Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (2 page)

We trailed a snowplow on the road into Helsinki. On the radio, a man’s voice sang in English about the pleasures of driving home for Christmas. I asked Kari if he would mind turning it down, and he turned the radio off.

The hotel had three stars on the plaque beneath its name— one star more than I was accustomed to—and I experienced

the vacuous pride travelers feel when a choice that’s been made for them is a good one. Inside, Kari took my luggage upstairs to reception, at which point, he moved behind the counter to check me in. No-smoking, one night, I told him.

Shortly after I settled into my room, the phone stuttered a staccato cry, far from an American
brrring
. It was Kari telling me he’d be getting off work in an hour. “You like to join me in the lobby for a drink?” he asked.

I said yes, in part out of relief that the call wasn’t from Pankaj, my fiancé. My fiancé still? I was no longer sure. Recently, everything around me felt familiar yet amiss, like the first time you ride in the back seat of your own car.

Dad had died a week before I left for Lapland. He was sixty-six, his death unexpected. A heart attack. Pankaj had answered the phone. I was in bed, paying bills, in the Morningside Heights apartment Pankaj and I had shared for nearly five years. He came into the bedroom, tentatively, and knelt on the floor beside me. He did not pray.

“Your father,” he said. “Your father.”

We left that night for Rhinebeck, where I had grown up. Where Dad had grown up. Where my mother had lived for fifteen years before she disappeared.

I had hired the new Hungarian florist in town to do the flower arrangement. A mistake. A ruby banner hung diagonally, like a beauty contestant’s sash, across a garish bouquet near the casket. In large silver lettering:
BE LOVED
.

The funeral was the first day I envied my brother’s ignorance. Since birth, Jeremy has never spoken, so it was unclear whether he understood Dad had died. My family would never acknowledge that Jeremy was retarded; my mother used to say he was slow. She vanished when I was fourteen, Jeremy six. In the hollow months that followed her disappearance, I convinced myself our family was being punished for our silent shame about Jeremy. I said the forbidden word over and over—
retardedretardedretarded
—as though I could undo what was fact: I could unretard him, I could bring my mother home.

While I wiped my tears with my hair—I had forgotten tissues—Jeremy picked at the laces of his dress-up shoes. I bent over, pulled the laces out, and slipped them into my purse. Jeremy was accustomed to Velcro.

A family friend held a reception. Unthawed frozen straw-berries, kosher wine, though Dad wasn’t Jewish, a woman I had never met sobbing in the corner. Friends and strangers hugged me so tight their chests pushed against mine, alluding to sex, and then vanished. As soon as the last guest had left, the hostess began vacuuming. “All those footprints in the carpet,” she said. “They make me tense.” I offered to help clean up. She accepted.

Pankaj and I dropped off Jeremy at the Home for Retarded Adults. The main hallway was lined with display cases of wom-en’s hats and men’s ties. I didn’t know why. As I stood below a beret, reporting to the nurse when and what Jeremy had last eaten, Pankaj handed Jeremy a paper bag filled with small plastic bags. The size that wouldn’t fit over his head. Jeremy had a thing for plastic bags.

“That was sweet,” I said, as we walked to the car. My words didn’t match the intensity of my gratitude. From the start, Pankaj had looked out for Jeremy.

We drove back to Dad’s house, where we had been staying since we got the phone call. We had left a few lights on, and as we approached the front door, I half-imagined it had been a hoax. Dad was alive and waiting to surprise us. I unlocked the door. “Hello,” I called out.

Pankaj started a fire in the living room. I stared at his large lips and his gray-black eyes, the color of papaya seeds. They were framed by long eyelashes, the kind that old ladies on trains made a fuss over. Pankaj could bat them like a flirtatious girl and somehow look virile, handsome, strong.

But tonight his eyes were tunnel-dark, his eyelashes fey. He was moving slowly, the way you would around a predator you didn’t want to enrage. I escaped to my father’s study.

The study had been my mother’s. She claimed to be working on her dissertation on the environmental battles of indigenous peoples. It was her research that initially took her to Lapland in her late twenties. While there, she’d gotten

sidetracked
—that was her word, her explanation. She would sequester herself in the study for a few hours every afternoon, ostensibly writing, but there was a silent understanding in our house that her dissertation would never be finished.

