort and low demand to bring him back. Each claiming a throw to wrap around themselves, they sit side by side on the little Hans Wegner sofa, perusing the jigsaw in comfortable silence. Every so often they’ll give each other a “Well done” for having placed a piece, or hand each other another, which might work on their respective sides.
Small as the sofa may be, they aren’t quite touching, but the space between their thighs is close. Anna can’t help looking at it. She senses the warmth that lies there. She wonders what would happen if the space were to close. Would there be sparks? It would be so easy to slide her hand onto his knee, to give him comfort, she tells herself, but really it’s because her fingers are twitching to. And the flat of her palm wants to slide slowly across the solidity of his thigh and sense the heat of his skin beneath.
“Ah, shit.” Jamie jolts her out of her ruminating and she gives her head a light shake to dispel the thoughts. Thecosiness is doing strange things to her. “We’re a piece missing,” he says.
Gradually, they’ve connected all the pieces and just as he says, there is a space just off centre and no corresponding piece.
“Nooo,” she says, disappointed, not least because these jigsaws had been hermorfar’s and he was meticulous in putting things away properly, but also as this was a something she and Jamie were working on together.
“We have the victory,” he says. “We completed it. It’s enough.”
But Anna isn’t happy about it. She pushes the throw aside and gets down onto the floor, searching through the pile of the rug. She looks up to see Jamie watching her on her hands and knees, his pupils huge. Putting it down to the low lighting, Anna searches on. Ducking lower, she moves in under the frame of the sofa, its legs raising the seat off the ground enough for her to get in under there.
The light beneath is even worse.
“Jamie? Your phone. Can you shine the torch under here?” She supposes they could just move the sofa away for a better look, but she’s down here now and she doesn’t want to move him out of his comfiness.
Jamie has other ideas it seems, and in the blink of an eye, he’s on the floor next to her, lying on his stomach, like she is. He shines his phone torch about and Anna tries to keep her eyes on the rug pile, her mind on the task. It is hard. His measured breathing is loud in her ear, the closeness of him warming the entire length of her side.
