Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (10 page)

When she returned home to her husband in Inari, she told him about the rape, and he held her. During the days and the nights, he held her.

The woman didn’t want to report the crime, because the man who had raped her was Sami and, at that time in particular, the incident would have been blown out of propor-tion. The protest was the first thing in her life she had felt connected to.

After seven days, she didn’t want to be held anymore. She flinched from her husband, closed doors on him. First, she bathed frequently, and then, after a month, not at all. Her bur-nished hair turned oily, her slender figure plump.

After three months, the woman told her husband she was with child. They had not been together in the weeks before the trip, nor since her return. She wanted to be rid of the child. She said she felt toxic. That was her word. The husband, who was a religious man and did not believe in abortion, knew that he would die for his wife, if it ever came to that. He said he would raise the child as his own. Together, they would raise the child. No one would know. “Not even God?” the woman said. She practically spit when she said it.

After the child, a daughter, was born, the mother grew bel-ligerent toward her husband. Why had he not gone after the man in Masi? Why had he not been a man? “Because you didn’t want me to,” he said. But that didn’t matter now. “You should have known,” the woman screamed, “you shouldn’t have let me stop you. I was not in my right mind.”

You’re not in your right mind now,
he wanted to say. But he no longer fought with her.

The priest had been invited to a conference in New Mexico, for indigenous leaders. Eskimo and Native American and Maori priests and politicians and thinkers would be there. He bought a ticket for his wife as well. The child, who was only six months old, would sit on their laps. He believed being in her own country would be good for his wife, that being so far away would be good for them all.

On the third day of the conference, he returned to their room to find the air-conditioning on high and his wife and daughter gone. Their belongings had disappeared with them. The man traveled to his wife’s hometown—Davis, California— and rang the doorbells of her sisters’ homes. The sisters were stunned by his arrival. The woman, it turned out, had never told her sisters she had married.

I could taste the tears, and I tried to open my mouth, but it was salty and dry, and I had no voice. Eero curved his arm around me, to steady me, as we walked down the aisle of the church, like a couple after a funeral service. “Please, my child, please stay the night.”

I thought of his new wife. I couldn’t face her; I could barely look at him. I despised him as much as I’d ever despised anyone.

Outside, he turned to lock the door of the church, and I ran in the direction we had come from. I heard him yelling behind me, but I kept running, through town and over the bridge. My backpack thumped against me like a drum.

I was on the other side of the lake when I saw the lights of his car behind me. I ducked into the woods. As I wove between the trees, snow cracked beneath my boots, the sound of light-bulbs burning out. The car slowed and idled, and I stood behind a tree, leaning into it. My eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness, and I saw the small eyes of the trees looking back at me.

“Clarissa,” Eero’s voice called out. I continued running until I came across a structure. A hut? A teepee? A sign was posted at waist height.
TRADITIONAL SAMI LAVU
, it read. I looked up and around me, and in the distance saw a large building: the Sami museum. The hut was part of an exhibition.

“Clarissa.” Eero’s voice echoed. I turned but couldn’t see him. Behind me, my footprints appeared as small, dark holes in the snow. I opened the door to the Sami
lavu
, stepped inside, and closed the door.

I inhaled the bosky scent of the bark poles and stood listening for Eero’s voice, for the sound of his footsteps. In the distance, a car door slammed. I saw a shadow in the corner of the
lavu
, and took a step back. I pulled the flashlight from my backpack, switched on the beam. It was only another museum sign propped up on a stand. I forced myself to concentrate on reading the words. I needed to anchor my thoughts.

“The Sami
lavu
is the equivalent of the Native American teepee,” the sign explained. “The family would sleep in the same
lavu
during reindeer-herding season.” A map illustrated who slept where in the
lavu
. The parents slept on one side of the tent, by the kitchen area, and next to them, the smaller children. The hearth was in the center. Past the hearth slept the older children, and beyond them, the servants, who slept by the door.