I sat down in Dad’s leather chair and opened the drawers of his desk—her desk. I found his address book. Inside, under our last name, Iverton, there were no entries. This was odd: Dad had written me once a month since I’d moved out. Scribbled in miniature handwriting, his letters had described landscaping projects he was working on, or summarized, in too much detail, a film he had recently seen.

I found myself in the ABC section, under “Clar.” My mother had named me Clarissa, but Dad never called me by my full name. Penned into the book were four addresses for me: one

P.O. box in college, one address in Lexington, Kentucky, two in Manhattan. He had entered my new address each time I’d moved and never crossed out the old one. I tried to imagine me living in each of these apartments, carrying on four different lives at once. In my Kentucky life, would my father be dead?

I didn’t recognize the majority of names. I assumed these were the owners of homes he had helped landscape. Why hadn’t more of his clients shown up for the funeral? The service had been small.

I sorted through the drawers—old bills, letters postmarked in the early nineties, sea glass, owner’s manuals to appli-ances we no longer owned. In the bottom drawer, I found a large manila envelope that appeared not to have been opened

more than once or twice.
CLARISSA
’
S
was written on the outside. She had been gone for fourteen years, but I immediately recognized my mother’s handwriting. Her
S
’s were exuberant, forward-leaning
8
’s.

I shook the contents out onto the desk: grade-school report cards, notes from teachers commenting on my shyness in class. I didn’t recall this about myself, and was surprised and strangely embarrassed—we like to remember our childhoods a certain way. I sorted through watercolors—“age 7” written in one corner—a note to the tooth fairy, a photo of me in front of the Washington Monument, wearing a dress patterned with keys.

Beneath a dried leaf, splitting at its stem, I found my birth certificate. I had never seen it before. I read it and read it again. I turned it over. With my forearm, I swept everything else on the desk into a far corner. Papers and a desk calendar dropped to the floor. I moved the certificate to the center of the desk and I read it again.

Pankaj found me sitting on the shower floor, still wearing my bra and black stockings. He stood, blurry, on the other side of the clear door. The birth certificate was in his hand. “Do you want to talk?” he said.

I shook my head. I was emptying the bottles of Dad’s dandruff shampoo, like tar, down the drain. Pankaj carefully placed the birth certificate inside the cover of a book about Vargas

girls; it had been sitting above the toilet since he had given it to Dad the previous Christmas. Inside, I knew the inscription read: “To Richard, my future father-in-law. With admiration, Pankaj.” Pankaj took off his clothes, opened the shower door, and sat next to me on the tiled floor.

“The water’s colder when you’re sitting,” he said, and reached up to adjust the temperature. He picked up the blue bar of soap, Dad’s soap, and rubbed it under my armpits. He took my Dad’s other, non-dandruff shampoo, and washed my hair. We sat in the shower so long the water turned tepid. Pankaj stood up, stepped out, and held a towel open for me.

I crawled out of the shower, and Pankaj bent over and rolled off my stockings and unhooked my bra. He wrapped me in the towel and picked me up. I couldn’t raise my arms around his neck or help in any way.

He carried me into my childhood bedroom, which had not changed: twin beds, a Sears stereo, and a hundred tiny holes in the wall where I’d thumbtacked my album covers. Pankaj put a blanket over me, tucking it in like he was making a bed. Then he left the room.

I stared at a photo of my father on the bookshelf. His arms like a game-show host, displaying a washer and dryer he bought when I was fifteen. Laundry had been my mother’s job, one that we both resisted taking on when she was gone. He had believed the new machines would make her absence less obvious. It had been my favorite picture of my father, but now it seemed to belong to some other teenager.

Pankaj returned.�

“He should have told me,” I said to his silhouette.� “He was protecting you. He—”�

“He was a liar.”�

Pankaj was holding a bowl and a spoon.� “Applesauce,” he said. “It’s all that was in the fridge.”�

“Didn’t anyone bring anything over?” I asked. “Isn’t that �

what people do?” “Sorry,” he said.

“Sorry?” I said. “What are you sorry about? You’re the only one who doesn’t have anything to apologize for.”

