“Good. It felt good. I felt…bigger.”
“It’s the adrenalin. When everything slows down and my muscles are hot and strong and the blood beats in my veins like champagne I feel this vast delight. Everything is beautiful and precious, and so clear. Light gets this bluish tinge and I feel like a hummingbird among elephants, untouchable.”
She reached out and flicked water against the pink welt that ran over my lower ribs. “But you’re not.”
“I’ve played with adrenalin, almost every dangerous sport you can imagine, but that’s not the same as violence, not the same as coming up against someone who wants you dead, where there’s no room for one misstep, where it’s all or nothing. Feeling that bungee cord whip you up just two seconds from the ground is one thing, looking into the eyes of a man with a knife is another. It’s the ultimate competition—there’s one life between us, and it’s mine. You feel how fine life is. It’s a sort of possessiveness. A bit like sex. Just as you can’t suddenly rip someone’s clothes off in public when you have the urge, you have to train the urge to violence. It’s like always singing sotto voce when all you want to do is take a great breath and let it rip. Violence feels good. It’s so simple and clear. There’s no mistaking the winner. I like it, but I avoid going there, going to the blue place, because I think I could get lost, might not find my way back, I wouldn’t want to find my way back because it’s seductive.” I dabbled my fingers in the warm water. “I said before that I left the police force because I didn’t want to work for anyone else. That’s true, but it was also because the blue place called too strongly. It had become all I wanted, all there was.”
She sat back on her heels and studied me with cool, slatey eyes. “Past tense?”
I thought about the blue place, about my life then, about Julia. “Past tense.”
She kissed me. I unfastened her robe. My cup fell in the water. We ignored it. I wanted to be inside her.
Later, when she was sitting between my legs and I was soaping her back with the washcloth, she put the soap back on its sturdy wooden shelf and said, “So what happened in the ambulance with the flashlight?”
“I hefted it in my hand—”
“Bet they edged away.”
I smiled, remembering the EMT’s undignified scramble to the back of the ambulance. “Yes. I hefted it. It was heavy and smooth and, Oh, I thought, so is the oxygen cylinder by my stretcher, so is the drip stand, the officer’s baton. I was surrounded by objects I could use as weapons. I told the sergeant he could have it. And I’ve never worried about carrying a weapon since. They’re everywhere.”
“Mostly, anyway.”
“Always.” I dipped the washcloth in the water, folded it over and over on itself lengthwise, doubled that in on itself and twisted it, but not hard enough to get rid of most of the water.
“That?”
“Instant blackjack.” With one flick of the wrist I smashed the wooden shelf off the wall.
She grinned. “Now you’ll have to fix it.”
“There’s still soap on your back,” I said, and changed the blackjack back to a washcloth by dipping it in the water.
I woke in the dark with Julia’s hand on my shoulder. “Aud, it’s all right. It’s all right. Wake up. It’s just a dream.”
“I’m awake.” The dream images began to drain away.
Her breath was soft and sleepy on my face. Her hair fell across my throat. I breathed in the scent of cloudberry and violet and warm woman. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
“It’s a recurring dream. About a dead woman in the bath. Her eyes are like unpolished marble and she is still. So very, very still. The water is still, too, and cold. And then I realize I’m not breathing, my heart is not beating. I’m still, and I’m cold, frozen. I’m dead.”
Julia slid on top of me. “Feel. That’s my heart. It’s beating. Yours is beating. Wrap your arms around me. There. Feel my ribs move up and down. I’m breathing. You’re breathing. It was just a dream. We’re alive. Just listen.”
I did. I listened to the fist-sized muscle that beat valiantly in her chest, lub-dub lub-dub, atrium-ventricle atrium-ventricle, pumping thick red blood through her arteries, sucking it back tired and thin, sending it out again refreshed, over and over, like some comfort-station cheerleader at a marathon handing out water and banana chips to exhausted runners and sending them on. Alive.
twelve
The stave church of Urnes, the oldest in Norway, lies five kilometers south of the seter. We tramped along the grass and through the flowers, water glinting green and glassy below and to the right.
I pointed down the slope. “There, between that rock to the left and the treetops, that’s the spire. We can either walk round, which is another kilometer or so, or we can head straight down.”
We scrambled down like children before they realize they are mortal, when the worst thing they can imagine is falling down and someone kissing everything better, maybe the smell of antiseptic and a Band-Aid—or, even better, the glory of a white bandage—but nothing permanent, nothing real, and like children arrived at the bottom red-cheeked and feeling physical, in charge of the world. There was no one else there, not even anyone coming or going from the handful of village houses clustered west of the tiny churchyard.
“It’s smaller than I expected.”
The church, even without its spire, was taller than it was long. The churchyard, bounded by an ancient stone wall, was a lopsided rhomboid half the size of a soccer field. The grass was smooth, as if cropped by sheep, and two large birches shaded part of the northwestern wall. Three or four dozen headstones on the north and south sides were all very plain. One was quite recent. It was quiet enough to imagine the soft hiss of worms gliding under the turf and old bones settling. It was the perfect place for a church, high above a headland that jutted out into Lustrafjord, and before Christianity it had probably been the site of the village hov. In the ninth and tenth centuries, womenfolk would have gathered on the headland, looking south, eager for the boat bearing their menfolk returning from a-viking. They would have seen the sail first, a faded yellowish white where once it had been bold blue stripes, taking the left fork from Sognefjord and into Lustrafjord, perhaps parting from a companion boat that would go on up Årdalsfjord to the women of Naddvik and Ofredal. Then the whole boat would be visible, and you would count the shields, look for the familiar crimson boss or the green rim, and you would run with the others down to the jetty, hoping some brother or son would bring back a fancy armring, or a bolt of fine Irish linen, but mainly just that he would be there with his familiar laugh and smile, not the awful strained blinking and bloody stump like poor Unn’s son, the winter before last….