Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (12 page)

“Clarissa.” I didn’t want the conversation to end. “How did you learn English?”

“I’ve spent a lot of time in Barcelona,” he said.

Henrik’s friend was buying tobacco and rolling paper. Henrik called out to him, and the friend picked up another package of tobacco.

“Nice to meet you,” Henrik said. “Likewise,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Nothing. Nice meeting you,” I said. I blushed and turned toward the door. I had been dismissed, but I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to be alone again.

“Welcome to beautiful Kautokeino,” Henrik called after me. “Kautokeino welcomes you.”

I waved.

Outside, at the gas station pumps, I saw the men’s snowmobiles. Whom did Henrik remind me of? No one. He seemed familiar because I wanted to know him.

I walked to the bus stop, waited, and boarded a bus going to Masi. Outside, the sky turned the sherbet colors of Hawaiian

hotels. My mind was deceiving me: if I squinted, a snow field became a beach.

I held my mother’s photos between my hands the way I would a map. “When I gave birth to you,” my mother once said to me, “it felt like someone was stabbing me with a knife.”

The bus let me out at the turnoff to Masi. The town, from what I could see, was to the north of the bus stop, on a slop-ing hill. I started down the road, past the modest one-story houses. Most homes had a car in the driveway, a simple strand of Christmas lights outlining a door. Through one lit window, I saw twin girls practicing cartwheels.

I had thought that I’d be looking for a person, not a place, but now that I was here, I found myself walking slightly faster downhill, toward the clearing. I assumed it was the Alta River, though now it was covered with snow. I approached the river, and the road took a turn. I followed it, passing larger two-story houses, and, on my left, a white wooden church. It was the first building I’d seen in this town that wasn’t a home—there appeared to be no restaurants, stores, bars.

Turning off the road, I followed a set of snowmobile tracks that cut through the riverbank. I was cautious of slipping—the grooves had turned icy, but the only alternative was to walk in the snow, which was too deep. It had been a mistake to wear such tractionless boots.

A brown car was parked on the side of the river. Empty. I tightened the forgotten scarf around my neck and tucked the

ends into the top of my coat. I had been lucky to find the scarf. “Lucky,” I said to myself, and laughed.

I took a tentative step onto the ice. It was covered in a foot of snow. If the ice could support so much snow, I thought, it could support me. In my scarf, in my jacket, I was invincible.

I walked farther out onto the river.
It happened there
, I thought, looking in one direction. I turned.
Or there.
I turned again and again and again. I faced the darkness of the trees on the other side of the river.
Or there.

As I turned, still looking for the site of the act, the site of my conception, I grew dizzy. I heard wobbling sounds above me, around me, in my head. My ears were so alert I could hear sound waves. Bolts of light shot across the night. I collapsed onto the frozen river, my eyes staring up at the crackling sky. It was lit like an aquarium.

I tried to use my hands to push myself up to a sitting position. They slipped on the ice. Something was wrong with me. I felt weak and energetic at the same time. I could knock down a house with my bare hands if I wanted to. I could scream and crack open the sky. I laughed at the thought. Beneath my head, the ice felt as hot as lava.

This Is How to Prove a
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Reindeer Belongs to
You
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A man in a red jacket was squatting down beside me. He took off a glove and reached for my face. I blocked his hand with my arm.

“Nej,”
he said.
“Nej, nej.”
He put his fingers to his forehead.

He’d been trying to feel my temperature.

He turned his head toward a shape, another figure. My legs tensed, and I took in a quick breath. Then I heard a woman’s voice. She knelt and looked into me, a befuddled expression on her face. They took turns talking to me, one sentence at a time. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t understand.” It was only then

that I knew where I was.

“English?” the woman said to me. “American,” I said.

“Yes, but you speak English?” “English, yes,” I said.

I felt hands behind my back, propping me up. “Water,” the woman said, and a moment later, cold liquid filled my mouth. I choked before asking for more.

They spoke quickly to each other. Sami. Lifting me to my feet, they placed their arms around my shoulders, palms on my elbows, and walked me in the direction of a car. The brown one I’d seen parked by the river earlier.

