Until I Find You

an aria quarta or a toccata by Pachelbel, Jack’s mom told him. She mentioned a Swedish movie that had made some piece by Pachelbel famous. “Or maybe that was Mozart,” Alice added. Jack wasn’t sure if she meant the music in the Swedish movie or his dad’s tattoo. But the boy was badly distracted by a snake. (An entire wall of flash was devoted to snakes and sea serpents, and other monsters of the deep.)

“I don’t suppose you have any idea where William might have gone,” Alice said to Doc Forest. She’d outworn her welcome at the Grand, or maybe the manager of the Grand had outworn his welcome with her.

“He’s in Oslo, I think,” Doc Forest said.

“Oslo!” Alice cried. There was more despair in her voice than before. “There can’t be anyone tattooing in Oslo.”

“If there is, he’s doing it out of his home, like me,” Doc replied.

“Oslo,” Jack’s mom said, more quietly this time. Like Stockholm, Oslo wasn’t on their itinerary.

“There’s an organ there,” Doc added. “An old one—that’s what he said.”

Of course there was an organ in Oslo! And if there was anyone, good or bad, tattooing there—even if only in his home—William would find him.

“Did he mention which church?” Alice asked.

“Just the organ—he said it had a hundred and two stops,” Doc Forest told her.

“Well, that shouldn’t be too hard to find,” Alice said, more to herself than to Doc or Jack.

A theme was emerging from the wall of flash, and the boy had almost grasped it—something having to do with snakes wrapped around swords.

“You should stay at the Bristol, Alice,” Torsten Lindberg was saying. “You won’t get as many clients as you got at the Grand, but at least the manager isn’t onto you.”

Years later, Jack would consider all that Lindberg might have meant by “onto you.” But Alice made no response, other than to thank the accountant; naturally, she thanked Doc Forest, too.

Doc picked Jack up in his strong arms and whispered, “Come back and see me when you’re older. Maybe then you’ll want a tattoo.”

Jack had loved the lobby of the Grand, and waking in the morning to the ships’ horns—the commuter traffic from the archipelago. He’d enjoyed skating on Lake Malaren with Agneta Nilsson, the formidable Mrs. Lindberg. Aside from the darkness, he would have been content to stay in Stockholm, but he and his mom were on the move again.

They traveled by train to Goteborg, then by ship to Oslo. Much of this journey must have been beautiful, but all the boy would remember was how dark it was—and how he felt cold. After all, it was still January and they were way up north.

Given all their tattoo paraphernalia, they had a lot of luggage. Upon their arrival anywhere, they never looked as if they were visiting for a short time. At the Hotel Bristol, the front-desk clerk must have thought they’d come for an extended stay.

“Not your most expensive room,” Alice informed the clerk, “but something nice—not too claustrophobic.”

They would be needing a hand with their bags, the clerk was smart enough to observe; he called for a bellboy and gave Jack a friendly handshake, but the handshake hurt the boy’s fingers. Jack had never met a Norwegian before.

The Bristol’s lobby was not so grand as the Grand’s. Jack hoped he wouldn’t have to get used to it. It didn’t matter to him that the organ was an old one; for all he cared, the stupid organ could have had two hundred and two stops.

So far, Jack and his mom were indebted to three tattooers, two organists, a small soldier, and a tattooed accountant. In whose debt would they be next? the boy wondered, as they followed the bellboy and their luggage down a dark, carpeted hall.

Their hotel room at the Bristol was small and airless. When they checked in, it was already dark outside—it almost always was—and the view from their room was of another building. (There were some dimly lit rooms with their curtains closed, which spoke to Alice of dull, silent lives—not the life she had once imagined with William, anyway.)

They’d not eaten since their last breakfast at the Grand. The bellboy told them that the Bristol’s restaurant was still serving, but he urged them not to dally. Jack’s mother had forewarned her son that the restaurant was no doubt expensive and they should order sparingly.

Jack didn’t much care for the bellboy’s suggestions. “You must try the cloudberries,” he said, “and of course the reindeer tongue.”

“Have the salmon, Jack,” his mom said, after the bellboy had gone. “I’ll split it with you.”

That was when the boy began to cry—not because his fingers still throbbed from the front-desk clerk’s handshake, or because he was hungry and tired and sick of hotel rooms. It wasn’t even because of that winter darkness special to Scandinavia—the absence of light, which must compel more than a few Swedes and Norwegians to jump into a fjord, if it’s possible to find one that’s not frozen. No, it was not the trip but the reason for the trip that made him cry.

“I don’t care if we find him!” he cried to his mother. “I hope we don’t find him!”

“If we find him, you’ll care—it’ll mean something,” she said.

But if they were his father’s abandoned responsibilities, didn’t that mean that his dad had already expressed his disappointment with them both? Hadn’t William rejected Alice and Jack, and wouldn’t finding him mean that he might reject them again? (Not that the boy, at four, could ever have expressed these thoughts, but this was what he was feeling—this was what he was crying about.)

At his mother’s insistence, Jack stopped crying so that they could go down to dinner.

“We’ll share the salmon,” Alice told the waiter.

“No reindeer tongue,” Jack said, “no cloudberries.”

Virtually no one else was eating in the restaurant. An elderly couple sat in silence; that they had nothing to say to each other did not necessarily predispose them to wanting a tattoo. A man was alone at a corner table. He looked depressed beyond desperation, a candidate for a fjord.

“A tattoo can’t save him,” Alice said.

Then a young couple came into the restaurant. It was the first time Jack saw how his mom was affected by a couple in love; she looked like a surefire fjord-jumper, one who wouldn’t even hesitate.

He was thin and athletic-looking, with long hair to his shoulders—like a rock star, only better dressed—and his wife or girlfriend couldn’t take her eyes or her hands off him. She was a tall, lanky young woman with a wide smile and beautiful breasts. (Even at four, Jack Burns had an eye for breasts.) Whether they were guests at the hotel or Oslo natives, they were as cool as any young couple who’d ever walked into Tattoo Ole’s. Probably they’d already been tattooed.

“Ask them,” Jack said to his mom, but she couldn’t bear to look at them.

“No,” she whispered, “not them. I can’t.”

Jack didn’t understand what was the matter with her. They were a couple in love. Wasn’t being in love a pilgrim experience, like getting your first tattoo? Jack had heard his mom and Ole talk about those turning points in people’s lives that inspire a tattoo—almost any pilgrim experience will do. Obviously this young couple was having one. And if they were guests at the hotel, they’d probably already had sex that evening—not that Jack knew. (In all likelihood, they couldn’t wait to eat their dinner so they could have sex again!)

Not even the presence of the waiter, who stood ready to tell them the specials, could keep them from fondling each other. After the waiter had left with their order, Jack nudged his mom and said: “Do you want me to ask them? I know how to do it.”

“No, please—just eat your salmon,” she said, still whispering.

Even in that brutal weather, the young woman wore a skimpy dress and her legs were bare. Jack thought that they must have been staying in the hotel, because no one would have gone out in such a dress—not in that weather. He also thought that he spotted a tattoo—it might have been a birthmark—on the inside of one of her bare knees. It turned out to be a bruise, but that was what propelled the boy out of his chair and gave him the courage to approach the couple’s table. His mother didn’t come with him.