I held out my arms and, careful of the rocking boat, she came to me.
It never ceased to amaze me how she could feel as wild as a living hurricane one minute, and delicate, almost bird-boned, the next. I cradled her to me, felt her heart beating through her ribs. So fragile. I stroked her hair, over and over, and hummed a lullaby. Eventually she sat up and wiped her eyes.
“It’s been nine years. I used to weep for him every day. It’s less often now, and sometimes there are days, even weeks, when I don’t think about him at all. Then I’ll think of my other brother, Drew, or Carmel, my sister, and I remember I’m the eldest now, and I feel…They live so far away now, but I feel so responsible for them. And then I miss him. Missing him is like a hole inside me, a gaping wound, wider than the hands of anyone who would try staunch the bleeding. A hole so big it could swallow the world.”
“I have big hands.”
“I know.” She tried a smile, and it worked pretty well. She took a deep breath and I could almost see her step aside from her grief and thrust it behind her. “There don’t seem to be any perch biting in this part of the lake.”
“Then I’d better row you to another part.”
It was good to bend my back to the oars, to watch the boat scooting over the fjord and see Julia laugh in delight at the miniature bow wave I managed to throw up.
At some arbitrary spot that seemed no different from the one we’d left, she told me to stop. I shipped oars and watched her cast, and cast again. I lay back in the thwarts and listened to the sing and plop of the line.
The sky teemed like the Serengeti: herds of cloud antelope, springbok, even rhino with cloud horns, racing in the same direction; with a bit of imagination I could make out a warthog and a line of anteaters trundling nose to tail. Farther down, a cautious tortoise couldn’t decide whether to creep north or south, and right at the horizon, three pearly gray porpoises seemed to leap from the water.
“I don’t miss the Atlanta sky,” I said.
“No?”
“No. You get up in the morning and the sky is blue. Later in the day you glance up and it’s blue. While you eat dinner, you look out of the window and it’s…blue. There are occasional days when you get up and it’s blue, you eat lunch and it’s blue, but when you have dinner there’s a thunderstorm, and, admittedly, those skies are something, cloud as pink as an alligator’s mouth, that gorgeous violet around sunset if the storm is on its way, the occasional green flash of a transformer going out—taking the power with it, of course—and it’s nice to have the road freshly washed, but when you get up in the morning, it’s blue again. You can’t lie on your back and watch another world form and dissolve and dance minuets over your head. Unless you count contrails.”
“Do you?”
The cloud tortoise was slowly being ripped apart by its own indecision, or maybe some haematovirus of the African plains…. “Um?”
“Do you count contrails?”
“If they have had the time to evolve. Sometimes I think of planes as seeding the skies with new life….” We contemplated the clouds for a while.
“It’s odd,” Julia said at last. “You talk about life so much, yet you’ve been around a lot of death. I asked you before why you did this, and you said it was because you’re Norwegian. So now I’ve seen Norway. It’s a land that doesn’t know compromise. It’s snow, ice and darkness in the winter; and endless midnight sun, bright meadow flower and sweet green grass for two months in the summer. Black or white. On or off. Yes or no. It explains some of the way you react to what life throws at you, the pragmatic immediacy, the readiness—you never forget that there are trolls in the hills. But it doesn’t explain why. Why you keep throwing yourself into the path of the pain in the world.”
“No.”
She waited.
“The pain of the world doesn’t follow paths. It blunders all over the place. It ran smack into my bedroom, carrying a gun, when I was eighteen years old.” She waited again. “It’s a long story.”
The antelope still galloped overhead, the dumpapers warbled, Julia seemed perfectly happy to sit there with that rod, waiting, until the Ice Age came again and we travelled around the world on a tongue of green ice. I sighed, and started at the beginning.
“I was born in England, where my mother was a consular officer, and didn’t see Norway until I was two. The bit of English I spoke was a strange cross between the Chicago accent of my father and the south London of my nanny. We split our time between Oslo and Bergen until I was six, when we went back to the U.K. My mother was now an attaché. My father was busy with his business, flying back and forth between London and Chicago. I was either at school or up in Yorkshire, spending vacations with Lord Horley’s children. I hardly ever saw my mother but I learnt not to miss her. I learnt to expect her to be a long way off, a presence who always came on the important occasions—birthdays, Christmas, school sports days—but who moved to a holy schedule arranged long in advance and never to be interrupted.” The boat creaked as I leaned forward. “My mother is one of those people who always knows how to act, how to dress, even how to do her hair. She never, ever looks out of place. She could be at a bonfire night party in an ancient Berber jacket, cutting up parkin and treacle toffee for my friends, pulling charred potatoes out of the fire embers with hair all tousled and nose just the right shade of red from the cold November air one day, and the next she would be in cashmere and pearls, hair in a chignon, taking tea with Lady Horley. Everyone thought she was a perfect mother. But we were strangers to each other. Perfectly polite, perfectly willing to try to be a model mother and daughter, but unsure how. I think it upset my father.”
“Did it upset you?”
“No. Not really. It’s just the way my world was.”
“But you want to see her when we go back through London. What changed?”
My whole life. “I’m curious. I think she is, too. And I think we’re both ready to treat each other as real people, not some personification of a role. We went back to Oslo when I was eleven, then back to London, then back to Oslo. That is, my mother and I went back. My father left and went to Chicago when I was thirteen. I went back and forth between England and Norway until I felt that both were my home, and neither. I hardly ever saw my mother. I finished school when I was seventeen. That summer my father wrote and asked me to visit him in Chicago. I didn’t want to spend summer in Chicago, but his invitation set me thinking. I was an American citizen who had never set foot in that country. And I thought: I could go to university there. So I applied to all kinds of schools, and I chose Georgia Tech.”
“You’re smart and well connected. You could have gone anywhere: Yale, Harvard, Smith. Anywhere. So why Georgia?”
“Because they said yes first. And because it’s warm. So I made a few phone calls, flew to London, told my mother where I was going, and caught the plane to Atlanta the next morning.”
“The next morning, just like that?” Her hair shimmered as she shook her head, then cast again. Hiss, plop.
“I flew economy on Delta, landed at five in the afternoon, local time, and got into a broken-down taxi whose driver had no idea where he was going.”
“None of them ever do,” she said, one eye on her float. “Should have rented a car.”
“I was used to English and Norwegian airport taxis.”
“Rude surprise.”
“Yes. Anyway, the only map I had was the one faxed to me in Norway by the manager of the apartment complex in Duluth where I had decided to rent—”
“Duluth? That’s a forty-minute drive from Georgia Tech.”
“I know that now. All I knew then was that…You’ve got a bite.”
She began to reel in. “It’s a big one.”