by Peter Geye
That morning, the trail that led her under the sink to finally get it installed had begun with an Ax & Beacon story from March of 1910: “Boy Mauled by Bear on Frozen Burnt Wood River.” She of course already knew about her great-grandpa’s encounter with the bear, which lost him an eye. But it had lived in her consciousness all these years as family legend, and here was something different: the reported facts. So how should she write about it? This was the question she came up against almost daily, one that frustrated her away from one kind of work into an urgent other.
As she lay on her back under the kitchen sink, attaching the trap to the PVC pipe, part of her mind was still back with that young boy on the Burnt Wood River, and on how his story had lived through all these years—more than a century of them. She was there on the river as a boy, and wrapping Teflon tape around a locknut, when she heard a car door slam outside. She heard another one open and then close and she figured it was her father, bringing her something, another loaf of bread or sushi from the co-op. She heard the fish house door open and boots kicked against each other and she shouted, “I’m down here!”
Her reading glasses were steaming up from the sweat on her brow, and she could feel her hair sticking to her neck. She tightened the trap and set the washer and the drain elbow in place and tightened them. Since her father hadn’t answered yet she called, “Dad?” and when he still didn’t answer she pulled herself out from under the sink and straightened up and saw Stig standing in the doorway with a handful of plastic-wrapped flowers.
She put the Channellock she was holding in the sink and looked at him again. They stood like that for a long time, his face expressionless, her breath short and her hands shaking. Finally, he looked at the flowers and then held them out as though to say, Here.
“Say something to me,” Greta said.
“I’m in love with you.”
She leaned back against the frame of the counter and put her hand on the edge of the sink.
“I had to come tell you,” he said.
All the hours they’d spent on the phone and FaceTiming, all the texting, it had begun to seem that he wasn’t real. That he only existed as a fantasy on her iPhone and as the fulfillment of the spiritual void she’d long felt. But here he was. He’d cut his hair and was wearing a dark gray ski jacket and jeans and leather boots and he still had the flowers in his hand.
“You came to tell me?” she said.
He looked at his watch and said, “I landed in Minneapolis at nine. I came straight here. Yes, to tell you I love you.”
“So when I talked to you this morning, you were in Minneapolis?”
“Yes.”
“And when you asked if I’d be working at the fish house, you wanted to know where to go?”
He only grinned.
“And you knew how to get here because I sent you the Google Map?”
“Well, I had to ask. There’s no sign for Eide Cove Road.”
“Who did you ask?”
“At the co-op. Where I got these.” Again he held the flowers up. “You are even more beautiful than I remember.”
Now she looked down at herself, jeans and a flannel shirt and running shoes. She felt her neck and the hair still stuck to it, even though the sweat had dried. “I’m a mess. I’ve been installing this sink.”
“You are not a mess.”
“You should’ve told me you were coming. I could’ve made myself presentable.” She glanced around in the glaring light, at the chaos on and around the card table, at her sleeping bag on the bunk, at the empty coffee cups on the windowsill. “And cleaned up around here.”
“I love you,” he said again, and now he unrooted himself from that spot by the door, he walked across the room, and handed her the flowers, which she set aside and in the same motion, as though it had been choreographed, took ahold of him, her hands beneath his jacket, her body pressing into his, her lips finding his. That kiss, it felt as if it had been happening since their last at the Hammerfest airport, when he said goodbye now more than four months ago.
When he stepped back and looked at her again, she was grateful that her hands were still on his waist to help steady herself. She’d wanted this for so long. Through so many conversations, some of which lasted all night. Through so many other sleepless nights. She’d imagined him walking back into her life a thousand times, and in many different scenarios, including this one. But now that he stood before her, it was as if they were on the Vannhimmel and in each other’s embrace again for the first time. She put her cheek to his chest and said, “I’ve been waiting for you. I didn’t think you’d ever get here.”
“I promised you.”
She tilted her head back to look up at him. “We promised each other.”
“Yes, we did.” And he pulled her close again, his big hands covering her back.
The past four months had been a master class in desperate thinking. The choice to meet him. The choice to stay in Hammerfest. The choice to go to his boat. The choice to tell Frans, and to leave him, and to give herself the chance to start over. And the choice to have faith Lasse and Liv would be all right. And to trust that this man now in her arms would be as true as she believed he was. All of this choosing had been done without the conviction that things would work out. Hope, yes, in abundance. But she’d come to think of herself like Odd Einar on Spitzbergen, wandering through the Fonn, beseeching some force she couldn’t name. Yet she knew that she’d rescued herself.