“What time?” I said.

“Five in the morning,” said the woman.

They put me in the front seat and turned on the heater. My hands and nose itched from the hot air. “Enough,” I said. “No.”

“Where are you staying?” the woman asked.

“The field house,” I said, proud that I remembered. Relieved that they seemed to understand. I gathered that the man was Ailo, and that he wasn’t as confident of his English as the woman. Janne.

Janne drove, and Ailo sat in the backseat. I tried to stay awake, but my head was dense. I looked out the window. I thought we’d been driving for an hour, but we weren’t yet up the hill. The tires of the car seemed airless. We were too low to the ground.

I unbuckled my belt. My head pulsed. I reached up to remove the rubber band that I was sure I had fastened too tight, but there wasn’t one—my hair was loose. My head pulsed harder. I had the terrifying sensation that everything coming back to me now—
Eero wasn’t my father
;
my mother had been raped
—might be true.

We parked outside the field house, and Ailo ventured out to

open the front door. It was locked. He returned to the car and discussed the situation with Janne. I interpreted
coffee
, I interpreted
hospital
. I understood that Ailo was more concerned about me than Janne was. He was for the hospital, while she was advocating food.

“Are you hungry?” Janne asked.

“Yes,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I was hungry, but I didn’t want them to leave me. He was gentle; I liked the way he unscrewed the water bottle each time I wanted to take a sip. She was determined—you could see her strength in her angular features, you could hear it in her voice. Together they could raise me. This idea was pleasing, soothing, until it occurred to me that I was older than they were. For a moment, I’d believed I was a teenager. That I was fourteen, eighteen.

Janne got out of the car—a gust of cold—and walked around the field house. She stopped at a door on the side. The owner, Nils, emerged in his pajamas. He disappeared and, a moment later, opened the front door.

Janne and Ailo ushered me inside. Nils apologized for locking me out. “I thought you were in bed,” he said. I, too, thought it was his fault that I had been in the cold all night, before I remembered. And then I willed myself to forget. The man seemed to know Ailo and Janne; together they discussed what to do with me. Janne removed her glove and felt my forehead with the back of her hand. She said something to the others, and turned to me. “High fever,” she pronounced.

Nils and Ailo searched for food, and Janne led me to my room. “Nils says a phone call came for you last night,” Janne said. “Apparently you were showing pictures?”

I nodded. I was sitting on the bed, on the summer comforter. Janne sat in a chair, with her thin legs crossed, a formal position for so early in the morning. She took off her hat. She wore her brown hair in three short braids.

“The man who called said he met you. Henrik?”

I remembered and nodded. Words were difficult. My tongue lay thick and too far back in my mouth.

“Yes, he is a friend of mine, too,” she said. “His aunt is very well known here. She is a healer. She heard you were showing pictures. She believes she can help.”

“A healer?”

“Yes, but not a witch doctor. We were talking now, Nils and Ailo and me, how maybe you should go to her. Since she already offered.”

“I’d like to stay here and sleep,” I said.�

“That’s the other thing,” Janne said. “Nils says he’s booked �

tonight. You have to move out.” Nils was lying.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go to the healer.” Strange words to say. “Good,” she said and looked at her watch. “I’ll call Henrik

in an hour, when it’s not so early, and tell him. Why don’t you rest until he gets here?”

I awoke to a knock at the door: Henrik.

“So we meet again,” he said. Around his neck, he wore a black rope necklace with a silver pendant the shape of an animal tooth.

I tried to speak but grunted instead.�

“I’m going to take you to my aunt,” he said. “Her name �

is Anna Kristine. She wanted to help you yesterday, when she heard you had lost someone.”

I nodded. I had lost someone.

“I brought my scooter,” Henrik said. “I don’t have a car. Do you think you’re strong enough to hold on?”

“Yes,” I lied.

Henrik carried my suitcase outside and placed it in the storage compartment of a snowmobile. Nils wished me well; he looked relieved.

“It’s not far,” Henrik said. He sat down in front of me on the snowmobile, and I wrapped my arms around his puffy jacket. As we drove through the wind, my eyes bled water. Within minutes, we approached a small red house. It was surrounded by other houses, also red. Henrik helped me off the snowmobile.

