Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (17 page)

“Yes. We go on scooter two hours. I leave and you sleep and I come in morning.”

“Okay,” I said.

Olaf asked how many layers I was wearing under my snowsuit. I pushed up the sleeve of my fleece pullover and showed him the archaeology of my attire: turtleneck, two layers of long-sleeved thermal underwear. He nodded in approval and asked about my legs. “Long underwear and jeans,” I said.

He handed me a ski mask, and I fastened it over my face. I looked like I was preparing to rob the Bank of Lapland. I tight-

ened the strap of my reindeer-skin hat below my chin and followed Olaf out into the cold. A dozen snowmobiles were parked in two lines, and Olaf stopped in front of them. Through the holes in his mask, I could see his small eyes.

“Is it safe?” I asked. I was thinking of the child growing inside me.

“Yes,” he said, “is safe. Something is wrong?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Should I be scared?” “No,” he said. “Are you scary?”

“I’m not scary, no.”

“Don’t be scary for me,” he said.

Olaf backed up a snowmobile and gave me a lesson. He showed me how to start the engine and how to brake. He told me he would lead the way and would put up his hand when he wanted me to stop. He demonstrated. He looked like he was taking an oath.

The snowmobile was more difficult to steer and less steady than I expected. There were tracks, but I slipped to the right and to the left as we rode. We drove past an old cemetery, its tombstones like teeth. I ducked behind the windscreen to shel-ter my face, but my hands burned. I couldn’t keep them on the handlebars. And Olaf was far ahead, winding through the forest. Above me, the moon was a comma in the sky, a con-junction between days.

Olaf raised his hand to signal that I should slow down. We had been driving for an hour. I pulled up behind him. He walked toward me.

Now is when he kills me.

“Now is when I make a fire for you and we have hot lingonberry juice,” he said.

Olaf lifted three pieces of firewood out of a compartment on the back of his snowmobile. From a pouch attached to his belt, he pulled out a knife. He was still wearing his mask. I took a step back and sank into the snow. I had left my knife at Anna Kristine’s house.

“Don’t be scary,” he said.

He used the knife to carve down the edges of the wood, the way scissors are used to curl a ribbon. When he was done, he had three sculptures of palm trees. He got out a match.

“It’s like the Jack London story,” I said. “Are you from England?”

“No, America,” I said. He looked confused. I stayed quiet.

We sat by the fire, the slender moon and the orange and aubergine flames our only light. He opened a thermos and poured me a cup of what he said was hot lingonberry juice
. It’s a drug.
I pretended to sip.

I asked Olaf if he had children. I wanted to remind him that if he had daughters, he would best think of them now, before murdering me.

He did have daughters: Camilla and Anne Britt.

“I love Norwegian names,” I said dumbly. What I meant was,
I love that you have daughters
.

“Yes, our food is very good,” he said.

He drank two cups of lingonberry juice. Relieved that he’d drunk it and he had girls, I took a sip. The juice tasted sour, like unripened cherries. I could feel the liquid heat slip down my throat and chest before expanding outward.

Olaf asked if I had tried reindeer meat. I said I had. “The Sami have reindeer,” he said.

“Yes, the Sami are often compared to Native Americans,” I said, trying to make conversation.
If I’m talking he can’t kill me.
“Some Native Americans are nomadic. They follow buffalo, Sami follow reindeer.”

Olaf nodded. “The Sami are like your . . . what do you call them?”

“Native Americans?”

“Yes,” he said, proud of his observation.

He turned his back to the fire and, like a dog, kicked snow onto the flames. I complained to him about my burned hands, and he showed me a switch on the handlebar. “Hand-warmer,” he explained.

Olaf broke off a number of large sticks from nearby bushes and carried them in one hand, like a bouquet. “So we can find our way back,” he said.

I nodded. I didn’t understand.

The next part of the trip was easier. The fields were flat

and open and appeared glaucous in the dim moonlight. Olaf stopped occasionally to plant a stick in the snow.

After half an hour, we turned, and I saw a structure in the distance, a cabin. I slowed. Ahead of me, Olaf stopped and turned off his engine. Dogs let out high-pitched howls, the sound of strong wind.

