Here to Stay (32 page)

Trudy nodded. “Even my father and his brothers wrecked a few boats there, back when they were running booze during Prohibition.”

Erik made a mental note to circle back to his great-grandfather’s bootlegging adventures. “What happened then?”

“Hard to say,” Trudy said. “Xandro’s boat was ahead and it all happened behind him. He only saw Byron’s boat flying end over end.”

“Byron hit something,” Kirsten said. “A shoal or a buoy, but he clipped it hard enough to lose control of the boat.”

A pause while the waiter cleared plates and asked if anyone would like dessert. With glittering eyes Kirsten raised a finger. “I’ll see a menu.” She smiled at Erik. “Life is short. Have dessert.”

“Byron’s life should have been short,” Trudy said. “Cripes, that he wasn’t killed is nothing short of a miracle. You’ll never convince me otherwise.”

“How bad was he hurt?”

“Cracked his skull. It’s a wonder his brains weren’t dashed out.”

“Or that he didn’t drown,” Erik said.

“Well, unlike Xandro, Byron had a life jacket on,” Kirsten said. “And he ended face-up in the water, not face-down.”

“Current took him,” Trudy said. “And he floated off into the fog. Coast Guard found him in a little cove off Frederick Island.”

Kirsten frowned. “I thought it was Vanderbilt he ended up on?”

“One of those,” Trudy said. “Anyway, it wasn’t like it is today. With an ER in every hospital and medevac choppers and trauma centers. We had a tiny little hospital in Alexandria Bay. It had an x-ray machine and it was considered high-tech. They brought in our boy with a fractured skull. All they could do was tell Kennet and Astrid how many cracks.”

“What did they do with him?” Erik asked, barely breathing. “The nearest city is Watertown.”

“No, Watertown had no help for him,” Kirsten said. “They took him to the Montreal Neurological Institute. It was the only place for such a head injury.”

“And the pneumonia on top of it,” Trudy said. “He should’ve been dead.”

“Or a vegetable.”

Erik blinked. “Was he in a coma?”

“For about two weeks,” Trudy said, leaning her chin on her hand. “I didn’t see him while he was up in Montreal, but my brother would give updates. First he said Byron’s eyes were opening but he wasn’t looking at anything. Then it seemed he was focusing on things. Turning his head to follow noise, looking around the room. But not talking or reacting to people. Not responding to his name. But then one day…” She lifted her head and snapped her fingers. “Opened his eyes. Perfectly lucid. Said hello. As if he’d woken up from a nap.”

“Jesus,” Erik said softly.

“Didn’t know what the hell happened to him, but he knew who he was and knew who belonged to him. It was a miracle.”

“The doctors were stunned,” Kirsten said. “No one had an explanation for how he survived.”

“Although he wasn’t the same after,” Trudy said.

“How so?” Erik asked.

Again, a look was exchanged between the sisters-in-law. This one longer. It seemed to make the air shimmer between them.

“You survived Lancaster,” Trudy finally said. “Were you the same?”

Erik gave a small smile. “No, ma’am.”

“Nobody was the same,” Kirsten said. “Definitely a shift in the family dynamic.”

“You mean Xandro was sort of disgraced after the accident?” Erik asked.

Trudy nodded, the corners of her mouth pulled down.

Kirsten crossed her arms, hugging herself. “Kennet never put a finger on the boy,” she said. “It was an unspoken understanding Xandro was Astrid’s son and she disciplined him. But after the accident, Kennet gave Xandro the hiding of a lifetime. Both their lifetimes.”

Trudy shook her head slightly. “Whipped him awful,” she said. “For the recklessness of racing in the fog and not wearing a lifejacket. Then his boat was taken away for good. To a river rat, it’s like losing a leg.”

“He must have died a thousand deaths.”

“Oh, he wore it like a hair shirt. Yes.”

“When Xandro died, my grandmother must have been…” Erik held out his hands. “I can’t think of a word. It must have destroyed her.”

Kirsten nodded. “Both she and Kennet were like candle flames blown out. Their health suffered. They aged horribly in the years after. They revived a bit when you were born. Revived a lot, actually. A little golden age. They adored you, Erik.”

“Me,” Erik said carefully. “Me and my brother, you mean.”

“Well, of course, Peter,” Trudy said.

“But especially you,” Kirsten said. “You were Astrid’s darling.”

This was so at odds with Erik’s personal narrative, he could only gape. He’d been his grandfather’s darling. Christine said so. Any memory Erik could scrape up from Clayton had Kennet’s presence somewhere. He barely remembered Astrid.

“I was?” he said. “Why me?”

“Because you looked just like Xandro.” Trudy reached and touched Erik’s necklace. “The boat charm,” she said. “This was his.”

“It was Xandro’s?” Erik said, stunned.

Trudy nodded. “It belonged to his father. His biological father. But he had no memory of the man. Kennet was the only father he knew. I don’t remember exactly when Xandro had Fiskare engraved into the bottom of the boat, but it was one of the few times I saw my brother get emotional.”

While listening to her, Erik ran his thumb over the tiny letters etched in the boat’s bottom. Nine thousand emotions were piling up in his body, along with a hundred questions in his mind. The waiter came back and the aunts ordered dessert, but Erik passed. He had no room for anything inside.

“It makes me so happy to see you wearing the chain,” Trudy said. “I remember playing with the charms when I was a little girl. When I’d sit on my father’s lap.”

“Same,” Erik said softly. “I played with it when it was on my father’s neck.”

Kirsten took his hand and squeezed it.

“When did Farfar give this to my dad?” Erik asked. “Do you remember? I’m asking because it seems Emil got it when Bjorn died. And Kennet got it when Emil died. But I remember my father wearing it when I was little and Kennet was still alive. It was given over, not inherited.”

