Close to the Heel

by Norah McClintock

  She let out a long sigh. “You don’t know much about Iceland, do you?”

  I tried to hold my anger in check. “I did my homework.”

  “Well, you obviously missed a few things. Most Icelanders don’t have last names the way you do in America.”

  “I’m Canadian,” I pointed out.

  “Whatever. My name is Brynja. My father’s name is Einar. So I am Brynja Einarsdottir. If I had a brother, he would be Einarsson. My father’s father’s name was Magnus, so my father is Einar Magnusson. His father’s name was Olaf, so my great-grandfather’s name was Tor—”

  “Olafsson. I get it,” I said. What I thought was, Whatever. “And I’m from Canada, not America.”

  She shrugged. The look in her eyes said that she either made no distinction or didn’t care to make one.

  “Is that your only luggage?” she asked, glancing at my duffel bag.

  I nodded. Before I could move, she grabbed it and headed for the terminal doors, leaving me with no choice but to trot after her. When the doors swooshed open and a blast of icy wind hit me, I wished I was wearing my parka.

  The duffel bag was heavy. I knew that for a fact because I had toted it from the Major’s car to the check-in at the airport back home. But she was swinging it along in front of me as if it was a handbag. She wove her way through the parking lot, stopped beside a four-wheel-drive SUV and tossed the duffel bag into the rear cargo area. Without even a glance at me, she climbed in behind the wheel and started the engine.

  “I’m supposed to have a car,” I said through the open passenger-side window.

  “My dad has one for you. You have a driver’s license, right?”

  Jeez, what did she think?

  She put the vehicle in gear and glanced inquiringly at me.

  I jumped in and hadn’t even begun to buckle my seat belt when she stomped on the gas and we shot forward.

  “Hey!” It came out automatically.

  She chuckled.

  I wanted to be mad at her—she had real attitude. Like I was supposed to have known she was a girl, like I should know every damn thing about her country when she obviously knew nothing at all about mine. I hoped I wasn’t going to have to spend a lot of time with her. I sincerely hoped she wasn’t planning to hike to the interior with me and her father. If she was, I had news for her. After all, my grandfather was paying for this. If that didn’t give me the right to say who came and who didn’t, then I don’t know what did.

  We had just got underway when it started to rain—an all-out downpour. Brynja had the windshield wipers going flat out. We drove in silence. There was no way I going to make small talk with a girl driving in a storm. The gray sky and the dismal rain were a perfect match for the fields of black rock on one side of the road and the slate-gray ocean on the other.

  The rain stopped suddenly, about the same time a cluster of buildings appeared up ahead.

  “Reykjavik,” Brynja said. “We’re going past it.” She glanced at me. “It’s good you got here when you did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “So you can see my afi.” She glanced at me. “My grandfather.”

  “What for?” What did her grandfather have to do with anything?

  “If it wasn’t for him, you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, you wouldn’t even be alive,” she said. “You know the story, right?”

  “What story?”

  She rolled her eyes. I was fast getting the impression that I was a huge disappointment to her—not that I cared. I mean, what did it matter to me what she thought?

  “Your grandfather’s plane crash-landed in the interior during World War Two.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “My afi saved his life.”

  I stared at her. “Your grandfather is the Sigurdur my grandfather told me about?” She nodded. “But I thought—”

  Her sigh was downright theatrical. Yeah, she definitely had attitude.

  “You thought what?” She made it sound like,What ridiculous notion popped into your head this time?

  Well, if she was going to be like that…

  I took a deep breath. “I thought he died.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes. Uh-oh.

  “What I mean is…my grandfather and yours exchanged cards at Christmas. But last year, my grandfather didn’t hear anything, so he assumed…” When you assume, my most recent school principal said, you make an ass out of u and me. Get it, Rennie?

  “He’s not dead,” she said. Her tone was sharp. Accusatory. I remembered what she had said: that it was good I’d arrived when I did. I hoped that didn’t mean what I thought it meant. I also wondered how it might affect what I was supposed to do. Did Mr. Devine know all this when he chose Brynja’s father as my guide? Did it matter? “When he heard you were coming, he was so excited,” Brynja said. “He wants to meet you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” She said it as if she couldn’t imagine why. She was quiet for a long time, which was okay by me. Then she said, “Tell me about your grandfather. What was it like growing up around a man who had so many adventures?”

  “I don’t really know,” I said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “I mean, I didn’t even know he existed until after my mother died.”

  She looked at me so sharply and for such a long time that I was sure she was going to miss the turn in the road up ahead.

  “Uh, Brynja…” I grabbed the steering wheel. She looked straight ahead, her whole body went rigid for a moment, and she wrenched the wheel, sending gravel cascading down the sharp drop into the sea below. She eased off the gas pedal.

  “Sorry,” she murmured. “It’s just—I didn’t know about your mother.”

