Book Review: Stockholm

Title: Stockholm
Author: Catherine Steadman
Genre: Short Stories, Thriller, Fiction

What It’s About: Olivia sits in the first class seat on the flight with her husband, Sebastian Cole, to Stockholm. This was a last minute surprise trip for their wedding anniversary, that Seb had booked for them both in the midst of his job as a cardiothoracic surgeon. Olivia, too, had been a doctor–a psychiatrist, to be exact, who worked with people and getting them better, but after their marriage, Seb put her into a conservatorship, making it impossible for her to work and have a life outside of their home. He’s far too smart to leave signs of physical abuse, which could ruin his reputation as a surgeon, but he controls her life in every way possible–Olivia has no choice in how to live her life, where she sleeps nor what is being done to her finances.

A lot of people look at her and think that she is lucky, even the friends that she never sees, but they don’t really see the chains on her. Olivia had met Seb at a party, and they quickly fell for each other–one pushing the other’s buttons to see how far they would go, and Olivia found out the length of Seb’s possessiveness when she slept with one of his coworkers.

The flight attendant stops by, offering champagne, and while Olivia hesitates, Seb lightly asks “maybe not with your medication, right?” with enough tone that would suggest to the Flight Attendant that Olivia is not to be trusted. She later comes by with the requests for the menu, to which Olivia states that she wants the lobster salad and the gnocchi. Due to her own knowledge, Olivia knows that Klonopin is a tranquilizer that is more addictive than Xanax. Seb had told her three days prior to the trip about the trip, at which point Olivia’s plan took shape–to disappear.

After the court case, her reputation is gone, so she is not able to work again as a doctor, and she cannot legally get out of this marriage anymore, even if she does want to. She knows that Scandinavia has one of the most comprehensive welfare systems in the world, and she hopes that she could break free of him by disappearing. So Olivia had done her research, preparing how to leave in Stockholm and disappear. She then falls asleep.

She is woken up by the landing hitting the runway, and she is ravenous and hungry from her Klonopin sleep that had put her out for the whole flight. Luckily she has enough experience to hide snacks in her bag, and tells Seb that she needs to use the restroom. It is at that time that Seb tells her to be quick because they have another flight to catch, which surprises and terrifies her–her plan to escape is all for naught.

Olivia had a miscarriage in her second trimester, and after the forced induction and stillbirth, her hormones had reached a high. She had been driving, lost focus for a second because she was fumbling with the radio for a song she didn’t want to hear and crashed on the freeway. While she lay in the hospital, Sebastian hired a lawyer, had professional witnesses and discussed not only her mother’s suicide, but also Olivia’s hereditary conditions, the loss of the baby and the postnatal trauma. They discussed her career, her reasons, and the courts made the decision to put her into a conservatorship during her absence. It was supposed to be a temporary measure in case she did something, but a year later, nothing has changed.

As she makes her way to the bathrooms, she checks the departure board and notes that there are two flights leaving in the next hour–one to Dubai and the other to Kiruna. She hides in the stall, eats her banana and drinks her water while trying to organize her thoughts, and ultimately through a process of elimination she figures that they are going to Kiruna. When Olivia leaves the stall, she tries to ask a woman to help her better understand Kiruna, but the woman runs off scared. Luckily for her, another woman overheard her request and tells her that it gets very cold up north in Kiruna, but that most hotels do provide warmer clothing if necessary.

Shortly thereafter, twelve of them board the flight from Stockholm to Kiruna, and Olivia sees the woman who had helped her in the bathrooms, but the woman doesn’t try to become friendly at all, which is a relief as it would have caused more trouble with Seb for Olivia. They arrive in Kiruna, where they are picked up by a guide by the name of Krasta, who gives them warmer clothing, tells Olivia the history of Kiruna–it was built on top of mines so they are moving the city–and drives them to another location, where they eat food with a couple. The man, Timo, then takes them in a reindeer sled ride out across a lake, and to a glass cabin where they will stay for the next while so they can see the aurora borealis.

As soon as they are alone, Seb unzips Olivia’s snowsuits, and has sex with her against the glass, which she does not acquiesce to nor does she deny–she just lets him do what he wants, including putting his hand around her throat lightly enough to give him the control that he needs, while he looses control. After he finishes, Olivia goes into the bathroom, and takes a pregnancy test that quickly turns positive as her period has been late by three days and she never had a problem getting pregnant. There was a time that she wanted a child with him more than anything, but now she does not, and since the conservatorship, she had to end two pregnancies, by either going to clinics that never ask too many questions and getting pre-emptive abortion pills. It is becoming harder to lie because he knows her cycle. She puts the pregnancy test back into the hole in her coat, to hide it from him.

A few months after the conservatorship started, Seb had taken her to a retreat in the Nevada desert, where they stayed for three weeks while he took a sabbatical. It was hell for her, and she made such a fuss that Seb had to take her back home, and ended up putting her in a short hold at the hospital. It was the last time that they traveled. Olivia realizes that she cannot stay here for three weeks and let the baby take hold, grow; because as soon as he figures out that she is pregnant, she will no longer have any options. So she makes the decision that she has to take action now, otherwise she will not get a chance to do this again.

