The Sunlit Night (23 page)

“Haldor is glad in my mother,” Yasha said, looking for the first time away from the road and right at me. Then his head snapped back to the road.

“Is your mother glad in him?”

“No,” Yasha said, his grip on the wheel loosening. I waited for the next thing he would say, which I could see him pulling, with some difficulty, up his throat. “Ian,” he said. “The man she left us for. She’s loved him since she left us.”

Seven ponies stood waiting for us with their necks stretching over the fence. Yasha stopped the truck, spent a moment checking around the steering wheel, pulled the key out, hesitated, and put it in his pocket. I knew a nondriving New Yorker when I saw one. But he had just mentioned his mother’s leaving, and I could not mention the emergency brake.

“I didn’t think she was capable of it,” Yasha said, opening his door. We got out and walked around to the back of the truck. I poked one loaf—the crust chipped off under my finger like paint. “Real stale,” Yasha said. “I hope it feels good on their teeth.”

I hadn’t considered their teeth. The ponies were white or black, with the signature Icelandic manes that made them look like Beatles. Their tails were as long as their short legs—they swept in a C from their butts to their hooves. The white ponies had gray tails; these looked like the ponytails of old women. When Yasha made his first toss into the pen, the nearest white pony spread its lips around the whole loaf and walked away with it, to a spot in the crabgrass where it could chew.

I threw another in. Two ponies chomped it neatly in half. They were cooperative, but hungry. I missed my sister, who would have known how to cut their hair, remove their ticks, clean their eyes. Yasha threw a third and fourth loaf into the pen. As I rested my hand between the eyes of one black pony, my phone rang. It was my sister.

“I was just thinking about you,” I said.

Yasha looked up at me.

“Her,” I said, pointing to the phone, and then felt cruel.

“I’m in a state,” my sister said.

I walked away from the pen, toward the farmhouse. Behind me, thuds announced each of Yasha’s subsequent throws. I could hear him thanking two ponies for sharing.

“I bet,” I said. Her message had said that she’d call me when she stopped crying; it had been weeks. It was now the last day of July. Five weeks until the wedding, and the mother and father of the bride had made their early exit. I hoped Scott was outdoing himself. I hoped he was smothering her with care. I hoped my parents’ absence felt like a twig thrown against his presence.

“I am coming,” I said. I knew that I was not my sister’s concern. She wanted news about them; she wanted to hear they’d changed their minds. All I could say of them was, “I told them that I’m coming.”

“I’m scared,” my sister said. “I don’t feel well.”

“What kind of well?”

“I’m dissolving.”

My sister sounded small—the register of her voice triggered in my mind the symbols and dice of third-grade board games, the Persian rug that appeared when my parents’ sofa bed folded away, her legs—which had always been longer than mine, even as toddlers—bending at the knees into large triangles while she sat listening to the game rules, my smaller triangles bouncing as I made up the rules. I imagined lowering this tiny version of my sister into a glass of water and watching her dissolve, as if she were sugar. I shouldn’t have been so far from her. I shouldn’t have been anywhere near ponies, or blacksmiths, or the Norwegian Sea. I should have been in Central Park. On my sister’s octopus-print, waterproof picnic blanket. Cutting her hair, removing her ticks, cleaning her eyes.

“You are one solid, magnificent chunk,” I said. “Where are you?”

“Gold’s Deli,” she said.

“Onion rings?”

“With eggs.”

“Delicious. Now, listen,” I said. “When are you flying out?”

My sister didn’t answer, and I heard the three-hundred-pound man who owns Gold’s asking her for exact change. I looked up. Yasha had thrown in all the bread and had crawled into the pen himself. He was standing sheepishly in an empty spot between the scattered, chewing ponies like a scarecrow, looking at me, and then at a pony, making sure the pony was eating. Onion rings would have felt good on their gums, I thought, looking at the animals flopping their lips around the hard rectangles. My sister came back.

“My ticket was with you,” she said, “and Mom and Dad. Do you know if they’ve canceled them? Scott might be flying out early.”

“Why would he do that?” I said.

