The Wonder of Us

by Kim Culbertson

  The waterfall rushes behind us, and I put my arm around her. She motions for Neel to take our picture. “Make sure you get the pants in the shot.”

  “Are you kidding?” Neel laughs. “This is going to be my new profile picture.” When he hands my phone back, he lets his fingers trail across mine for a moment, and that rush from the waterfall has nothing on the one his touch sends through me.

  Yep, we have a problem.

  I hurry to join Riya near the trailhead. Gunnar leads us down a narrow dirt path to a rocky ledge where we can stand next to the falls. The powerful spray spots my glasses, and Riya hangs back, wary of another shower. On the way back up, Gunnar pauses to show us a sign reading Ástarsaga that tells the legend of a shepherd boy in the seventeenth century who fell in love with a girl across the raging waters of the Hvítá River, and she with him. They pined for years, as the waters were thought impossible to cross. Finally, after years of making googly eyes at each other from afar, the boy found the shallowest possible crossing and made his way successfully across to her. They married and had many respected descendants in Iceland.

  “I know what you’ll say.” Riya nudges me. “You don’t hear about the after part. He probably never put away his shoes or took out the garbage.” It does sound like something I’d say.

  Rand comes up alongside me to study the sign, his hair curling under his cap from the waterfall spray. “Of course we don’t hear about that part; that would deflate the power of the myth.” At my surprised look, he grins. “Sorry, professional hazard. I’m a literature professor at Bennington, specializing in mythology.”

  “No, I agree with you,” I say, squinting at the sign. “This is good stuff here. The contrast of his love with the pain and challenge that went into making his dream a reality.”

  He looks impressed. “Exactly. Examine almost any myth, and at the center you find love driving it and something in its way. And not just romantic love. Sometimes, it’s the love of wealth or power or self, but ultimately, everything is a love story.” He stares out at Gullfoss, perhaps imagining that young Icelander attempting to cross it all those years ago. “The after part isn’t the point.”

  At the end of a rural road, Gunnar parks the van next to a white farmhouse, the perimeter dotted with four white cabins. The clouds shift in layers of gray, blanketing the light and bringing out the lush green of the landscape. A woman in a flannel shirt with a thick blonde braid hanging over her shoulder emerges onto the front deck, a collie trotting behind her. Gunnar starts piling our bags next to the van.

  “Hallo!” The woman motions for us to join her on the deck, where she begins passing out keys to our cabins. “I’m Sabrina and I’ll be your host tonight.” She smiles at Neel as he collects the key for number three. “Dinner buffet will be ready in a half hour,” she tells us. “We meet here in the main house, so feel free to find your cabin and freshen up first.” The dog licks my hand, and I look down into his sweet eyes, his black-and-white head like a patchwork quilt. “That’s Ingi. Don’t give him any cheese,” Sabrina tells me, her ice-blue eyes serious. I immediately agree not to, even though it’s not like I’m smuggling cheese in my pockets to hand out to random dogs.

  “Sorry, Ingi.” I scratch his shaggy head. “No cheese for you.”

  We cross the front yard to Cabin Three. To the side of the narrow porch, I notice a stack of rocks and a tiny wooden house. The other cabins have them, too. Sabrina wanders by with a stack of towels. “What is that?” I ask her, motioning to it.

  “An álfhól.” She peers at it affectionately. “For the elves.”

  “Right, okay.” I remember reading something about Icelanders and their elves and trolls. Hidden elves in gardens. Troll faces frozen into various rock formations. Icelanders have a deep belief in magical hidden worlds. My kind of people.

  Neel unlocks the door, and inside, we’re met with the clean, Nordic orderliness I’m coming to expect in Iceland. White walls, blond wood floors, two single beds with crisp white duvets, each with a single pillow and a white towel and washcloth folded and waiting at the base. No frills. To the right of the bathroom, there is a separate bedroom with a double bed. Neel goes into it and closes the door.

