"She didn't even know who I was."
"I was hoping that you might take more responsibility for your grandmother. You have a chance to make things right with Sigga before she dies."
"It's too late for that."
"I'm sorry you feel this way. Well, I suppose there's nothing more to be said on the subject." He stood up, carefully pushing the vinyl yellow chair back under the table. "I'll be working on packing Olafur's study today. Take what you want from the rest of the house."
I could hear him as I went upstairs to get my things, packing Olafur's books into boxes, to be carted off to the University of Manitoba. I knew Stefan despised me, but I was certain I despised myself more. I took nothing from that house, because nothing was what I believed I deserved.
Outside it was cool and crisp. Heavy dark clouds. What Mama used to call brisk. As a child I'd imagined wind as the whisk of invisible brooms, whipping white froth on the lake, white froth in the sky. Whitecaps and white clouds, dabbling the bright blue surfaces of lake and sky. I stood outside Betel, looking out on the harbor, composing myself after the argument with Stefan. Discussion, as Mama would say. I never asked him to buy my plane ticket. Anything he chose to do for Sigga was of his own free will. And had nothing to do with me. Visiting Sigga that morning was my last remaining obligation, and then I would be gone from there, done with that.
Fortunately, Sigga knew me again. I found her in the Betel library, new as everything else there, though when I looked closely I saw that most of the books on the shelves were old ones with Icelandic titles. Stefan collected them, Sigga explained, from people's attics. When the old folks die. Hardly anybody left in Gimli reads Icelandic anymore. So there sat our great sagas spine to spine with large-print mysteries and Reader's Digests.
"How does it feel to be a centenarian, Amma?"
"Exactly the same. My joints are no more creaky today than yesterday. But no less so either."
"Amma, can I ask you a question?"
"Of course."
We were sitting in two adjoining chairs, which meant I wasn't facing her. That made it easier to ask. But not easy. "Did ... Birdie ever have a child of her own?"
Silence. Then, "Whatever gave you that idea?"
"I overheard some women talking last night. At the party. They said something about Ingibjorg's child."
"Oh my." Sigga closed her eyes for a long moment, and when she opened them again it was with a faraway gaze. "She was a lovely child. So lively and bright. A handful!"
So Birdie did have a child! "Tell me more about her, Amma."
"We just adored her. We did everything we could for her."
"But ... what happened to her?"
"I don't know, really. I suppose they were there all along, those parts of her nature. That made her so wild, and so ... depressed. But when she was a child those aspects were bearable. Charming even. Oh, how Olafur loved that child! She was his favorite. Sometimes I think that's what went wrong, that if he hadn't doted on her so, given in to her-"
"Amma, who are you talking about?"
"Birdie. Aren't we?"
"I thought we were talking about Birdie's child."
"Birdie's child?"
"Amma, I need to know this." I spoke slowly, clearly, loudly, right into her hearing aid. "Did. Birdie. Ever. Have. A. Baby."
Sigga's mouth was open, as if she was about to say something, but no sound came out. Her eyes had shifted, she was staring at something past my shoulder. I turned in my seat to see Halldora standing in the doorway, watching us through her thick-lensed glasses.
"Here is my darling Halldora!"
"I didn't mean to interrupt your visit."
"Interrupt? It's no interruption. You're to come and join us. Have you met my Freya?" .
"Oh certainly, I have. A lovely girl she is."
Halldora and I exchanged tight little smiles, then she sat down on a small love seat opposite Sigga and me.
"I was just about to tell Freya something," Sigga announced. "But for the life of me I can't remember what. My mind is going, I'm afraid."
"Nonsense," Halldora assured her. "But didn't you have a big day yesterday! How did you sleep?"
"Oh, fine, I suppose. But I had one of my dreams. Freya, I'm afraid Halldora doesn't think much of my dreams."
"But dreams are so important," I said pointedly, pleased to contradict Halldora in that, or anything.
"I think so too. Would you like to know what I dreamt?"
I nodded. It didn't matter now. We couldn't talk about anything important with Halldora there.
"It took place back in Iceland, on the farm where I grew up. It was summertime and it was my job to mind the lambs in the pen. Usually my eldest brother did that chore, but in the dream, it was my turn. I sat on a little rock and read from a book late into the night. It must have been June, the sun was that bright. Every once in a while I threw a little something on the fire, pieces of wool or dung or moss, anything to keep it smoking. The smoke kept the eagles away, and the foxes. They'd come to steal the baby lambs.
