Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (7 page)

and watching. Virginia had her disposable camera ready, though I wasn’t sure what she was going to document. If we saw my mother entering or leaving the house, I didn’t need it on film.

On the third day, Virginia suggested we knock on the door. “We don’t have all the time in the world,” she said. “School starts next week.”

We rang the doorbell. We heard furniture shifting inside. “Jesus,” I said. “He’s home.”

The door opened. “Can I help you?” said a young man. “Do you live here?” Virginia asked.

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

He nodded. He had curly black hair and dry lips, and he was all the better-looking for not being Mr. Wells.

“Do you know a Mr. Wells?” I said. “Yeah, he’s my landlord.”

He asked us to excuse him—he had the flu. He’d been in bed for days.
How sad,
I thought,
no one came to take care of you. We were watching, and no one came.

He gave us Tim Wells’s address, and that evening, we went to his house, in a different, less appealing part of town. Virginia rang the doorbell while I stood at the bottom of the steps. A redheaded woman answered the door, said she was Mr. Wells’s wife. He was at a meeting but would be home at nine. “Can I help you girls?” she asked. She was the kind of woman who asked questions with her hands on her hips.

“That’s okay,” Virginia said.

We waited on the neighbors’ steps. By ten, he still hadn’t shown up. “Maybe his wife told him to come in the back door,” Virginia offered. “What kind of meeting would he be at this late?”

“He used to drink,” I said.� “Oh, right.”�

At ten thirty, we saw Mr. Wells get out of a dented Datsun. � His hair was thinner now; he wore a striped jacket over a striped shirt. I was outraged he had made us wait so long. I intercepted him before he made it to the stairs of his house.

“Where were you?” I said. I felt emboldened by the days of waiting. “You were supposed to be home at nine. Were you at your girlfriend’s house?”

He raised his briefcase like he was going to use it to hit me. Then he placed it down on the ground. It toppled over. “Who are you?”

“You don’t remember?”�

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “What’s going on?”� I asked him if he knew where my mom was.�

“Your mom?”�

“Olivia,” Virginia interjected.�

“Jesus Christ. Is that what this is about? I haven’t seen that �

crazy lady for three or four years.” “Don’t call her crazy,” I said.

“You swear you haven’t seen her?” Virginia said.

“Boy Scout’s honor,” Mr. Wells said, and started laughing. I almost spat at him.

Virginia and I looked at each other, not knowing whether to continue pressing him for details, for proof, but his laughter defeated us.

We headed back to New York that night. Going in this direction, we hardly said a word.

The year my mother disappeared, I began following missing persons cases. It had surprised me that when families found the bodies of their loved ones, they told news reporters they finally felt a sense of closure, of relief. But after Texas, I began to see how this could be true. If someone gave me a pile of bones and said they were my mother’s, I decided I would cry for a day and move on.

Other girls in my class dated and went to school dances and proms, but I wasn’t interested. When I started college, I lied and told people I was in a long-distance relationship. I almost began to believe I was involved with someone. He lived in San Antonio, I told my new friends, and when I pictured him, he was the young man with curly black hair who lived in the house where my mother did not.

On the fourth anniversary of my mother’s departure, Dad and I had a funeral for her, behind my vegetable garden. We were

the only ones invited, the only attendees. We had no proof she was dead, but we needed to feel that she was. We filled a soup terrine she had loved—a wedding present—with some of her favorite possessions: the earrings she’d given me, a golf ball she had found in the woods (she thought it brought her luck), a red silk blouse with three buttons missing, and a matchbook collection she’d started when she’d visited Lisbon in her twenties.

“So long,” I said. I was on my knees, patting snow over the soup terrine, like I was firming the foundation for a snowman. “Fare thee well.”

Family Portrait Above
Altar
�
‌

I woke at six-thirty and checked the hotel bathroom. I was surprised to see Kari was still on the floor, on his stomach. His feet were sticking out beneath the sheet, his heels dry and deeply cracked.