  I fall onto the bed nearest a sliding glass door that opens to a small deck, my limbs feeling like they’ve been weighted down with cement. I set my glasses on the bare table next to me and rub my eyes. After a few minutes, I hear a door slide open and shut, and out of the corner of my eye I see a slightly blurry Neel outside, leaning on the railing, watching the light move across the hills beyond. He has changed for dinner into jeans and a light wool sweater the color of pumpkins. I study the long lines of his back. Does someone get even cuter after you’ve kissed him? Can the features morph? When I first met Neel, he didn’t strike me as anything special. He’s attractive in that nerdy way I tend to like, but he’s not going to be posing on magazine covers anytime soon. But over the last couple of weeks, I can’t seem to stop thinking about all the tiny details that make him Neel. The way he sits casually in a chair, his long legs splayed out, his feet just a little too large in his shoes. The way his soccer jersey stretched across his shoulders that night in Berlin when we watched the James Bond movie. Even how he always folds his magazines or newspapers in half and tucks them beneath his arm after reading at breakfast.

  The bed shifts next to me, and Riya’s face appears inches from my own. “I got mad at Neel.”

  I stare up at her. “I know.”

  “Did he tell you why?”

  “Yes.”

  She looks surprised. “I feel like I’m not allowed to have a normal reaction to this news since you’re still mad at me for the whole moving-to-London situation.” She flattens a wrinkle on the black sweater dress she has changed into and crosses her legs, now clad in thick teal tights. She waits for my answer, elbows on knees.

  I slip on my glasses, tugging at my pillow so I can sit up to face her. “You are allowed to have whatever reaction you want.” Now would be the time to mention, Oh, yeah, I kissed Neel.

  Riya sighs. “I want you to know I told him that under no circumstances is he to complicate things with us.”

  Did she mention what to do if I complicate them?

  Neel opens the sliding door and steps into the room, hesitating when he sees us talking on the bed. “I thought it might be time for supper.”

  My stomach rumbles at the thought. “Perfect timing.” I wiggle past Riya and grab my jacket. “I’m starving.”

  As I pass him, his eyes ask, Did you tell her? and I give the slightest shake of my head. No.

  Inside the farmhouse, the massive buffet table takes up an entire wall of the high-ceilinged dining room. Different salads, meats, a silver tureen of creamy soup, fish, meats, a cheese plate, and four different loaves of bread for slicing on a wood cutting board. Sabrina stands next to the spread, beaming, reminding us to “leave room for dessert!” We fill our bowls and pile our plates and find seats around the community table.

  Riya sits down next to me, holding a piece of bread up for me to inspect. “Are those walnuts or white raisins?” She peers suspiciously at the bread, and then nibbles at it. “Walnuts,” she declares.

  “And one of the world’s most vexing problems gets solved.”

  Riya ignores me, waving to Diego and Matías to sit with us. Diego takes the seat next to Riya, and Matías sits down next to me. Neel finds a seat at the end of the table by the twins’ parents, Manuel and Josefa, and Rand and Suzie sit across from us. Carol and Maggie scoot into chairs next to Gunnar, and everyone starts eating. For several minutes, the only sound in the room is the scrape of forks against plates, water being sipped, the creak of a chair as someone shifts their weight in it.

  It’s the kind of silence that makes Riya nuts. “Okay, travelers!” she says to the group. “Shall we play a game of Stump the Nerd?”

  I groan. “Let these people eat their meal in peace.”

  “What is Stump the Nerd?” Diego asks, his mo
uth full of salad.

  Riya explains the game we haven’t played since before she moved. My dad started it when we were ten to try to trip us up with Harry Potter trivia, but over the years it evolved into a random trivia dinner game.

  Rand leans forward in his chair. “Can you ask anything? Or just our areas of interest?”

  Riya and I glance at each other. We’ve never really had anyone take our game seriously before. “Um, I guess we usually give categories like the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World or Doctor Who or whatever the person who’s playing is nerdy about.” I eat a forkful of beet salad. “Like maybe for you, it would be Stump the Mythology Lit Professor.”

  “We would try to ask you a question about mythology you can’t answer,” Riya adds.

  Suzie snorts. “Good luck.”

  “Or something else,” Riya says, eyeing Suzie. “It doesn’t have to be mythology.”

  Matías says, “For me, it would be Stump the Nerd for Football.”

  Diego nods. “Me too.”

  “Or Neel would be Stump the Economics Nerd.” I glance down the table, but he’s talking quietly with Manuel and doesn’t hear me.