Now that I was still, I grew cold. Stray strands of hair near my face, wetted by tears, were now frozen. They felt like straw against my cheeks and chin. I crossed my arms and slid my hands under my armpits, the way my mother had taught me. “The warmest part of your body,” she’d said.

She had given me so many instructions, instructions that had seemed unprovoked, but now I understood.
If a man tries something on you, force yourself to pee. Use your legs. That’s where your weight is. Gouge his eyes with your fingers. Punch his ears with your fists. Ruin his ability to see and hear. And then run.

Perfume
Girl
�
‌

The summer I was nineteen, I volunteered to work on an archaeological dig in Montana. I read about the project in a paleontology magazine Dad subscribed to. A
T. rex
had been found in the vicinity the year before, and archaeologists were searching for fossils so they could determine when it had lived. I signed up to help, because I liked the photos that accompanied the article. A woman stood in front of a cliff, wielding a pitchfork; a man, arms extended, displayed an unscrolled time line.

The dig had been organized by a paleontologist who had a following among grad students: men with bad posture and delicate fingers, women with pear-shaped bodies and braids. Nonarchaeologists like me included landscapers who wanted to apply their digging skills to science, and middle-aged women who had opted out of their usual Club Med vacations. When I arrived in Montana, I felt adventurous, precocious. I was the youngest volunteer by five or six years.

By that evening, I felt ridiculous, alone. No one had much interest in talking to me. Everyone else teamed up for tents; I was granted my own. It was slick, mildewy, set apart from the others on the side of a dusty hill. At night, I could hear the call of wolves in the distance, and, nearby, the hissing of snakes.

Days at the site were long, the sun high and hot. We spent the first two days chopping down and dragging away the bushes on the site. During the third day, our excavation group scouted out the grounds and superimposed a grid, which we constructed out of six-inch wooden posts and miles of white rope. The rope turned brown after a day.

The seventy volunteers were divided into groups of ten. Matt was my group’s supervisor. He was in his late twenties, short but strong, with brown eyes that squinted so you couldn’t tell if he was laughing with you or at you. He took off his shirt after ten in the morning and didn’t put it back on until night. His spine curved like an
S
.

I was assigned to a plot called G1, four feet by four feet.

The real challenge was its depth—I was only allowed to plumb a centimeter at a time. I spent the entirety of one morning sweeping dirt until I found small seashells: Montana used to be underwater.

Matt flirted with the women during lunch at the site, when we relaxed in the shade of a pitched yellow tent. No one bothered to talk to me, except to make sure I was having a good time. A librarian from Idaho checked the inside flap of a book I was reading, to see if I had borrowed it from a library. She had two long hairs hanging from her chin. After I’d finished eating, I would recline on my backpack and pretend to sleep so no one would have to feel bad for me.

Matt would give massages to the women, and, once, to a man. His ex-girlfriend had been a masseuse, he bragged. A

masseuse and an archaeologist. I pictured them sitting around giving massages and talking about bones.

On the fourth day of the dig, Matt came by my plot. “How’s it going?” he said. I was squatting. He stood above me.

“Okay,” I said. I showed him some tiny bones I had come across.

“Fossilized turtle vertebrae,” Matt said. “Pretty common.” “Do you think I’ll find something big?”

“Sure,” he said.

“What’s the best thing you’ve ever found?”

“I was on a dig in New Zealand where we found skeletons.” He looked down at his chest and picked something invisible off of it.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I even found the skeleton of a woman and a sheep side by side, like they died fucking.”

“Wow,” I said and looked at his sandals. He wasn’t wearing the snake guards the rest of us wore. His toes were sunburned.

During the second week, Matt told our group that a friend of his who lived in town was having a party. We were all invited. After dinner, our group piled into two cars.

We walked into the kitchen of the house as though best friends, but within a minute, after we’d made ourselves gin and tonics, I found myself alone. The kitchen was crowded with locals, who looked showered. Those of us on the dig bathed in the lake, the dirt trickling down our legs and caking around our ankles.

A hand took my red cup. How could I have already finished my drink? The hand vanished, and a moment later, it reap-peared.