I turned on the faucet, muffling it with a hand towel, which I used to rinse off. It was what my mother used to call a whore’s bath, and this seemed appropriate. After dressing in the same clothes I’d worn the night before, I slowly zipped my suitcase, joining only a few teeth at a time in an attempt to stay quiet. Kari’s pants, shirt, and sad sweater were nested together on the floor. I opened the door to the room gently and closed it silently. There was only the click as it locked behind me.

I picked up my passport at reception. The woman at the front desk didn’t ask how my stay was, and for this I was thank-ful. Outside, snow fell like baby powder. I pulled my suitcase behind me and felt comforted by the steady sound of its one good wheel bumping over cobblestones.

The train station was three blocks away. A cab stopped—I thought, for me, a likely suspect with the suitcase. But no: a man and a woman in their early twenties tumbled out of the backseat, holding beer bottles. They left their bottles on the street, propping them carefully upright, and disappeared into a

doorway. Seconds after they closed the door behind them, one beer bottle fell over with a clamor. It rolled past four parked cars, gathered speed, and continued until it reached the bottom of the hill, where it hit a curb and shattered.

As I passed in front of a department store, the lights in the window snapped on, and the sound of “Silent Night” blared through a speaker. Startled, I almost twisted my ankle. In slow motion, and accompanied by a ticking sound, the mannequins in the window rotated left and right. A dog’s tail wagged. A small boy in a striped sweater extended a present toward me, then retracted it. The mouths of women in traditional dress dropped open. I quickened my pace.

At the train station, I asked a man behind the ticket counter how to get to Inari. There were no direct trains, he said. I would have to take a twelve-hour train ride to Rovanemi, and from Rovanemi I’d take a bus to Ivalo, and from Ivalo I’d take another bus to Inari. It would be a twenty-one-hour trip. I unsuccessfully searched my map for the towns he was mentioning. The man redirected my gaze. I hadn’t been looking far enough north.

I booked a sleeper, sat on a bench, and waited to depart for the town where, according to the Finnish phone book, Eero Valkeapää, my real father, still lived. A pigeon flew into the train station and sat at my feet. I kicked it with my boot. Watching it scurry, stumble, and fly away was more satisfying than anything I’d done in weeks.

The train was called The Santa Claus Express. I boarded and searched for my sleeper. As I approached my compartment, two men smoking cigarettes ducked inside. I had assumed I would be in a smokeless compartment, alone—not with two men. I almost wept. I hadn’t realized how tired I was, how unable I felt to remedy a mistake.

I stood outside the door to my compartment, and the men stood inside. I showed them my ticket. The men, it turned out, had stepped inside to let me pass. They shuffled out and nodded, leaving behind a plume of unfiltered smoke. My stomach curled—it was empty and I was hungover. I had been so angry at those men, and now I was angry that I had been angry.

Each room in second class had three berths. Mine was the middle one. I turned the pillow so I could look out the window, and placed my backpack at my feet. I took off my jacket and crawled under the comforter. Clean and white and soft.

As the train left the station, I pressed my forehead to the cold window. We started out slow, passing houses the color of Viking ships in children’s books—utterly confident blues, reds, yellows. Ladders led to the rooftops, to ease the shoveling off of snow. Parted curtains in the windows revealed the same scene: seven lighted white candles, all balanced on an upside-down
V
.

The farther north we traveled, the darker it grew. By three

o’clock, it was already night.

We arrived in Rovanemi after midnight. My bus wouldn’t be leaving until six a.m. I sat in a coffee shop adjacent to the train station, and when that closed, I lay on a bench inside the waiting area. I slept with my purse held close to me, like an infant. On a nearby bench, a woman slept with her baby held close to her, like a purse.

The bus, when it came, was double-deckered. I sat on the top level, toward the back, away from the schoolboys listening to unquiet headphones. I removed my boots, but my feet were so cold on the footrest I had to sit on them. The bus stopped at every town to pick up mail, drop off packages. On the side of the roads, children walked to school, their flashlights casting yellow circles on the snow.