  “It’s no big deal.” That was my standard line. I killed my mother, no biggie, right? But this time, as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wished I had chosen different ones. Her eyes were hard and her look sharp. “I mean, it’s no big deal that you didn’t know. Why should you? It was a couple of years ago.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “It was…an accident.” That’s what they’d called it, a freak accident. Falling rock in Northern Ontario. There were signs posted along the road warning about it, but I’d never heard of it happening and I’d never seen it until that day. We were cruising along, just my mom and me, with the top down on her little convertible. My dad was away, as usual, and we were on a road trip to visit my grandmother, who lived in Toronto. Then, just like that, something crashed right onto the car. I remember hearing it. I remember thinking, Holy %@$#! The car swerved and slammed into the rock face. Despite my seat belt, I hurtled face-first into the airbag. Everything went black. When I finally lifted my head, I looked over at my mom. But all I saw was rock.

  “It was an accident,” I said again. “It was a long time ago.” But I remembered it as clearly as if it had been yesterday.

  She didn’t say another word. Neither did I. I stared out the window, where there wasn’t much to look at except ocean, rock, the occasional farm and sheep. Lots of sheep, all over the place, usually in groups of three. And waterfalls. I’d never seen so many waterfalls.

  SIX

  We seemed to be moving inland. I heard a bell-like sound. Brynja frowned at the display on the dash. She was low on gas. Forty minutes and another warning ding later, she turned off the main road, and the next thing I knew, we were approaching a small town.

  “Borgarnes,” she said. “We live between here and Reykholt.”

  That was it. That was the name of the town I couldn’t remember at the airport.

  She slowed and pulled into a gas station. She jumped out, grabbed a pump and began to fill up. I got out to stretch my legs. I was walking toward a tourist information center when I heard someone shout in a language I assumed was Icelandic. I turned and saw Brynja, gas pump in one hand, push a woman away from her. The woman was jabbering at her the whole time and came
at her again as soon as Brynja had shoved her. I doubled back, and Brynja pulled up the nozzle and thrust the gas hose at me. The woman was still talking. While I stood there holding the hose, Brynja shoved her again, harder this time, and the woman went flying backward and landed on her butt on the ground. I stared at Brynja. Her face was completely transformed by anger and hatred.

  “What’s going on?” I said. “Are you okay? Do you—?”

  “Get back in the car,” she said, grabbing the nozzle from me.

  Right. Like some girl I didn’t even know was going to start ordering me around as if she was the Major.

  Brynja jammed the gas nozzle back into the gas tank and the numbers on the machine started spinning again.

  The woman struggled to her feet. Brynja looked at her and hissed something in Icelandic.

  The woman turned and said something to me.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Get in the car,” Brynja said.

  “Please.” The woman turned to me and spoke in English this time. “Please, I just want to know where my husband is.”

  Her husband? I didn’t know who this woman was. How was I supposed to know anything about her husband?

  “I’m sorry, but I—” I began.

  Brynja finished filling the tank. She slammed the nozzle back into its slot and spoke sharply to the woman. To me she said, “I’m going to pay. Get in the car and don’t talk to her. She’s crazy.”

  With that, she marched toward the gas station. I circled around to the passenger side. The woman followed me.

  “Please,” she said. “Please, I know he wouldn’t desert me. Please, talk to her. I just want to know where he is.”

  “Look, lady, I’m not from around here.”

  She grabbed my hand and held it tightly.

  “You look like a good person. Ask her. Just ask her, that’s all I want.”

  I saw Brynja through the window of the gas station. She was holding a mobile phone to her ear while she glared at me.

  “Lady, I really have to—”

  “She knows. I know she does. Or her father knows. Please.”

  I glanced back at Brynja. She put the phone back in her pocket and pushed open the gas station door. She wasn’t looking at me; she was looking at a car that was pulling into the gas station.

  A police car.

  It pulled up behind the woman just as Brynja reappeared, and two cops got out.

  The one who had been riding shotgun sprang out of the car and strode over to Brynja. Maybe I was reading it wrong, but it seemed to me like he wanted to be the first to get a handle on the situation. He listened for a moment and then turned to the woman and spoke to her. She looked frightened and replied in the same whiny voice she had used on Brynja. The second cop took his time getting out of the car. He was taller than the first one. He watched for a moment before approaching the woman. He bent down and said something into her ear. When he straightened again, she stared up at him. Then she slunk away. She vanished into a grocery store across the street.

  “Jeez, what did you say to her?” I asked. He’d gotten action and he’d gotten it fast.

  The second cop looked me over. Cops are always doing that—sizing people up before they speak to them. It didn’t bother me. I lived with the Major.

  “I told her if she made a nuisance of herself again, I’d have a word with her boss. It’s a tough economy these days, and it won’t be easy for a woman her age to find another job.” He spoke even better English that Brynja, with an accent that made me think of New York. Maybe his teacher had been from New York. Or maybe he’d lived there for a while.

  Brynja said something in Icelandic.

  The first cop scowled his disapproval and spoke angrily.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I told you to get in the car,” Brynja said.

  The tall cop grinned. “Sounds like she’s got you on a short leash, son.”

  “Shut up, Karl,” Brynja said.

  The first cop clucked his disapproval. Brynja growled at him in Icelandic.

