You'll Thank Me for This by Nina Siegal (top novels txt) 📗

luck he’d managed to sidestep for all those years finally caught him. She’d had Pieter for twenty-two years, and Karin had had him for ten. Those were the numbers.

She looked again at the picture of the two of them from so many years ago. How strange that she’d never seen it before. Who had taken it? And from where? It was blurry, slightly overexposed, and taken from very far away, like someone had photographed them from a moving car across the street. It was grainy, suggesting it had been shot using a long zoom lens. Like someone had been watching them, snapping shots to indicate their whereabouts, locate them. Why would Martijn have this picture?

Chapter 9Red Deer

It was dark now, but more like a deep-sea blue than black. They could see stuff, but more like the outlines of things, and all kinds of crisscrossing shadows that made the forest feel more strange, or maybe magical. It was a bit creepy with the weird gnarled trees that looked just a little like swimmers doing a sidestroke, or swimmers drowning.

Lotte, who was walking ahead of Karin, always started to talk a whole lot when she got nervous, and now was one of those moments. “Where are you going for winter break?” she asked, and said without waiting for an answer, “We’re going to Thailand. My parents have been telling me all about it. They’ve already been there four times. They say we can swim all day long. They have this place that’s just a hut with, like, the walls completely open, and they say it gets hot enough that you never want to close the doors or anything.”

Karin’s family hadn’t made any plans for the winter break. Everything was too scrambled at home. She didn’t even know if they’d be living in the same house in a week or two, the way it was between her mom and Martijn. “We rented a place in the South of France,” Karin lied, remembering a holiday she took with her mom and dad when she was younger. “They got a cottage there, and we can go hiking nearby. My parents like to go wine tasting, and they let me have a few sips. It’s really pretty all around there.”

Lotte didn’t seem to be very interested in this lie, or maybe she just needed to talk. “In Thailand, they have these places where you can go and take care of elephants. You wash them with a hose and feed them with buckets, and if you’re lucky, my mom says, you can even ride on one.”

Karin remembered the elephants she had seen with her mom and dad at Kruger Park when they’d gone to South Africa that one time together. She’d been really young then, like eight. They’d had to get shots for that trip, and Karin never forgot how much it hurt. But it had been worth it. How giant and graceful the elephants were. So gentle, even though they had so much power; Karin respected that. “My mom went by herself last year, just to see what it was like, and if it was okay for me to go,” continued Lotte. “And she said there are a lot of kids who live in the village, and they really like foreigners, like to take them around and show them all the amazing plants and places to swim, and I don’t have to be with my parents the whole time, like here…”

The trail here was half paved with asphalt but mostly covered with sandy dirt and overgrown with tufts of grass that sprouted up through cracks. While Lotte talked, Karin tried to convince herself not to be frightened of the coming darkness. She’d been here at night before, and she had never been scared then. But of course that was with her dad, and being with her dad had always made everything okay. He’d let her go off on her own a bit and collect kindling; he even had let her light the campfire and poke it with a branch. The Veluwe had never seemed scary before. But now, with just the two of them, just her and Lotte?

Karin pictured her father here, guiding them, the straps of all his camera bags crisscrossing his broad chest like some kind of special armor. She saw his face, his pale blue eyes, always smiling when he saw her, and his nose, wide and sturdy, and his salt-and-pepper stubble, not thick enough to be called a beard, really. He had on a sort of padded vest with lots of pockets, and that black-and-white-checkered scarf he always wore, which he sometimes used to clean his lenses in a pinch.

“Just a little farther,” he had told her, looking back and giving her a wink. “It’s just over this ridge.”

The first time they’d come here together hadn’t been that long after the trip to South Africa. She’d begged to go back to Kruger Park, but her parents said they’d have to save up for another trip. It cost, like, thousands of euros. Her dad said they should start exploring local nature, their own national forests. He was going to learn how to shoot nature photographs because it was safe—safer than Africa. No vaccinations needed!

“Come on, darling,” he’d said. “See that big boulder there? That’s where we’ll stop.”

She’d followed him, up over the dune-like hills to a place where there was a rock just big enough to hide them. He dropped his camera bags off his shoulders and sat beside the rock, motioning for Karin to do the same. She slouched over and sat next to him, resting her back against the rock.

“What now?” she asked.

“Now we wait,” he said. “We wait for the deer to come.”

“When are they coming?” she asked, naturally.

He laughed and put his arm around her shoulders. “They’re on the two forty train,” he said.

Karin didn’t get the joke at first and tried to find the train tracks nearby. “Ha ha, very funny. How long?”

“That’s the beauty of it,”