Miles Away from You

by A. B. Rutledge

  The rest of the day was different, though. Óskar showed up while I was loading the car. Weekend Óskar with messy hair and blue jeans. I could tell he hadn’t slept. He really did write Jack a big, long Dear John letter. I didn’t read it or anything, but I saw him stuff it in a manila envelope with his iPhone and a set of keys. Then he went into the hotel and put it on the desk in his old office. He came back to the car with two cups of coffee and then remembered I don’t like coffee and immediately apologized.

  “I can get you some tea.”

  “No big deal. Forget that, dude. You’re not a concierge anymore, okay? You ready to do this?”

  He sighed and tossed his backpack into the trunk. “Let’s go.”

  So, the first thing that I really wanted to knock out of the way was the Golden Circle. It’s the little route that takes you through some of the more popular landmarks—the first being Thingvellir National Park. So I turned on the GPS and hit the highway. About ten, fifteen minutes into our trip, I looked over and saw that Óskar was crying.

  Well, shit.

  That’s when I realized what an asshole I really am. I had it in my head that this trip would be all hot springs and hand jobs. I hadn’t even considered the fact that I’d just badgered a practical stranger into ending a long-term relationship for a two-week road trip. Óskar is going to need to grieve. Even if things were shitty, six years is a long time. You don’t just end a relationship like that and go off fucking some dude from Missouri. Well, okay, some people would. But not Óskar.

  I opened my mouth, and he immediately cut me off. “Don’t try to talk to me now.”

  I know I don’t know him very well, but I can tell he hates crying. So, I pulled my auxiliary cable out of the console and plugged in my phone. “Wanna hear some Smiths, ya sad bastard?”

  He smiled a little. “Anything but ‘This Charming Man.’”

  “We’ll skip that one,” I said. “‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ too.”

  So, we drove straight through Louder Than Bombs until we got to the park. There were a few places I might have stopped along the way to photograph, but I felt like we needed to put some distance between us and Reykjavik. I didn’t want to be within reach when Jack finally woke up and found that letter.

  When I could see we were getting close to the park, I turned the music down and asked Óskar if he’d been there before. He said he had and that as soon as we got there, we should make a cairn. He wasn’t crying anymore.

  I said I didn’t know what a cairn was, but I’d be down for making whatever.

  The first thing you see when you get to Thingvellir is this giant field with thousands of neatly piled stacks of rocks—the cairns. Now that I know what they are, I realize I’ve seen them everywhere. Even that first day, traveling from Keflavik to Reykjavik, I remember seeing these piles of stones all along the highway.

  “So . . . are they, like, fairy houses or something?” I asked as we approached the field of cairns.

  He just looked at me like I was a moron. “They’re path markers from back before Iceland had roads.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Of course, nobody is marking a pathway here. This is just for fun,” he said, gesturing in front of us, where all across the field people were constructing their own little piles of rocks.

  “I would like to respectfully disagree, man. Everyone here is marking their own path.”

  He nodded. “True.”

  So, we went and gathered our stones and then chose a spot in the field. Óskar isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, and he appears to be able to carry ten times his weight in rocks, like some sort of human/ant hybrid.

  It sounds kind of stupid, but building this little pyramid of rocks with him was really soothing. Like our quiet mornings together at the breakfast buffet, I found myself caught up in Óskar’s personal bubble of calm. I tried not to overthink, just let him lead the way. I figured we were just going to stack some shit together and leave—like, how could we possibly make our stack of rocks look different from a thousand other stacks of rocks?

  But I forgot I was traveling with an expert-level Jenga player. Our cairn did look like all the others—until Óskar worked his magic. He circled the cairn, carefully pulling out stones here and there. And by the time he was done, it wasn’t a messy pile, but this intricate swirling thing. It was mathematical, intense. Like his guitar solos. Or a DNA strand.

  It was beautiful.