This thought inflamed her and she reached her hands up to his face and brought it down to hers. If the first kiss had felt like a continuation of their last in Hammerfest, this one felt like it would last the rest of their lives. And it was thanks to this that she had the confidence to step back and drop her hands from his face to the buttons of her flannel shirt, to step again so he could see her as she slowly undid them there in the brilliant afternoon light, exposing herself one inch at a time. If she’d had the ability to step outside of herself, she might’ve felt shy or hesitant. It’d been some twenty years since a man other than Frans had seen her naked in the full light of day. She was not, she knew with both certainty and pride, the same woman she’d been then. She had the wisdom of two children written on her flesh. That experience could be hidden in the darkness of a boat’s berth, but not here. Had she been outside herself, this next step might’ve given her pause. But she had never felt as bold as she did when sliding the shirt off her shoulders, reaching behind to unclasp her bra as she took those backward steps toward her bunk. She pulled her hair over to one side and laid it across her shoulder, then unbuttoned her jeans and put her hands to the waistband before he said, “Wait. Don’t move, please.” He took off his jacket and dropped it to the floor as he covered the space between them, the eagerness of his expression as plain as the sun pouring through the windows.
Once in front of her, he dropped to his knees. Still his head came up to her chin, which she rested in his hair as he put his face into her neck and inhaled. Three, four, five breaths before he sat on his heels and put his hands on the waistband of her jeans. She looked down at him and knew how water felt when plunging over the falls. Then, instead of pulling her jeans down, he spread his hands across her stomach, his thumbs in her belly button and the tips of his pinkies on her ribs, and ran them up her body, rising from his heels until he could touch her neck so gently, and then finally through her hair, which he brushed off her shoulders so they both were bare and absorbing the light, and when he’d done all of this and then run all eight of his fingertips down the river of her spine before resting them again where he’d first put them, she realized she hadn’t taken a breath since he knelt before her. She took a gulping one now.
“You,” he whispered. “I am here with you.”
She took another deep breath and as he tugged her jeans down she felt an even deeper kinship with those waterfalls. She kicked her shoes off and peeled her j
eans from her feet.
“Here,” she said, stepping backward until she reached the bunk and the bunched-up sleeping bag.
When he began unlatching his belt, she reached for him. “I’ve wanted to do this for so long,” she said. “Let me undress you.” And she did. He raised his arms and bent at the waist and she pulled his shirt over his head. He’d lost a bit of his paunch and when she ran her fingertips down his chest and belly, his stomach rippled like a little wave. She put her mouth on his navel and kissed him while she pushed his jeans and underwear down. His boots were still on and he tried to kick them free, but she had to help untangle his pants. Finally, they got them off and looked at each other and laughed.
Stig looked around as though someone besides her might see him there, naked in the sunlight, which seemed aimed directly on them through all six windows.
“No one’s coming,” Greta said, leaning back on the bunk. “It’s just us.” She unzipped the sleeping bag so it covered the whole mattress and fluffed the pillow and took her underwear off before lying down, her knees joined and lying to the left, her arms, she hadn’t realized until just then, covering her breasts.
He sat down and slowly moved one of her hands and then the other until they rested above her head. Here he paused and gazed at her and she nodded her head in permission and he ran his hand down the length of her, from wrist to waist to knee, all the while staring into her eyes.
Now she put a hand on his knee. “Your skin feels so nice,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re here. I’ve never been so surprised or so happy.” She was whispering, she noticed. “You came here for me,” she said.
“Yes, I did. Of course I did.”
Now she moved her hand up his body and sat up a little herself and when her hand retraced its line she ended on his cock. He closed his eyes and groaned just barely and because he was stunned and because she couldn’t wait a second longer she sat up and grabbed his shoulders and shifted her left leg over his lap and as if they’d made love a thousand times she sat astride him, easily guided him inside of her, and locked her arms behind his head. With each slow and almost imperceptible gyration of her hips, she felt a pressure both releasing and mounting that rolled out over her entire body and increased with every movement of his hands, with each brush of his lips against her neck, with each whiff of his hair and skin. But she also felt an exhalation, again from her entire body. As though the blizzard within was finally releasing its snow.
* * *
—
She dozed after they made love and woke to the icicles dripping from the eaves outside in the afternoon sun. Stig was up and standing at one of the small windows overlooking the lake, his wild hair like a filigree between her and the light. He was naked except for his socks and his hands were slightly raised, his fingers playing imaginary keys in the air. When she leaned up on her elbow and pulled the sleeping bag over her, he turned in place.
“Why are you covering yourself?” he said.
She glanced down and shrugged and then pushed the sleeping bag aside. “What are you looking at out there?”
“The lake looks like home,” he said. “You look like home,” he said, and then walked to the bed. He lay down next to her and put his left hand on her hip and kissed her.
“Were you playing a song you know or composing a new one?”
