It went about as badly as Sheldon expected, perhaps a bit worse than Mabel predicted, and it forced Rhea into a position that until then she couldn’t have imagined.
It didn’t matter where Rhea found her. It didn’t matter what she was wearing, or what she’d been doing only moments earlier. What did matter was the expression of utter indignation on her mother’s weathered and joyless face when she opened the door and met her adult daughter. The memory of that encounter — what they were holding, how they stood, what smell lingered longest in the air — dissipated into irretrievable fragments the moment it was over, because the words her mother used blotted out the rest. Her words were so definitive, so clear and concise and without equivocation, that they grabbed Rhea by the heart and shook apart every dream, every illusion, every rationalisation she had created and cherished for twenty years, so that nothing of the present or the past remained but the harsh reality of the new world.
I was done with you!
And so Rhea walked away from that door, and came home to New York to be with Sheldon and her grandmother.
She didn’t talk about it for a long time. It was four months before Sheldon broached the topic at all, with an oblique, ‘Anything on your mind?’
The watch-repair and antique shop, by the 1990s, had changed with the tastes of the era. Sheldon stocked what people liked, figuring this was a reasonably strong business strategy. During the Clinton years, with property prices booming and the definition of sex on the national agenda, people were returning to mid-century Modern. Sheldon haunted estate sales and hunted auctions with a good eye for quality, beauty, and price. When Rhea was in her early twenties the shop was filled with Matt Gottschalk’s leather chairs, Poul Kjærholm’s delicate woods and steels, and Eames’ classic lounges and ottomans. Wall Street was booming, and retro was back.
Rhea sat in an egg-shaped Danish chair suspended from the ceiling by a chain. Whatever was on her mind was about to hatch.
‘Why was Dad attracted to her?’ she finally asked.
‘Oh, Rhea, that’s a question for your grandmother, not me.’
‘I’ll ask her later. For now …’
Sheldon shrugged. There was nothing left to protect her from, except lies.
‘I don’t think he was. I think they had what counted as a fling in the early seventies just before he went back to the war. Why? She was curvy and outgoing and fun, and was so obviously not a fit for him that she suited all kinds of bills. She was hardly the only girl he had flings with, by the way. When he got back, I think he ran for the nearest safe haven, so to speak. Why her and not another girl, I can’t say. Things get lost to time. Stories dry up.’
‘So I wasn’t conceived in love.’
‘That question is too self-pitying, and it isn’t worthy of you. You know perfectly well that your grandmother and I adore you. For my two cents, being conceived in indifference but raised in love is better than the inverse. I’m sorry this woman is a disappointment to you. Truly. But you didn’t miss out on anything, because there was nothing there to miss.’
‘I’m never going to have kids,’ she’d said.
Sheldon put down the Tudor Submariner he’d been working on and frowned.
‘Why would you say that?’
‘What if I don’t love them? It clearly happens, right?’
‘It wouldn’t happen to you.’
‘How do you know? Maybe it’s all hormonal and stuff. They say everything changes when you have kids.’
Sheldon sounded sad when he corrected her.
‘Everything doesn’t change when you have them. Everything changes when you lose them.’
Rhea rocked on the chair, and Sheldon said Don’t rock on the chair, and Rhea stopped.
From out of nowhere, at least to Sheldon’s mind, Rhea asked, ‘Why don’t you go to synagogue anymore?’
Sheldon leaned back in his own chair and then rubbed his face.
‘Why are you punishing me?’
‘I’m not. I really want to know.’
‘It’s not like I made you go. I’m entirely fair.’
‘I want to know why. Is it because of Dad?’
‘Yes.’
‘You stopped believing in God when Dad died?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘What then?’
How many of their conversations took place right here? Right in this very spot over a period of twenty years? All of them? It seemed that way. It was as though there were no apartment upstairs. No kitchen. No den or bedroom. Sheldon just sat here, year after year, being interrogated by various women. The antiques changed, the women aged, but Sheldon was always there, fixing timepieces, answering questions. The only conversation he remembers having in the apartment was the one with Saul.
‘You know what Yom Kippur is?’ he’d answered.
‘It’s the day of atonement.’
‘You know how it works?’
‘You ask for forgiveness.’
‘You ask for two kinds of forgiveness,’ Sheldon explained. ‘You ask God to forgive you for your trespasses against Him. But you also ask people to forgive you for your trespasses against them. You do the second in Jewish tradition because, according to our philosophy, there is only one thing God can’t do. He can’t forgive you for what you do to other people. You need to ask forgiveness from them directly.’
‘Which is why there is no forgiveness for murder. Because you can’t ask forgiveness from the dead.’
‘Right.’
‘Why did you stop going to synagogue, Papa?’
‘Because in 1976, the year you arrived on my doorstep, and a song about a sinking ship was on the radio, I took you to temple on Yom Kippur, and I waited for God to apologise to us for what he did to your father, and he never did.’
Chapter 18
It was a good night. They found a dry and secluded spot in from the shoreline and out of view from the road and nearby houses. It was still best not to light a campfire, which was a pity, but they managed well without it.
