American by Day

by Derek B. Miller

That night, as Sigrid and her sunburn recline on the cool sofa across from the television, her father calls. It is not scheduled but it is not unexpected.

  Sigrid puts the television on mute and watches an American police car with poor handling chase another car with poor handling though an urban environment, endangering the lives of hundreds.

  “Hi, pappa.”

  “You didn’t call me with the results of the report.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I take it the findings were favorable.”

  Sigrid switches ears. “Why?”

  “Because I know you. You wouldn’t have shot a man unless you thought it was necessary.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have thought it necessary. That’s the part the police department is ignoring.”

  “You made a choice, not a mistake, in a situation where any reasonable person would have experienced danger. You’re free to return to work?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come home instead,” he offers. “We’d be happy to have you.”

  “We?”

  “Me and Ferdinand.”

  “Who’s Ferdinand?”

  “The duck. I could have sworn you’d met.”

  On Monday morning Sigrid reports to the office convinced that her hair still smells like her compatriots’ oversexed flesh, their barbecued pork, and the tropical suntan lotion that no one needs this far north. As she enters the building she nods to the smokers by the door, their faces turned toward the sun like so many sunflowers past their prime.

  Inside, the light is weaker and the air colder. She passes through the halls of the building that make the days bleed into each other by design. In uniform, she seats herself outside her commanding officer’s door. At precisely 9:15, and on schedule, he opens it and waves her in.

  Sigrid stands to adjust her tie but does not step forward into his office. She wants to avoid signaling that this might be a long conversation. “I’m taking leave,” she says immediately.

  “You don’t have to,” her CO says, standing with his hand on the door lever. “You’re cleared. The report was definitive. You rescued the hostages and took out a criminal network. You might even be up for a medal.”

  “I’m going to take leave.”

  He nods as though he understands something, though Sigrid can’t imagine what that might be. “There’s counseling,” he says.

  “I’m going home.”

  “You won’t mope around your apartment, I hope.”

  “My father has a farm.”

  “How long will you go on leave?”

  “Until I’m back.”

  Home

  She drives north to Hedmark with one suitcase. There is traffic on the E6 as she leaves the city, but it thins out and she settles into the drive, following signs for Trondheim.

  The farther one travels by car from Oslo into what Sigrid thinks of as Norway—Oslo not being a part of it—there are fewer speed cameras. She always feels that as the speed cameras disappear so too does the state and its central control. Her breathing becomes freer, the air a little sweeter, and the tension in her shoulders releases. When she watches American Westerns she wonders if this was how they felt with their horses, six-shooters, and the view of the horizon.

  Her father likes to insist that the cameras are not really speed cameras at all but part of a complex troll-detection grid set up around Norway’s most populated areas. From the bar atop the SAS Radisson in the center of Oslo, where she has on occasion had a drink, this theory might seem preposterous, but out here, on the highway, there is no denying that the farther she leaves the city behind, the more she feels the essence of the woods, the weight of the shadows, and the flow of a million small waterfalls that spill from cracks in the plunging fjords.

  When traveling south into Roman Europe on vacation, Sigrid feels antiquity. But as she journeys north into Norway’s forests, what she feels is ancientness.

  Maybe there are trolls.

  There were never any trolls in the woods behind the house in 1973 when she was five and Marcus eleven. There was, however, a graveyard by the small church adjacent to their property. That is where their mother, Astrid Ødegård, was buried that year. Sigrid can only remember the four of them as a perfect family. Her earliest memories are of two enormous horses at the farmhouse, three stuffed animals she used to play with—a blue dragon, a pink one, and a panda bear—and her parents sitting in the living room reading at night by a fire. She can smell kanelboller.

  The memories are mismatched, separated by time, and unlikely to be reliable. Sigrid has never tried to concoct a story to connect them or question what feels most authentic about them. What is important, she has always believed, is how the memories make her feel. And they make her feel happy. The heart is one of the few places where facts and truth may be separable.

  When her mother died, though, that happiness ended. The family broke apart. Marcus was angry at his father for his mother’s death and became—in Sigrid’s view—irrationally unwavering in his certainty that it was Morten’s fault and then, later, his own. Neither made sense to her. The consequence of Marcus’s anger was that their daily life—getting him off to school, doing his homework, managing their activities, surviving the intensity of weekends—became impossible.

  And yet, this is not how she remembers her brother. Her enduring memory, her enduring feelings, are of how much she loved him. How much fun he was. How they were inseparable. How she would abuse him and make him cry and he would take it because there was no meanness to him, no revenge, no cruelty.

  Morten explained to Sigrid, much later, that the year after Astrid died proved to him that Marcus was not going to forgive and was not going to heal unless a new approach was taken. Morten was devastated by his inability to turn the situation around while grieving for his wife and trying to be a support to little Sigrid. Morten ultimately succumbed to the recommendations of doctors and extended family that life would be better for everyone if Marcus moved in with Astrid’s sister Ingeborg, who lived in a village by the Hardangerfjorden and ran an apple farm with her husband, Jakob. They were childless, loved Marcus very much, and were desperate to help.

