Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (11 page)

Until that night, I had been a virgin.
I’m involved with someone
;
he lives in Texas.

It hurt too much to use a tampon. I put on all my pairs of underwear to stop the bleeding.

I stuck my head outside. The tent had slipped ten feet down the hill.

I pulled myself back inside and zipped the tent shut.

For the first time in years, I related to Jeremy’s quiet. It was too difficult, too much to speak.

I didn’t want to press charges. I didn’t want to be the girl who had been raped. I didn’t want to leave the dig. I didn’t want Dad to think I couldn’t be on my own. I didn’t want other people to think I had been too young, after all. I didn’t want to do anything.

I stood in the
lavu
, hands curled into my armpits, unsure of when it was safe to leave.

How rarely I thought of that night now. The thumbprint bruises faded in nine days. As I bathed in the lake, I’d watched them change from purple to green to brown.
Why are you fight-ing? Be a lover
,
not a fighter.

After a decade, strong scents still made a fist of my stomach. It didn’t matter what the source was: Casablanca lilies, pot-

pourri, eucalyptus in a steam room. Magazines arrived in the mail, and I ripped out the fragranced pages, discarded them in the building’s foyer. Pankaj bought me a perfume he liked. I sniffed it to be polite but never wore it. The one time I met his ex-girlfriend, she was wearing the same scent.

Now, as I stood in the
lavu
, I began picturing that night, the red cup, the mousetrap, the sideburns. I saw the arm pinned to the floor of the tent, but it wasn’t mine. It was my mother’s. When I pictured a leg, a thumb pressing into the thigh, it was her leg, her kneecap with its sharp blond hairs. It was her I heard softly protest as the man placed her hands above her head, locking her down, thrusting.

I fell to my knees. I rested my forehead on the
lavu
floor, covered with reindeer skin, and wept. I tried to pray.
Forgive me
, I said.
Forgive me.

Northern
Lights
�
‌

I left the
lavu
, closing the door behind me, and followed my footsteps back to the road. There was no sign of Eero Valkeapää or his Volvo, no sign that anyone was awake. Inari was still, like a city the night after a bombing. I tightened the straps of my backpack and ran again.

From a drawer beneath the cabin’s kitchen sink I took out a knife, still with butter on its teeth. I sat at the kitchen table, the knife to my right. I turned the blade so it was facing me, as though I was setting a table for company. Then I turned the blade outward. Inward, outward, inward, outward.

I sat upright in the wooden chair for hours, waiting for the night to pass. I took out the five photos of my mother and spread them around the table. Moving from chair to chair, I examined each one.

I would go to Kautokeino, where my mother had stayed, and then to Masi, where the act had taken place. I never wanted to see Inari again.

What would Eero and Kirsi say about me to each other? To them, I would be the girl who wanted so badly to believe.

I woke with my face on one of my mother’s portraits. I had slept forehead-to-forehead with her.

It was eight a.m. when I left the cabin for the bus station, my suitcase dragging behind me like a child’s sled. When I arrived at the station, Eero was there, standing in front of his car.

“I want to say good-bye,” he said.

“How did you know what time I was leaving?” “I wait since morning.”

“But how did you know I was leaving today?” I said. “You are your mother’s daughter.” A cruel thing to say. “Did you know the man’s name, the man in Masi?”

Eero shook his head, and averted his eyes, looking at the ground. “No.”

I wasn’t sure I believed him.

He stepped forward to hug me good-bye, and I grew tense, feverish. I was sweating in the cold. I unfolded myself from his embrace.
Two. I have now mistakenly believed two men to be my father. Never again.

I lifted my suitcase into the luggage mouth of the bus to Helsinki. I had packed the knife in the bag, thinking I might have to use it should I find the man who had raped my mother
.
It was best if Eero didn’t know where I was going.

Eero turned and walked back to his Volvo. As he started the car, I could hear the radio, the volume turned high, playing the same song I’d heard on the bus with Kari, the song about driving home for Christmas. When Eero and the Volvo were down

the road, I pulled my suitcase off the Helsinki-bound bus and loaded it onto the one going north.