Paul was willing to take off the horns, but would not give up the world’s most unusual crusader outfit. This seemed to Sheldon the least weird decision of the day.
Lying close together, Sheldon whispered, ‘You wake me if you hear any trouble.’ And then they both fell into a glorious, restful sleep.
By six o’clock the sun was so high that its warmth stirred them. The fresh air had probably done them both some good, but the ground had not been kind to Sheldon. He was stiff and sore and grumpy. It felt as though rigor mortis was getting an early start on him. Worse yet, there was not a drop of coffee to be found anywhere.
It did not take them long to break camp. There was little to gather up, and they hadn’t left much of a footprint in the forest. They weren’t being tracked, after all, and since they’d made it through the night without being caught under searchlights, it likely meant that no one had witnessed the tractor’s final moments.
Within an hour they have made their way through the thicket of evergreens to a reasonably large road that holds the promise of passing motorists. After about twenty minutes on that road, Sheldon feels winded.
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute. I need a rest.’ Sheldon eases himself down gently in the high grass by the side of the road. Paul, who was up ahead, comes walking back towards him.
‘Don’t get old,’ he says to Paul. ‘If Peter Pan shows up, just go.’
Paul is standing tall with his wooden spoon, magic dust bunny, and woollen hat. He looks good. The way a young boy is supposed to look.
Sheldon looks at his watch. It has bright white hands, and insists that it is only eight o’clock in the morning.
‘Come here,’ says Sheldon.
He waves him over and the boy comes. ‘Do this.’ Sheldon sticks up his thumb to
hitchhike.
Paul doesn’t quite get it, and his thumb angles off towards Germany over his extended index finger. ‘It’s more … sort of towards Finland. Like this.’ He reaches over and fixes Paul’s thumb, tucks in his extra appendage, then tilts the whole hand-and-thumb arrangement backwards and down the road a bit. ‘Good. Let’s hope this isn’t an obscene gesture up here.’
Paul stands looking down the road for a couple of minutes, and nothing happens. In the meantime, Sheldon catches his breath and stands up again. He walks over, stands beside Paul, and says, ‘Right, now we start walking backwards. If we’re lucky, we’ll go backwards in time, before yesterday and the day before. Before you were born, all the way back to at least 1952, when Saul was born.
‘We could stop for lunch in 1977. I knew an excellent sandwich shop in 1977.’
They cover several kilometres on a road that winds northward. There are few signs of civilisation, other than the perfect ribbon of road running alongside the green strip of grass that edges the forest.
Sheldon has placed two pencils in his lips, insisting he is a walrus. To entertain Paul, he has started walking like one. Before long, however, Sheldon stops.
‘Big walrus thirsty. Little walrus thirsty? Big walrus also needs to pee again. Big walrus is eighty-two years old with a bladder the size of a lima bean.’
Sheldon makes the universal symbol of an old man chugging a beer.
Paul intuitively understands and nods. Yes, he says, he too would like to be an old man chugging a beer.
‘Right. Then it’s time to scare up a ride. Enough of this playing around.’
Sheldon then says to Paul, ‘Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to count down from ten and when I do, a car will show up and offer us a ride to a place that has ice-cold Coke in a bottle. OK?’
Sheldon nods for both of them.
‘Right. Here we go.’ He stops, looks down the road, and starts to count.
‘Ten.’
Paul stops and looks at him.
‘Nine.’
Nothing happens.
‘Eight.’
A bird poos directly in front of Sheldon, which makes Paul laugh, but Sheldon raises a finger and says, ‘Concentrate.’
‘Seven.’
The cool breeze blows off the river, accompanied by a chilling cloud that makes Sheldon close his eyes just for a moment and blissfully forget the world.
‘Six.’
Nothing.
‘Five.’
Sheldon sticks his thumb out higher and with more confidence.
‘Four.’
He closes his eyes and concentrates. Really focuses his mental energies. On what, he’s not entirely sure. He tries to imagine the Swedish women’s volleyball team slowing down and asking directions to heaven. He is partly sure that Bill has placed this vision in his mind.
‘Three.’
A nap would be very welcome now. Who is going to explain to the boy that his mother is dead? How much longer should he wait until going to the police?
‘Two.’
Is there any way the killer could know about the summer house? He must be missing something. Am I missing something?
‘One and a half.’
Will they try for another baby? Or is this it? The end of days for the family?
‘One.’
And then, if not on cue, at least on time, a pick-up truck filled with five hunters and their rifles comes around the bend and slows down.
There is a scruffy man in his early forties wearing a T-shirt who hangs out the passenger-side window as the truck comes to a halt. In a friendly tone, he says something to Sheldon in Norwegian. Paul — it seems — is almost about to speak when Sheldon takes the pencils from his mouth and says expansively and in English, ‘Boy, am I glad to see you boys. My grandson and I broke down a few kilometres back. We’re trying to get to a cabin outside Kongsvinger. You couldn’t give us a lift, could you?’