The cabin’s shutters were open, and a single lit candle stood in each window, winking.

I braked next to Olaf, and he turned off my engine for me. The dogs’ howls grew so loud I covered my ears. Olaf side-stepped up to the entrance of the cabin—the hill was steep— and I trailed him by six feet. I wanted to see her before she recognized me.

The door opened.
“Velkommen,”
a man said. A man. All this way, and she wasn’t here. My head fell forward in defeat.

“Are you okay?” I heard a voice say. My mother’s. The same voice I often heard in my head. Now the voice was asking if I was okay. I stood up straight. I stepped to my left to get a better view.

It was her.

I removed my face mask and walked closer. Her eyes were the blue of a stove’s flame, brighter than I remembered them. Her hair was cut short and jagged, her straight blond bangs coming to points across her forehead—a crown inverted. Her figure

was curvy but compact, stuffed into black motorcycle pants. On her left hand, she wore a strange glove.

The young man extended his hand. He had a long face and an impatient handshake. “Peter,” he said. He was twenty years younger than my mother.

“Clarissa.”

My mother stuck out her hand, without introducing herself. “So here you are,” she said, staring at my nose.

She gave no further indication that she knew me. Peter welcomed us inside.

I stomped the snow from my shoes and removed them. Olaf unzipped and stepped out of his snowsuit, and I did the same. A fire was burning in the furnace, and we hung the suits from a hat stand close to the flames.

My mother offered us coffee. Olaf accepted; I declined. The skin around her mouth was smooth, her lips thin and parted. Wrinkles, like the dark, uneven edges of water stains, circled her eyes. Maybe tears had caused the damage. Nights spent crying with regret.

She disappeared into the kitchen, and I sat on a couch. Cheese and crackers had been arranged on a coffee table—too much of each. She had been expecting more people.

Peter and Olaf sat around the table, speaking Norwegian, laughing. I wanted to slap them, stuff the pompom from Olaf’s

hat into his mouth. They noticed my silence and switched to English.

“Do you live here, too?” I asked Peter. My voice sounded accusatory.

“No, nearby,” he said. Olivia—he gestured toward the kitchen—worked for his tour business. They specialized in husky trips and overnight excursions to the hut.

I looked in the direction he was pointing. I had spent fifteen years waiting for this. My mother was stalling. She could be crawling out the window, running away. It hadn’t occurred to me that she didn’t want to be found. I had come to picture her as a ruined and lost woman, with bags packed, looking out the window, waiting for someone to take her home.

I was standing up to go look for her, when she came back into the living room, carrying coffee for Olaf. What I had thought was a glove was a splint on her thumb.

“What happens?” Olaf asked her, nodding at her hand. I sat back down.

“It was so stupid,” she said, addressing her thumb. “I cut my thumb to the bone when I was chopping firewood last week. I have to wear this leather thing when I’m near the stove. The cut’s sensitive to heat.”

I tried to picture her thin arms chopping wood. My mother in her fifties, wearing motorcycle pants and wielding an axe. I wished Dad were alive, so I could tell him.
So absurd
, he would say. When he was troubled by something, he said it was
absurd. So absurd.

“Are you sure you don’t want something?” she asked, looking in my direction. With her good hand, she was tugging at the back of her hair.

“Maybe tea,” I said. I didn’t want her in the room until she was my mother again. Asking for tea would give her a chance to reenter, playing the right part.

She stared at me. Maybe she didn’t recognize me. I stared back.

“You have to excuse me. I’m a little deaf in one ear. From the dogs barking.”

“Tea,” I said louder. Was she blind as well?

Olaf and Peter had slipped back into Norwegian. Fine. I glanced around the cabin. There was no electricity, only candlelight. Everything was old. The cracker plate was chipped, the candles were burned down to stubs. I neatened a stack of sled-dog magazines on the coffee table.

The dogs had stopped barking. It was now too quiet. I could hear my heartbeat; I could smell my snowsuit drying by the fire. The scent of damp money. I wanted Peter and Olaf to leave, so I could talk to my mother in private. I did the math. I had fourteen hours with her. If eight of them were spent asleep, we would still have six.