  And before I could even photograph it, some bratty little kids stormed through and knocked it over. I screamed at them for being shitheads, but I don’t think they understood English.

  “Sorry, Óskar.”

  “Not a problem. It wasn’t meant to last.”

  And then we hiked around the park for a little bit. The cool thing is that there’s this big blue-green lake and you can also see where the continental plates have shifted, leaving a huge gap. That was actually the only time I stopped to photograph your boots today.

  We stopped for lunch at a picnic area, and I made us some quesadillas, which Óskar seemed to really enjoy. I asked him how he liked the pasta I made the other night, and he frowned and told me Jack ate it all before he got home from work. That asshole.

  While we were there, I made use of the free Wi-Fi and uploaded that picture of your boots next to the continental drift.

  Allow me, for a moment, I wrote, to take us back to third grade science class. This is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the place where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are slowly, slowly tearing apart. It sounds so destructive, doesn’t it? Like the world could just keep spreading and eventually it’ll just crack in half and bleed out into the universe. But the good news is that it doesn’t actually work like that. When the earth splits, lava rises and cools, creating new land where there wasn’t any before. It heals as it tears. I think humans do that, too. So, anyway, this is the tenth photo I’ve taken of Vivian’s boots, and it might be my last for a little while. I do want to keep connecting and keep exploring this new scar tissue. You might be seeing some pics of my camping trip soon, or maybe some radio silence for a while. But know that I’ll be around and scoping out the hashtag when I can. Sincerely, your favorite molten rock lava boy, Miles.

  Next we drove to Geysir, the geyser for which all others are named. It’s inactive now, but there’s another one nearby called Strokkur that goes off every ten minutes or so. I snapped a few photos and tried to convince Óskar to lie down and let me frame a picture making it look like the geyser was shooting out of his mouth—but he was not down for that shit.

  “Are you ever going to let me take a picture of you?” I asked. Other than the one I snuck of him walking away from me on our beer run, I don’t have a single photo of Óskar.

  “I’m not scenery,” he said. “Not some pretty landscape for you to sell or show off to your friends.”

  The tone of his voice surprised me. He’d never snapped at me like that. I put the lens cap back on my camera and walked toward him. Behind him, the geyser went off, speckling both of us with mist.

  “Sorry.” He put his hand up, and at first he seemed to be blocking me from giving him a hug. But his fingertips grazed my shoulder and he leaned into me. “That should not have been directed at you.”

  I just grabbed him and told him it was all right, but really I was thinking of places to dump a body. Fucking Jack, man.

  The third thing on the Golden Circle is Gullfoss, which I liked the best. It’s these enormous falls. You can get really close, and the spray settles down over you, casting rainbows all over the place. Óskar told me that, in the nineteenth century, Gullfoss was set to be turned into a power plant, but this lady walked, like, seventy miles and threatened to throw herself over the edge in protest. And she won—they canceled the plans for the power plant.

  I like stories like that.

  It seemed like we’d done enough sightseeing for the day. We drove to the nearest campground and started setting up. I guess tomorrow we’re going to drive along t
he south coast. I already saw some of it when I went on that tour, but I’m looking forward to letting Óskar show me around.

  I’m also looking forward to sleeping next to him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Miles Away to Vivian Girl

  June 19 5:54 PM

  Yesterday morning when I woke up, rain was beating down on the tent, dripping down the wall on Óskar’s side. And he was gone. I groaned to myself, feeling so stupid and lonely again. Then I saw his backpack, and all that fear and paranoia slithered back up my spine to wherever it normally hides.

  Óskar showed up a few minutes later, shaking droplets off the hood of his raincoat. “Gódan daginn.”

  I smiled because he’d never spoken to me in Icelandic before. “Hey.”

  He’d gone to the campground showers to get cleaned up and change, so I headed out to do the same. When I got back, he’d already disassembled the tent and loaded it up in the car. I could see that blond head of his bobbing in the driver’s seat, giant headphones strapped to his ears. I slid into the passenger side and thanked him for packing up.