The man is just about to speak when Sheldon rubs a handkerchief across his forehead and says, ‘Yes, indeed. Some nice cold beers, some chilled white wine, and a big pile of pork. That’s what I could use this afternoon. In fact, I have to go to the Wine Monopoly in town before going out to the cabin. I couldn’t interest you boys in a little barbecue before you go back in the forest to shoot bunnies, could I? Speaking of which, I don’t see any game in the truck. Didn’t you kill anything?’
A large one in the back sort of slumps a little and turns sullen. His friend across the bench pokes a finger at him. ‘Tormod missed.’
Tormod nods. ‘I missed.’
‘Poor Tormod. Better luck next time. So how about it?’
Today is the fourth day. The event took place, and they had fled. They had bedded down at the hotel, made for the water, slept in the blue house by the fjord, forded the land by tractor and raft, and then made camp down at Jackson’s Island. Now they were up again and, hopefully, on the final stretch.
That’s a good amount of time to be on the run with a boy. Any moment now, the tumblers could fall into place in Paul’s mind, and the enormity of what he has experienced could swell his soul. If he started to encounter the past now, he could become inconsolable. Once that happened, what could Sheldon do? Paul would go from being his companion to his hostage. And that is not what friends do.
Hitchhiking was dangerous. But strategy changes with circumstance. And now was the time to catch a ride and hope that the police have made some progress in catching the killer.
Sheldon sits as comfortably as he can on someone’s duffle bag in the back of the Ford F150 as it glides along the well-trimmed road by the tiny lakes and ponds that pop in and out of view. The hills undulate as they round each bend. The road twists and meanders, and then straightens again for long stretches past farmland and forest. Sheldon pulls the scent of cut grass and pine trees into his lungs.
‘I should have spent more time outside,’ he says to the young man in the hunting vest sitting beside Tormod.
When Sheldon had first moved here last month, Lars had told him that the Norwegian mountains form a continuous chain across the sea to Scotland, Ireland, and the American Appalachians that run directly through the Berkshires of Massachusetts. They run across the seas and oceans from when the world was one piece and the continents lived together. The land was called Pangaea.
Sheldon didn’t know if it was true, but he smiled at Lars for his kindness.
Now he is sitting next to a young man named Mads. Mads is having the devil’s time trying to light a cigarette in the back of the truck. Sheldon watches as he tenaciously burns through some eight or ten matches before sitting bolt upright and looking around wide-eyed for some reservoir of patience.
Sheldon smiles to himself and then snaps his finger to get Mads’ attention. Then he points to a spot in the centre of the truck directly behind the cabin.
‘Sit there.’
‘Why?’
‘The air flows over the cabin, and at this speed it creates a vacuum behind it. There’s no turbulence in there. You can light up like you’re in the kitchen.’
Mads is perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four, though these fair-skinned kids can be a bit older than they look. He’s a little more slight than the other four men, and has a hapless charm that Sheldon finds endearing. He is the kind of boy who could grow into a malcontent or else a leader of men, depending on the winds and fortune.
Mads looks at the spot in the trunk and then skirts over there and sits. He strikes the match, and smiles as it gently flickers before the orange point singes the tobacco and white paper.
‘Cool,’ says Mads. ‘How’d you know that? You an engineer?
With the warm breeze blowing around him, Donny locks his blue eyes on Mads with the affected tone of a hilltop sage. ‘I used to design search-and-r
escue aircraft for the Canadian Mounties, 1961 through 1979. You ever hear of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald?’
‘No.’
‘Good. Lake Gitche Gumee. Or at least that’s what the Chippewa called it. It was November, and the gales were blowing. Ship was loaded with 26,000 tons of iron ore, more than the good ship weighed empty. A hurricane-force west wind came in, and the ship was in peril. Then … then there’s something about Wisconsin and Cleveland I can’t remember. So we came in by air from Whitefish Bay, but the hurricane gales were slashing, and it was freezing rain. If the Fitzgerald could have put fifteen more miles behind her, we could have saved those twenty men. But it wasn’t meant to be. No sir, it wasn’t meant to be.’
Mads nods and takes a pull off his cigarette. He sits silently after that.
Sheldon rubs his hands together. He isn’t cold, but circulation at his age isn’t always dependant on temperature. Seating position alone is enough to make anything go numb. Anything that still had feeling to begin with.
‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ was a song by someone named Gordon Lightfoot. It was playing incessantly on the radio in August 1976, a month after Rhea showed up. The same four chords went round and round in a mournful, monotonous, drunken hymn. A cargo ship had, in fact, sunk on Lake Superior in 1975, killing twenty-nine men. The song made number two in the charts a year later. Meanwhile, 50,000 American soldiers died in the jungle, including his son and Eli Johnson, and Sheldon couldn’t find a bumper sticker on the streets of New York during the bicentennial remembering them.
But that goddamned song played on and on as the teenagers wept.
After being struck on the head yesterday, Sigrid had allowed the medics to examine her, but otherwise refused, refused, refused to go to the hospital. Instead, she vomited in the police station’s bathroom, cleaned herself up, and — once she found it — sat behind her desk with feigned dignity.
She slept in the office as a compromise with the medics so that she could remain under some supervision, in case she needed emergency aid. The station was busy all night, and someone was assigned at each shift to look in on her.
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