"In the dream I was watching over two lambs and two ewes resting in the pen. And the grass was so green, greener than I'd ever seen it, and their wool was very white against the green. I can't remember what I was reading, but I must have been very involved in the book. I wasn't paying proper attention to my duty. And then suddenly I heard a terrible screaming and I looked up to see a large eagle making off with one of the lambs. I'd let the fire go out while I was reading. It was an awful sight, the poor thing squealing and struggling under those huge dark wings, and I could see blood in its wool, where the talons pinched. I stood watching until the eagle and the lamb were a speck in the sky."
"What a horrid dream," Halldora said.
"Oh, that wasn't the end of it," Sigga continued. "There's plenty more. My father was in the dream, and he was very gloomy. It was no small thing to lose a lamb. And meanwhile, the other ewe, the one that hadn't lost its young one, stopped giving milk. So we'd lost one lamb, and my father was fearing we'd lose another because its mother had no milk. But then a strange thing happened. One of the dogs came trotting up with the dead lamb hanging from its mouth. The eagle had dropped it. So my father took the dead lamb and he skinned it. And then he took the skin of the dead lamb and sewed it onto the live one, the one whose mother wouldn't give milk. He presented the fake-skinned lamb to the mother who had lost her own little lamb, hoping that she would recognize its smell, I suppose, and mistake it for her own. This was done, you know, by the farmers back then. You could also try to get a ewe to adopt another ewe's lamb by introducing them to each other in the dark. But in the dream my father did it this way, by sewing on the skin of the dead lamb."
"Did it work?" I asked. "Did the mother accept it?"
"Oh, she accepted it all right. But the funny thing was, the second skin, we just left it on the lamb. Never took it off. So the lamb had a funny, lopsided look. A queer shagginess. And then my father sold it, in the end, to a family in the next valley. It left me with a terrible feeling, when I woke up. I don't know what it all means."
"Too much excitement last night is all it means," Halldora declared. "Whenever you have too much activity, then you have one of your dreams. Nothing mysterious about it."
"I suppose not."
"Amma." I stood up. "I have to go now."
"Didn't you just get here?"
This same conversation, again. Sigga's memory a sieve. "I got here Friday," I explained, but patiently. "And now it's Sunday, and I have to be at work in New York tomorrow."
"I wish you could stay a little longer."
"I do too." Even a few minutes longer, a few minutes without Halldora there. So Sigga could answer my question. Did Birdie ever have a child? Sigga had been just about to answer me when Halldora had interrupted. Meddlesome Halldora!
Sigga's thin cracked lips brushed my cheek like the wings of a trapped moth, her clouded eyes shining with tears. I was unable to say anything.
"Bless, els
kan," Sigga called after me. "Bless bless!"
Bless means good-bye in Icelandic.
It began to rain as soon as I turned the rental hearse south onto Highway 9. The heavens are weeping, Mama used to say when it rained. Let them weep. I drove past field after sodden field. Good-bye to Gimli, to Amma and vinarterta, to ghostly surprise parties, to the house thicker with memory than with dust, to shifty lake weather, to distant relations I'd never see again, to the brand-new Betel and cranky Halldora, to Stefan and his precious genealogies. Let him spend his life in the muck of the past. I was done with it, I was moving on. The only thing hard to leave behind was Sigga.
By the time I reached the outskirts of Winnipeg, the rain had stopped and the sun was breaking through, glinting on the brick of crumbling buildings. I nearly pulled over to take a photograph-brick is a favorite of mine-but there wasn't time. And plenty of brick awaited me in the city, which I found myself thinking of, maybe for the first time, as home. Goodbye to my basement apartment, hello to the sunlit loft. My mind hopped from one eager plan to the next as I pulled into the car rental lot, returned the van, checked in at the Air Canada counter.
And then I was sitting in a hard plastic chair in the waiting area with an hour to spare, suddenly exhausted. I'd hardly slept that night. I closed my eyes, but instead of entering my own dreams I found myself in Sigga's. The eagle swooping up the lamb. The dog appearing with the dead lamb in its teeth. The dead lamb's coat sewn onto another lamb that had been taken from its true mother because she couldn't give milk. A queer shaggy disguise, to fool the new mother. A farmer's trick.