“Scott doesn’t feel well either.”

I didn’t know what kind of euphemism this was.

“Tell Scott I want to talk to him,” I said.

“He isn’t here,” she said. “He’s home.”

I’d seen the word
home
explode before. It had happened to my downstairs neighbor Lily, the daughter of our building’s superintendent, who’d grown up in a building where her father was king, only to move as a ten-year-old back to Slovenia, the country where her grandfather was dying. It had happened to Yasha, twice. First Russia, then the bakery. Both gone. Or not gone, but made foreign—through distance, through vacancy, through the permanent misalignment of then and now. When Sarah said
home
, I flipped through the wrong answers—she didn’t mean our old apartment, or either of my parents’ new apartments, or my Room 18—and I knew it had happened to us.

“Mom didn’t mention the tickets,” I said. “If they cancel them, you and I will buy our own.” Haldor would have to find more work for me. Maybe he’d let me take on a couple of wool-dyeing shifts.

“I want them to come,” she said. I did too. Besides, after the injury of their refusal, it seemed miraculously gracious of her to still want them there, and I wanted her to have anything she wanted.

“Sarah,” I said, “you love him?”

“I do,” she said. “Fuck, Frances, I shouldn’t be saying those words before the wedding.”

“International calls cancel out jinxes,” I said.

She said, “I love him.”

“Then the rest is cats,” I said, “and apartments.” I made the same hand movement Yasha’s mother had made at the funeral.

“I have to go,” my sister said. “Frances,” she said, “it’s going to be a small wedding. We didn’t give ourselves much time to plan. We wanted it to be simple. I’m not having bridesmaids or centerpieces or any of that. But if Dad doesn’t give me away,” she said, “who should give me away?”

I didn’t know. “We’ll talk about that later.”

“Maybe Scott’s father would. We haven’t told his parents yet about my parents.”

“Maybe, but you don’t need to know right now.” My parents might turn around yet, I thought. Everybody had five weeks. “Go home,” I said. “Go to bed. When you wake up, it will be a whole new month.”

“Bye,” she said. “Okay. Bye.”

The ponies were alone in the pen, the bread all swallowed, and Yasha had returned to the driver’s seat. He was twirling the key ring around his thumb. Sigbjørn’s tractor had cut deep tracks into the mud around the farmhouse. I walked within one groove down to the truck, which was very red beside the black and white ponies. I got in, and Yasha locked our doors. Inside the small cabin, we couldn’t hear the ponies stomping or batting their thick tails against the fence. Yasha put the key in the ignition, but didn’t turn it. We sat still. He and I have since discussed that this was an unbearable stillness.

•    •    •

Kurt assigned Frances to the pizza preparation shift, as soon as she and Yasha returned from the ponies. Kurt said they would need to roll out seventy crusts. Frances followed him into the kitchen gloomily. Yasha was glad at the time to escape the dough work—the smell of yeast would have made him very upset, he thought, and perhaps they all knew it and so had moved him out to the lavvos—but the lavvos were nearly impossible to build. They were too tall and too heavy. By the time he came in from the beach, Frances was asleep.

She had left her door open. Yasha moved around her room in a hush. He was grateful to be in that room again and desperate to wake her. But he didn’t wake her, and he didn’t brush his teeth, which would have woken her, and he fell asleep on her second bed. They slept turned away from each other, facing opposite walls.

In the morning, he was rabid. She had gotten up and out first. With irritating symmetry, she hadn’t woken him up. He opened the door and stuck his head out into the hall. There were people everywhere. He closed the door. It was the first of August. It was the whale meat festival. It was the fucking whale meat festival. He put on the pants he’d left in a pile by the bed—puffy blue work pants Haldor had given him for lavvo-building. He looked like the Cookie Monster. A child outside his window was shouting “Pig! Pig! Pig!”

It would be impossible to open the door behind the guest chair. Visitors would be checking in with Gunn all day. Yasha stood between the two beds. He crouched and hooked his fingers under his bed’s wire frame. He pulled it across the room. It made hideous sounds the whole way. When he had trapped himself between the two bed frames, he climbed over his mattress—he hadn’t yet put on his sandy shoes—and pushed them, with both arms outstretched, together and against the wall. There.