  Astrid had died of cancer. When Sigrid became a police officer she checked the death certificate and even asked for the medical records. She had not been suspicious, but her access to the files made them impossible to avoid. They were as expected and exactly as her father had explained. What was not in those records but was true nevertheless was that her parents had loved each other. She learned this from the stories of neighbors and the comforting words of family and friends whose memories never conflicted. Her feelings, she knew, were not a lie. Her memories were youthful and incomplete but they were not wrong. So why Marcus blamed Morten and himself for Astrid’s death was never clear, even though she asked, and even pressed him, as they grew up.

  The family would reunite on holidays and vacations, but Marcus never reconciled with Morten. Not entirely. Sigrid, however, adored her father, and so the difference in her brother’s stance toward him resulted in an emotional breakwater that kept the strongest emotions—good ones and bad—from reaching either of them. She tried, as they grew, to replenish what they had had, but she and her brother had irreconcilable feelings about their childhoods. It was a hard foundation for an adult relationship.

  When Marcus moved out Sigrid had her father mostly to herself from the age of six to eighteen, when she left for the university. And until recently, she has mostly had him to herself in her adulthood, as he never remarried and she never married at all. They keep each other company. Not that he was alone. He also had his library, of course. After Astrid died he filled the void of words unspoken with the new silence of books unread.

  He built the library in the dining room after Marcus moved out. The urban hip would say he “repurposed” the room but Morten would have scoffed at the inaccuracy, as the room evidently hadn’t been serving any purpose at all.

  Morten lucked upon a small municipal library in Elve
rum that was refurbishing and therefore dispensing with their gorgeous oak bookshelves at a very reasonable take-them-away-please price. He paid a few young men in town a fair wage to collect the shelves and directed the boys to place the units so they covered all walls but the windows. There was enough space remaining to place two of the long shelves in the center of the room, thereby creating “stacks” around a long table between them, which he and Sigrid used for studying. They spent as much time in there, together, as they did in the adjacent kitchen.

  It was, perhaps, an affectation, but her father had placed a bronze-finished green banker’s lamp on the table; it warmed that already darkened wood and pushed away the hurried, the ephemeral, and the radical notions that come from direct sunlight. When Sigrid moved out and went to the Big City to study at the police academy, Morten placed an easy chair in the corner of the room too, which was as good for the nap as for the read itself. This room became his primary sanctuary.

  She had argued with him, many times, to be more social, but he scoffed at her, saying that she didn’t understand the term. Time alone, he explained, need not be wasted or lonely. Yes, there are men who turn inward and reclusive when their wife dies and children move off. Depression and alcoholism are common. Norway is not alone in this regard, he said, though it has perfected the art.

  He is not a candidate for this, he said. She shouldn’t worry.

  “We’re only a three-hour drive away from each other in a country that is twenty-five hundred kilometers long,” he’d said to her. “Marcus is only five hours away. This is nothing. And although you have moved out, you haven’t really moved away. We talk almost every day. I’m not lonely. And if I become lonely . . .” he’d said, “I’ll get a pet.”

  For the twenty intervening years Sigrid kept herself convinced that her father was happy enough. Now, unhappy herself, her optics have changed. She cannot tell whether she is seeing him more clearly through this new understanding or whether she’s projecting her feelings onto him. Either way, she has no place being a police investigator right now.

  Early evening, Sigrid rolls her car across the packed earth of the farm’s driveway. The last time she was home the hills were covered in snow between her front yard and the Arctic. Now everything is green. The sun is still high. Night will not properly come. Dusk, at this time of year, only merges with the dawn.

  Sigrid heaves the suitcase from the car and trudges across the driveway, dragging it into the hall. She parks it by the empty umbrella stand with its upturned mouth gaping like a carp’s.

  Her father is in the kitchen and he does not interrupt his task to welcome her. He is adjusting a hinge on the back door that opens to the barnyard with its tractor and the few remaining animals. He is on his knees, which rest on a neatly folded towel. He wears a flannel shirt and old jeans with the washed patina that young people covet. His pharmacy-bought reading glasses perch on the end of his nose and he studies the hinge as if it’s an ancient text.

  Morten is sixty-nine. His arms look thin to her. She watches him work.

  “Planning to stay for a while, I take it,” he says, not looking up.

  “What makes you think so?”

  “The sound of your suitcase being dragged like a body across the pebbles.”

  “It might do both of us some good.”

  Morten sits back for a moment to study his handiwork.

  “I’m using a lubricant to loosen the joint because it squeaks, but I’ve applied too much, and one of the defining characteristics of lubricant is its ability to attract grit, which creates friction, which creates the very problem I’m trying to solve, and that makes the entire process too ironic to tolerate. It’s this sort of thing, at a grander scale, that will eventually cause the universe to collapse back in on itself.”

  “How about a napkin?” Sigrid says, and collects one from the kitchen table and hands it to her father.

  He takes the napkin and cleans the hinge, saving the world.

  “That was close,” she says.

