Love and Other Lies

by Ben McPherson

  “I welcome the fallen. Bring them back to the fold.”

  That strange charisma of his. Where was it from?

  He seemed to catch the question in my gaze. “What?” he said.

  “You’re unusually alpha for a priest.”

  “Says the alpha-satirist.”

  I looked at the girls in the field, at the gray of their shift dresses blending with the parched farmland.

  “Were those girls fallen when they came to you?”

  “No more than you are, Cal,” he said. He smiled a warm, enveloping smile.

  “I don’t consider myself fallen.”

  “What fallen man knows that he is?”

  I pointed at myself. “Not fallen.”

  His eyes were dancing now. “We are sparring a little. This is fun, no? The alpha-satirist and the alpha-priest. But in answer to your question, you would have to ask the girls themselves. We really are very nonjudgmental.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I can see there’s something to what you do here.”

  He became serious. “Then I have a question I wish you to consider. In the midst of all you are going through it is easy to feel cast adrift, to lose sight of what you are fighting for. There were very few heroes on the day of the massacre. We all want to believe that we would have the presence of mind to do what your daughter did, but in reality most people simply freeze when confronted with mortal danger. And because of this Alicia Curtis will be turned into public property, and in ways that you cannot control. People will claim her for their side.”

  “Already happening,” I said. “We’re trying to ignore it.”

  “So I wonder this: Is there an image of your daughter that you wish to preserve?”

  “An image that I wish to preserve?”

  I took a swig of coffee. I could feel his eyes on me. The coffee was strong and black, its bitter edge tempered with a gentle sweetness.

  Beyond the shed was a large field. A small herd of horses stood by the trees at the far end, feeding from a hay bale.

  “Are those your horses?” I said.

  “They are.”

  “They hardly look big enough to wage war.”

  Bror smiled. “No need to answer my question. But do think about what I’m asking you.”

  He put a hand on my arm. I blinked, and in that instant I saw Licia in a sea of light.

  I opened my eyes. Bror was staring off toward the horses.

  I said, “She was in a blue sequined dress that day. People saw her sleeping under a tree by the water, wearing that dress. I imagine the sun on her hair, and the sun on the fjord, and the light dancing on the dress, and I imagine that she was happy as she slept.”

  “That is a beautiful image.”

  “Licia is so quiet and so modest. Her bedroom mirror is covered in dust. Literally.” I could hear my voice cracking. “That dress was such a gesture of confidence. And I realize this is a grandiose thought, but in that small moment before the killings I imagine she had the world at her feet. And I hope she was happy and excited. Because she deserves to be.”

  Bror was silent for a long time. He looked out over his farmstead, as if seeking answers in the landscape. At last he turned to me. “What if we could help anchor for you that image of your daughter?” he said. “Would that be useful?”

  “Through meditation?”

  He laughed, sought my eyes with his. “You find us a little ridiculous. And that’s okay. But hear me out.” He put an arm on mine, turned me so that I was facing him. “What if your family were to plant a tree by a grassy bank?”

  “We don’t want a memorial.”

  “I agree. And certainly not on Garden Island, in that most godforsaken of places. But might not planting a tree turn that moment of yours into something more permanent? Might it anchor the thought of who Alicia Curtis is, until the day she returns?”

  I considered this. Most likely Elsa would like the idea. Vee too.

  “It might,” I said. “It would certainly be in Licia’s spirit.”

  “Then there is another island a little farther down the fjord that I would like you to see.”

  Eighteen

  We took our boat, traveled an hour down the fjord to the island Bror had told me about. Håøya. Unpronounceable but beautiful, all abandoned factory buildings and wild-roaming goats. German troops had been stationed in this place during the war. The officers’ quarters had been converted to weekend cabins; a small workshop made goat cheese and served coffee.

  We moored in a natural harbor on the western side of the island, followed the path up past a simple tarred-wood cabin.

  “Strange,” said Elsa.

  “What is?” said Vee.

  “I’m pretty certain that’s Quisling’s cabin.”