She came back with the tea for me, and sat down. Again, she played with the back of her hair. Gathering it and letting go, gathering it and letting go. Four of us were congregated around the table, two of us related but acting as though we had

just met. I had recognized her right away, the way you know the key to your house on a ring of others.
Maybe she was in an accident. Amnesia.
I had never believed in dramatic scenarios people offered, but now they seemed likely.

“What kind of dogs are they?” I asked. “Siberian huskies?” “No, Alaskan huskies. They’re not as purebred as Siberian,

but they’re the best pulling dogs.” My mother’s voice was chirpy, deceptively inviting.

“How do the dogs get along?” I asked, looking at her.

She nodded before answering. “They’re like a school class. They each have a personality. One’s a troublemaker, another’s a brat. It’s very funny.” She was fielding my questions the way she would those from any tourist. It was clear she was wholly uncurious about me.

“What time do you have to wake up?” I asked.

“In the summer I get up at nine.” She held her teacup to her lips but didn’t take a sip. “In the winter, five.”

“Five,” I repeated. Dad had consistently gotten us up for school while my mother had slept in. Five.

“Are the dogs like children?” I said, more pointedly than I’d wanted to.

She didn’t take offense.

Again, she nodded before speaking. “When they’re pup-pies, they’re like children,” she said. “But when they grow up, they’re like partners. In fact, you can learn a lot from a good old lead dog.”

I glanced around the room, at Peter and Olaf. They seemed to be following what she was saying. I suspected she had lost her mind. How could she be talking to me about children and partners?

“A lead dog,” I repeated absently.

“Would you like a sauna?” my mother asked. She rose suddenly. The room seemed thrown off balance, as though she had stood up in a small boat.

“Excuse me?”

“There’s a sauna outside. I started it a few hours ago so it should be warm by now. Usually, the women go to the sauna hut first, then the men.”

“Okay,” I said.

Olaf and Peter were immersed in a conversation. Still laughing.

“Would you like a sauna beer?” my mother asked. “What’s that?”

“A beer you take in the sauna,” she said. I passed.

We stepped out of the cabin, and she led me to another, smaller cabin next to the outhouse. Inside the sauna cabin was a dressing room, with an assortment of chairs set out, as in a doctor’s office. Steam had coated the mirrors. She told me how

to adjust the temperature and instructed me on when to use the bucket of water.

“Aren’t you going to take one, too?” I asked. We were standing in the changing room, its walls sweating.

“No, I can’t go in there. The heat hurts my hand. I haven’t had a sauna in weeks.”

I stared at her. It was the first time I had been face-to-face with her, and so close. I had grown or she had shrunk: we were the same height.

“I have something to tell you,” I said.

“Yes, I know,” she said. “You’re my daughter.” I nodded.

“I knew the second you walked in the door,” she said. The corners of her mouth turned upward. I believed she might hug me.

“I knew this might happen one day.” She extended her finger to the mirror and drew a vertical line. “I thought it was Richard who would track me down,” she said, looking at the line. She traced a flower, transforming the line into a stem. “I don’t have anything to say to him, and I don’t have anything to say to you. If I had, I could have written you a letter.”

“Don’t you feel any obligation?” I said. I wanted to ask,
Any bit of love?
But I spared myself having to hear the answer.

“That was not my life. I had every reason to seek something else.”

“But you had chosen that life,” I said.

“No, decisions were made for me,” she said. She held her forefinger in the air, as though scolding me. “I didn’t make them.”

I reached for her finger to slap it down, but before I could make contact, she returned her arm to her side.

“Why don’t you take your sauna while I finish dinner,” she said. She turned to leave. Her narrow back was facing me. I bolted forward to shove her, but she had already stepped out the door.

I stripped out of my clothes. My pants snagged around my thick socks like shackles. I sat down on the floor and tugged them off with such force that the right pant-leg ripped. I had been sweating profusely while talking to my mother, and my clothes smelled musty. I kicked them into the corner and stepped into the sauna.

I sat naked, my back against the warm blond wood. My heart was a fist, and my lungs were full of heat. I was not the only child in the world who had been born of a rape. In some cultures, the mothers were disowned by their families. But the women didn’t disown their children. That was the difference.