On the way out of town, the bus passed a sign. A rendering of a city—church steeple, high-rise buildings—with a red slash through it. We had left Inari. It looked nothing like the sign.

In the distance, a white circle hung in the sky, like a halo. The sun? It was so low down on the horizon, it was hard to tell. It could easily be the light of a distant lamppost.

Snow dropped, first thick, then wet. The bus driver turned on the large windshield wipers. A soothing, metronome sound. My heartbeat slowed to match the rhythm, and soon I felt myself on the cliff of sleep.

How obvious: I dreamed of my mother. In the dream, she was the age I was now, wearing the clothes I last saw her in. The suede pants faded at the lap creases. The black sweater that made her chest look like a shelf. She was sitting on the frozen Alta River, salt and pepper poured onto it like sand. She’d written something in the seasoning, and I leaned over her shoulder to see:
TOXIC
.

Karasjok, Norway. The hum of the bus came to a groan. I checked with the woman at the ticket counter. I had missed

the bus to Kautokeino. “Ten minutes ago,” she said. With her hand, she simulated an airplane taking off.

The next bus wasn’t for two hours. I felt like a shattered window—at any moment, at the slightest provocation, the pieces would fall to the ground, hard as hail.

At the bus station newsstand, I bought a bag of licorice and a phone card. I paid with euros, and got kroner in change. I had crossed the Norwegian border.

The next bus came, and as I boarded, I felt faint. Sugar, I needed sugar. The licorice I had bought was frozen, unchewable

The bus slowed and stopped; three animals were blocking the road. Reindeer. They were smaller than horses, their ant-lers delicate. Mythical-looking creatures, wearing white ankle socks. The bus driver honked until the reindeer sprinted out of the way. To steady my head and my stomach, I clutched the back of the seat in front of me, its upholstery tacky, bright. Animals in the road reminded me of Taft, the cat my mother had adopted as her own. The cat that, three years after my mother vanished, I killed with my car. An accident, I said.

The woman sitting in the seat across the bus’s aisle was scratching her lottery ticket with the tips of a bobby pin. Could she—could everyone—tell there was something wrong with me? Was I convulsing or talking out loud? I feared that I had crossed to the other side without realizing it. I stared down at

my hands to see if they were quivering. They were steady, but something was different, my fingers more bare. My engage-ment ring—where was it? For almost a year I had worn it, and now it was gone.

I searched my pants pockets, my coat. I dug through the compartments of my backpack. I turned my left glove inside out and pulled at the fingers one by one, as though counting mistakes. “Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid,” I said.

The woman with the lottery ticket looked over at me and quickly turned away.

The bus driver told me there weren’t any hotels in Masi, only something called a “field house” in Kautokeino, the closest town. It was where Eero said my mother had stayed. I got off in Kautokeino and walked down the side of the main road. There was still light, and in the distance, I could see a church with a cross. The town looked like Bethlehem on Christmas.

I followed signs up a hill to the field house. Once inside the heavy doors, I called out. I was out of breath from the climb, from the cold. A thin man in his forties came to meet me. His name was Nils, and he seemed surprised I was alone, and more surprised that I was American. “You look Sami,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said. “You have a room?”

It had been decorated for summer. The comforter, patterned with orange poppies, was the texture of paper towels. I placed my head on the pillow, and only when lying down did I acknowledge that I was dizzy, my nose moist. I sat up. I had no time to be sick.

It was a little after one p.m., which meant it was morning in New York. I dialed Jeremy and felt a pang of homesickness for the way the phone rang. I got Dede, the nurse on duty—one whose face I couldn’t place among the Greek chorus of nurses. “He’s fine,” Dede said. No accent, a source of irrational relief. “Just fine.” She said Jeremy hadn’t had an episode since the night of the funeral. I asked to be put on the phone with him, but Dede said he was sleeping. “Can you call back in half

an hour or so?”

I stared at the phone. I wanted someone to call. I had to remind myself Dad was not an option.