  Nordic carvings decorated the heavy front door, roughly cut. Smoke curled from the chimney. Plants hung in baskets from the heavy roof beams. Through the windows I saw plates and pans lined up in the white-painted kitchen; the table was set for a meal of crayfish and crab.

  “Who’s Quisling?” said Vee. But Elsa was disappearing fast up the rise, pushing Franklin’s stroller ahead of her, as if sweeping a path.

  “Wartime leader,” I said. “Under the Germans.”

  “What, like a Nazi?”

  “An actual Norwegian Nazi. Sent a lot of Jewish people to their deaths.”

  “Why are people using his cabin?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Elsa had stopped in a clearing where the redbrick mess hall stood. Through high metal-framed windows you could see the stage where German troops had cheered and entertained each other with music and song on chill Norwegian nights. The guts of a piano were spilled across the floor. Someone had taken an ax to it in cruel revenge for the songs it had once played.

  “Why are we doing this here?” said Vee. “If this really is a Nazi island?”

  “It belongs to people like us now,” said Elsa. “Not to people like that.”

  We sat for a while at a picnic table outside the mess hall, listening to the wind in the trees, and, farther off, the bells that hung around the necks of the goats. Sunlight dappled prettily on the brickwork. There was an eerie stillness to the buildings that appealed to Elsa, I guessed; something unresolved and unfinished. She knew this place from her childhood. She had said yes to Bror’s suggestion at once.

  “Who’s that?” said Vee, staring toward the far end of the clearing. But when I looked up there was no one there.

  Henrik met us on the eastern side, at the water’s edge. He had taken the ferry over from the mainland. He nodded at each of us in turn, embraced Vee. Then he took Franklin’s stroller wordlessly, walked ahead of us up a gentle rise to a piece of flat land that overlooked the harbor. And here by the spreading canopy of an old willow tree we planted a small willow for Licia.

  Elsa hung a copper band on the tree onto which Vee had stamped the words:

  Time to come home, Licia

  We stood in a ring, closed our eyes, held hands around the sapling. From the fjord you could hear boat engines, and far away the sound of blasting.

  “Licia,” said Vee, “what I miss most—” Her hand clasped tightly around mine.

  “What you’re looking forward to,” said Elsa’s voice, gently correcting her.

  “I mean, what I’m looking forward to is you and me going back to Whistler. Or anywhere with shitty weather, really. And skiing till Mum and Dad freak the frick out.”

  I could hear Elsa laughing gently. I squeezed Vee’s hand. She squeezed mine back.

  “I’m looking forward to breakfast and homework,” I said. “Our time, in the mornings, before the chaos of the day.”

  A long pause. I could feel Elsa’s weight shifting, as if she were searching for the words. I leaned toward her. “Are you okay, love?”

  I felt her nod. She tightened her grip on mine. She said, “Licia, I’m looking forward to listening more. I don’t think I’ve done enough of that and I plan to make a change. I’m looking forwa
rd to learning.”

  We left the longest of pauses for Henrik, but Henrik said nothing.

  “So here we all are, Licia,” said Vee. “We’re talking to you through a tree. That’s how much we want you back. Hope you can hear us. Because otherwise this would all be kind of lame.”

  Henrik’s breathing sounded labored. When I opened my eyes he was there in front of me, stiffly holding Elsa’s hand, and Vee’s. His eyes were misting with tears. He took a half step backward. Vee stepped with him, taking her hand from mine. She stood there for a time, holding her grandfather’s hands in hers, saying nothing, then she let go and turned toward the sapling.

  “Oh. Hey there.”

  A goat and her kid had wandered up, were nibbling at the base of the slender trunk. Vee stepped toward Franklin’s stroller and lifted him out. She crouched down, held him close to the kid. Franklin reached out gingerly. The kid sniffed at his fingers, licked carefully at his palm. Franklin burbled and kicked. Henrik caught my eye and smiled.