  Rand pauses for a moment. “That sounds fun. Try it with me. Mythology.”

  “I have a question.” Matías sets down his glass of water. “Volcanoes. Here in Iceland they have much volcanic devastation, and I think of Pompeii.” Rand nods for him to go on. “How something can be, er, aniquilado”—he searches for the word in English—“wiped out. A city. A civilization.”

  “Like Atlantis?” I ask.

  “Oh, one of his favorites,” Suzie mutters.

  “Not one of yours?” I take a small bite of fish.

  She sips her wine, mulling my question. “It’s not that,” she says. “It’s just, well, when you’ve been married to a professor of literature and mythology for twenty years, sometimes you just want some concrete answers. Yes and no. Black and white.” She looks at Matías. “I’m sorry, what was your question?”

  Matías considers. “I wonder how some stories, Pompeii”—he smiles sideways at me—“or Atlantis succeed, when others do not.”

  Riya frowns. “Usually in the game you just ask a question that can be directly answered, like ‘Name one place rumored to be the former site of Atlantis?’ and the Nerd would say—” She glances at me.

  “Santorini, Greece,” I supply.

  Rand nudges his wife. “See, honey, there is a black-and-white answer in mythology. Name one place Atlantis might have existed? One place is Santorini.” He winks at me. “Of course, some people argue that it was beneath Antarctica.”

  Suzie shakes her head, her lips pursed. “Here we go.”

  Matías’s gaze slips between Rand and Suzie. “I think maybe I say the wrong question?”

  “Not at all!” Rand butters a thick slice of bread. “I think it’s an excellent question.” Matías seems pleased, sitting back with his own slice of bread to listen to Rand’s answer.

  Maggie signals from down the table. “Speak up! Some of us want to eavesdrop and don’t hear like we used to.”

  It might be my imagination, but it seems like Suzie’s face darkens as everyone turns attention to Rand. He colors a bit, repeating Matías’s question for the benefit of the people at the other end of the table. “I’m off the clock for lecturing, so I’ll try to keep it short. I guess my answer would be that Pompeii’s legend perpetuates because of historical evidence. But Atlantis is one of the great myths because it has continued to be passed down despite such evidence, having perhaps its most famous voice in Plato in the Socratic dialogue in Timaeus. So his fame was a huge reason it persisted, though Plato used it, I think, as a philosophical parable, more than to prove its actual existence.”

  “So you don’t think it’s real?” Carol asks, her face aglow in the candles Sabrina has lit along the middle of the table runner.

  Rand leans his forearms on the table. “My interest in mythology isn’t about whether or not it’s real. For me, the truth in mythology is that it taps into our human capacity to wonder and imagine things—no matter the time period.” He digs into some roasted potatoes.

  Josefa, who hasn’t spoken much with us during the trip, clears her throat. “I love the myth of Atlantis. But my father told it to me as a little girl as the story of Iram.”

  “Iram of the Pillars,” Rand adds. “The Atlantis of the Sands.”

  Matías and Diego catch each other’s eyes over our heads. “Mama told us that story as boys,” Diego explains.

  Josefa nods. “The city was consumed by sand in a single night, in what is now Saudi Arabia.” My skin tingles. Iram is a new one to me; I haven’t read anything about it before. This is one of the reasons why mythology and history are so cool. You pull one thread and you suddenly dislodge all these other strands. Josefa continues, echoing my thoughts. “In all these separate cultures, before they had a chance to be connected, I have always found it fascinating that they told versions of the same stories, whether it was water or sand or ash.”

  “The connective power of myth!” Rand exclaims.

  Maggie claps for him. “Excellent discussion; what fun!”

  “Not when you’ve heard it a thousand times,” Suzie mutters, getting up to inspect the dessert that Sabrina has been setting up while we’ve been talking. I raise my eyebrows at Riya as the others go back to smaller conversations, and she mirrors my look back at me. Rand stares after his wife, any earlier enthusiasm draining from his face.