I chewed on my thawed licorice. When the bag was finished, I tried calling Jeremy again. A nurse named Laura answered. I knew her! She had piercings all the way up both ears, but wore no jewelry on her wrists or hands. She gave me an update and put Jeremy on. I heard his loud breathing. “Hi honey,” I said. “I’m in Lapland.” I made it sound like it was a vacation destination, some place I’d long dreamed of traveling to. I was careful whenever speaking with Jeremy, fearful that one day he would start talking and he would laugh and make it clear that he had understood everything I had ever said, every-

thing anyone had ever said. “I’ve been quiet my whole life,” he would explain, “because talking seemed like it would complicate things.”

We were on the phone for ten minutes. I wrapped up my monologue. “I love you, Jeremy,” I said. Never so much as a grunt of acknowledgment. Not before, and not today. “Did you hear me?” I said. “Did you
fucking
hear me?”

Laura was back on the phone. “Are you talking to me?” she

asked.

I hung up.

I brushed my teeth, emptied my backpack, and repacked it with my wallet, the photos of my mother, and the knife. In the reception area, I looked for Nils. I wanted to show him the photos, to ask him questions. But he was nowhere, and I didn’t want to ring the doorbell to what I saw must be his living quarters. No other room had a doorbell.

I zipped up my coat and set out with no plan in mind. Once outside, I unzipped my coat, removed my hat—was it warm out? I half-walked, half-slid down the hill to the main road. Teenage boys on snowmobiles sped past like bees. Older women in local Sami outfits, all wearing red hats, were gathered outside a grocery store.

“Excuse me,” I said. I removed a photo of my mother from the envelope. “Did you happen to know this woman?” The

photo was passed from small hand to small hand. I took out all the photos so each of the five women had her own.

One woman, the shortest of the short group, said something to the others. Then she spoke to me in Sami. It was clear the women didn’t speak any English, or understand a word I was saying. And yet, the more confused they looked, the more I talked. “She was living here while taking part in the early Alta Dam protests,” I said. “She was American, one of the only ones involved. Did you know her?”

The shortest woman pointed down the road. “Alta,” she said. The others joined in. “Alta Dam,” they said, nodding. One of them pointed to the bus stop.

“Thank you,” I said.

For a moment, I felt we were all related, the five Sami women and I. None of us understood anything.

The sky was now muted, the town cast in a flesh tone. I wasn’t feeling well—my legs pulsed with fatigue, black spots floated in front of my eyes.
I can sleep tonight
, I told myself. I continued walking up the road until I got to a gas station with a small market. Suddenly hungry, I scoured the store for snacks. It was stocked with shelves of flashlights and stuffed animals, most of them tigers. Next to the tigers, a bin of Sami hats—red, bulbous like pincushions.

The cashier was an older man in a Sami tunic that fit him

like a dress. Beneath the tunic he wore motorcycle pants. I took out the photos.

“I was curious if you ever knew this woman? She was here during the Alta Dam protests, staying in this town.”

The man took the photos in his hand and leafed through them slowly. I appreciated how delicately he handled them.

“I don’t think I remember,” he said. Two men walked into the store, and he greeted them by name—Henrik and something else. Everyone in the town knew each other.

“She was American, maybe that helps,” I said.

“It was a very long time ago,” he said, and he handed the photos back to me. He looked at me with concern. “You are okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. I wondered what he was seeing.

The men he had addressed approached the counter. They were young, in their early twenties.

“What are the pictures of ?” one of them said to me. His English was good.

“Oh,” I said, looking at the photo on top of the stack. My mother had a mole on her collarbone, something I hadn’t noticed before, or had forgotten. “I was curious if anyone knew anything about this woman. She was here a long time ago. You’re too young to have known her.”

The man had blondish hair and smelled like cold. He stood next to me, shoulder-to-shoulder, and examined the photos, as though we were friends sharing pictures after a trip.

“She looks like you,” he said.

“Really?” No one had ever told me that before.

“Yeah, the shape of her eyes. I’m Henrik,” he said. He had a smile that started slowly and spread from the right side of his face to the left.