The skin on my hands, thin and damp, split over each of my knuckles. Then the splits got infected. I took to wrapping my fingers with duct tape each morning, though when I removed the tape in the evenings my soggy skin came off in strips. Although there were no showers on the glacier, I tried, at first, to keep my hair relatively clean, kneeling in the snow by my tent at night, washing my head in a bucket of ice water. I liked being the last one outside on the ice, a lone soul in the wilderness. I tried to feel the whole expanse moving, slipping toward the sea. Sometimes I found myself building in time like that, quiet moments between rushing to prepare teams and appeasing tourists and scooping shit, when I could take a few breaths to be properly stunned by the space around us. But one night, two of the male guides stood and watched me, murmuring about the way my wet shirt stuck to my skin. I felt intimately exposed, humiliated, as I dipped my head once more into the bucket to rinse the last soap from my hair, feeling their eyes on my back, making my body theirs. By the time I stood up, they were gone. I wondered what they would have done if I wasn’t Dan’s girl. I stopped washing my hair, and wore more hats.
My joy was the dogs. My dogs—mine for the moment, to feed and brush and train, to care for, to carry me through the days. They leaped up when I approached, licked my face, buried their heads in my chest. There was Mabel, a ten-year-old leader and veteran of multiple Iditarods, who curled into my lap whenever I sat on her house; Monkey, part hound, with legs nearly as long as mine; Jaxon, a yearling built of solid muscle, who wagged his tail so hard that it bled from the tip. They wanted love and they wanted to run and those were two things I could give them, two things they could give me.
I refused to have sex with Dan on the glacier. For one thing, our bodies were disgusting, unshowered and greasy and covered in a days-old film of dog shit. And although Dan promised that sex would start to feel good to me, I was yet to be convinced; the few other times we’d had sex it had left me just as unmoved as the first. But most important, the glacier lacked privacy. Every thump, every murmur, traveled clearly from one tent to another, and the last thing I needed was for the men to hear that, to picture my body in its most vulnerable of states. So when Dan slipped into my tent late one evening, I tensed. “Hey,” I said. “I just don’t—”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know.” He wore a zip-up jacket and now he shrugged it off in one movement and sat down at the edge of my cot. “I can’t stop thinking about you. I just want to hold you. Can I do that?” He tucked a hair behind my ear. “You’re pretty,” he said.
“No sex?” I whispered, quiet as a moth.
“No sex. I promise.”
I thought about it, then scooted over and made room for him on the cot. He crawled in beside me and arranged my sleeping bag so that it covered both of us. Our faces were close together. His breath made me giggle. “Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” said Dan.
Outside, somebody’s footprints crunched in the snow.
Dan’s face was solid, impenetrable, but his hands were moving. Lightly, decisively. One at my throat. One tracing my hip, hesitating, then slipping into my underwear, sliding down between my legs.
“Doesn’t this feel nice?” he said.
It didn’t feel nice at all. I reached down to move his hand, but when I tried to push it away, his arm hardened. Our bodies were frozen, my hand on his wrist, his arm unyielding. My back pressed against the tent wall.
“Hey,” I said.
Dan wiggled his fingers, just slightly. A pulse. “How many people can say they’ve had sex on a glacier?”
“Come on,” I said. “I told you I don’t want to.”
Now he smiled and pushed a finger inside me. “Yeah, you want to. I can tell. Look at you, you’re so innocent and sexy.” He brought his mouth to my ear and purred. “Rawr!”
And I thought, Rawr? Who says that?
But he was tugging my long underwear off my hips, kissing me even as I pressed my mouth shut. Pulling a condom from his pocket, rolling it on. As soon as I saw it, my heart sank: he had come here for this. I pressed my knees together. He shoved them apart easily. “Please stop—” I whispered, but he put a finger to my lips.
“Shh,” he said. “We don’t want everyone to hear us.”
Everyone meant the men on the other side of the canvas. They couldn’t know. I couldn’t face them if they knew. I closed my eyes and let my body go slack. It wouldn’t occur to me until later that maybe Dan wanted to be heard.
