Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (4 page)

I told her that the man I had called Dad had recently passed away, and I’d discovered that my mother—who disappeared when I was fourteen—had lied to me. As a result, I’d spent my life deceived about the identity of my father. My birth certificate said that my real father was the man she’d been married to before. He was a Sami priest in Lapland. I was going to find him. When I finished my story, I made a gesture like I had jumped out of a cake. “Ta-da,” I said.

We didn’t talk the rest of the trip. A shame. She probably thought I had made the story up.

At passport control, I handed over my landing card. “Pur-pose of your visit?” said the man behind the counter.

“Business,” I said. “I’m here on business.”

I looked to my left, where I expected to see Kari, but he wasn’t there. At one point in our walk, he must have turned. I circled around in place until I felt a hand on my elbow. “Didn’t you see me?” he said. I shook my head no, my hood swinging left and right.

I hadn’t been touched by anyone since Pankaj, the liar, had tried to comfort me. Kari saw my eyes on his hand and let go.

“Sorry,” he said.�

I forced myself to smile. “About what?”�

I was impressed by his choice of a bar. It was on a back�- street, and from the outside, it looked candlelit, warm. Inside, groups of friends convened around blond wood tables bordered by benches. Plum-colored tulips were mixed with red berries and placed in the center of each table.

Kari gave his last name to the hostess. It sounded short but looked long when she wrote it down. The plans had evidently changed to include dinner. I didn’t mind—I had a night to kill. Another woman escorted us to the bar’s wooden stools. A third came by for our coats.

I gave her mine, along with my hat and scarf, and then shivered.

“Why do you do that?” Kari asked. “What?”

“What you just did . . . what do you call it?” He imitated me, doing an exaggerated shudder.

I told him it was called shivering. “But that’s not real,” he said.

“Not real? You mean not natural.”

“Yes, it’s not natural. You don’t
sliver
because you’re cold.” I shivered again.

Kari had changed clothes since driving the bus. He was wearing a black-and-white speckled sweater that made me sad. All that effort put into making something so ugly.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Twenty-three,” he said. He was adding a few years. “And you?”

“Twenty-six,” I lied, subtracting.

Kari ordered a rum and coke. I ordered a vodka and cran-berry.

We knocked glasses, and I studied Kari’s face. He had pale, doughy skin. I could see the palimpsest of teenage acne.

I took another look around the bar, at the woman who’d written down his last name, whatever it was. She was wearing camouflage pants and was admiring another waitress’s camouflage belt. Gone were the deep-jungle patterns of the eighties; these were sand-colored, period-specific. Fashion knows no bounds.

Kari and I had nothing to say to each other.

I told him an anecdote that had amused Pankaj:

One night, when I’d first moved to New York and gotten a job waitressing at a steak house, I had a table of Swedes. After they’d finished their food, I asked the busboy, Gilbert, to clear the table. Gilbert was from Guatemala and kept a picture of his wife wrapped around the handle of his comb. The picture was so frayed that the one time he’d shown it to me, I couldn’t make out much of her appearance except that, in the photo, she seemed to be wearing something red. He sent her money every month.

I paused to ask Kari if he understood everything so far. He nodded, and I continued:

Gilbert returned from the table and told me that each time he tried to clear their plates, the Swedes had laughed.

“I’m sure they’re not laughing at you,” I told him. “Go try again.”

I watched as Gilbert returned to the table. He asked if they were done, and the Swedes said something to him and then laughed. He came back to my side, confused. “See?” he said.

This time, I went to the table. “Is something wrong?” I asked. The man who was leaning forward in his chair, the man who had sent back his steak because it was overcooked, decided to answer my question. “Your busboy keeps coming to the table and asking, ‘You Finnish?’ and we say, ‘No, we’re Swedish.’”

Kari stared at me. Pankaj had liked this story so much he had told it a couple times himself.

A minute passed. Kari downed his drink, examined his knuckles. At last, he spoke. “Why did the busboy think they were Finnish?”

My mother’s friendship with Gita, Pankaj’s mother, bore a strong resemblance to that of schoolgirls—they would talk on the phone every night, rehashing the day’s events. For a short time, Dad and Pankaj’s father became friends as well, drawn in by their wives’ enthusiasm for each other.

