The Bucket List Read online

  This edition first published in hardcover in 2021 by

  The Overlook Press, an imprint of ABRAMS

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  New York, NY 10007

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  Copyright © 2021 Peter Mohlin & Peter Nyström

  First published in Sweden by Norstedts as Det Sista Livet

  Translation copyright © 2021 Ian Giles

  Cover © Abrams 2021

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020944983

  ISBN: 978-1-4197-5218-6

  eISBN: 978-1-64700-196-4

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  PART 1

  2019 & 2009

  1

  BALTIMORE, 2019

  He lay in bed looking up at the white ceiling. The contours of the discolored plasterboard panel were gradually becoming clearer. The stain looked like a ghost, or maybe a balloon. Something a child might have drawn.

  John knew he was in the borderlands between sleep and wakefulness. He had no idea how long he had been drifting between the two worlds.

  He tried turning his head to see where he was. A second later he was hit by a wave of pain. Its epicenter was at the back of his head, rippling out to the rest of his body. He closed his eyes and tried to find somewhere inside himself where he could take cover. There was no such place.

  He waited until the worst of the pain dissipated and decided to take in the room using senses other than sight. It smelled of cleaning fluid—but it lacked the synthetic scent that products like that often had. No lemon or meadow flowers, just a clinical smell of cleanliness.

  He discerned a beeping sound to his left. The noise was repeated at intervals of a few seconds and had to be coming from some kind of technical equipment level with his head.

  Using one hand, he slowly gripped the steel frame of the bed and let his fingers slide along the structure until they encountered something that seemed to be a wire. He took hold of the cable and lifted it high enough for him to see.

  At the end was a plastic cylinder with a red button. He pressed it and waited for something to happen. After just a few seconds, he heard the sound of a door opening and footsteps approaching. A woman in a white coat with her hair tied in a bun at the back of her neck leaned over the bed.

  “Are you awake, John? Can you hear me?”

  He nodded imperceptibly and received a smile in return.

  “You’re at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore,” she said. “We’ve performed surgery on you to treat the gunshot wounds to your chest.”

  As he listened to the nurse’s voice, he became aware of the postsurgical pain. It was different in nature—less explosive than the neck pain, more gnawing in its character. Like a second layer of pain.

  The woman continued to update him about his condition. He had lost a lot of blood and had been unconscious when he was brought into the emergency room twenty-four hours earlier. They had then operated and the doctors had managed to stop the internal bleeding. The bullets—two of them—had missed his vital organs and passed through his body.

  “Water,” he managed to say, taken by surprise at how feeble his voice sounded.

  The nurse picked up a cup with a straw from the table and helped to put the straw to his lips. John was overenthusiastic and sucked up more water than he could swallow. He coughed and the white-clad woman had to wipe his chin with a napkin.

  “It’s hard to drink when you’re lying completely flat. Would you like me to angle the bed?”

  He nodded.

  The nurse pressed a button on the wall and the head of the bed was slowly raised.

  Finally, he had a view of the room. Next to the bed on his left was a stand on wheels holding intravenous drugs. John counted three transparent tubes supplying his body with a concoction of chemicals through an insertion in the crook of his arm. The beeping he’d heard was being emitted by an instrument monitoring his breathing and oxygen.

  The closed curtains in front of the two windows were thin and they let in more sunlight than he would have liked. The door into the corridor also had a pane of glass in it. It was inset at the top and big enough to let him see the policeman on guard outside.

  John slowly turned his head and saw the other bed. He was apparently not the only patient in here.

  As he saw the face, pain exploded at the back of his head again.

  There—just a few steps away—was the man who twenty-four hours earlier had put a pistol to the back of his neck.

  2

  KARLSTAD, 2009

  Voicemail again. Heimer knew she could see he was calling even though it was almost midnight. Her phone was practically glued to her hand and was always going off at every hour of the day. When one continent closed for business, another would open—and she was always available when the troops needed their commander.

  But when he—her husband—wanted to get hold of her, she chose not to pick up. Sometimes he was tempted to borrow a phone from someone on the management team and call Sissela from it. Just to see if she picked up.

  Heimer looked through the huge picture window and was surprised by how dark the water outside was. Emelie would be returning to Stockholm soon and summer would be officially over. He thought about how he barely recognized his daughter when he’d picked her up at the station in June, a week before Midsummer. The transformation into a well-turned-out economics student had happened so quickly that he almost couldn’t remember what she looked like now.

  Sissela had naturally been overjoyed when Emelie started her course the previous autumn. All of the past was forgotten and the heiress to the family firm was at the finest of educational institutions. He’d not been quite so convinced. He made an effort to patch up their relationship during the summer; he really tried to win back Emelie’s trust after what had happened. But she refused to let him in.