  “Mind your manners, Brynja,” the first cop said in English, glancing at me.

  “At least Karl got her to go away,” Brynja said. “But you, Tryggvi? You’re useless. She only moved here so that she could harass us—and today of all days. But you do nothing.”

  “The minute she breaks the law, we’ll deal with her,” Karl said smoothly. Tryggvi shot him an annoyed look. “But she’s crazy, not criminal, and everyone knows it. And being crazy is not against the law.”

  Tryggvi broke in. “She’s been warned. If she sets foot on your property again, I’ll arrest her for trespassing. Other than that, there’s nothing I can do.” I noticed he said I, not we. “She’ll eventually give up and accept what happened. She’ll have to.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “That’s none of your business,” Brynja said. She opened the driver’s-side door. “Get in the car, Rennie.” Her tone was warning. She sounded eerily like the Major.

  I counted to five before climbing in beside her, so she wouldn’t think I was going to jump every time she yelled at me.

  “What was that all about?” I asked as she put the engine in gear.

  No answer.

  “What’s with those cops?” I asked instead.

  “What do you mean?”

  Where should I start? “You talk to cops back home the way you did just now, and they’d bust you out of spite.”

  “Tryggvi is my uncle.”

  “You talk to your uncle like that?”

  “It’s more accurate to say he’s my ex-uncle. He used to be married to my father’s sister. If you ask me, he’s an ass, not to mention an arrogant one. My aunt agrees with me.”

  “And your dad?”

  “You know what men are like. They stick together.”

  In other words, the brothers-in-law had remained tight.

  “Tryggvi thinks he’s a big deal because he’s a cop and he got his training in America at the FBI.”

  “He trained at Quantico?” Not bad. If I’d liked cops, which I didn’t, I might have been impressed.

  “He thought he would come back here and be made chief of police in Reykjavik. But instead he’s stuck here. It drives him crazy.”

  “And the other one?”

  “Karl? Karl drives him even crazier. Tryggvi thinks he doesn’t understand the way things work over here. He’s always competing with Karl. He says the only reason all the bosses like Karl is because they’re so flattered he decided to come back here.”

  “Back?”

  “His grandfather was Icelandic, but Karl’s father emigrated before Karl was even born.” That explained the American accent. “He spent most of his summers over here when he was a kid. A few years back, he came for a vacation and decided to stay.”

  “What did he do in the States?”

  “He was a cop.”

  And that explained Tryggvi’s annoyance. After his time in Quantico, he probably thought he had it all over Karl. But Americans…well, let’s just say they never seem short on confidence, and I bet Karl didn’t take well to Tryggvi insisting he didn’t understand people over here.

  We drove in silence for a few moments. I kept waiting for Brynja to explain what had just happened, but she didn’t, which meant that I had to take the bull by the horns.

  “Brynja, what happened to that woman’s husband?”

  There was a long pause before she said, “I have no idea. But I sincerely hope he’s dead.”

  She refused to look at me again. I guessed there was no point in asking her what was so important about today of all days.

  Fifteen minutes later, we turned onto a graveled laneway and drove across a narrow bridge. We passed a tiny church, a barn and a few other smaller buildings, then stopped in front of a white house with red trim.

  “Who lives here?” I asked.

  “We do.” She spat the words at me. Still angry, I deduced. “My dad, my
afi and me.”

  I considered asking about her mother but, given her mood, decided not to push my luck.

  But there was one question I had to ask.

  “Um…” I admit it. She had me walking on eggshells and choosing my words carefully so she wouldn’t give me more attitude. “Could I maybe settle in first?”

  “Settle in?” She spoke the words as if she didn’t know what they meant.

  “Check into the motel or whatever, take a shower, maybe catch a nap—”

  “Motel?” she said. “What motel?” As if she had no idea what I was talking about. See what I mean?

  “Hotel, then.”

  “The hotel in Reykholt is booked up for a conference.”

  “How about in Borgarnes?”

  “You’re staying with us until my dad can take you to the interior.”

  “Yeah, but I—”

  “You Americans are so rude. Someone offers you hospitality—”

  “I’m Canadian,” I said.

  She didn’t even pause.“—and all you do is complain.”

  “Fine. Okay.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and waited.

  “Thank you,” I said finally.

  “That’s the car you can use,” she said, pointing to an ancient Yaris in the driveway. “The keys are inside. Come on.” She climbed out of the SUV, circled around to the back and was halfway to the front door with my duffel bag before I realized what was happening.

  “Hey, I can take that,” I said.

  No response. She shoved open the front door and disappeared inside. I scrambled after her.

  The main floor of the house was large and the kind of neat the Major would have approved of. To the right was a living room, to the left a dining room and behind that, a kitchen. All the rooms were painted a gleaming white. Paintings and photographs decorated the walls between and above bookcases crammed with books. The Major had told me that Iceland had one of the highest literacy rates in the world, due to a combination of the long dark winters and the state religion, Lutheranism, which required that all children be able to read and write in order to make their confirmation into the church.