  “No problem. I have a raincoat, and you don’t.”

  “I wouldn’t have melted,” I said.

  “Can I drive today?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” I started chewing on the ends of that paracord bracelet you made me two years ago at Camp. The one with the little sloth bead. You said it was my merit badge for being the laziest counselor at Camp. And then I threw my dream catcher like a Frisbee and accidentally hit Jade in the temple. And thus began the Great Craft War of ’13. Those were the days.

  Óskar was eating these peanut butter sandwich cookies I’d bought. He offered me the open package, and I scooped a few up. We sat there in silence for a bit, just stuffing our faces with junk food and watching the rain pelt down. The blurry, marbled windows gave me that same alone-in-public feeling as the day we’d almost kissed in the concert hall. But none of those romantic feels were there this time, just melancholy. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get that kiss I’d been wanting.

  When he was done eating, Óskar pulled his headphones down and started the car.

  I reached for the stereo knob, turning the radio down to a murmur so I could talk to him. “How are you feeling today?”

  “Internally directionless.” Eeenternalleh Di-Rrrectionleees.

  “Story of my life.”

  “Outwardly, though,” he continued, “I have a plan. I was thinking that—if you do not mind—that since it is raining, maybe we could visit my family today? I need to speak with Karl.”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “I’m sorry—always involving you in such personal things. It’s awkward.”

  “Oh, like I don’t do the same thing to you!” I laughed. “It’s easier sometimes, isn’t it? To go through shit with someone you don’t really know? I mean, it’s like . . . the people who supposedly know you sort of unconsciously put all these expectations on you, and you find yourself behaving in accordance with that. But, like, in the presence of a stranger, you set your own expectations, you know? You become a truer version of yourself, maybe? Or at least get a little bit closer to the person you subconsciously want to be.”

  He blinked at me a couple times, then went back to watching the road. His mouth curved up just the tiniest bit.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I’m rambling.”

  “I like it. I like the way you don’t sanitize your words for me.” He told me that people staying at the hotel tended to try to dumb stuff down for him, assuming he couldn’t understand English well. I’d never even thought of that before—how he must have to concentrate to decode my babble from English to Icelandic, and vice versa for his replies. All that blinking he does is probably from moments lost in translation. He’s been doing all the work in these conversations of ours. I wondered what it’d have been like if we’d been born into the same native language.

  I found myself getting a little antsy when we passed the turnoff for that pool where I got some sense knocked into me. It already seemed like a million years ago; the bruise on my face is just a slightly darkened smudge.

  “Can we try something?” I asked, and without waiting for his reply, I plucked his hand off the steering wheel and wove my fingers through his.

  Óskar scowled at me. But he definitely didn’t let go.

  The thing I keep hearing about Icelanders and dating is basically that they don’t do it. Supposedly they just get drunk and screw around on Friday nights, and if, perhaps, you find yourself in the same person’s bed a few weekends in a row, the two of you might start to hang out together during sober daylight hours. And if that goes okay, then maybe you end up as a couple. There’s a carefree casualness about it, but, personally, I’m a fucking sucker for a smidge of romance.

  And since Óskar’s spent the past six years being pampered by Handsome McBritishPants, then I figured he might like that sort of thing, too.

  Sexual tension is, like, the best/worst thing in existence, right? I rubbed my thumb across his palm and examined his fingertips. “Yep, these are some nice phalanges. Excellently shaped metacarpals, might I add?”

  Then he smiled his dorky smile, and we drove the rest of the way to his family’s house with our hands resting in my lap.

  “Would you mind going to the door and asking Karl to meet me in the barn? Normally I call, but I abandoned my phone.”

  “Uh, sure.” I disentangled my hand and dashed up to the house in the rain.

  Óskar’s dad answered the door. It’s hard to believe that crumpled old man spawned the Icelandic Ken doll I’d left in the car. Their eyes are the same, though, and Óskar’s dad is equally petite.