“I don’t know, honey.” Trudy’s gaze was far away as her shoulders rose and fell. “Maybe the question is why rather than when. Why Kennet passed it down while he was still alive. Maybe he felt Byron needed it. Maybe Byron somehow earned it.”

Erik scooped all the charms into his palm and looked at them. “I always thought it was one complete piece, start to finish,” he said. “But it’s not. It’s a collection.”

“It’s a story,” Kirsten said.

ERIK TOOK THE LADIES to the Imperial Theater to see Daisy and have a little backstage tour. After much hugging and kissing, Kirsten paused with Daisy’s face in her hands. She peered close then turned to Erik. “Young man, did you knock this girl up?”

“Oh, you’re one of
those
types,” Daisy said, laughing.

“Damnedest thing,” Kirsten said, her expression smug yet a flicker of sadness in her eyes. “I never got any kids of my own, but I have this weird ability to peg a pregnant woman from fifty yards.”

The Fiskares had only told their parents and the Kaegers, cautiously sitting on the news until the end of the first trimester. But the ladies were too irresistible not to let in on the secret, which they promised to keep.

“This was so nice,” Kirsten said as Erik walked them back to the pier. “What a beautiful city and what a lovely life you’ve made.”

“And you speak such nice French,” Trudy said.

Erik laughed. “My French is terrible, are you kidding?”

Trudy shrugged. “Sounds sexy to me.”

“Reminds me,” he said. “Was my grandmother born in Brazil? Or did she move there from Europe?”

“She was born in Sweden,” Kirsten said. “Her father’s side was Finnish. They immigrated to Brazil when Astrid was…oh, she wasn’t even five. Brazil was the place she thought of as home.”

“She met the love of her life there,” Trudy said.

“You could say she left half her heart there,” Kirsten said.

“More than half.”

Erik’s insides frowned, not liking the idea that Farmor didn’t passionately love his grandfather, but unable not to admire her resiliency at the same time. “How did she end up in Clayton?”

“Emil’s second wife, Marta, was Astrid’s distant cousin,” Kirsten said. “She sponsored Astrid to come to America. Astrid sailed to New York and took a train upstate. With a broken heart, forty dollars, a year-old little boy and not a word of English. She still didn’t have much English when Kennet came home from the war.”

“I remember that night,” Trudy said. “Clear as yesterday. Astrid wore a navy blue dress with white polka-dots. She had a figure like a Coke bottle and that white-blonde hair. Pale skin and red lips.”

“It was a cold beauty,” Kirsten said. “Like a piece of Danish furniture.”

“Cold but compelling,” Trudy said. “Cripes, I was thirteen. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I watched as she leaned and served Kennet. Potatoes or something. And how he looked up at her like he was waking up from a dream.”

“Kennet was in bad shape after the war,” Kirsten said. “His unit liberated Mauthausen, you know.”

Erik raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t know.”

“It haunted him.” Trudy shivered. “He wouldn’t talk about it and, frankly, I never wanted to ask what he had seen in that hellhole. But that night, he looked up at Astrid like he’d forgotten what beauty was.”

Like she was a Daisy,
Erik thought.

Trudy squeezed his arm. They had arrived at the pier. At the ship’s check-in booth, Erik hugged and kissed his aunts, promised to take care of his wife and to keep in touch.

“Bon voyage,” he said. “Try not to get yourselves thrown out of the casino.”

“Oh, we’ve been banned already,” Kirsten said, sliding on her giant sunglasses. “Now we pass the time trying to pick up men.”

“What do you mean trying?” Erik said. “Fiskares just stand in bars and take numbers.”

Kirsten laughed and Trudy reached one last time to caress Erik’s face.

“Look at you,” she said, her eyes bright with tears.

“SO TELL ME FIRST,” the technician said, pulling on her gloves. “If you’d like to know the sex of your baby. That way I get my pronouns arranged up front.”

“Yes,” they said. It had been decided long ago. No surprises. They wanted to know who was coming.

The technician clicked and clacked at her monitor some more. Then she squirted her bottle of gel onto Daisy’s stomach and set the ultrasound wand down. “Let’s find a baby,” she said. “Except you’re such a skinny mini, I’ll probably find the pattern of the rug under you first.”

They laughed. Daisy was fiercely proud of her bump, although what counted as a bump for her was a normal woman’s indigestion. Heart thumping with anticipation, Erik caught her hand up in his. She flicked her head over to him and smiled, then turned back with interest to the monitor.

“Hello,” the technician said. “Somebody’s showing off.”

“What,” they said, leaning in.

She angled the screen further in their direction. “This would be a boy.”

And indeed it was.

“Impressive,” Daisy said.

“Well, come on,” Erik said, a smile widening his face and a burning pleasure filling his chest. It crackled in his veins on the ride home. Glowed like a fire died down to red coals as he pinned the sonogram pictures to the refrigerator.

It’s a boy.

He went outside, stood in the sun on the concrete slab, golden and warm as he mixed up his face with Daisy’s face to come up with a new face.

What will you look like?

Who will you be?

His eyes swept the yard, imagining his son at play. He squinted at the trees, assessing them, coming back repeatedly to the oak and its sturdy branches. It was begging for a treehouse. A really spectacular one. He’d do it right, get a couple of the stagehands to help him. Jack, too. Together they’d build something amazing for his son.

It’s a boy.

“What are you thinking about,” Daisy said, sliding her arms around him from behind.

“Everything,” Erik said, loving the curve of her belly in the small of his back and the news it brought.

“Have you thought of any names yet?”