“The vodka’s almost out,” said a voice. Matt. “Getting you a refill while there’s still some left.”

“It was gin,” I said, taking a sip of the new, stronger drink. He shrugged. He was wearing a sweatshirt that said
COLLEGE
. “So what’s your number?” he said.

“My number?”

“Yeah, how many countries have you been to?”

I tried to suppress a laugh. “Counting America, one.”

He had asked me the question so I would ask him. He was waiting. “And you?” I said. “What’s your—” I paused— “number?”

“Sixteen,” he said. “But I’ve only been to four continents.

So far.”

He told me a story about a Turkish bath in Istanbul, where he’d gone with his ex-girlfriend. She got felt up. “Not by me,” he added. He looked like he needed to spit.

We had somehow moved into a corner of the kitchen. I spotted a mousetrap on the floor by the stove, near his feet.

“Watch out,” I said, and pointed.

He took a step away from the mousetrap, closer to me. “I like the little gap between your teeth,” he said.

“They’ve been trying to put me in braces my whole life,” I said, liking that he had noticed.

I felt emboldened by the gin. “I like your muscles,” I said.

“Yeah?” he said. “All the better to hold you with.”� “Who
are
you? The wolf in
Red Riding Hood
?”� “Whoever you want me to be. What else do you like?”�

“I like your voice.” I wanted to feel the strength that came �

with giving compliments. “What do you like about it?”

“It’s very commanding,” I said. But I wasn’t sure this was what I liked, or that I liked it at all.

“Kiss me,” he said, a bit too forcefully. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “As the man says, I don’t want to wait in vain for your love.”

“The man?” “Bob Marley.”

I laughed. “I didn’t realize you were waiting in vain. I thought we were having a conversation.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he said angrily. “Is that it?” Suddenly his mouth was inches from my face, his breath reek-ing of scotch.

“Yes,” I lied, and took another sip of my drink. I was holding it between us like a shield.

“That’s unfortunate.”

“Unfortunate?” I asked. I wasn’t feeling well. The lights in the kitchen were too bright.

“What’s his name?” “Whose?”

“Your boyfriend.”

“James,” I said. Did I know anyone named James? I couldn’t remember.

“That’s my real name,” he said. His mouth was open, mocking.

“What?”

“It’s James Matthew,” he said.

He signaled to his friend across the room. I didn’t recognize him from the dig, and figured he lived in town. He was tall, with a straight nose and wide sideburns that didn’t match his hair.

“Listen to this, Kurt,” Matt said. “Clarissa here says I’m her boyfriend.”

“That was fast,” Kurt said. “How quickly you two have become acquainted.”

Who talked like that? I tried to think of what to say to make things normal again, but my mind was a parachute that had failed to open.

“Something’s not right,” I said.

“Maybe it’s your perfume,” Kurt said. “It’s too strong. What’s a nice girl like you doing wearing perfume like that?”

“I don’t wear perfume,” I said.

I parted them with my hands, like a swimmer, and went outside. I left the house, the screen door slapping behind me. I felt warm in the cold that hit Montana at night. I hitched a ride back to where I was staying. It wasn’t far—five, ten minutes. The driver turned on the windshield wipers to clear the dust and dropped me off at the base of the campground. I hopped through the tall grass; I wasn’t wearing my snake guards.

None of the tents around mine seemed occupied. I lay down in my sleeping bag and held my head in my hands to keep it steady. It was either ten minutes or an hour later that I heard my tent being unzipped.

“Wrong tent,” I called out. “Hello perfume,” they said.

There had been a joke about the hair on my spine. Something about an armadillo—who was talking to whom? Was he talking to me? Were there two of them? It hurt to open my eyes, it hurt to close them.

I remember him rolling on me, into me, my wrists stiff above my head—were they tied?
I’m being punished
, I thought. I had said daring things, gone too far with my flattery. Up until tonight, I had rarely given compliments. And now I had over-compensated.

I woke the next morning and stared at the zipper to the tent. It was open an inch at its base.