  We had with us bamboo canes and green garden wire. Henrik made a little enclosure to keep the goats off the sapling. Then he walked with us back to the little harbor and we drove him across the sound to Drøbak, where we moored the boat in the guest marina.

  The sun was out. It was almost warm. We walked down narrow streets of delicate clapboard houses toward the market square, bought pizza and sour-cream dressing from a restaurant in an ugly gray villa. We sat on the plastic benches outside, eating meditatively, saying very little.

  “This was nice,” said Henrik. “Thank you for the food.” He patted me on the back, got stiffly to his feet.

  “Where are you going?” said Vee.

  “Home.”

  Vee stood. Henrik hugged her tightly, nodded to Elsa and to me, then headed off.

  “Why’s he being weird?” said Vee.

  “Because he’s your grandfather,” Elsa said. “And because the police interviewed him and asked him a whole lot of questions about how close he was to Licia.”

  “But he would never . . .”

  “I know.”

  We sat for a while, finishing the pizza. “Seriously,” said Vee, “why is that woman staring at us?” I looked up. Elsa and I exchanged a look. Because there was no woman.

  “Let’s go get you an ice cream, Vee,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said brightly. But I saw how she shivered as she got to her feet.

  We found a place that sold five flavors of ice cream, with a soft-scoop machine at the back. Elsa and I bought dispenser coffees. Vee bought a white soft-scoop, obscenely large and obscenely soft.

  The air was warmer. The breeze had fallen away. We scuffed along through the narrow streets, with their picket fences and their orchards heavy with fruit. Crickets chirped. Apples and pears rotted in the dry grass. Our shoes made little ruck-ruck sounds on the softening tarmac.

  No one was following us. Just Vee’s mind turning paranoid circles. Except . . .

  It was then that I saw the woman, at the far end of the park. She was turned away, waiting on the bench outside the baker’s, nondescript in her gray shift dress and her flat black shoes, quietly blending in.

  “Vee,” I said, taking her by the shoulders, turning her in the other direction, “help your mum get Franklin back to the boat.”

  “Why, Dad?”

  Elsa sent me a questioning glance.

  “I’d like to take a couple of minutes for myself,” I said. “To think about your sister.”

  “You all right, Dad?”

  “Please. Just to . . .”

  You okay? Elsa mouthed.

  I nodded. “I will be,” I said softly.

  I watched them disappear down the narrow street with its white-painted fishermen’s cottages. I felt a stab of guilt. Wrong to use emotional pain as an excuse. But Vee would be full of questions if I told her the truth. Elsa too.

  Milla shielded her face until my wife and daughter were out of sight. I sat down beside her on the bench, looked out across the park.

  She said, “Did you like the island?”

  I turned to her. “Tell Bror the island was perfect.”

  She smiled. “I’d prefer him not to know I’m here.”

  She opened her leather bag, took from it a folded sheet of paper, which she passed to me. “I am sure you will do the right thing with this.”

  I unfolded the paper. A color photocopy of a Post-it note. The note itself was pink, the handwriting blue, backward-sloping:

  16:12

  til Ephraim Tvist

  “What is this?” I said.

  But she was shaking her head. “Thank you for offering me coffee. That was kind.” She stood up, nodded a goodbye, began to walk from the square.

  I looked at the note. I understood most of the words. The center of town. Two black-clad men. The registration number of a car. I would need Elsa’s help to be certain of what I was looking at. But already I had a fairly clear idea. The note was addressed to Ephraim Tvist. Five minutes before the town hall bomb went off.

  That evening I sang my little son to sleep, my back resting against his crib, my hand trailing through the bars. Franklin held my index finger in his tiny fist as I sang to him the lullaby of mint and clover. When I felt his grip relax I slid my finger out of his. I counted to a hundred, then got quietly to my feet.

  From her doorway I watched Vee as she liquidated opponents with rifles and shotguns. She was catlike and alert, talking easily with her American friends over her headset.

  In the kitchen I took an orange from the fruit bowl and a peeler from the drawer. I shaved off two strips of peel, which I laid on the chopping board, one above the other. I cut the edges straight with the sharpest of our knives.