  He called Sissela again. Why the hell wasn’t she picking up? If he called three times in an hour, surely she understood it was important?

  Heimer sat down at the kitchen island and reflected on what a shitty day it had been. It had started with a quarrel over breakfast. Throughout the academic year, the reports from Stockholm had been good. Emelie said that she’d passed her exams and was getting along well with the other students. Heimer had privately questioned the exam results with his wife. Their daughter had inherited his dyslexia and he knew how hard it had been for him during his architecture studies. But Sissela waved away his objections and asked why he didn’t have more faith in his only child.

  But yesterday the castles in the air had collapsed. A business associate of Sissela’s who was close to the president of the School of Economics reported concerns about Emelie. Her attendance was poor and she’d barely been seen in the corridors lately. Naturally, Sissela called the president and didn’t let up until the poor devil had come clean about her daughter. Out of a possible sixty credits she could have earned during two terms, she’d only managed twenty-four. She didn’t even take her two most recent tests.

  Breakfas
t had turned into a cross-examination in which Emelie was confronted with her lies. Heimer tried to get his wife to calm down, but it seemed as if she had already forgotten about their daughter’s mental state in recent years—how close they’d come to losing her.

  The morning ended with Emelie’s disappearing into her room and then leaving the house with a backpack. Just after that, Sissela also departed, leaving him in the wreckage of what was meant to be a family—left alone to clean up after others, as usual.

  He spent the morning in the wine cellar trying to bring some order to it. He had been lazy about maintaining inventories over the last few months and their insurance was only valid if he kept the list of bottles updated. The project of rearranging the wine cellar had worked and when he had laced up his sneakers to run the twelve kilometers prescribed by his fitness program, he felt better. But this improved state of mind didn’t last long. After dinner, which he cooked and ate alone, the final illusion relating to his daughter’s new life fell apart.

  Heimer had gone into her room. It hadn’t been his intention to pry. He just wanted to spend some time there. After she moved to Stockholm, he did that sometimes just so he could remember how it had once been the two of them against the world.

  Opening the top desk drawer was something he had done on impulse. It wasn’t fully closed, and he’d meant to close it. At least that was what he told himself. But instead, he opened the drawer and the stack of old schoolwork there put him on alert. It looked suspiciously planted. He picked up the papers and found a bag of white powder.

  There was only a little left at the bottom and he ran his middle finger through it to collect some. He pressed his finger to his upper lip and immediately recognized the chemical, bitter taste of cocaine.

  Since then, he had tried calling his daughter at least eight times without getting through. Somewhere, deep down, this was what he’d sensed but hadn’t wanted to see. The new Emelie was too perfect. Time after time, the therapists in rehab reminded them that the journey back from mental illness was long and often full of obstacles. But for his daughter, the stay at Björkbacken had seemed like a miracle cure. A nineteen-year-old girl, acting out and with a taste for drugs, had gone in, and a young woman who had gotten into the School of Economics and wanted to become involved with the family company had come out. And it had only taken six months.

  Heimer left the kitchen island and began to wander aimlessly around the house. The soles of his leather shoes creaked on the whitewashed monochrome parquet and he felt like the only guest at the most deserted of parties—overdressed in a shirt and jacket when he might as well shuffle around in slippers and a dressing gown. There wasn’t anyone here, after all.

  He changed into beige chinos and the black polo he had bought in Milan. The top fitted his toned, wiry upper torso well. He could thank running for that. There weren’t many men at forty-eight who were in this kind of shape. Granted, his hairline had crept up and the skin around his eyes had become creased. But he liked his face—it had aged with dignity.

  Sometimes he would secretly buy the gossip magazines if he and Sissela had been to a premiere in Stockholm. Being one of the people in those photos was something he loved—and he liked to compare himself and Sissela to other couples. The Bjurwalls—Heimer had taken his famous wife’s name when they married—as a duo were hard to beat when it came to radiating status and style.

  Heimer returned to the kitchen. He made a sandwich, but he only managed to eat half of it. His thoughts returned to Emelie and where she might be. She had been so angry when she had left the house that morning, and he really wanted a chance to talk to her—in peace and quiet, now that the worst of the anger had dissipated.

  He went back into his daughter’s room and sat on the bed. It struck him how badly the new Emelie suited the old one. White blouses and cashmere sweaters were stored on hangers next to black hoodies and band t-shirts. A Burberry bag sat on the floor next to a yellow crate of vinyl records. And the clearest contrast of all was the sleek MacBook in a leather case next to a tower PC with three monitors and a headset worthy of a fighter pilot.

  Above the desk was a reminder of another era: a group photo of the Striker Chicks from the first competition they had participated in, at Dreamhack in Jönköping. Emelie was on the far right, a head taller than the other girls on the team. Her blonde hair had been dyed dark at the time and was in a short pageboy haircut. Her makeup was harder-looking and there were two piercings on her upper lip that Sissela had been really upset about.

