Until I Find You

‘Make the bitch think you’re in love with each other. Make her think that all the lies she tells Jack have come true!’ But then you went up to them, and they didn’t know what to do. Naturally, your mom fell apart, and she took you away again. She was always taking you away.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Your father told me: ‘Maybe forgiveness would have worked better, Ingrid.’ But I told him that nothing would work with Alice. Nothing worked—did it, Jack?”

“No, nothing worked,” he answered.

“Your father said: ‘God wants us to forgive each other, Ingrid.’ That’s all I know about the religious part, Jack.”

It was dark outside—the lonely time of night in the Stensparken—and the candle on the kitchen table was the only light in the darkening apartment. “Look how dark it is, Jack Burns,” Ingrid whispered, bending down to touch his ear with her clenched teeth. “You’re still a little boy to me. I can’t let you go home in the dark.”

Even with her speech impediment, she made it sound as if this were another not- difficult decision in her fabulous apartment, where there’d been no difficult decisions—not ever.

Kissing Ingrid Amundsen was almost normal; there was an unnatural sound she made when she swallowed, when she was kissing him, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Jack held his mom’s ripped-heart tattoo on Ingrid’s small left breast—exactly where her babies had been delighted to touch her.

Ingrid had no breasts to speak of, and the blue veins in her forearms stood out against the gold of her skin— just as he’d remembered. Another blue vein, which began at her throat, ran down between her small breasts; that vein seemed to have a pulse in it, as if an animal lived under her skin. Maybe the animal affected her speech. At least he’d remembered her veins correctly.

“I used to think about which of us was the more damaged, but we’re all right, aren’t we?” Ingrid asked him; her poor voice sounded awful at that moment.

“Yes, I think so,” Jack said, but he didn’t really feel that he was all right—and he couldn’t tell about Ingrid. She had the aura of an accepted sadness about her. Jack hated to think of her meeting people for the first time, and what that did to her. He was even angry at her son, who’d gone off to the university in Bergen. Couldn’t the kid have stayed in Oslo and seen more of his mother?

Yet Ingrid’s life, her seeming wholeness, impressed Jack as more likable than whatever life Andreas Breivik was living. Breivik’s opinion—namely, that Ingrid had not had much success at anything—struck Jack as arrogant and wrong. But Andreas had known her better than Jack did. She was such a beautiful yet flawed woman; it hadn’t been hard for Jack’s mom to make the boy believe that Ingrid and William had been lovers. (Who wouldn’t have been her lover?)

“It couldn’t have been as bad for your father anywhere as it was in Copenhagen,” Ingrid told Jack, “but I don’t think that the problems with your mother ever got better. Not in Helsinki, anyway. Alice was perfectly awful to him there. But she didn’t achieve her desired effect. I think your mom started running out of steam in Helsinki, Jack.” (That had always been Jack’s impression.)

“What happened in Helsinki?” he asked her.

“I don’t know everything, Jack. I just know that Alice tried to break up a lesbian couple, but she couldn’t manage it. They both slept with her—and had a good time, or not—but they went right on being a couple!”

“Who were they?” Jack asked.

“Music students—your dad’s two best, like Andreas and me. Only one of them was an organist; the other one was a cellist.”

“Ritva and Hannele were gay?” Jack asked.

“Their names sound familiar,” Ingrid said. “The point is, Jack—your mother, once again, didn’t get what she wanted. But neither did your father.”

“You stayed in touch with him?” Jack asked.

“Till he left for Amsterdam,” Ingrid told him. “Whatever happened there, he didn’t write me about it. I lost touch with him when he left Helsinki.”

The kissing had become more interesting; it was principally her speech that was damaged. There was something detectably but indefinably strange about her mouth—if not actual damage, a kind of involuntary tremor that felt like damage. Jack didn’t know what it was, but it was very arousing.

It seemed the wrong time to ask her, but the thought had occurred to Jack—when she implied she’d had some limited correspondence with his father, if only when William was in Finland. Jack just had to ask her: “Was there anything romantic between you and my dad, Ingrid?”

“What a thing to ask me—you naughty boy!” she said, laughing. “He was a lovely man, but he wasn’t my type. For one thing, he was too short.”

“Shorter than I am?” Jack asked.

“A little shorter, maybe—not much. Of course I was never with him when I was lying down!” she added, laughing again. Ingrid grabbed Jack’s penis, which in his experience implied an impatience with the particular conversation—whatever it was.

“So I’m not your type, either?” he asked.

She kept laughing; it was the most natural sound she was capable of making. (Except, perhaps, on the piano.) “I have other reasons for wanting to sleep with you, Jack,” was all she told him.

“What other reasons, Ingrid?”

“When you’ve made love to me again and again, I’ll tell you,” she said. “I’ll tell you later—I promise.” There was an urgency about her speech impediment now, something more than impatience. He began by kissing her broken-heart tattoo, which seemed to make her happy.

In the morning, Jack woke her by kissing the tattoo again; it looked as if it were still bleeding. She smiled before she opened her eyes. “Yes, keep doing that,” Ingrid said, with her eyes still closed. He kept kissing her wounded-heart tattoo. “If you keep doing that, I’ll tell you what I believe about Hell.” Her eyes were wide open now—Hell being an eye-opening subject. He kept kissing her, of course.

“If you hurt people, if you know you’re hurting them, you go to Hell,” Ingrid said. “In Hell you have to watch the people you hurt, the ones who are still alive. If two people you hurt ever get together, you have to watch everything they do very closely. But you can’t hear them. Everyone in Hell is deaf. You just have to watch the people you hurt without knowing what they’re talking about. Of course, Hell being Hell, you think they’re talking about you—it’s all you ever imagine, while you’re just watching and watching. Kiss me everywhere, Jack—not just the tattoo.” He kissed her everywhere; they made love again. “What a bad night’s sleep your mother’s had, Jack,” Ingrid said. “She’s been up all night, just watching.”

Jack had fallen back to sleep when he heard the piano. There was the smell of coffee in the apartment. He got out of bed and went into the living room, where Ingrid was sitting naked at the piano, playing softly. “Nice way to wake up, isn’t it?” she asked, with her back turned to him.

“Yes, it is,” he told her.

“We both have to get dressed, and you have to go,” she said. “My first pupil is coming.”

“Okay,” Jack said, turning to go back to her bedroom.

“But come kiss me first,” she said, “while the bitch is watching.”

There was a lot Jack didn’t know about religion. His dad, apparently, was a forgiver. Ingrid Moe (now Amundsen) wasn’t; she hadn’t forgiven Andreas Breivik or Alice. As Jack kissed Ingrid on her damaged mouth, he was thinking that he wasn’t much of a forgiver, either.

In Hell, where his mother was watching, Alice might have regretted giving Ingrid the wrong tattoo—or so Jack Burns was also thinking.

29. The Truth

Jack never saw what the rest of Finland looked like. It was dark all the way from the