And then I got it, the real trick: the bird's lamb = Birdie's lamb = Birdie's child. Sigga had been about to answer my question when Halldora appeared. So she answered it instead with the dream. Maybe Sigga hadn't understood the dream, but I did. Birdie had a child she couldn't raise, so she gave it up for adoption. A new mother took it as her own. Plain as day.
I stood up, no longer sleepy, and began pacing the waiting area. There was a child, I was sure of it. No matter what Stefan said, or didn't say. Sigga had as much as told me so, in the language of dreams, which does not lie. Birdie's child! What would such a person be like? Fragments of Birdie. And an unknown father. Growing up in a Birdie-less world. Ignorant of kennings or Gimli summers.
Maybe I could even find Birdie's child, now grown. There might be records I could locate. Wouldn't Birdie have wanted that? Didn't I owe that much to Birdie? But first I had to find out if it was true. And the only one who knew was Sigga. Any answers would die with her.
And that is how I came to the decision not to board the plane but to return to Gimli, for a few more days, a week at the most. To see what I could find out. About-face! There were no buses to Gimli late on a Sunday, but Stefan was delighted to retrieve me. I did not tell him my true motivations. Of course not. I said simply that I'd decided to stay and help him pack up the house, visit more with Sigga. Then I left a message on my boss's answering machine that my grandmother was suddenly ill. I was in Canada, I'd check back later in the week.
It began raining again, and through the window I could see my plane arrive, watch the other passengers board. I left myself behind.
27
And so I re-returned to Gimli. Because of you, Cousin. Remember, I knew nothing about you at that point, nothing concrete, not when or even if you'd actually been born. But you became my excuse, my quest. Like King Gylfi, I arrived back in Gimli bearing questions. One question, actually, and not even one of the Big Ones. As I walked along the beach the next morning a bright blue day of wavelets plashing the shore and a few cloud-puffs jaunting across the sky I cared not how the world began or how it would end. No, I intended to learn the answer to one simple question: Did Birdie ever have a child? Surely that was not too much to ask, not after everything I had been through, for even if I was not, technically, an orphan (too old), still, the death of my father (true, I don't remember him, but isn't that itself a loss?), the suicide of my aunt, the sudden death of my mother, didn't these count for something?
No. I was lapsing into self-pity. I ordered a coffee and two slices of vinarterta at the bakery from the lank-haired girl, then made my way over to Betel. Still, if the answer was yes, there was a child and I felt convinced as I walked along First Street sipping weak Styrofoam-cup coffee that it must be so-then the child would be ... what? Not a lost key, no, or a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle, or even the long-sought solution to a mystifying riddle. Those things were too precise, too simple. No, the child would be more like the knot whose untangling might begin to unravel the monster snarl where my life and my mother's life and Birdie's life fatally meshed. Ensnared in these thoughts, I walked with my head bent groundward, as if the child might be found right there on the sidewalk, or there, on the doorstep of Betel, still red-faced and squalling after all these years yes, the child would explain
And then my thoughts were jolted right out of my head. I'd nearly knocked over a little old lady entering Betel's front door. Luckily the woman caught her balance, as did I. The only one to take a fall was the cup of coffee. "Oh, I'm so so sorry, I didn't see you at all," I stammered. And no wonder. Peering down the woman was so short and humped over she barely reached my ribs -I recognized Halldora.
"I'm easy enough to miss, I suppose." Fixing me with her impossibly huge eyes. "But I thought you left us yesterday." Sounding not the least bit happy to see me.
"I did. I mean I was supposed to. But I decided to stay for the rest of the week ... so I could spend more time with Sigga. And help Stefan get the house ready." This last sentence especially had such a virtuous ring, surely even Halldora could not help hut be impressed.
"Well, isn't that something."
"It's nothing, really."
"Nothing is it? That house will sell for more than nothing."
"I didn't mean-"
"Children move off to the city, can't be bothered to visit, then come sniffing around when it's time to collect. Believe me, I know all about it! Now, please, dear, be sure to clean up this mess, because it doesn't take much for an old person like myself with brittle bones to slip and fall and break a hip and end up in hospital catching pneumonia and never coming out again. Happened to Mary Stevenson just two months ago, rest her soul."