One night, my parents and Pankaj’s parents went out to dinner together, leaving Pankaj and me at his house with a pack of ramen noodles and a salad. School had started a month before—I was a freshman; he was a senior. We had never

exchanged more than a few words before, but I had watched him from afar. I knew the location of his locker, I knew he brushed his teeth after lunch.

Pankaj took me into the living room and told me his family had recently remodeled. I said it was nice, though it looked sterile. There was a fresh bouquet of yellow flowers on the coffee table, and Pankaj said his father had In Full Bloom, an upscale florist, send his mother an arrangement every week. That impressed me as much as it was supposed to.

We sat on the couch. I had been instructed to remove my shoes upon entering the house, and I tried to look casual and quick as I lifted my bare feet to rest on the glass coffee table. But my heels fell against the surface harder than I’d intended, and the glass shattered and collapsed beneath their weight. Only the metal legs remained.

Pankaj shot up.

“Oh my God,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” I reached for the tilted flower vase. The water was spilling, the petals scattering.

“What were you thinking?” Pankaj asked. “I didn’t know it was so fragile,” I said. “It’s
glass
.”

“I’m sorry, but there must have been a crack. I remember

seeing one.” I was standing now, too. “My mom—she’ll be so pissed.”

“
Your
mom?” Pankaj said.

“We need a garbage can. And a vacuum,” I said. I was holding the vase in front of me, as if offering it to him.

“Are you okay?” he asked.�

I looked down. “Yeah, I think so.”� “What time is it?” he asked.�

“Six something. Maybe not even that. We got here before �

six.”

“Let’s go,” Pankaj said. “I know where they bought the table.” Pankaj drove a green station wagon. My seat belt felt too tight, but I didn’t want to adjust it. My big toe was bleeding,

and I brought my right foot up to my left knee to examine it.

Pankaj looked over. “Shoot.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” I said, though suddenly it did.

Pankaj asked to speak to the manager of the furniture store.

I had never asked for a manager.

“You’re in luck,” the manager said. He had another table exactly like the one I’d broken. He walked us to it.

“I don’t have that kind of money,” I whispered to Pankaj. “I have a credit card,” he said.

“I’ll pay you back,” I said, and he nodded. I knew I would have to ask Dad for the money. It would be our secret from my mother.

We carried the table out to Pankaj’s car, stopping twice when I needed to adjust my hands. At his house, we picked up the glass and placed the pieces in a garbage bag Pankaj had lined with paper bags. “Careful,” he said, as I got to the smaller shards. We vacuumed. The old table’s legs had left small circles in the carpet, and we matched the new table’s legs to the indents. I placed the vase of yellow flowers in the center of the table.

At nine, when our parents returned, Pankaj and I were sitting on the couch, watching TV. Pankaj had found a Band-Aid for my foot.

“How was dinner?” Gita asked.� “Good,” I said. We had forgotten to eat.�

—

Pankaj graduated from high school that spring. I didn’t talk to him again until nine years later, when I was living in New York. One Saturday, a friend took me to a party in Brooklyn. I didn’t know the hosts. I walked in and saw Pankaj standing by a birthday cake.

“Happy birthday,” I said.�

“It’s not my birthday,” he said. “I play in the band.”�

Pankaj played the sitar. I danced in a cluster with Pankaj’s � older sister, Archana, and her friends, all of them tall. Other women formed other clusters around us. The men stood by the tables of drinks. It was spring and hot in the loft, and I loved it all—the heat, Pankaj’s sister, and the loudness of the music, which was not good.

Within four months, Pankaj and I moved in together. After two months of living together, we were in love. Despair was a thing of the past, discarded like a scarf through the window of a moving car.

—

After we’d been together three years, Pankaj got a position teaching philosophy at Hunter College. He was working on his dissertation. I quit waitressing and started my subtitling job at

Soutitre. I was happy there, but I knew that I would soon have to move on—there was no promotion to be had, no position I coveted. The company was a way station for Czech and Swiss and German expatriates needing a reason to stay in New York for a few years. But what was my excuse? I had no excuse.

