Northernmost

by Peter Geye

  “Next you’ll ask if I’d take you as my wife again.”

  “Well?”

  I took a step toward her. “Of course I would, Inger. And I’d send Thea to follow her wishes. And I’d say yes to Sverdrup, too. And finally, because I have to, I’ll take Marius Granerud’s offer as well. Better to give something to get something than to give everything and get nothing, which is what my faering promises.”

  She steeled herself against a harbor breeze. “You speak of Thea as though she were on a lark, Odd Einar.”

  How many times in my life had I been out on the sound with my faering, racing on the wind, the fish boxes stowed with my catch, only to feel the wind die or shift and watch my sail hang slack? That was the feeling I got now—my spirit the sail, and my wife’s words the dying wind. “Christ, Inger. My own sick worries about her aren’t enough? I need your doom?” I jumped from the dock into my boat and lifted the masthead off the bottom. It was splintered clear through. My line might as well have been kelp, so I tossed the stringy coil overboard, and the dark water swallowed it whole before the ripples stopped circling.

  “She’s my daughter too. You are hardly the only one who misses her.”

  “But I’ll wait for her,” I muttered, almost hoping that Inger hadn’t heard me.

  “You would be forgiven if you’d gone straight to Tromsø and stayed there.” Her voice was low. “It would be as if you hadn’t survived. The good Lord God would know the truth, but no one else would need to.” Then she glanced over at the suddenly clear Håja plateau, its emerald grass now lit up by the white sun and clouds. I climbed back onto the dock and moved to her side, and together we looked out across the water.

  “Do you remember the summer days we used to take her out there?” I said. “How she’d scramble up that slope like a sheep, through grass taller than she was. And her soft blond curls!”

  Inger’s breath caught, and for a long minute we stood there with our memories, more colorful in the past but surely still alive on this day. Inger believed they’d have to be enough. I could accept that now, even as I should’ve admitted it a year ago. Yet I would never rest until I knew it with complete certainty. Telling my story to Marius Granerud—and more important than the hundred kroner this would bring—would be a first step toward that prospect. But I already knew I would not go Tromsø without Inger.

  “Those summer days, Inger, and the sound of her laughter…the sound of your laughter. Why, those days alone have made my life worth living.”

  Now she looked at me.

  “I’m not about to quit them yet. I fought those nights up north because I wanted more of you. And more of our daughter.” I took her hand, there on the dock above my faering. “I’ll go see Marius Granerud now, to tell him I’ll go. That we’ll go, I beg you. Then, the minute that’s done we’ll come back home and get the boat ready. To make a new life here. I want all of that, but I only want it with you.”

  She shifted her gaze back to Håja as a new bank of clouds lowered over it. “You’re a good man, Odd Einar. A good, gentle man.” The island disappeared under the sky. “And I love you,” she added softly. “All I ask is that you let me grieve for my daughter, even if you won’t. So please let’s not speak of her.”

  [2017]

  The phone vibrated on the nightstand, pulling her from sleep and into an alien hotel room. It was dark but for the sheen of streetlights through the curtains and the glow of her phone’s screen. She propped herself up on an elbow to look: a photograph of Liv kissing Frans’s cheek with an exaggerated pucker that was displayed every time he called. The picture had been taken at a concert at the Lake Harriet band shell the August before. Later that night, Greta remembered, a hailstorm had struck and a big branch from a linden tree snapped onto the boulevard, narrowly missing her truck. Axel, just a puppy but already as big as a Lab, had pissed in his crate and cried all night after the storm passed. She knew because she’d been awake with him.

  When the phone stopped pulsing she got up, went to the bathroom, and brushed her teeth. Even in the dark mirror she could see how drawn and tired her face was. And angry. How had she become this person, day after day?

  She was practiced at the art of not taking his calls. But this time felt more deceitful. Sure, it was the middle of the night—3:07 according to her phone—but factoring in the time difference it was just after eight in the evening at home, where Frans thought she was; so lateness of the hour was no excuse. There was also the matter of where she now stood, so much closer to him than he was to her. She felt like an intruder in their marriage, and wondered if this was how he felt, whenever he went to Alena and had to find the proper time to call home.

  Back at the window, she parted the curtains and felt a wash of something like vertigo as the lights in the square came rushing up at her. She was surprised to see so many people in the square itself, bathed by the lights from the stores and streetlamps in quiet snowfall.

  Her phone buzzed again, with a text this time: Why aren’t you answering my calls?

  As she pulled on a T-shirt and her underwear she remembered her fantasy from hours earlier. Her neck flushed and she felt another kind of light-headedness; her hands went warm and damp, and she sat on the edge of the bed and for a full minute conjured that man again. Then, as if waking for a second time, she shook her head and wondered what sort of woman sat in a foreign hotel room dreaming about a stranger.

  As though to remove this new temptation, she put jeans and a sweater on, slumped in the small chair under the window, and picked up her phone.

  “Mom!”

  Liv’s voice sounded like it was next door, and Greta missed her suddenly and fiercely.