And then she was gone, with a smart rap of her cane, leaving me down on my knees sopping up the spilled coffee with a paper napkin.
An aide was helping Sigga dress when I arrived on the second floor. I stood in the hall leaning against the pale green wall waiting for them to finish, gathering my spilled thoughts. A door opened at the far end of the hall, but no, luckily, it wasn't Halldora, only an ancient man in a wheelchair, pushed by an attendant who guided him briskly, expertly through the doorway and around a linen cart. That's the way, I decided. It was just a matter of finding the right route. Sigga had been on the verge of answering my question yesterday, when Halldora had interrupted. All I had to do now was gently maneuver Sigga's wandering mind back to that same point in the conversation.
Just then Sigga's voice rose sharply and escaped into the hallway. "I can do it myself, Hannah, thank you." Sounding, to my surprise, not in the least decrepit, but instead exactly like the old Sigga, or rather, a less old Sigga, the Sigga of my childhood: gracious but commanding, the Sigga one dares not cross. Sigga the Queen.
Hannah gave up whatever it was she was trying to do, passing me outside the door with a wan, just-doing-my-job smile. I took a breath and entered. Sigga was seated by the window at a small table draped with an oddly oversize linen tablecloth that nearly reached the floor. I recognized it from our old dining table at Oddi. Sigga seemed not to notice my entrance. She was wearing a dark green dress, her head was bent toward her lap, her hands fiddling with something behind her head.
"Let me help you, Amma."
Startled, Sigga dropped the necklace she had been trying to clasp. I picked it up off the floor, ran the smooth pearls over my palm. It was the same double strand she'd worn for her
birthday, smooth and polished against the sagging skin of her neck. I reached around her to fasten it, but she pushed my hands away. "Just put it on the dresser." As if I were Hannah, or some other aide, and I wondered for a moment if Sigga knew me that morning.
"I remember that dress. It looks lovely on you."
"Nonsense," Sigga said crossly. "It hardly fits anymore."
The soft wool fell in empty folds over her chest, the shoulders drooped. And yet somehow it did look lovely, still. "I can come back later."
"But you just got here."
"If this isn't a good time ..."
"No, this will do. Just take a seat at the table here and we can visit. Stefan called last night to tell me you could stay. I was terribly surprised. How can you do this, Freya? What about your job?"
"I told my boss you'd suddenly taken ill."
"Oh my." Sigga shook her head. "I don't think that was a good idea. Nothing good ever comes of a lie."
"It was the only way, Amma."
"I suppose so. And surely Stefan could use your help. It's a big job, I'm afraid, packing up that house. I should have gotten rid of more things over the years. Honestly, I feel terrible about it."
"It won't be too bad. With the two of us working, we can have the whole thing packed up in a week." A bit of false optimism. Sigga didn't fall for it.
"A week!" She shook her head. "Oh, I doubt it. All that ... stuff."
She seemed shaken by my last-minute change of plans, and nothing I said reassured her. She kept smoothing the linen tablecloth, flattening it against the table. Out the window, the puffy clouds continued their jaunt over Gimli harbor.
"Elskan," she began at last, "as I mentioned to you at the party, I have things I need to discuss with you. Things about our family." Sigga's voice seemed clear suddenly. Her mind too. A wave of dread washed over me. I knew, instantly, what was coming: my day of reckoning. Sigga would finally confront me about the trip to Iceland with Birdie, the events leading up to Birdie's suicide. Over the years I'd imagined the interrogation over and over again. Why did you go with her? Why didn't you let us know where you were? Why didn't you get help? But no one had ever asked. Not the police or the doctors or my mother or grandmother or Stefan or anyone. Except me. I became an expert in the art of self-interrogation. Defending myself against imaginary accusations. Deposing myself to no avail. That was all rehearsal. This would be the real thing. If I wanted absolution, I would have to take the stand; for how could Sigga forgive me without understanding what, exactly, I had done, and not done? The dread was mixed with relief. Finally, someone would extract the story from me, piece by piece, even if only to confirm my guilt. I stared at the floor, waiting.
The Tricking of Freya Page 26