When Dan finished, he got up quickly and slipped through the tent flap. He walked out backward, so that his floating head was the last thing I saw. “Now we can say we’ve had sex on a glacier,” his head said. “Admit it, that’s pretty cool.”
I grabbed a baby wipe from the box on the floor, rolled over and faced the wall.
After that night, something changed. Whereas before I had regarded sex with Dan as an interesting experiment, it now struck me as grotesque, and incessant, though it probably happened once or twice a week. “I don’t want to,” I’d tell him. Sometimes that was enough. But usually he’d laugh like he knew better, reach between my clenched legs and rub until he pulled his fingers away damp, then climb onto me. During sex he was a different person, focused and cold. Then, when it was over, he loved me, he traced his fingers on my skin. “Don’t worry,” he promised every time. “If we keep doing this, it’ll start to feel good.” The whole thing left me with a jumpy energy in my chest. I wished every day we had never started.
After a few weeks I accepted that Dan would fuck me regardless of what I said, so I turned my focus to getting it over fast. I lay dead still on my back, my eyes tightly closed, my body open and waiting. Sex was only an unpleasant feeling, nothing worse than a bad-tasting food you had to chew before you could swallow. One day, instead of lying still, I tried rocking my hips. It worked: Dan moaned and came, and I was pleased with my ingenuity. But then he sat up between my legs and grinned. “See?” he said. “I told you you’d start to like it.” In that moment I hated him.
He was right about one thing, though. A year or two later, in college, an impromptu contest developed around the dinner table: What’s the weirdest place you . . . ? On a glacier, I said. Everyone was very impressed. I won the last whoopie pie.
IT WAS AFTERNOON, ON A SLOW DAY. I drifted around the shop and arranged belts on a belt rack that Arild had gotten cheap from a dead store in Finnmark. The belts were garish, metallic pleather with studs and rhinestones. Every now and then I tried one on over my shirt. Nils drank his Coca-Cola and watched me from the table.
A few nights earlier, Nils had invited me to a party in the mountain village, a bonfire by the lake. “The young people will be there,” he promised. I was intrigued to meet these new young people. But when I got there, it was the same people I saw every day at the shop, plus a few men who were usually off driving trucks or working oil rigs. They sat around the fire on logs, roasting hot dogs, drinking beer, dancing drunkenly to music from someone’s car stereo—Queen, and a Norwegian country group called the Hellbillies. A guy asked me about America, talking too close with his breath in my face, and Nils cut in by tipping my log backward and catching me when I fell. I gasped. His arms were strong around my shoulders, but I squirmed away.
I was comfortable flirting in the shop. Those were careful transactions of attention and flattery, in a space I could enter and leave at will, and with an age difference between myself and the regulars that meant nothing was too real. But the party felt serious. The few women seemed to be pairing up with their chosen men, and the rest of the men were debating how to get some. The conversation centered around Dag Ole, a ruddy young man whose Thai girl was arriving in two days. Dag Ole would fly to Oslo to meet her, so that they could take the last leg of the journey together. He couldn’t stop smiling. They’d been video-chatting for weeks; he rose at 2 A.M. to see her off to work, but he didn’t want her to think him overzealous, so he pretended that the sun outside his window meant daylight. Dag Ole was twenty-e
ight and rumored to be a virgin. Everyone was very excited for him.
I sat on a log and accepted sips of Turkish Pepper liqueur that a teenage boy offered me from a soda bottle. It was salty. I was antsy, and wanted to go back to the shop, but I wasn’t sure how to leave. Finally I stood up and asked Nils to drive me home. He grinned on the drive, but his smile was stiff, sinking. I liked him. I wanted him to be happy. Nils was the good guy, the one who’d invited me, the one who’d snap Odd Jonny’s shoulder back in place when he fell off a picnic table and dislocated it later that night. I was afraid he would try to kiss me. I got out of the car fast and thanked him through the window, pretending not to notice his disappointment.
