The Bucket List Read online

  “I don’t understand why she’s doing this to us,” Sissela said, while her gaze remained fixed on the boats outside.

  Her voice sounded judgmental. Heimer knew she didn’t intend to come across like that, but that was how he perceived her. Always quick to point out the weaknesses in others.

  “Business school was a mistake,” he said.

  He shouldn’t be drinking right now—he knew that.

  “How can it be a mistake? Going there was one of her goals in life,” she said, turning to face him.

  How long had she been staring at that lake? Emelie wasn’t going to come walking across the water, if that was what she thought.

  “So, you think the first tick on her arm was about business school?” he said.

  “What else would it be about? She got the tattoo after Björkbacken, when she decided to go to business school.”

  Heimer shook his head. “You’re wrong about that.”

  “So why did she get it then?”

  “I don’t know. But there is one thing I know—business school wasn’t what she wanted. It was what you wanted.”

  “I had nothing to do with it. I was just as surprised as you were when she told us she’d applied.”

  If he hadn’t already started on his second glass of Chianti, he would have capitulated—but he couldn’t stop now. The words inside wanted to get out and if he suppressed them yet again he would suffocate.

  “Don’t you understand that’s how it works in your family? Nothing needs to be said out loud. Everyone understands what’s expected of them. You’re sitting here actually believing that your daughter made a whole new start in life just because she’s dressing like you and going to your old college? Damn it, it wasn’t a new start. She gave up. She ignored what she wanted and tried to make you happy instead.”

  He watched her tear a crust from her pizza and put it in her mouth. A flake of oregano got stuck to her lip and she wiped it away with a napkin.

  “All changes are good changes when it comes to Emelie,” she said.

  “You still don’t get it, do you? She didn’t change. She might have looked different, but it didn’t mean she felt better. The only thing that’s happened is that we’re out of the loop. We have no insight into her life. She didn’t even dare tell us how badly school was going.”

  Sissela interrupted him. “You have to stop living your life through Emelie. She’s an adult and she can make her own decisions. That’s something you have to accept.”

  Heimer looked down into his glass and saw the surface of the wine rippling in time with the tremors of his hand. Anger shot through him from the deepest place within him, spreading out to the finest capillaries in his fingers.

  “The same way you accepted it when she wanted to focus on gaming?”

  He was on his feet before he realized it. His chair tottered on its rear legs before falling to the floor.

  “That’s absolutely not the same thing,” she said. “You saw for yourself how she was, sitting in front of those screens for hours every day.”

  Their fights always followed the same pattern. When he raised his voice, Sissela would lower hers, thus gaining the upper hand. Heimer assumed that she used the same tactic at work. He decided not to walk into that trap again. This time he was going to make his point. Slowly, he righted the chair and sat down again.

  “You’re wrong. She was never happier than when she was gaming. If you had watched her you would have seen that.”

  “So, you think all that violence and shooting had nothing to do with her being unwell?”

  “No, it’s a sport. Like any other sport. You must be able to see your own role in this! She felt like she was letting you down, that she wasn’t living up to the family’s expectations, and God knows they aren’t the easiest ones.”

  “See my own role in this? What do you mean by that? Is it my fault that Emelie …”

  Her voice faltered and she turned her face back to the window. She had come to a halt. She always came to a halt there. She couldn’t say it—couldn’t express the words. Couldn’t accept that their daughter had tried to take her own life.

  “You’ve pushed her too hard, Sissela. And it’s sad that you can’t acknowledge that.”

  Heimer drained his wineglass in one go and poured a refill from the next bottle. Inebriation helped him to stay calm, but he knew it was deceptive. If his state of mind shifted—even just slightly—the wine would become fuel to the fire.

  Sissela met his gaze and he saw that his words had hit the mark. Her eyebrows were drawn together and there was even a furrow on her botoxed brow. This was the closest to being off-balance he had seen her in a long time.

  “I’m going to call Dad,” she said.

  Heimer woke several hours later because his neck hurt. It was at an angle of almost ninety degrees against the armrest of the sofa. The room was dark except for a dimmed lamp. He remembered that he had lain down to rest a little after the pizza and wine. But he must have fallen asleep, because his tongue felt fuzzy and he had a string of saliva at one corner of his mouth.

  He sat up to reach for the wineglass on the coffee table. There were two mouthfuls left and he had no intention of letting a vintage this good go to waste. He swirled it in the glass, smelled the hints of earth and ripe cherries, and finished it. Then he draped the dark blue lambswool blanket over his legs. Sissela must have put it over him before she had gone to bed.

  He looked at his watch, which said it was just after two. He got up and checked that the kitchen island had been wiped down and the pizza boxes put in the recycling. Then he rinsed the wineglass, filled it with cold water, and went to the window overlooking the lake.

  He drank slowly while his eyes adjusted to the darkness outside. Slowly, he began to make out the ripples on the black surface below him. He thought about Emelie’s tattoo again. There was something about it that had been nagging at him, and only now did he realize what it was.

