On the E6 they zip along pleasantly at eighty-five kilometers per hour and at one point Morten actually reaches out his hand and places it on Sigrid’s thigh and smiles at her.
Sigrid looks at his hand and his smiling face and assures herself that he is OK and not having a stroke or asking for help. Uncertain of what is happening, however, she manufactures a smile and pats his hand a few times, hoping that will make it go away, but it only seems to make him happier.
Morten can see Marcus in his rearview mirror.
“How do you feel?” Morten asks.
“Like a child again,” Marcus says.
“There was a time when you were very happy as a child.”
“I don’t remember,” Marcus says.
“I do.”
Morten tunes the stereo to NRK Klassisk and fills the car with Ravel.
“Some things have changed since you’ve been gone,” Morten says, turning into the hills.
“I figured,” Marcus says.
“The troll population has surged. They’re issuing hunting permits.”
“Pappa, he’s not in the mood,” Sigrid says.
Marcus is returned to Norway through the language coming through the radio. The temper of the presenters is as lighthearted as their American DJ counterparts, but the production is not as polished, carefully timed, or aggressively commercial. In this way it is comforting. But they show no reverence for the music. In the hourlong drive to their house they pass through two news cycles. Each time, the news presenters switch the music off on the hour no matter what piece is playing. A woman named Rachel Podger was playing Bach’s Sonata no. 1 in B Minor. Bach’s music, passing through her violin, made the world a vivid and memorable place; layered and more possible than it had been only moments earlier, both taking Marcus away from the hills of Norway and yet planting him more firmly in the moment. This is what they end with the casual brutality of a fishmonger wielding a cleaver.
On comes the news. The NRK news sounds authoritative and calming. Norway listens—as Americans once listened in the 1950s—to one voice. And it both unites them and deceives them in equal measures, but the deception is delicious and the unity appreciated.
Outside, on the road, other cars let them merge.
They drive the speed limit and think nothing of it.
In town, on the way to the farm, almost everyone they pass in the street waves to them. They know Morten; they know his car.
Their waves are not grand swings of the arm as if to flag down a spouse or encourage a helicopter to land. They are short and to the point. There is a nod, or an upturned head, an open palm. Marcus is returning to the land of his birth and these are the people who have buried the last five generations of his family. He had forgotten they existed. It feels as though they have not forgotten him.
The driveway to the farm is still gravel and the pebbles pop as the Subaru makes for its port. The sky is as blue as a daydream. The farmhouse is red and the grass around it is still green and all of this surprises Marcus because he thought time would have faded all the colors.
“I stocked up the refrigerator yesterday,” Morten says to his children, leaving their suitcases in the front hall. “I don’t know what you’re eating these days but I took a few guesses beyond the staples. I started with the four Norwegian food groups of brown cheese, waffles, hot dogs, and beer. I then bought a few frozen pizzas, which I remember you kids eating. I also bought some fruit and vegetables, salmon, pasta, juices, and a chicken we can roast in case your tastes have evolved. Marcus, your bedroom remains unchanged and I asked Agatha to dust it when she was here yesterday.”
In America, Marcus did not have a picture of his mother. He did, however, have an excellent memory of her. He also saw her face in his own. Her hair was blond like his. Her eyes were blue and dark like his own. Her neck was long and graceful like Sigrid’s, and she had excellent posture and graceful limbs.
Piano fingers.
She had them too.
There are no pictures of her here, either. There never were. His father was never one for family photos on the walls. He has always preferred landscape art; the occasional Ansel Adams–inspired black-and-white of a forest or a fjord, the bucolic countryside, the flea market art from estates. None has moved from the spots where he left them. The farmhouse is preserved. His father either didn’t want to change anything after Astrid died or didn’t know how to.
Change things into what?
For all the philosophy and verbiage, the growth and the pain, Marcus stands in the hallway by the kitchen and realizes that his life has never quite matured beyond these rooms.
Marcus opens the downstairs bathroom and looks at the vent over the toilet.
From inside that vent he heard a story. His mother and father were speaking. He listens carefully. There is only a whisper of air.
Marcus leaves and closes the door too quickly and as he does the wineglasses in the cupboard rattle as the swinging door creates a pocket of air that swells the entire house.
The family eats dinner together at home that first night. They talk about the farm. Marcus asks about the financials. Morten explains how the farm is working as much as it needs to and the expenses are low and his pension is coming in, so he has no trouble making a living wage that will ensure a stable retirement. He could probably stop now but . . . why bother?
To Marcus, Sigrid sits at the table like an adult—not a large child, which is how he feels. She has been here during the intervening years and has grown into her place. She eats her salmon and potatoes like a forty-year-old adult. Marcus is still eleven.