He closed the door to her room behind him. In the lobby, the child who had been shouting
Pig!
was now with his parents at the reception desk. The boy’s mother lifted him up to her chest. The family was from England. It was hard to understand what they wanted with Kurt’s whale pizzas. It was hard to imagine being lifted to a mother’s chest. The beds are separate, Gunn was telling them, but can be pushed together.

Yasha looked at Gunn, searching for a wink, any indication that she had heard his bed screeching across the floor—no. The total amount, she went on, would be charged in kroner. She pulled out a conversion chart for British pounds. Behind her, the Ceremonial Hall was full of fresh waffles. The pizzas wouldn’t be ready until the evening—the whale meat had to be marinated, grilled, portioned—but the event was advertised as all-day, and the schedule began with breakfast, followed by nail-smithing in Sigbjørn’s hut. Frida supervised breakfast. She stood pressing waffles, each waffle composed of five heart-shaped sections. At the tables, guests dismantled their waffles heart by heart, biting the tips off first and dipping the curved tops into their bowls of sunberries.

Follow me, you sunberry, Yasha rehearsed as he approached the kitchen. Through this door, down these—

Frances opened the kitchen door. She was wearing her sack uniform, and it was splattered with tomato sauce.

“Hey,” Yasha said.

“I don’t know how you did this,” Frances said. “If I look at another ball of dough, I’ll throw up.”

“I have somewhere you can hide,” Yasha said.

“Give me eight minutes.”

“What is the time?” Kurt said.

Frida said, “I am not making any more waffles.”

Sigbjørn came in through the back entrance and said, “Time for fire?” He smiled at Frances. Yasha watched jealously. Here’s Sigbjørn, with his arms and his leather apron, Yasha thought, and here I am, wearing Cookie Monster pants. Between him and me, wouldn’t Frances pick him, if given the chance? And didn’t it look like Sigbjørn, who was staring at Frances the way he stared at his burning lumps of coal, would happily give her the chance?

“Everybody out,” Kurt said. “Sigbjørn,” he said, “make the fire.”

Frances beamed at Sigbjørn.

“Superfine,” Sigbjørn said.

Yasha felt sick. This stream of strange-named men, all saying
super
whenever they pleased, would never end and he would have to battle all of them. Kurt pointed ahead, and the team started to move. Sigbjørn retrieved two handfuls of kindling from his pockets and crunched the twigs for Frances’s amusement. Yasha watched her laugh. In the cave, he thought, his only competitor would be the goat.

Frida, followed by Sigbjørn, followed by Frances and Yasha, filed out through the kitchen door and into the center of the Ceremonial Hall.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Sigbjørn hollered, “it is our time!”

A few guests giggled. Everyone looked up.

“Follow me, please, to the smithy.” Sigbjørn walked out to the lobby.

The guests shrugged and stood from their chairs—leaving their breakfasts, taking their jackets, pushing their kids along—and followed Sigbjørn toward the back door. The hall emptied. That was the first thing. The second thing would be harder: it was Gunn. The stream following Sigbjørn moved through the lobby, past Gunn’s desk, and she looked at them all with her mouth open, delighted. Then, as if she too were part of Yasha’s moment, she stood and followed them out onto the beach. The door slammed behind her. Yasha heard Sigbjørn giving directions, and the crowd moving farther down the shore, and Kurt in the kitchen, chopping. Frances stood beside him, waiting.

“Fast,” Yasha said. He ran into the lobby, and Frances followed. He kicked the chair away from the wall, pushed the knob, ushered Frances in first, jumped in behind her, and slammed the door shut. It was true—the darkness changed their bodies. In the first moment, he could not see her, but he knew where she stood, from her heat, and her being denser than air, and an electric signal that all their fingers seemed to emit, irrepressibly. He had to choose between swallowing her whole, or finding her knuckle by knuckle—they were fully available to each other now, so conveniently invisible. Frances began to feel around behind her.