  “Hi, sweet pea.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Far away, Liv. I’m in Norway.”

  “Are you with Dad?”

  “No,” she said. “Not yet.”

  “With Grandma and Grandpa?”

  “I’m not with them, either.”

  Liv let out something like a laugh, then said, “What are you doing there?”

  Greta looked over at the church tower and told her daughter that she was just visiting. “Anyway, you must be getting ready for bed?”

  “More like getting out of bed,” she said. “It’s morning, Mom. Duh.”

  Liv and Lasse had both made half a dozen trips to Norway to visit their grandparents, marveling anew each crossing about the loss or gain of hours. After the last visit, Liv had asked what happened to those hours. Greta wondered herself now. “I guess I slept a lot longer than I wanted to, kiddo. I thought it was the middle of the night. Because it’s dark out.”

  “Grandpa Gus made apple pancakes this morning and now it’s snowing again. It snowed all day yesterday, and at recess I made a snowman with Claudia and we put her scarf around his neck. Then we forgot to take it off when we went back inside.”

  “I hope she doesn’t catch a cold.”

  “Lasse’s gonna catch one.”

  “Oh?”

  “He took Axel out skijoring and didn’t wear his hat.”

  Greta started to say that she’d have a word with Lasse, but Liv had apparently handed the phone to Gus, whose voice came low into her phone. “How’s the motherland?”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “I heard Liv tell you Lasse was skiing without his hat. Don’t believe her.”

  “I hope she’s not making too much trouble.”

  “Trouble’s the last thing she is. But that boy of yours is bound and determined to teach that dog how to ski. He was up in the dark harnessing him. Been gone for almost an hour now. His pancakes are stone cold.”

  “Well, he’s Frans’s son, too.”

  “There are worse fates. How was the flight?”

  “Longer than usual.”

  “Oslo’s pretty dreary this time of year, eh?”

 
“I’m not in Oslo.”

  “Oh?”

  “I made a detour. To Hammerfest.”

  “Hammerfest?”

  “And yes, it’s dreary and dark. I thought it was the middle of the night here.”

  “Greta, what’re you doing in Hammerfest?”

  In fact, she was on the phone looking out the window at the snowfall. “It’s snowing here. Big, heavy snow.”

  “Does Frans know where you are?”

  “No.”

  He was silent for a beat, then said, “Well, I’ll be. If I’d known you were going, I might’ve sent some letters along with you.”

  She could see the bundle of letters he was talking about, sitting in a glass-topped wooden box on his coffee table, letters written by Greta’s great-great-grandmother—Thea Eide, who’d been the first of her family to immigrate, a hundred and twenty-odd years ago—to her mother and father back home. And half a dozen letters they’d written to her, too. Not a single one of them ever delivered. They sat there like a strange homage to the stories that never got told in her family.

  “I went to the cemetery to see if I could find their graves,” Greta said.

  “And?”

  “Everything was covered with snow. And it was dark. Maybe I’ll go back again today.”

  “Hammerfest,” he said again, as though the idea was just starting to sink in. “What else is there?”

  Greta pushed the curtains wide open. “A couple hotels. Lots of boats in the harbor. A pretty square with a few stores and restaurants. A church, of course. I went in there yesterday. Not much else. At least not that I’ve seen yet.” She counted the hours again. “I think I just slept for eighteen hours.”

  “That sounds like more than jet lag.”

  The residue of all that sleep came up in a big yawn. She stretched and felt her toes and the soles of her feet on the cool tile floor. “It’s the first time I’ve slept like that since Lasse was born.” She yawned again and felt suddenly alive. “What day is it?”

  “It’s Tuesday, here and there.”

  “Everything’s all right at home? The kids are being good?”

  “You already know the answers to those questions.”

  On the far side of the square she saw an awning and a lighted window and thought, Café. Her stomach somersaulted. “I don’t think I’ve eaten since I left Minneapolis.”

  “There must be a damn good plate of fish to be had in that town.”

  “I bet there is.” She pulled a pair of socks from her bag beside the bed and sat down. “You’ll be okay with them for a couple more days?”

  “Are you kidding? Between the kids and your fancy digs, I’m in paradise. Anyway, I saw in the paper this morning that it’ll only be sixteen up in Gunflint today. The older I get, the less this season agrees with me. It’ll be twice that temperature down here today.”

  “Huh, Tuesday. Lasse has guitar lessons after school.”

  “He already told me that.”

  “And Liv gets a homework packet today. She won’t want to do it, but Frans tells her that unless she wants to fish for her dinner, she’d better study hard.”

  “Hey, there’s no shame in fishing for your dinner.”

  “That’s what I say. Anyway, you’ll see to it she does it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thanks, Dad. Really. I’ll call again when I’m headed home. Is that all right?”

  “You bet. But, Greta?”

  She waited for her scolding.

  “Call Frans. It’s not right he can’t reach you.”

  “I’ll call him right now. I love you, Dad. Give the kids hugs for me.”