  In the photo she had posted on Facebook, two of the squares had ticks tattooed in them. The design hadn’t looked like that when she had visited at Christmas. Back then, only one of the boxes had been ticked—he was sure of that. Emelie had been wearing a short-sleeved red dress on Christmas Eve and he saw the tattoo when she had reached to pass a dish of food.

  She must have done something big ahead of the summer break, something that meant she could get the tattoo of the second tick. He pressed the glass of cold water against his forehead to keep his thoughts clear. It was so contradictory. Emelie was clearly not well and had lied about her grades to avoid disappointing her family. At the same time, she had been ticking off another goal on her bucket list. How did that work?

  His thoughts continued to spin around in his head, becoming entangled in the darkest part of himself. The picture he had just conjured up, of his daughter’s tattooed forearm, felt unbearable. He thought about the final tick—carved into the skin like a wound—and shut his eyes.

  Heimer imagined cutting through the black surface of the lake outside, and sinking quickly through the water, as if a force were pulling him to the bottom. It didn’t feel unpleasant—more like liberation.

  When he opened his eyes again, he heard himself crying. First quietly, then more loudly. Sobbing, he sank to the floor with his back to the panorama window. He smacked the back of his head so hard against the thick glass that it felt like his head might explode.

  Sissela wasn’t to blame for Emelie being gone. She was just doing what she was programmed to do—preparing her daughter for the role awaiting her. Just as her father had drilled her. Whether or not the family’s daughters wanted to take over the company didn’t matter. It was a matter of duty and responsibility toward something greater. Almost like a religion.

  It had been up to him to make Emelie understand that she actually had a choice. That she was free to do whatever she wanted with her life. He had seen it as his most important duty and yet he hadn’t backed her up at a critical moment.

  Perhaps h
e was blowing what happened out of all proportion. But it was impossible to ignore the fact that there was a correlation between his betrayal and the events that had ended with his daughter’s attempted suicide.

  Striker Chicks had won an online tournament for players from across Scandinavia. Heimer thought back to the dinner he hosted for all five girls in Karlstad to celebrate the victory. They had scarfed burgers and talked about becoming the first girls’ team in the world to make a living playing Counter-Strike. They asked him if he knew anything about agents’ contracts. He had laughed and told them to calm down. Then one of the girls had shown him an email from an agency in London that said they represented e-sports stars.

  “If things go well in Seoul, they’ll probably want to sign us,” she had said jauntily.

  Heimer hadn’t understood a thing. Seoul? What was that all about? The friend had read his puzzled face and explained.

  “ Didn’t Emelie tell you? First prize in the tournament we just won is entry into a competition there. They pick up the tab—business-class flights, hotel, food—everything.”

  Heimer knew that Counter-Strike was something that was getting serious for the girls. They were eighteen and rising stars in a field no one in the adult world knew existed.

  When his daughter had fallen asleep that evening, he had sat down with Sissela and told her what he found out at the restaurant. The response had been as expected—but even more intense. This had gone too far. The amount of time Emelie spent playing computer games was bad for her. It was time they put a stop to it, before things got completely out of hand.

  Heimer had protested and said he took the opposite view. That gaming gave her a purpose. That it was something she had achieved on her own and could be proud of.

  Sissela had changed tack, arguing that gaming was having a negative impact on Emelie’s already-weak studies. A trip to South Korea during the school year wouldn’t help her grades. When Heimer had realized that she wasn’t going to change her mind, he gave up trying to persuade her. It would have been pointless and simply ended in another huge fight.

  So the Striker Chicks had gone to Seoul without Emelie. The agency found a replacement and the team came in third. A few weeks later, it emerged that the girls had signed a contract with the agency behind Emelie’s back and that the new girl was taking her place on a permanent basis. Emelie was no longer part of Striker Chicks and was forced to watch as her friends took a year off from high school to move into an all-expenses-paid apartment in London.

  Heimer banged his head even harder against the window. Why hadn’t he stood up for her when he had known how much gaming meant to her?

  He thought about how quickly Emelie’s world had fallen apart after that. All the time and energy she’d previously spent on Counter-Strike was now spent partying or sitting listlessly in her room, refusing to come out. Depression had taken a firmer hold of her by the day.

  Sissela handled the issue as she usually did—by asking someone else to deal with it. A string of therapists had been brought in and Emelie had seemed to take a perverse delight in messing with them. Once, she claimed that her parents hit her if her grades weren’t good enough. That they didn’t care that she had dyslexia.

  In the middle of this circus, Heimer saw it was more than just teenage rebellion and disappointment at what had happened with the Striker Chicks. Emelie felt trapped—chained to a future she didn’t want. But he could never have imagined things were so bad that she’d attempt to take her own life and have to be admitted to a treatment center.

  Sometimes, he thought the transformation that had happened after Björkbacken was a way for Emelie to punish him for betraying her. She had made it clear to him that their pact was broken and she had thrown herself into the Bjurwall side of the family. From then on, she had treated him as the sad person he was. A clown living on his wife’s money and spending his days doing things he thought were important. Like finding a case of Margaux of the right vintage or cutting a few seconds off his personal best for a 10K run.