On the bus from Rovanemi to Ivalo, I finally grew impatient with travel. Until then, I’d liked that the trip was taking so long: I had time to plan what I would say to Eero Valkeapää. But on this, the second-to-last leg, I didn’t want to think, didn’t want to read any of the books I had brought. Restless, I flipped through the in-flight magazine from my SAS flight from Brussels to Helsinki. Hans Blix was on the cover, pictured relaxing in a black leather chair. I read the article about him. He was Scandinavian—that I knew. But I hadn’t known he had two sons, a wife. I stared at his picture for a long, long time. I bet Hans Blix was a damn good father.

A woman who looked like my dentist was sitting two rows ahead of me. She got off the bus at the cemetery, leaving behind her scarf, gray and thick. I picked it up and wrapped it around my neck. It smelled clean, like snow.

When we approached Inari, the bus driver signaled it was my stop. “Hello, English,” he called out.

“Hotel?” I asked.

With a gloved finger, he pointed down the road.

I dragged my suitcase behind me, unsure whether its wheels were rolling on the ice or sliding. The sun never rose, but at ten thirty, the sky looked like a dark blue parachute con-cealing a flame.

I turned down a narrow road toward a colony of cabins and moved faster, feeling colder at the prospect of imminent warmth. I rang the bell of the main house, waited, and then turned the knob. The door opened a crack: a woman with her shirt unbuttoned was nursing a baby. I averted my eyes from her breasts. Inside the entranceway stood several pairs of boots—those of a woman, a man, at least two children, and a baby, all in a row. A family of footwear.

The woman said something in Finnish. I stared at her. “How many night?” she said in English.

I wasn’t sure how much time Eero Valkeapää and I would need together. “One week?” I asked, still looking at the boots.

The woman put on a coat and, carrying the baby, escorted me to a cottage. It had one bunk bed, two single beds, a kitchen-ette, a table, and a bathroom. The extra beds made me feel small, alone in a dollhouse.

I asked where the church was. “Which kind?” she said. “Sami.”

It was down the road, right before the center of town. As she was leaving, she placed the key in my palm, as if it was a communion wafer, and pressed lightly.

I sat in front of the heater and warmed my feet until my damp socks smelled of burned wool. I pulled on another sweater, unhooked a flashlight from the cottage’s coat rack, and headed out. It was significantly easier to walk without the suitcase—my body felt lighter, sleeker, free. I came upon the start of a town, and to the side of the road, a white wooden church. Fifteen cars were parked in the lot. I looked at my watch: twenty minutes past noon. Sunday.

I approached the brown doors of the church and stared at the gold handles. I hadn’t expected it to be so easy. Everything had gone so slowly until now.

No one turned as I entered the church. I sat toward the back, across the aisle from a little girl. The church wasn’t crowded, but everyone was spread out—two or four people per pew. The congregation consisted of grandparents with their grandchildren; the generation in between was missing.

The older women wore black dresses, embroidered with red and green; the men, black tunics, similarly trimmed. The grandchildren, in their early teens, were dressed for snow-boarding.

I couldn’t put it off any longer: I forced myself to look in the direction of the priest.

I knew it without thinking. My father.

He stood behind a pulpit, wearing a white robe with a green sash. His eyes were dark, like mine, set deep in his face. His hair was the white of doves’ feathers, but his face was youthful, handsome though gaunt. His white robe looked large on his body, as though he had recently lost weight. Was he sick?
Not another funeral. Not now
,
after finding him at last.

He gestured while he spoke: he made fists and open—

handed gestures; he stared up at the ceiling and then looked compassionately out toward his congregation. Could he see me? Did he know? I was afraid I might stand. Or jump. In my boots, my toes tingled as they defrosted. When he extended his hands outward, I reached mine forward and touched the pew in front of me.

There was the sound of creaking, of furniture shifting. The congregation was kneeling to pray. I leaned forward, my knees hitting the hard floor. Everyone around me had closed their eyes, but I watched my father through my lashes. I watched him without blinking, until my eyes started to tear. I could see why he would make a good priest: his voice was deep and calming and caring, the voice of a contented man. I felt proud

of him. I felt proud of myself.
You are who I come from. I am more like this man than my mother. I am you
,
my father.

Above the altar hung not a cross, not Jesus, but a portrait of a family—parents, son, daughter, all in traditional clothing. The same outfits worn by the older members of the congregation. In this church, you gave thanks to family.