I followed him up three stairs. Inside—a rush of heat and an old woman sitting on a couch, knitting. “This is Anna Kristine,” Henrik said.

She stood and moved toward me. If I hadn’t seen her face, etched by age and cold, I would have thought she was a child. She was four and a half feet tall.

I lost my legs. I fell against Henrik, spiraled to the floor.

There were palms upon me, so many fingers.

They led me into a small, dark bedroom, and I toppled on a mattress. Anna Kristine said something to Henrik, and he left the room. She peeled off my pants, long underwear, and socks, and dressed me in a flannel nightgown and knitted slippers.

After ten minutes, or twenty, Henrik returned to the room

with a coffee cup. He propped me up and held the cup to my lips. I took a big sip and nearly choked.

The liquid was viscous, salty, neither cold nor hot. “What is it?”

“Reindeer blood,” Henrik said. “My aunt asked me to bring some to you.”

“No,” I said, pushing away the cup.

“You’re sick,” he said, “and she’s trying to make you good.

The blood is good for chills.”

He held the cup up to my mouth again, and I made myself swallow. “It tastes like electricity,” I whispered to no one in particular.

Strands of hair stuck to my forehead. I was sweating. Anna Kristine’s weathered fingers smoothed the strands from my face and tucked them behind my ears. I grasped her hand and held it tightly.

“Don’t leave,” I said.

I woke alone. The room was small, with a single bed and a dresser. Anna Kristine’s daughter’s room. Old dolls sat bowed and tilted in the corner, like paralyzed children robbed of their wheelchairs. A silver thimble and a brooch lay on the bedside table, next to a clock that had stopped. It was the kind of room from which everything important has been packed up, shipped off.

I called out and was surprised by the sound of my own voice. It was soft and desperate. Anna Kristine came to my side. She rotated my ankles. She pressed lightly on all sides of my stomach, and examined my tongue. On my forehead, she placed a washcloth, and on my calf and against the back of my head, she pressed strips of what looked like bark.

Henrik brought me toast, and I ate four bites hungrily. “What’s the bark for?” I asked.

“To stop the bleeding,” he said, without consulting Anna Kristine. “She did the same thing to me when I was young.” He pushed up the sleeve of his heavy gray sweater and showed me a small scar.

“My head is bleeding?” I said.� “Just a little. You bumped it, yes?”�

I nodded, and raised my hand to touch my head. Anna � Kristine caught my wrist and guided my arm back down to my side. She said something to Henrik.

“She says you are suffering from shock, from exhaustion, from chills. She’d like you to stay here for a few days until you get better, you see,” he said. “I live next door if you need a translator. This is okay?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. He smiled weakly.

Neither of them had asked me what I was doing on the frozen Alta River. For this, I loved them more. I felt something on my lips and saw that Anna Kristine was applying Vaseline.

“You’re too kind,” I said. I meant it.

I fell asleep at 12:00 and I awoke when my watch read 4:10. I woke again at 5:20 and 6:05, but whether it was day or night I did not know—the curtains were heavy, the sky the colors of an ocean floor.

I woke up sweating between my breasts. I blotted myself dry with a sock.

Nightmares suffused my sleep. In one, there were too many people in the bed: my mother, Pankaj, Virginia—and the man who raped my mother. I crawled to the corner of the mattress, careful not to touch any of them.

My mind traveled to the narrow bed of my childhood room, where there was only room for me. I watched everyone else tumble off the side and roll behind the ruffled bed skirt. They remained there along with old files, torn ski pants, a crushed game of Risk.

Anna Kristine’s legs were short beneath her dress. She floated into my room occasionally with water, and tea, and two types of bread: crisp and soft.

“I’m so sorry,” I told her. “I’ll be out of here by tomorrow.”

I was reminded of Kari, of having to watch over him, the nuisance of it all.

“Shhh,” she said. She couldn’t understand what I was saying. I didn’t think I’d ever been so close to someone so old. Her eyes were the soft brown of suede, and her breath was sweet, as if exhaling air from a happier time.