Until I Find You

like it hurt him to walk. “It will feel like a sunburn,” Jack had told him. “Better put some moisturizer on it.”

But Andreas didn’t know anything. After the organ student had gone, Alice had sobbed, “If he’d known anything, he would have told me.”

She’d meant that Andreas Breivik didn’t know what irons William had in the fire; the boy had no idea where William was thinking of going next. But Ingrid Moe knew, and Alice wasted little time in letting Ingrid know that she’d slept with the girl’s fiance. Ingrid had never felt so betrayed. Her speech impediment isolated her; she’d always been shy about meeting people. Ingrid couldn’t forgive Andreas for being unfaithful to her. It didn’t help that Alice wouldn’t leave the girl alone.

Jack remembered that Sunday when his mom took the shirt cardboard to church—how she’d stood in the center aisle at the end of the service, with the shirt cardboard saying INGRID MOE held to her chest. Jack had thought Rolf Karlsen must have been playing the organ that Sunday, because everyone said Karlsen was such a big deal and the organ sounded especially good.

But the organist that Sunday had been William Burns. It was the one time his father had played the organ for Jack, but—not unlike how the boy had met his dad in the restaurant at the Hotel Bristol—Jack didn’t know it, and neither did William.

“I’m sorry he hurt you,” Alice had said to Ingrid Moe, when the girl had come to the hotel for her broken- heart tattoo. But the he had been Andreas Breivik, who’d slept with Jack’s mother—not, as Jack had thought, his father, who had never slept with Ingrid Moe.

Jack remembered how Ingrid’s exquisite prettiness was marred by what an obvious strain it was for her to speak. Not that he’d understood her very well; for all these years, Jack had thought of her speech impediment as an agony connected with kissing. (When he’d imagined his father kissing the girl, Jack had felt ashamed.)

“I won’t do his name,” Alice had told Ingrid.

“I don’t want his name,” the girl had answered—clenching her teeth together when she talked, as if she were afraid or unable to show her tongue. She’d wanted just a heart, ripped in two.

Then Alice had given her a whole heart instead—a perfectly unbroken one, as Jack recalled.

“You didn’t give me what I wanted!” Ingrid Moe had blurted out.

“I gave you what you have, a perfect heart—a small one,” Alice had told her.

“I’m not telling you anything,” the girl had said.

She’d told Jack instead—“Sibelius,” she’d said. Not the composer but the name of a music college in Helsinki, where William’s next best students would come from. (New students were part of what Andreas Breivik meant by irons in the fire.)

“Ingrid quit the organ,” Andreas told Jack. “She went back to the piano, without much success. I stayed with the organ. I kept growing, as you have to,” he said, with no small amount of pride. “Ingrid’s marriage didn’t have much success, either.”

Jack didn’t like him; Breivik seemed smug, even a little cruel. “What about your marriage?” Jack asked him. “Or didn’t you get married?”

Andreas shrugged. “I became an organist,” he said, as if that were all that mattered. “I’m grateful to your mother, if you really want to know. She saved me from getting married at a time when I was far too young to be married, anyway. I would have had a time-consuming personal life, when what I needed was to be completely focused on my music. As for Ingrid, in all likelihood, she would have chosen a personal life over a career—whether she married me or someone else. And I don’t think her personal life would have worked out any better, or differently, if she’d been married to me. With Ingrid, things just wouldn’t have worked out—they just didn’t.”

Like some other successful people Jack had known, Andreas Breivik had all the answers. The more Breivik said, the more Jack wanted to talk with Ingrid Moe. “There’s one other thing,” Jack said. “I remember a cleaning woman in the church—an older woman, well-spoken, imperious—”

“That’s impossible,” Breivik said. “Cleaning women aren’t well-spoken. Are you telling me this one spoke English?”

“Yes, she did,” Jack replied. “Her English was quite good.”

“She couldn’t have been a cleaning woman,” Andreas said with irritation. “I don’t suppose you remember her name.”

“She had a mop—she leaned on it, she pointed with it, she waved it around,” Jack went on. “Her name was Else-Marie Lothe.”

Breivik laughed scornfully. “That was Ingrid’s mother! I’ll say she was imperious! You got that right. But Else-Marie wasn’t that well- spoken; her English was only okay.”

“Her last name was Lothe. She had a mop,” Jack repeated.

“She was divorced from Ingrid’s father. She’d remarried,” Andreas said. “She had a cane, not a mop. She broke her ankle getting off the streetcar right in front of the cathedral. She caught her shoe in the trolley tracks. The ankle never healed properly—hence the cane.”

“She had dry hands, like a cleaning woman,” Jack mentioned lamely.

“She was a potter—the artistic type. Potters have dry hands,” Breivik said.

Needless to say, Else-Marie Lothe had hated Alice; she’d ended up hating Andreas Breivik, too. (Jack could easily see how that could happen.)

Jack asked Breivik for Ingrid Moe’s married name and her address.

“It’s so unnecessary for you to see her,” Andreas said. “You won’t find her any easier to understand this time.” But, after some complaining, Breivik gave Jack her name and address.

Under the circumstances, it turned out that Andreas Breivik knew more about Ingrid Moe than Jack would have thought. Her name was Ingrid Amundsen now. “After her divorce,” Breivik said, “she moved into a third-floor apartment on Theresesgate—on the left side of the street, looking north. You can walk from there to the center of Oslo in twenty-five minutes.” Breivik said this with the dispassion of a man who had timed the aforementioned walk, more than once. “The blue tram line goes by,” Andreas continued, as slowly as if he were waiting for the tram. “Since the new Rikshospitalet was built, there are three different lines passing. The noise might have bothered Ingrid to begin with, but she probably doesn’t hear it any longer.”

Ingrid Amundsen was a piano teacher; she gave private lessons in her apartment.

“Theresesgate is quite a nice street,” Andreas said, closing his eyes, as if he could walk the street in his sleep—of course he had. “Down at the south end, toward Bislett Stadium, which is only a five-minute walk from Ingrid’s, there are a few cafes, a decent bookstore—even an antiquarian bookstore—and the usual 7-Eleven. Closer to Ingrid, on her side of the street, is a large grocery store called Rimi. There’s a nice vegetable store next to the Stensgate tram stop, too. It’s run by immigrants—Turkish, I think. You can buy some imported specialties—marinated olives, some cheeses. It’s all very modest, but nice.” Breivik’s voice trailed away.

“You’ve never been inside her apartment?” Jack asked him.

Breivik shook his head sadly. “It’s an old building, four stories, built around 1875. It’s a bit shabby, I suppose. Knowing Ingrid, she probably would have kept the original wooden floors. She would have done some of the renovating herself. I’m sure her children would have helped her.”

“How old are her children?” Jack asked.

“The daughter is the older one,” Breivik told Jack. “She’s living with a guy she met in university, but they don’t have children. She lives in an area called Sofienberg. It’s a very popular and hip place for young people to live. The daughter can get on a tram in Trondheimsveien and be at her mother’s in about twenty minutes; by bicycle, it would take her ten or fifteen. I imagine, if she had children, she’d want to move out of central Oslo—maybe Holmlia, an affordable area, where there are still almost as many Norwegians as there are immigrants.”

“And Ingrid has a son?” Jack asked.

“The boy is studying at the university in Bergen,” Andreas Breivik said. “He visits his mother only during