Years passed, and I was still working at Soutitre, and Pankaj was still finishing his dissertation on free will. The stagnation in our separate and joined lives prompted Pankaj to propose. Atlantic City. He’d lost fifty dollars at blackjack. I’d won three hundred quarters on a Yosemite Sam slot.

At the end of the night, we took the elevator up to our room. Somewhere around the twenty-fourth floor, Pankaj got down on both knees. I thought he had fallen.

Kari and I got our dinner at the bar.

“So why are you here only one night?” Kari asked. I told him I was going to Lapland.

“Which part?”

“Finnish Lapland,” I said. “Around Inari.”

“You’re going to see some Sami,” Kari said. “They’re like your, what do you call the people who wear feathers? Indian?”

“Native American.”

In my guidebook, I had read about discrimination against the Sami, that they’d become Finnish or Swedish or Norwegian citizens only within the last generation.

“My parents work at tourist agency for ski area in the north,” Kari said. “One year they can’t open the ski ride because a Sami man said his reindeer likes to eat there. He said the reindeer was there first. That stupid reindeer made everyone lose much money.”

Kari picked the cherry out of his drink and made a slow production of biting it off its stem. This was supposed to be sensual.

“You know how you can tell a Sami?” he offered. “They’re short and they walk with their legs like this.” Kari got up from his bar stool and stood bowlegged.

“Sit down,” I said. He did.

“This is because they hang their babies from sacks on the wall and that’s how their legs grow. And typical, they are darker and shorter than other Scandinavians.”

I stared past Kari.

My mother had light hair, even before she dyed it lighter. I had black eyes (like Dad’s—or so I had believed), hair the color of bark, and at five foot three, I was four inches shorter than my mother. I knew her height from the missing-person report Dad had had to fill out. From the top of the stairway, I’d listened as he’d told the detectives: “Olivia Ann Iverton . . . a hundred and thirty-five pounds, five foot seven . . . People who have reason to be upset with her? Where do I start?”

Our third round of drinks arrived. I was drinking to keep awake. Kari looked toward the television above the bar. I strained my head to see what he was watching. Some sport.

“Handball,” Kari explained. “I play it, too. I’m good.”� I asked, stupidly, if it was a hard sport.�

“Oh, yes,” he said, tucking his dirty-blond hair behind his �

ears. “Men who play are very strong. Good athletes.”

We watched the handball game in silence. “Not an exciting game, this one,” Kari said, turning his attention back to me.

“What do you want to do next?” he asked.

“What are our options?” I pictured myself lying in my hotel-room bed, alone, dark shadows crowding my head.

Kari turned in his chair so his legs were on either side of mine. “You know what our options are,” he said, and pressed my legs together. I fought my reflex to press outward. I had terrible taste in flings.

“And don’t worry,” he added, now tightening his knees’ grip on mine. “I picked something up when I went into the Diesel store.”

I tried to think what it could be—a hat? a vest? a better-looking sweater?

“They give out free condoms there.” He opened his hand like a magician at the end of a trick, displaying his surprise. “I learned from last time I was with someone like you.”

“Like me?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Enough like you. She wasn’t American, she was Finnish.”

I laughed in his face. “Ready?” he asked.

I nodded. I needed to leave.

When the check came, we split it. From his pocket, Kari pulled out a folded but crisp five-euro bill and left it for the bartender. It was the same bill I had given Kari earlier, when he had driven me to the hotel. I was glad to see him get rid of it. It felt wrong to go to bed with a man who had your tip in his pocket.

“No one else is on this floor,” Kari said as I unlocked the door to my room. “I made sure you were private.”

I stepped into the room and was again surprised by how small it was. Kari sat on the bed and handed me one of the two beers he’d brought up from the refrigerator behind the reception desk. He drank his quickly. He got up to pee; when he returned, he reeked of beer and urine.

I checked the closets for a blanket. I stood on tiptoes to reach the top shelf. A force came from behind me, and at first, I thought I was falling. Kari’s hands were below my ribs, and he was lifting me. When I pulled the blanket out from the shelf, it fell to the floor—I wasn’t prepared for its weight.