  Heimer looked away from the photo. He wanted to go out running again. He just wanted to drain his body of energy and feel the taste of blood in his mouth. He wanted to forget what a spineless amoeba he had been, if only for a while.

  Then he heard the door opening downstairs. There was the dull thud of a bag being dropped on the tiled floor and the rattling of the hangers swinging against each other on the coatrack. Then weary footsteps on the stairs.

  “Would you pour me a glass of water, darling?”

  Heimer went into the kitchen to meet Sissela. He saw her take off her high heels and sink onto the sofa in the adjacent living room. She was barely slurring her words, but it was enough for him to grasp that she was inebriated.

  “Of course,” he said, making an effort not to show how irritated he was that she had been unreachable all evening. Emelie needed their support, so it would be stupid to start yet another fight.

  He pressed a glass against the watercooler in the door of the refrigerator. While cold sparkling water poured out, he observed his wife on the sofa. The platinum blonde hair with the stubborn lock that refused to stay in place behind her ear. The aristocratically shaped nose that he knew she was so satisfied with. And the chin that she stroked a little too often these days. The doctor made the skin too taut during the last operation. It didn’t look natural for a woman over forty, she often complained. That was surely the whole point of plastic surgery, he had thought to himself, but Heimer didn’t say anything. If Sissela wanted to look natural, she could’ve kept her old chin.

  He put down the glass of water on a coaster covered in a Josef Frank print, to protect the coffee table.

  “Thanks,” she said, drinking half of it in one gulp. “Sorry I’m late. The meeting went on forever and I completely forgot we were having a wine tasting afterward. I managed to get a few bottles to bring back for you. The new guy on the board is co-owner of a vineyard in South Africa, and when I told him about your passion for wine he absolutely insisted you got a case.”

  “Do say hello and thank him from me,” said Heimer, sitting down in the Lamino armchair.

  He hated it when his wife did this. What made her think that the bottles from that horse trader would be worthy of a place in his cellar? Didn’t she understand the care with which he curated his collection? The scant space left was promised to some Bordeaux wines he hoped to acquire at an auction at Sotheby’s later in the autumn.

  “Have you heard from Emelie this evening?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “Isn’t she at home?”

  He shook his head, while his wife pulled one leg up onto the sofa and began to massage her own foot. Heimer tried to remember when she had stopped asking him to do that after her long days at work in uncomfortable shoes.

  “She’s not well,” he said, getting up.

  With a gesture, he indicated that he wanted her to do the same, and together they went into their daughter’s room. He opened the drawer and pointed at the bag with the remnants of cocaine.

  “Is that what I think it is?” said Sissela.

  He nodded.

  “I feel so betrayed,” she added after a period of silence. “First all of her lies about business school and now this. She promised she would stop.”

  “We’ve been naïve—we should have known it wouldn’t be this easy.”

  “You mean I’ve been naïve. You never believed that she was better.”

  That was exactly what he meant. But he was glad she r
eached the conclusion on her own.

  “She’s not picking up her phone,” he said. “I’m going to go out and look for her.”

  “Is that really smart?” Sissela replied. “She’ll probably come back soon, and when she does, I want us both to be at home. Emelie listens to you more than me.”

  Wrong, he thought. She used to listen to him more, but that was before her time at the Björkbacken treatment center.

  As usual, he let Sissela decide and they drank chamomile tea because she said it calmed the nerves. When it was after one and their daughter was still not home, Sissela went to lie down in the bedroom. Heimer curled up on the sofa and pulled a blanket over himself. If Emelie tried to sneak past him, he would wake up. He promised himself that he would really try to talk to her. Somewhere inside her was the old Emelie, the one who trusted him—and this time he didn’t plan to let her down.

  3

  BALTIMORE, 2019

  The spot where the man had been lying was empty; the bed was gone. The machines that had been connected to his body had been switched off and placed on a cart by the wall.

  The man’s face reminded John of why he was in the hospital, but then he once again lost consciousness. When John next woke up, it was dark outside the windows. Day had turned to evening—he didn’t know just when. There was no clock in the room.

  The nurse came in again. She stood next to the bed and looked concerned. She said that blackouts were unusual with gunshot wounds to the torso and wanted to get a doctor. John protested. His head no longer hurt and the pain in his chest had been dealt with by the morphine. After some hesitation, the woman capitulated.

  “What happened to the man who was lying next to me?” John said.

  “He’s gone back into surgery. It didn’t go quite right the first time, so the surgeon wanted to take another look,” the nurse said, before stopping herself.

  Maybe she had said too much about the other patient. There was strict confidentiality in hospitals. John wondered how much the nurse really knew about the men she was caring for. The police guard outside the room was hardly likely to be commonplace at Johns Hopkins.