He didn’t answer, and, at the time, I took this as a sign of modesty. We both twisted into the same twin bed.

A few hours later, I learned why he was sorry. “Are you awake?” he said.

I nodded and then said yes. “I knew.”

“You knew what?”

“I knew about Richard. That he wasn’t your real dad.” In the dark, I tried to see Pankaj’s mouth.

“How long have you known?” I said. I spoke slowly. I didn’t want any room for misinterpretation.

“A long time.” “Like days?”

“Longer. Since we were—” “Engaged?” I said. “Teenagers.”

“What?”�

He said nothing.� “How?”�

“Your mom told me.”� “What? Why?”�

“Well, let me think about what happened.”� Pankaj was stalling, preparing a lie.� “Don’t make me wait.”�

“Your mom told my mom.”� “Fifteen years ago?”�

“About that time.”�

“Fifteen years! Almost half my life. More than half my life.”� Pankaj exhaled.�

“So everybody knows? Dad knew? My mom? You, Gita? � Gita! Your fucking mom knows who my real fucking father is and I don’t? What the fuck is this? Does the fucking florist who can’t even fucking spell know?”

“No.”�

“Really, Pankaj. Was this posted at the train station?”� “I didn’t want to know. I wish I didn’t.”�

“Fuck you,” I said. “And tonight was the right time to tell �

me?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I felt deceitful, with you in the shower like that. I thought it would make things easier if I told you I knew. Later, you would never forgive me.”

I switched on the bedside lamp. I stood up, stared at the bookshelf, pulled at the spine of my first-year Russian textbook

and threw it to the floor. The carpet absorbed its thud. I had wanted thunder.

“Of all days to tell me,” I said, and threw down another book, this one a dictionary, unabridged.

“Stop saying that,” Pankaj yelled, “and stop with the books.” “You and Dad are the same. When you don’t tell someone

something like that, you are fucking with their life.”

“I understand how you must feel,” he said. He was sitting up in bed. He was wearing one of Dad’s old sweatshirts.

“Take that off,” I said.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t pack well.” He removed the sweatshirt, folded it neatly, and placed it on the bedside table.

“First of all, you do not understand how I feel. So take that back.”

“You’re right. I don’t know, but I can imagine . . .” “Imagine! You can’t imagine anything. Has every person

you know been betraying you for fifteen years?” “Not everyone knows—”

“Shut up. Has everyone close to you—your father, your fiancé, your who-the-fuck-knows been lying to you? Answer me.”

“No,” he said. He stood to comfort me.

“Stay away,” I said. I pulled an old doll off the shelf and held it between us.

He stared at the doll, as though addressing her. “I know you’re angry with me right now.”

“You’re a genius, really. Not only at philosophy, but at emo-tions. You know that I’m angry with you. Wow.”

“What can I do for you?” he said. “I think you need some sleep.

Everything will be better in the morning.” He looked scared. “Really? Will Dad not be dead in the morning? Will my

fiancé not be a liar? Will it turn out tomorrow morning that not everyone betrayed me? Ah! Morning!”

“Please stop saying that word,” Pankaj said. “Morning?”

“Stop saying
betrayed.
You make it sound like—” “Like what? Like I was betrayed?”

“Please go to sleep. Everything will be better tomorrow. I promise.”

“You promise?” I said. I was now holding the doll to my chest. It was an ugly doll. I didn’t know where it had come from or why I had kept it. “I suppose I should be happy now that I know, right? Dad was a cuckold. And I have a fucking father in fucking Finland.”

“He wasn’t a cuckold,” Pankaj said. “You were born before your mom met Richard.”

I sat down on the floor.

“Where does the word
cuckold
come from, anyway?” Pankaj said.

“I don’t know but I think you’re right. This is a good time for an etymological discussion. While we’re at it, why don’t we figure out where
asshole
comes from? Where
get out of my room
comes from.”

“I was trying to change the subject,” he said. His voice cracked like a boy’s. “Listen, I’m going to go downstairs for

a little bit. I’ll be there if you need anything.” He headed toward the door. His chest looked hairier than usual, his legs skinnier.

“Is there anything else you have to tell me?” I said. “Any other surprises? If so, tell me now. I’m serious. I should know everything and get it over with.”