She drugs him with the Klonopin that she had been saving and hiding in her makeup bag, which is enough to knock him out for the night. She takes his cards, gets dressed and makes her way across the lake, but with the snow and the frigid weather, she loses her way as the tracks disappear. Eventually she finds her way to a house, and asks the family there to drive her to Kiruna. The man takes her in his car to a gas station, where she gets into another car, a truck. This man is supposed to take her to the train station in Kiruna, but instead takes her back to the glass cabin where Krasta is waiting for them. At this point, Olivia realizes that Seb must have told Krasta that she’s not well, and that she is unable to make decisions for herself, which is what Krasta relayed to the driver. Krasta knocks on the house door and Olivia’s fear spikes.

At first she worries that maybe she got the dosage wrong and killed Seb, but she knows from her experience of writing affidavits that the legal power of diminished capacity. While the world is concerned that she’s a danger to herself and others, she is also seen as not an adult, which means that she’s not legally responsible for her own actions. Seb made sure of that in his plan of rigging the system against her; however, that also means that if she kills Sebastian, she is not legally responsible for it. For the entirety of the conservatorship the one thing that has kept her from doing something extreme is her own knowledge that she is not crazy enough to do something. But that’s not how the legal system or the world sees her–to them, her life is someone else’s problem to deal with.

Sebastian opens up the door eventually, and Olivia gets returned to him. Once Krasta is gone, Seb tells her that what she did will set them back. She does not speak, and when he brings her chin up so that she’s forced to look at him, she can tell that there is controlled rage. Seb tells her that she has not been taking her pills, which are there for her own good, and tries to pry her mouth open. When Olivia doesn’t let him, he slaps her, and asks her if she wants to hurt him, while telling her that she’s only hurting herself. He adds that things will have to change because she’s gotten used to him playing nice, but that she doesn’t respond to nice. He pulls her towards him, and Olivia still is reeling from the shock of the physical punishment. She realizes that they are miles away from others, that the bruises will heal, and she is a suicide risk, so if something very bad were to happen to her, he would just be able to get away it.

The fear from that realization makes her stumble, while he drags her into the room and pins her. He reiterates that they are alone out here, no one will come for her, and they can stay here as long as it takes. Seb tells her that she will stop fighting him, and she will learn to be good if it kills her, without acting. What he gives, she will get and she will be thankful for it. Seb then punches her in the stomach, causing her to fold onto the floor, at which point he kicks her into the side. Olivia asks him to stop, telling him that she’s pregnant. He does stop, and pulls her onto a chair, to study her, realizing that she’s telling the truth. He surmises that she ran away because she’s scared, which Olivia does nothing to dispel at all. Olivia believes that he thinks he won because he will be a father, and she is beaten in that game. Sebastian tells her that she is forgiven, and that he will take very good care of the both of them. Then, seeing the bruises and the blood, he tells her to go clean herself up, which Olivia does with great difficulty.

Once she’s in the bathroom, she realizes that things have stepped up a bit because they are very isolated. She knows that no one begins a game thinking that they will lose, and realizes that she would rather cheat than find out what it would mean to lose a game like this to him. Her decision to not return to New York, not have the child and not stay in this marriage solidifies. She remembers what she thought of outside of the cabin about the diminished capacity and hope blossoms again. Olivia doesn’t really want to end up in a facility, but if she does, she can play by their rules as she knows how the system works from the inside. She realizes that the chains that have been binding her in the form of the conservatorship could be the same ones that can be used to set her free.

So she grabs the heavy ammonite from the sink, and while she is not stronger than him, she knows from her studies in medicine where exactly to aim to make it quick and avoid a struggle. Not only that, but she also knows that he will let her get close enough. She slips it into her pocket, takes one last look at herself in the mirror and then heads out of the bathroom.

My Thoughts: I figured just by the name of the book that it may have to do something with Stockholm Syndrome, but this was a nice and surprising twist on the story. I love how we are introduced in the beginning to Olivia and told that she’s in a conservatorship, which means that maybe she’s not a reliable narrator. But as time goes on, we discover the true horrors of what is going on to her, and how she’s in a cage of her own; how she has to hide her actions, and pretend to be someone because of this conservatorship that Seb put her in after her accident, which truly can happen to anyone if they take their eyes off the road for a moment. It almost seems like it was overkill on Seb’s part to put her in a conservatorship for an accident, which does make me wonder if there’s something more to the story–though it’s clear that Seb cherishes control. In a way, this makes me question if this was the same thing for Britney Spears and her conservatorship, as it seems super restrictive and there’s nothing that Olivia can do legally without Seb’s approval that would dissolve it. I only wish that we would find out whether Olivia did or did not go through with ending Seb’s life and escaping it all.

Overall, a good short story to get through when you don’t have a ton of time to read.