  Outside, after dessert, Diego and Matías kick a soccer ball back and forth on a patch of grass. Abby and I play around with them for a bit, kicking the ball, but soon, Abby grows bored and wanders over to a paddock where three Icelandic horses graze near a wooden fence. I toss the ball to Diego and trot over to where she stands watching them. “You found our unicorns.” I reach out to pat the brown-and-white patterned nose of the closest one, but she gives an annoyed snort and moves away. “I guess this one’s Mirabelle,” I say to Abby, who tries to click and kiss the horse back to us. The mare answers with a quick swish of tail and turns her back.

  Abby laughs. “Stubborn. Definitely Mirabelle.”

  Sabrina brings us some carrots to feed them. “That’s Feima.” She motions to the horse I tried to reach out to. “It means the shy one.”

  “She’s beautiful.” Abby tries to lure her with a carrot. Again, Feima swishes her tail, but she’s thinking about it.

  “When you’re ready, we have chairs by the fire and some hot cider.” Sabrina points to the chairs set up around a flickering fire pit. It’s not too cold and the light is still strong, but the fire casts a warm glow.

  “Let’s get some cider.” I tug at Abby’s sleeve, but she won’t give up on trying to coax Feima over for a treat.

  She waves the carrot. “I’m stubborn, too.”

  “Where do you think Mirabelle got it from?” I tease, waiting, my arms draped over the wooden fence.

  Finally, Feima creeps over, head down, plucks the carrot from Abby’s hand, and trots away. “Yes!” Abby grins at me, brushing some hair from her face. We say good-bye to the other horses and head over to the dark green Adirondack-style chairs, where Sabrina gives us two steaming mugs. Settling into the chairs, we watch the twins kick their soccer ball back and forth, back and forth, their motions growing hypnotic.

  Rand sits down in the seat next to me. “May I?”

  “Sure.” I try to study him without him noticing. He’s a little older than my dad, maybe early fifties, and he stares sullenly into the fire. Stump the Nerd went sideways on us at dinner. We clearly managed to upset Suzie, and she seems to have disappeared into her cabin for the night. “Sorry if we made your wife mad at dinner,” I tell him, watching the flame flicker and shift.

  “It’s just a silly game we play sometimes,” Abby adds, sipping her cider.

  He stuffs his free hand into the side pocket of his red North Face jacket. “Oh, don’t worry about that. She was mad long before dinner. It’s sort
of her resting state right now. Constant mad.”

  Abby and I exchange glances. Neither of us seems to know what to say to this, so I do what people often do when someone overshares something uncomfortable. I change the subject. “You’re heading to Paris next, right? I love Paris.”

  He frowns into the fire. “Paris isn’t my favorite; too busy. But Suzie loves it, has that whole artistic attraction to Paris and its aesthetic, I guess. I chose Iceland; she chose Paris.” He hesitates, thinking. “But then we’re on to Italy for a couple of weeks. This is our let’s-see-if-travel-can-help-fix-all-the-things-that-have-gone-wrong-in-the-last-twenty-years trip.” He must notice my alarmed face, because he clears his throat. “Whoa, sorry, more information than you needed to hear.”

  “No big deal.” I try to laugh. My acting teacher Niles says that we should soak in other people’s stories when they give them to us because we can use them later for characters. Besides, I can’t possibly judge Rand. I’m trying the same sort of strategy with a friendship right now.

  Rand sets his mug on the flat arm of the chair and then leans forward, holding his hands out to the fire. “So you like Paris?”

  “I’ve only been once. We went for Christmas last year.” I tell him about our long weekend there, remembering the way the lights reflected in the watery streets, the dusting of snow on the branches of the trees along the Champs-Élysées, wandering the rooms in the Louvre. Maybe I’m like Suzie and love it for its aesthetic, for the feel of it. Both Berlin and London, too.

  I don’t notice at first when Abby leaves her chair, but then I see her, letting herself in through the front door of our cabin. Watching her, I decide to share something of my own with the total stranger sitting next to me. Maybe it’s easier because I’ll never see him again. “You know how you said you’re trying to travel to see if you can fix things?”

  He looks surprised I’ve brought it back up, but nods. “Yeah?”

  “Me too.” I motion in the direction of our cabin. “With Abby. We’ve been like sisters since we were three years old, but I moved away from our hometown last year and I’ve been screwing some things up with us.”