  Like me, he was still a little bruised-up around the eyes.

  He said something to me in Icelandic, and I said, “I don’t speak Icelandic,” and then he said something else in Icelandic.

  “Karl,” I said. “I’m looking for Karl.” I said Karl American-style.

  “Khaaruhl?” All right, so now we know where Óskar gets his pronunciation pickiness from.

  I waited in the entryway while Óskar’s dad went to get his eldest son.

  “Hi, uh. I’m supposed to pass along the message that your brother is waiting in the barn,” I told Karl when he showed up and said hello. I don’t think he remembered me from the five minutes he’d seen me last week.

  “Brother?” I heard their dad say in the background. Or probably he said it in Icelandic—bródir. “Óskar?”

  “Tell him to come in the house,” Karl whispered. “Pabbi”—another word I had to Google (Dad)—“has been asking for him.”

  “Are you sure it’s safe?” I asked.

  And then Karl got this look on his face like he realized who I was. “It is safe. He isn’t like that all the time.”

  So I went all the way to the barn and told Óskar his dad was having a good day, and Óskar goes, “But I need to speak to Karl alone.” So then I had to go back to the house (at least Óskar gave me his raincoat that time) and ask Karl again to go to the barn. It felt like playground gossiping.

  So, anyway, Karl finally went to the barn, and I think Óskar told him that he broke up with Jack (I definitely heard a Yak in there), and Karl just grabbed him and hugged him for the longest time. I left them to talk, and wandered toward the other end of the barn where some sheep were chilling in their stalls. Some of them were friendly and let me pet them, but others skittered away.

  “Do you eat them?” I asked when Óskar showed up and leaned against one of the gates. Karl must have gone back into the house.

  “The sheep? They are mostly for wool, but we do eat them occasionally,” he said. “Why? Are you going to argue about it?”

  “Just curious.”

  “I’m going to visit my father. Do you want to come inside?”

  “That depends. Is your family going to want me to eat a little baby lamb? And, on a scale of one to ten, how rude am I to turn it down?”

  “About an eight. But why do you car
e about offending these people you’ll never see again?”

  I shrugged. But really I was thinking, I like you, dummy! I don’t wanna piss your family off. He’s right, though. This whole thing with him is futile, but I want it, nevertheless. A week, an hour. Whatever time with him I can get.

  “Come on. I’ll make sure they know you don’t eat little baby lambs.”

  It was barely sprinkling then, so I gave him his raincoat back. We stood there for a second in the doorway of the barn. It’s weird, isn’t it? I think of Óskar as this classy European guy—way more cultured than me—but really he’s a little farm boy from the south. That’s precious.

  “Everything go okay with your brother?”

  “I told him I want to put Pabbi in a home. I know it’s wrong, that I should have more respect for the man who raised me, but that person is gone most of the time. I want Bryndis to be safe, and I want to come home.”

  I could relate. To all of it, in a weird way. “What’d Karl say?”

  “That we’d talk about it. For now, he’s giving me the keys to Mamma’s summer home. Little place just off the water in the Westfjords. No electricity, but there is hot water and a gas stove. I will survive there until winter comes.”

  He also said that Björk has arrangements to stay with a friend. Apparently, these when-Óskar-finally-gets-the-balls-to-ditch-Jack plans have been in place for a long time.

  When we went into the house, Óskar went into the living room and his dad gave him an even bigger bear hug than Karl had. Bryndis showed up and pulled me into the kitchen. “Let’s give them some time alone.”

  Bryndis made some coffee, and she, Karl, and I sat at the kitchen table and chatted. Both of them are really cool. Karl’s a computer nerd who kinda got tossed into taking over the farm after their dad started to go downhill. Bryndis is the animal lover, though. After she finishes school, she wants to take Karl’s place, and he’ll go back to developing software.