  Sigrid removes a bottle of Farris mineral water from her bag. She unscrews the blue top and pulls heavily. Her father scowls. “We have the finest water on the earth flowing through the taps. Why are you paying for that?”

  “Convenience.”

  “Save the bottle, then. Fill it with real water.”

  “It came with water of its own. I wasn’t going to dump it out on principle.”

  “What did you bring me?” he asks, rolling off his knees and joining her at the table. He rests a hand casually across his knee and for a moment he looks younger and strong.

  “In the car. Supplies from civilization.”

  “Is that what we’re calling Oslo these days?”

  “You mentioned on the phone something about a duck. Where’s the duck?”

  “Doing duck things. I don’t pry.”

  “Is it a pet?”

  “A pet?”

  “You once said . . .”

  “What?”

  “Forget it.”

  Sigrid takes two cans of pale ale from the refrigerator and pours them into glasses while her father places dark bread, cheese, and sausage on the table.

  Sigrid looks at the distant hills across the farmland, their tops shorn by time as with everything old. She had forgotten how good silence can sound in the company of others.

  “It’s good to be home,” she says as she takes her place at the table across from her father. “I feel like I could stay forever.”

  “That’s too bad,” her father says, after taking a long pull on his beer, “because you can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you have to go to America tomorrow. Late afternoon.”

  Sigrid does not understand the joke but laughs anyway. “Why would I do that?”

  “Because your brother is missing. And you’re going to find him.”

  Que Sera, Sera

  The beer is not enough, so her father places a bottle of aquavit on the table between two small decorative glasses that have served the same purpose for a century.

  “Aquavit is for Christmas,” Sigrid objects.

  “It’s also for Christmas,” he says, pouring a glass for each of them.

  “Skål,” Sigrid says.

  “Skål.”

  They each drink the full measure.

  After a pause Sigrid says, “Fine. Out with it.”

  “As I said, Marcus is missing.”

  “He’s in America teaching a couple of university courses as an adjunct on conservation or something. You’ve been corresponding.”

  “That’s right,” Morten says.

  Letter writing is an old-fashioned and obsolete form of communication they both prefer, he explains. Letters on paper are penned deliberately and read without interruption. Also, there is a timeless pleasure in walking to the mailbox in anticipation. The Romans did this, he says.

  “And?” she asks, not yet interested.

  “A slow and deliberate conversation was good for us.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “I didn’t like something in the tone of his last letter,” Morten says. “And they stopped coming after that.”

  “That’s the mail for you,” Sigrid says, pouring them each another drink. “I’m assuming you’ve called him.”

  “His last letter was sent a week ago,” says Morten. “I received it only three days later. I called immediately. No answer on his home phone and his mobile has been disconnected. I called the university but he doesn’t teach during the summer, so they don’t know anything. I tried the hospitals, too. Nothing.”

  “And the police?”

  “I called you.”

  “Again . . . not what I meant.”

  “I want you to talk to the police. You’ll know what to say.”

  “You’re a father concerned for his son. You provide his name and address and last working number. You explain where he might go and . . .”

  Morten shifts in his chair.

 
“What?” she asks.

  “I want you two to see each other.”

  “Why?”

  Sigrid and her father are close, but long speeches and discussions are typically rare. The simple pleasure of company has served as a worthy substitute for the words not spoken. Sometimes, though, words help.

  “Pappa . . . why?”

  “For a while it felt like Marcus was going to come home.”

  “That’s wishful thinking, pappa. You’ve been saying that since he moved in with Aunt Ingeborg.”

  Morten stands and leaves the room, returning soon after with a bundle of letters. He removes them from a shoebox that bears the name of a company long since out of business.

  Her father places the small stack of white envelopes with their exotic American stamps in the center of the table. There are scenic vistas, national park scenes, famous citizens, and ducks.

  “Ducks,” she says.

  “Ducks are universal,” says Morten, untying the bundle. He takes the letter from the bottom of the pile and the letter from the top and places them on the table, facing Sigrid. Side by side they are identical aside from the stamps themselves and the dates they were franked by the U.S. Postal Service. They have the same addresses, to and from. The same handwriting.

  Morten taps the oldest letter but does not open it.

  “Seven months ago he wrote to me. I was surprised. I was worried when I found it in my mailbox. I assumed—I feared—it would contain startling news of some kind.”

  “Like what?”

  “Everything a parent worries about. An injury. A financial crisis. An unwanted pregnancy or child. A wanted one that something happened to. I came in and read the letter and I was indeed startled, but only because of how unexpected it was. He seemed happy. He had taken the position at the university—this ‘adjunct’ position you mentioned—and even though it lacked prestige or payment and any other obvious career path, he was putting that old master’s degree to use, as well as some thirty years of professional experience in agriculture. There was little personal in the letter, per se, nothing emotional, nothing too confessional, but it opened the door for casual conversation. And there was a mention of a woman’s presence in his life. Lydia. He didn’t say much. Only mentioned weekend trips to interesting spots. He shared some vivid memories of hiking and rock climbing. Nothing personal, though. Nothing about her. Nevertheless. It was a letter written by a fully living person. I was . . . delighted.”