In his bedroom, after dinner, Marcus lies on the freshly laundered sheets he slept in as a child. Sigrid’s room, next door, was once decorated with rock posters and pop stars. No more. She grew in hers. His remained static. The only decoration on the wall is a poster of a U.S. Navy precision flying team called the Blue Angels. On the poster the pilots stand on the tarmac, straight as pines, beside their F-4 Phantom aircrafts. It is 1967. Their uniforms are yellow and blue. After his mother died he would stare at them. He’d imagine his own hand on the flight controls, watching the instruments and picturing the other men flying around him in perfect formation against a cobalt sky. They were high above the earth, working in unison, speaking only when necessary. They counted off the beats before a turn, completing a fleur de lis, leaving behind them white pillars of smoke as they rose ever higher into the sky. In 1973—the year Astrid died—the Blue Angels suffered a midair collision, killing two pilots and a crew chief. But Marcus did not know this. To him, everyone in the poster was immortal.
Lying there, Marcus decides it is time to take it down.
They remain on the farm, leaving only for provisions. Their daily routine involves more sleep than Marcus might have expected—part of which he attributes to jet lag. Conversation among them is calibrated to avoid upset. All three prefer reading to TV or films. They drink after dark and go to bed early. They do not “catch up” the way Americans do. They are present with one another again.
The market is far enough away to require the car and usually it is Sigrid who does the shopping, leaving the men alone. Marcus isn’t sure how much Sigrid has told their father about the events in America, and so far Morten isn’t asking, but Marcus assumes he knows most of it. Sigrid would have prepped him somehow. But the uncertainty, on this occasion, is what makes their relationship tolerable.
The days are bright and long but not warm. Not in the way New York is warm now. There, in the woods, the days pull moisture from the trees and earth. The air is so saturated it chokes you, and the only remedy is to plunge yourself into a lake and wash the sweat from your skin with the glacier water that collects in the Catskills. He liked to swim under the water there until his lungs begged for mercy; he’d resurface slowly and deliberately and draw in the cool air that hovers an inch above the surface. He’d drink it in, blue and nourishing.
He and Lydia camped one weekend. Marcus emerged from Lower Saranac L
ake feeling like a Roman god, and he wrapped himself in a thick terrycloth robe. She had smiled at him as she lay there smelling like coconut.
Today, in Hedmark, the day is dry and the light is crisp. Summers here are brief, but they promise a perfection of balance that exists nowhere else. A Scandinavian summer day is a miracle; dry and endless. Full of woodland scents and optimism. Not a bug, not a mosquito. Beneath it, like a melody, is a subtle sense of melancholy because everyone knows it won’t last. So they breathe it in and relish it and hold on with the knowledge that they can’t.
As kids, he and Sigrid would run to the river every day through woods that were wild and unowned and uninhabited and they would dip their toes in and dare each other to go farther.
He would dive in and the water would hit his chest and constrict the muscles and force the air out, making it impossible to inhale. You could drown in open air, the river was so cold.
Every Norwegian child knows this feeling. Every child knows the feeling will pass.
“Is it warm enough yet?” he’d yell. Because Sigrid was always the first one in the water.
Downstairs, in the kitchen, Sigrid is fixing herself a snack of dark brown bread, herring, and sour cream. After she settles at the table with her food, Marcus silently shuffles into the kitchen and begins to rummage around in the drawer to the right of the sink.
He feels her watching.
“Have you talked with your boyfriend since you’ve been back?” he asks, his back to her.
“What makes you think Irv is my boyfriend?”
“I watched you say goodbye to him at the airport.”
“Hmm.”
“How’s that going to work?”
“It doesn’t have to work,” she says, taking a bite.
Screwdrivers. Tape. Stamps. Swedish coins no one needs. A calculator from the eighties. Glue. A red balloon. Layers of junk upon junk. He pushes it around and it makes a grinding noise.
“So it’s over, whatever it was?” he asks.
“Irv may have mentioned something about vacation time owed to him. Frequent flier points. You’re looking for batteries, aren’t you. For those old American flashlights.”
“How did you know?”
“I saw you playing with one.”
“I want to get them working and I can’t think of why.”
“We used to explore with those.”
“Yes,” he says.
“You’re ready.”
“For what?”
“Exploring.”
“I’m just getting the flashlights working.”
“I’ll come with you when it’s dark enough.”
“Where?”
“We’ll take a walk,” she says. “See if we remember our secret code. Do you remember it?”
“I haven’t thought about it since visiting here in 1977.”
“Me either,” says Sigrid.
At ten o’clock, when they are both tired and would normally be in bed, Sigrid and Marcus leave the farm behind and walk into the forest. Marcus pushes the small signal button located above the switch and tests the light. Sigrid, twenty meters away through the trees, flashes back, and they diverge in the wood on two separate paths. The moon is up but the sky is not dark. Even now the horizon is a palette of pastels. They walk softly to hide from each other—from the enemy forces, from the aliens, from the Nazis—and succeed in disappearing into a memory.
Marcus breaks the moment with an encrypted message flashed from his hidden position inside a bush. She reads it:
Put the dog in the bucket and don’t tell the monkey.