“Another new one.”
“Another?”
He kissed her again. “I have written one hundred songs since I met you.”
“I swear I know them already. The songs.”
“Know them?”
She nodded. “I’ve laid awake so many nights after we talked. I swear I could hear them across the night. They’re beautiful.”
He glanced around and into the corners filled with the falling light. “Will there be room for a piano?”
“Right there,” she said, pointing to the spot she’d pictured him playing. “Tell me about the songs?”
“I would rather just play them for you.”
The thought of it made her shiver.
“Are you cold?” he said, offering to pull the sleeping bag up.
“No. I’m ecstatic.”
“Me too.”
They kissed again and pressed their naked bodies together and the thought they might make love again so soon, well, that such a thing was even possible baffled her. Like hearing a foreign language for the first time and understanding it at once. She reached for him and pulled his cock into her and then she was holding on to him, this time lying side by side, their lips less kissing than feeling for each other, their legs in an odd, desperate tangle. But she reached down between them and pressed her clit and they made love until she came, her body shaking, one hand holding on to him, the other letting herself go.
“Jesus,” she whispered, her voice slow and languid. “I’ve never made love twice in the same day, never mind the same hour. I mean, it’s been years since I made love twice in the same month.”
“Me too. Are you all right?”
Their bodies had already started slipping apart, and in answer she pushed her hips back into him. She reached around his back and pulled him closer.
“It is okay, then?” he said.
“Fuck yes,” she said.
For the first time she saw a sort of arrogant grin come across his face. If it hinted at pridefulness, she’d never before now found this attractive in a man.
He shook his head and sighed and lay back, now offering his right arm for a pillow. She nestled into him and they rested in the silence long enough to hear the waves rising out on the shore.
“I thought the lake would be frozen,” he said.
“It was a month ago. It rarely freezes over completely.”
“In Duluth I saw a big ship coming to harbor.”
She looked at her watch, at the date. “It’s early for that.”
“A lastebåt. A long ship, yes?”
“Freighters, we call them. Or boats. Not ships. We call them boats.”
“What is the cargo?”
“Taconite, coal, other things. It depends on the boat.”
“Taconite?” he pronounced it awkwardly.
“Iron ore. For making steel. It’s mined on the range and sent down to Chicago and Gary and Detroit and places in Ohio.”
His eyes lit up and he started humming the Gordon Lightfoot song about the Edmund Fitzgerald.
“Yes, exactly,” she said, laughed and patted his bare chest. “That wreck’s the most famous, but around here we also remember a boat called the Ragnarøk that went down not far away.”
“When was this?”
“Oh, fifty years ago? Maybe longer?”
“It is a very rocky coast. All the way from Duluth. I imagine the lake is very deep?”
“Thirteen hundred feet at its deepest.”
He shook his head and kissed her and said, “Did I really come here to ask you how deep is the lake?”
“I know why you came,” she said, and they laughed together.
His stomach gurgled, and he glanced at her and smiled.
“You’re hungry,” she said. “Me too. All I’ve got to eat here is cheese and bread.”
“That’s enough for me.”
Now she sat up on her elbow again, her body still pressed against his. “No, let’s go get something. There’s a good restaurant only five minutes from here.” She checked her watch. “It won’t be busy now.”
“I am not sure about leaving this place,” he said, running his hand over the slope of her shoulder and down her ribs and resting it on the small of her back.
“If I’m going to make love to you again, I’ll need some fuel.”
Now he held her more firmly and gave her a playful spanking.
“After we eat,” she said, and stood up and stretched and then looked at him lying o
n the bunk. The arm he’d had around her was folded under his head and the other across his chest, which was hairless and broad, his hand splayed there and relaxed. His stomach was sunken, the bottom of it rising back up to his pelvis. His cock, still half-hard, lay in the tangle of blond hair. She stared at it, even though she knew he was looking into her eyes. It twitched and she turned slowly to look at his impish face. His stomach growled again. “After we eat,” she said again, but now with less conviction.
He took a deep breath and scratched his belly and then his pelvis and said, “Okay, Greta.”
Her clothes were strewn across the wood floor, and she went from spot to spot picking them up and putting them on. By the time she was buttoning her shirt Stig finally got up, too, and from across the room she could see the shape of his back, the skin she knew to be so soft, the firmness beneath his flesh. She’d never looked at a man like this. Never seen in his nakedness the perfect expression of her desire.
When he finished dressing he joined her at the door, took her by the elbows, and looked at her without saying anything. She put her hands up to his hair and flattened it and then rested them on his cheeks. For a long time they just stood there, taking contented breaths until she whispered, “I’m in love with you too. I am.” She pulled his face toward her and with their lips touching, she said, “How did this happen?”