  He could have dealt with the contempt from others—but not from Emelie. She was his daughter—they belonged together. The way she treated him made him furious and miserable at the same time. He pounded the back of his head against the window with such force that his vision flickered.

  The sound must have woken Sissela. She was standing in front of him in her pearlescent, shimmery white nightdress, which made her look like a ghost in the low light. She didn’t say anything—she just sat down on the floor. She carefully took his face in her hands. He could smell her hand cream—a faint scent of rose water.

  “It’s my fault,” he sobbed.

  She hushed him and let him sink his head into her lap. Then she stroked his hair slowly until there were no tears left to cry.

  9

  BALTIMORE, 2019

  The doctor really knew how to rile Brodwick up. When she pushed back the time of the debrief, Brodwick lost it. He said that he represented the FBI and could basically do whatever he liked. The doctor replied that she was medically responsible for the patients and that if he didn’t respect that then he wasn’t welcome at the hospital. It ended with a compromise. The debrief was postponed—but just overnight, instead of for forty-eight hours as the doctor had said at first.

  The nurse came into the room and said it was time to go. Trevor was up first—Brodwick wanted to start with him. She rolled him away in his bed and almost two hours passed before he returned. He looked tired, but winked at John from his pillow. Trevor had told Brodwick what he needed to know and nothing more.

  Then it was John’s turn. The policeman helped the nurse to maneuver the bed into the corridor. The doctor was standing in a doorway farther along it, talking to Brodwick. He assumed she was issuing final exhortations to him not to push the patient too hard. The boss smiled his lopsided smile. He was presumably providing her with the assurances she wanted to hear.

  The nurse adjusted the angle of the bed so that John was sitting more upright and then pushed the bed into the meeting room. Then she turned on her heel and left the room without giving Brodwick so much as a look.

  “I really hope they’re treating you better than me,” the boss said in the nasal voice that was his other distinctive characteristic alongside the lopsided smile. It had taken John a long time to realize that he actually talked like that and wasn’t afflicted with a long-term cold.

  “She likes me, that’s why she’s messing with you, I reckon,” John replied.

  “I guess it’s those velvety eyes you’re into. I can’t really disagree with that.”

  Brodwick took his jacket off and pulled the chair closer to the bed. Then he fixed a microphone to the collar of John’s white hospital pajama top and checked that it was connected to the smartphone on the adjacent table.

  “Shall we get started?”

  John nodded. He was ready.

  The first part of the conversation was a report of his time as an undercover agent in the Nigerian drug cartel. He reported what he had seen, being careful not to exaggerate. Everything he said had to correlate with previous surveillance and describe things that he had personally witnessed. If a statement was about something he’d heard secondhand from someone close to Ganiru or the leader himself, he made sure to emphasize this.

  When it came to the events that had taken place at the port, he stuck to the alternative version that Trevor had come up with. It felt so plausible that John almost believed it was the truth—that he had really been a take-charge FBI agent who’d kept a cool head and together with Trevor had improvised a scenario that had fooled everyone else in the container.

  When Brodwick was satisfied he stopped the recording.

  “Well done, John. You and Trevor did a fantastic job. But I want to warn you now that this was just a warmup. The Nigerians will have an army of lawyers and it’s my and the prosecutor’s job to make sure you’re ready. But we have several months ahead before the trial and crunch time, so don’t worry.”

&
nbsp; “Sounds good,” said John, who saw that the conversation was slipping into the next phase. The one that encompassed the decision he had made late the night before and that he had to be ready to defend.

  “Well then,” said Brodwick. “We need to discuss the terms of your witness protection arrangements. The Bureau obviously has a process for this, but I wanted to start the conversation.”

  He got up and checked to make sure no one was listening outside and that the door was shut.

  “Have you given any thought to where you might like to disappear to?”

  John looked him in the eyes. There was no room for hesitation.

  “Sweden.”

  Brodwick laughed. “I assume you’re joking.”

  “I’m not joking.”

  “Jesus Christ, John. You’ve got family in Sweden. You grew up there. It’s too risky.”

  “But any traces of my background there have already been erased, right?”

  “Yes—the digital ones. John Adderley disappeared from all the official databases the same day you accepted your mission to infiltrate the cartel. We’ve also got confirmation from the Swedes that you’ve been erased from their population register. But the people who know you—they still exist. How many people in New York know you grew up in Sweden?”

  John sighed inwardly. This was the weak link in the plan.

  “I don’t actually know. Not as many as you might think.”

  “One is all it takes, John. Don’t be naïve. Ganiru is a heavyweight, but the cartel won’t go down with him. There are even uglier customers out there, with even more resources. They’ll do everything they can to find you and Trevor. It’s not only about revenge—it’s about making an example of you. Showing the consequences of disloyalty to the cartel.”