When I got inside, Arild stood in the kitchen, making an omelet: a stick of margarine, six eggs, heavy cream, chives. He cut the omelet into thick slabs while I set the table and sliced bread. Then he opened the window and called his birds, tossing them the crusts. We ate the omelet while seagulls and crows fought over the pieces. When I finished eating, I thought suddenly of going over to Arild’s side of the table, and resting my head on his shoulder. Just to sit there, beside him. But that was an odd thought, too personal even to witness in myself. I was careful not to look at him, and instead threw more bread to the birds.
Now, in the shop, Arild was intent on solving Nils’s romance troubles—and making a few sales along the way. “One thing you should do,” Arild suggested from the counter, “you should bring good Norwegian belts with you to entice the Thai girls.”
“No,” said Nils. “No, no.” He took a long swig of Coke. The bottle made a breathy squeak as it left his lips.
“Nils doesn’t need belts to entice them,” I said. Facing away, I draped a fat silver number around my hips. A stupid thing to do, I thought, buckling it, but my body seemed to move on its own: my weight shifting, my hands unbuckling the belt more slowly than was strictly necessary. I knew Nils was watching. When I turned around, he pressed something into my hand: a bottle cap, with words inside it: I live alone.
“You need to take this with you,” I said. “Get someone to translate it into Thai.”
Nils frowned. Arild glanced over at us.
“Maybe you could get a bunch of them,” I said. “You could hand them out on the street.”
“No, that’s not the point,” said Nils.
“How’d you get this, anyway?” I turned the cap over. The words were printed under a layer of plastic. “It’s off your bottle? Maybe you just need to take a bunch of Norwegian Coca-Cola. You can buy it in bulk; I bet Arild’ll cut a deal for a good cause . . .” I knew I was being cruel, but I couldn’t stop.
Nils wasn’t grinning anymore. “It’s for you,” he said. “It’s not for Thai girls, it’s for you.”
“Oh.” I felt very tired. I put the cap down in the middle of the table and leaned back. But later, when Nils wasn’t looking, I slipped it into my pocket. I wasn’t sure why I wanted it.
Nils would be leaving in two days, going for a month of sun, beer, and beaches. Although he didn’t know it yet, word of his trip had spread. Far away, in Thailand, a woman had quit her job and set up an empty bank account in preparation for his arrival.
CHAPTER SIX
“OH ARE YOU HERE, YOU SMALL devils? You have black on your faces and black on your feet. Why aren’t you in the mountains? Why are you in the road, where you can be run over?”
I woke in the morning to the sound of Rune’s voice. But the room was empty. Groggy, I pulled back the curtain and looked down on the road before the shop. The asphalt was covered with sheep, sprawled like seals on a rock. Rune stood among them with his hands in his pockets.
Rune wouldn’t say it, but all that day he was waiting for me to go with him to Martin’s grave. He walked in and out of the shop, not even bothering to sit down. He’d come in, look around, and go out again, sit at the picnic table under a low sky and roll another cigarette. He was angry when I passed with the lambs’ milk bottles. “They never explain why half the people who get cancer don’t smoke,” he spat, then sank back into hunched lethargy. That was when I remembered my promise. I fed the lambs and came back, and Rune was happy again.
The sky was a bulbous gray, colorless to the point of absence, so the glowing church on the hillside with its glowing, swaying trees seemed perched on the edge of nothing. The seagulls weren’t even flying. Rune wanted to drive to the church, though it was only meters uphill. There was a parking lot to the left of the graveyard, where traveling RVs stopped for a night of quiet and free water. “See?” Rune explained. “We can park close.” He opened the little gate and shut it behind us and watched it drift open again.
Martin’s grave was in the back corner, and fresh. To get there we had to walk past everyone else, names I recognized. Someone had mowed the plots short, down to dirt in patches. Each grave was decorated with flowers and little sculptures. I stayed quiet, walking. I didn’t know what role I was playing here, what Rune wanted me for, so I tried to whittle myself down to presence alone.
“There’s a lot of old graves here,” Rune told me. His tone hinted at a coming lecture, some moral he wanted to share about the depth of history, but he was distracted and fell quiet. Scattered throughout the graveyard were white wooden crosses, markers for gravestones not yet carved. He pointed at them, counting under his breath. “Fifteen white crosses,” he said. “That’s a lot of new graves. It’s not common to see so many at once.”