  * * *

  —

  She kept her phone right next to her plate of king crab, just below her glass of wine, as if it were a part of the place setting at the restaurant in the Scandic Hotel, which the concierge at the Hotel Thon had recommended. Frans hadn’t called or texted since he woke her up this afternoon. She’d ordered the crab because she liked how “Kongekrabbe” looked on the menu, softer than the other Norwegian words. She was in a mood for softness. For lightness, which was why she’d got the chardonnay, something she couldn’t remember ever ordering before, and also the reason she was taking such pleasure in the quiet restaurant and the light shimmering beneath the clearing sky outside the window.

  Fine as the crab smelled, she had no appetite. She’d brought along a novel she got at the airport, read the first page, and then closed it and taken another sip of wine. There was only one other customer in the restaurant—a middle-aged woman sitting by the entrance and having coffee after her dinner.

  The waitress—who, as far as Greta could tell, had also prepared the crab and poured the wine—came by her table. “One minute, the snow and clouds,” she said with a smile, then waved her hand like a magician, “now this—what, this starlight?”

  Greta looked up at her. “It’s like snowfall, illuminated, isn’t it?”

  The woman, who might’ve been her cousin given how much they resembled each other, sighed in exhaustion. “And now this is our only light for months. You are Canadian?”

  Greta smiled herself. “American. But my hometown’s only fifty miles from Canada.”

  The woman looked down at her and said, “No Americans visit Hammerfest unless they come on the cruise ships.”

  “Do the Canadians?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “No Norwegians, even. No one comes until summer. Why are you here?”

  Greta looked down and twirled the stem of the wineglass between her thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know.”

  “Then another glass of wine?”

  “Okay.”

  Stepping behind the bar to open a fresh bottle, the waitress also turned a stereo system on low, and soft piano notes filled the small dining room. A dirgeful sound that made Greta’s stomach catch. She took a deep breath and felt the long night of sleep seeping out of her.

  “Is something wrong with your food?” the waitress asked, trading her empty glass for the full one.

  “No. I guess I’m just not hungry after all.”

  “Or too much wine and no food.” The woman tsk-tsked.

  “You’re right.” So Greta took a bite of the buttery crab, which was delicious. More than delicious. She had several more bites, and listened to music so slow that it seemed not to be moving at all, with low, breve notes—as her mother had called them—interrupted by higher, trembling ones. The same repetition over and over for a full minute, then shifting into an even lower scale. It struck her that it sounded like something beyond longing. But there was playfulness in it, too, as though the darkness was searching for a little light.

  Greta herself had never learned to play, despite her mother’s wishes. Sarah had taken lessons all through college, from an English woman who, by her account, was ninety years old when she’d first taught her in kindergarten. Sarah could play anything. Classical, of course, but also jazz and country and anything in between. Greta could remember her parents performing Christmas carols together—Sarah on piano, Gus on guitar—and making their happiness seem like the easiest thing in the world.

  The song ended and another began, still melancholic but with more pace.

  “It is lovely, yes?” the waitress said, startling her. “The music.” She set a basket of warm brown bread and a ramekin of butter next to the crab.

  “Very,” Greta said.

  “It is winter music.”

  “Chopin?”

  “Stig Hjalmarson,” she said, pointing to a small balcony hidden by the fireplace.

  He sat at a baby grand piano that Greta hadn’t noticed when she walked in, drawn as she was by the table overlooking the sound. Behind her, a short glass-brick wall flanked the fireplace, and on the far side was the piano with him sitting on the bench. He wore th
e same sweater as the night before, but his hair was pulled under a knit hat and his eyes were behind stylish glasses. He was facing the dining room, so she couldn’t see his hands, but the second she thought of them she warmed again and picked up her glass of wine.

  “When he’s in town he plays every night. Just comes in and plays even if no one is here.”

  “I thought it was the radio at first,” Greta said. “But I should have known better. He plays at the church, too.”

  The waitress cocked her head and glanced at the wedding ring on Greta’s left hand.

  “I stopped in there last night,” she said quickly. “He was playing a Christmas song I know.”

  Now the waitress looked her in the eyes before turning to listen intently. “He’s been working on that same fugue for two winters already.”

  Greta, too, swung her gaze over. He seemed almost to reabsorb the music as he played it, only to play it again, slower, until it reminded her of waves breaking in a dying wind.

  “It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” Greta said.

  “He’s not a sad man,” the waitress told her.

  “He’s got to be something, to write music like that.” She regarded him as though he were a curiosity. Some strange nocturnal animal that only lived in the Arctic.

  The waitress sat down in the chair opposite her. “I’m Ava,” she said.

  “And I’m Greta.”

  The man began from the start again.

  “Do you know what he told me when he came in tonight?” Ava asked.

  “What?”

  “That tonight he would finally play it right. That in church last night he understood why it was different in his mind than in his fingers.”

  Greta blushed. But why? As if she’d been caught staring, she turned away and said, “It sounds wonderful to me.”

  “I think he was ready to quit this one.”

  “Do you know him well?”

  “Ever since we were kids.” She was looking at Greta. “We are not kids anymore.”

  “I guess none of us are,” Greta said.