One of them does not remember the code.
Sigrid is leading them in a direction that Marcus does not quite remember.
Marcus abandons his post with the Resistance and connects with Sigrid, who leads them through a thicket he vaguely remembers. At the end of the path there is a simple white church and Marcus immediately realizes where Sigrid has led him. What surprises him, though, is that his father is waiting by his mother’s gravestone with his hands in his pockets and his pipe in his mouth.
“I’ve been ambushed,” Marcus says, turning off his flashlight and clipping it to his belt.
“Sigrid told me everything, Marcus.”
“Told you what?” he says.
“About what you heard when you were eleven years old that caused you to fall off the toilet you’d been standing on to overhear our conversation. Which you shouldn’t have done.”
“You’re going to say I misunderstood.”
“No. You didn’t.”
The moon is a sliver of white above the steeple. From where Marcus stands, it looks like a replacement for a missing cross.
“You heard correctly and I’m sorry. But you still don’t understand. She did say that. And we did have that conversation. We even considered it. But in the end, she didn’t do it, Marcus. She died in her sleep months, months later. You have it backwards. You didn’t kill your mother, Marcus. Your silent fear didn’t convince her to kill herself to save you. You’re the one who saved her. We had that conversation, but we never returned to it because of you. You and your little broken arm. You needed us both for as long as you could have us. It struck us as obvious after that. There was no leaving you. Every day she lived after that was a blessing that you gave to her and to all of us. But in return—if I understand correctly from Sigrid—you were waiting for something to happen that wasn’t going to happen precisely because you prevented it, if it was ever going to happen in the first place. People say dark things in the dark of their rooms. Sometimes the talking helps. But I assure you it never came up in conversation again. I can never explain to you how sorry I am for what you went through. But I never knew.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Morten placed his hand on his wife’s gravestone. “I promise you.”
“You’re asking me to see my entire life as a lie. My entire life as a mistake. My entire life has been lived in the cloak of a misperception?”
“A misunderstanding.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I think you do. I think you need to make room in your heart for how much your mother loved you and how much I did too. You were angry at her for dying and me for letting it happen. But you blamed yourself. Your letter about Lydia proved that. It is my opinion that your guilt has prevented you from mourning. It may have also prevented you from fully living. If you can accept what you’re hearing, you might be able to come home again. I would like you to come home again, Marcus. I miss you.”
Marcus reads his mother’s name and the dates on the stone.
“I can’t stay here alone,” Marcus says to Sigrid.
“I’m staying for a while.” Turning to her father, she says, “I’m thinking I might resign from the police force.”
“You don’t want to fight crime anymore?”
“Criminal investigation is about solving riddles from the past when the damage is done, and it is already too late,” Sigrid says, looking at Marcus. “What I saw in America made me want to get ahead of things rather than show up behind them. Maybe step into the fray. See things from another perspective. Make things better.”
Morten smiles at her. “That’s the spirit.”
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Lauren Wein and Pilar Garcia-Brown at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for their editorial assistance, ideas, and good humor. Thanks to Alison Kerr Miller, and also the entire team at HMH including the late Carla Gray, who believed in my writing. Thanks to Bill Scott-Kerr and the Transworld team at Penguin Random House, who embraced this book with open arms and hearts. Thanks, as always, to my UK agent, Rebecca Carter, for her uncompromising judgment and professional guidance, and also my American agent, PJ Mark, for his support and outstanding (or possibly just similar) sense of humor. Thanks to the full team at Janklow and Nesbit.
Thanks to Dr. Lesley Inker and Dr. Howard Stevens for their guidance on how to set up and address Astrid’s cancer. All errors are mine
. Some are even deliberate.
Thanks as always to my wife, Camilla, my son, Julian, and my daughter, Clara. It is not always easy having a writer for a husband or a father. It is a little cool, though, isn’t it?
Irv was singing “Somebody’s Knocking” by Terri Gibbs (1980).
The quote from House is from episode #202. That aired in 2005, not 2008 as Melinda was watching it. As a novelist, I occasionally take some liberties with reality. I consider this fair because reality has taken some liberties with me.
I have messed around with the geography but not—I hope—the essence and feeling of upstate New York. Sometimes one needs to pull back to see more clearly.
Morten’s duck was named after Ferdinand from the movie Babe and, later, Babe: Pig in the City. That was one funny duck.
The SWAT team members were discussing the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), directed by Julian Schnabel.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice, only 7 percent of full-time sworn law enforcement officers in medium-sized sheriffs’ offices were women in 2007. In small offices, this dropped to 4 percent (www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/wle8708.pdf). In Norway, some 45 percent of employees in the police force are women and the number of female managers and leaders is going up. Thanks to (Senior Norwegian police officer) Cecilie Lilaas-Skari for answering important questions for me. Any errors here are clearly her fault and you should probably call her directly.
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