Martin had a gravestone already, red marble with a half-buried pot of yellow daisies in front of it. MARTIN DAHL, 1951–2012. THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING. Two brass birds perched on the stone, and a brass cross entwined with a rose. I could have fucked you. I picked up a pebble from a bare patch of grass and set it down beside the flowerpot. Rune frowned.
“That’s my tradition,” I said. “To put pebbles on graves.” I found another pebble, for Rune, and put it beside the first.
“It’s a nice grave,” said Rune. “With the birds. And the flowers.”
“Did you put the flowers?”
“I took care of his house,” he said. “It was my job to take care of his house, until Martha got here. And I come to the churchyard. We come in winter, people come in winter at Christmas and New Year’s and light candles. You would like to see it.”
“I would like to see it,” I agreed.
“But now there’s so many white crosses,” he said. “And so many old graves. There”—he pointed to the grave behind Martin’s, with an engraved boat and a plot of pansies—“that’s he who got stabbed in Finnmark last year, just a boy. The son of the cowboy, he Helge Jensen.”
“Twenty-one years old,” I said, reading.
“Mmm, twenty-one,” said Rune. His eyes had moved on. “And there’s Jeanette’s grandparents, do you see, and there’s my sister’s baby daughter. And here are the Kristoffersens. It’s the whole family.”
Some of the Kristoffersen graves looked among the oldest in the graveyard. There was Johannes Kristoffersen, who had founded the shop and built the church; Arild’s aunt Aud Unn, whose purple dress hung in the Old Store; a wooden cross marking his mother, Edel. I’d come to know Edel, albeit secondhand. She was a constant presence in the apartment, with her paintings of storm-tossed ships and fishing docks and the occasional tropical sunset, or the half-eaten candy bars that turned up in corners and drawers, where she’d stashed them after her doctor forbade sugar. Her tiny white clogs remained in a pile of shoes by the door, though Arild had set off several times to dispose of them. Edel had enjoyed romance novels, smoking a pipe, and sago pudding thick enough to slice. “Now you know me, now you can get to know my mother,” Arild had remarked one day, suggesting that, if I were interested, I could peruse the dozens of wire-bound journals that Edel left stacked throughout the apartment. After that, I flipped through them on occasion, enjoying the nonagenarian’s notes about her handsome young doctor or how spring’s cyclists biked past the window “nearly naked.” She wrote that she’d baked krumkaker, though her hands,
still fluid on the piano, were too shaky to roll the cookies into cones. When a friend stopped by, Edel was embarrassed: not only were her krumkaker flat, but she’d eaten up nearly all of them.
Over the course of her final year, Edel’s handwriting grew looser, and her entries shorter, until she rarely marked more than the date and the weather. The last entry followed the pattern of those before it, but was written in Arild’s firm, familiar hand:
3/30 Died today. Fine clear weather, -2ºC
I’d had to read it twice before I understood.
At the end of the row of Kristoffersens, beside Edel’s white cross, was a grassy space with room for more graves. It occurred to me that I hadn’t thought about bodies, that when I’d stood before Martin’s gravestone I had not considered the fact of his body in the ground below me. I wondered if I would ever stand here before Arild’s grave.
When I looked up, Rune was watching something to my left.
Two teenage girls had entered the graveyard. One had apple-red hair and the other wore a sleeveless sweatshirt with a rib cage painted on it. They stood by the gate. They were pointedly not looking at us.
“So you’re coming to the graveyard,” Rune called out.
The redhead whispered something to her friend, and both girls started walking the long way around the church, away from us.
“There’s a lot of old graves here,” Rune called. “And this year, you know, there were fifteen white crosses. Fifteen, yes, and not just old people.” Rune leaned forward as he talked, like an actor reciting careful lines, but his voice still slurred. Maybe more than usual.
The girl in the sweatshirt muttered, “Yeah.” The redhead pulled her phone from her pocket and started texting.
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