  The gin bottle was frosted white from the freezer, the shaker so cold that my fingertips stuck to its steel surface.

  Over the ice in the shaker I poured a capful of vermouth, then three teaspoonfuls of brine from the olives. The ice cracked. Now the gin, viscous and heavy. I stirred, counting to twenty, poured the liquid carefully down the sides of the crystal glasses. The ritual slowed my thoughts, calmed my nerves. Tiny suspended ice shards refracted the light.

  Elsa was sitting on the terrace, staring out at the purple hills. She heard me as I approached and turned. “So there’s a new meme,” she said. She held out her phone. That picture of Licia, her hands locked around the pistol. Someone had added, “This is what a #feminist #fightback looks like.”

  “Was she even a feminist?”

  “Good question.” She gave the tiniest shake of her head, put the phone down on the table. “She’d find the whole thing very strange, I guess, the uses to which a picture can be put. But it keeps her alive in people’s minds. I’d kind of prefer it without the gun, though.”

  “Me too. Maybe a gun is what it takes.”

  “Maybe.”

  I sat down. I set a glass in front of Elsa. She lifted it to her eyes, turning the stem.

  “How do you get them so perfect, Cal?” she said, her voice full of warmth.

  We drank, holding each other’s gaze. The ice shards were almost gone now.

  I put down my glass. “Elsa, do we ask Bror to speak to Vee?”

  “Interesting.” She rearranged herself in her chair. “Why?”

  “I guess I am starting to worry a little about her gaming . . .”

  “Thank you. Finally. That fucking game.”

  “Yeah. That fucking game. So if Bror could start a conversation with her?”

  “Which would be what? I don’t really get what he stands for these days.”

  “Believe what you like, and try to be good. More a discipline than a religion.”

  “Sounds like a match. Except the bit about being good.”

  I laughed. We drank to each other again, holding each other’s gaze.

  I put down my glass. “There’s something else.” I slid the scanned Post-It note across the table to her. She read it, tracing the words with her thumbnail.

&n
bsp; “Okay,” she said. “It’s a message to Ephraim Tvist from Switchboard:

  “ ‘Four twelve: Man called with description of two individuals behaving in a suspicious manner in the vicinity of the town hall. Both were men, both appeared to have dyed their hair blond, both were wearing black coveralls, and walking at a swift march to a white Volkswagen Polo with the registration plate XR310701.’ ”

  “Bastard,” I said. “He’s such a master of deflection.”

  Her blue-gray eyes, quietly appraising me. “I think he might be playing you, Cal.”

  “You know what’s so hard in this place?” I said. “Everyone’s so nice, so understanding, so welcoming that you never really believe someone could be taking you for a fool.”

  “And we are sure this is genuine? Where did you get it?”

  “One of Bror’s people. Milla. Waiting for me in the town square while you went back to the boat. Why would it not be genuine?”

  The tiniest of frowns. “So from Bror . . . ?”

  “I don’t think Bror knows.”

  “All right,” she said. “This note is significant.”

  “Significant? Elsa, Tvist could have prevented the whole fucking thing. And all the while he smiles and tells us he understands how we must be feeling. And all the time he’s deflecting our attention away.”

  “You can’t confront him. That isn’t how we do things here.”

  “Yeah, I’m starting to realize that.”

  “I’m serious. If you confront him he will keep on smiling and he will freeze you out, and he will do it so slowly and so imperceptibly that you won’t notice he’s done it.”

  “Bastard, though.”

  “Cal,” she said, “this is the knife in the table between you and Tvist. Cool your head. Show yourself willing. Cooperate. Then choose with great precision the moment when you reach for the knife. Because when you go for him you need to go hard.”

  Nineteen

  I pulled into a street that ran parallel to the fjord. Fancy area, expensive, though the September air was full of diesel and smoke. On the other side of a high fence a train yard blocked off the water. Elsa got out of the car and slammed the door. I opened the passenger window.