Until I Find You

guessed; there hadn’t been time. Something small in the kidney area, maybe.

“Where did you tattoo him?” Jack asked his mom.

“Where he’ll never forget it,” she whispered, smiling at Andreas. Possibly the sternum, Jack imagined; that would explain why the teenager trembled at Alice’s touch. She was pushing him, albeit gently, toward the door; it looked as though it hurt him to walk.

“Just keep it covered for a day,” Jack told Andreas. “It will feel like a sunburn. Better put some moisturizer on it.”

Andreas Breivik stood stupefied in the hall, as if even these simple instructions were bewildering. Alice waved good-bye to him as she closed the door.

By the way Jack’s mother sat down on the bed, Jack knew she was tired. She lay back, with her hands behind her head, and began to laugh in a way her son recognized; it was the kind of laughter that quickly turned to tears, for no apparent reason. When she started to cry, Jack asked her—as he often did—what was the matter.

“Andreas didn’t know anything,” Alice sobbed. When she got control of herself, she added: “If he’d known anything, he would have told me.”

They would be late for church if Alice paused now for breakfast; besides, she said, Jack had eaten enough breakfast for both of them.

Whenever they had their laundry done at the Bristol, it was returned with shirt cardboards; their clothes were folded among the shirt cardboards like sandwiches. Jack watched his mom take one of these stiff white pieces of cardboard and write on it in capital letters with the kind of felt-tipped pen she used to mark her tubes of pigment. The black lettering read: INGRID MOE.

Alice put the shirt cardboard under her coat and they walked uphill to the Domkirke. The Sunday service had already begun when they arrived. The organ was playing; the choir was singing the opening hymn. If there’d been a procession, they’d missed it. Jack was thinking that the great (or at least big) Rolf Karlsen must have been playing the organ, because the organ sounded especially good.

The church was nearly full; they sat in the back pew on the center aisle. The minister who gave the sermon was the lightbulb man. He must have said something about Jack and Alice, because in the middle of his sermon a few anxious faces turned their way with expressions that were both pained and kind.

There was nothing for Jack to do but stare at the ceiling of the cathedral, where he saw a painting that frightened him. A dead man was stepping out of a grave. Jack was sure that Jesus was holding the dead man’s hand, but that made the boy no less afraid of the walking corpse.

Suddenly the minister pointed to the ceiling and read aloud from the Bible in Norwegian. It was strangely comforting to Jack that the parishioners were all staring at the frightening painting with him. (It would be years before Jack understood the illustration or saw the English translation, which was of that moment in John 11, verses 43 and 44, when Jesus brings Lazarus back to life.)

Now when He said these things, He cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!”

And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and his face was wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Loose him, and let him go.”

When the minister cried, “Lazarus,” Jack jumped. Lazarus and Jesus were the only words he’d understood, but at least he knew the dead man’s name; this was strangely comforting, too.

When the service was over, Alice stood in the center aisle beside their pew with the shirt cardboard held to her chest. Upon leaving the church, everyone had to walk by her and the sign saying INGRID MOE. A boy about Jack’s age was the acolyte; he led the congregation out, carrying the cross. He passed Alice in the aisle, his eyes cast down. The minister, whom Jack thought of as the lightbulb man, was the last to come up the aisle; normally, he was the first to follow the acolyte, but he had purposely lingered behind.

He stopped beside Alice with a sigh. The lightbulb man’s voice was gentle when he spoke. “Please go home, Mrs. Burns,” the minister said.

If she’d noticed the Mrs. Burns, Alice made no attempt to correct him; maybe, on his part, it was not a misunderstanding but another kindness.

The minister put his hand on her wrist, and, shaking his head, said: “God bless you and your son.” Then he left.

Jack concluded that, since even the cleaning lady had blessed him, they were big on God-bless-yous in Norway. Certainly Lazarus, leaving his grave, seemed predisposed to offer a blessing.

Back at the Bristol, Alice sipped her soup. (That was their lunch—just the soup.) But if Alice had lost her enthusiasm for spotting future tattoo clients, Jack thought he saw one. A young girl stared at them from the entrance to the dining room; she had a child’s face on an overlong body, and she refused to let the maitre d’ show her to a table. Jack doubted that his mother would tattoo her. Alice had her rules. You had to be a certain age, and this baby-faced girl looked too young to be tattooed.

The instant Alice saw her, she knew it was Ingrid Moe. Alice told the waiter to bring another chair to the table, where the tall, awkward-looking girl reluctantly joined them. She sat on the edge of her chair with her hands on the table, as if the silverware were organ stops and she were preparing to play; her arms and fingers were absurdly long for her age.

“I’m sorry he hurt you. I’m sorry for you that you ever met him,” Alice told the young girl. (Jack assumed his mom meant his dad. Who else could she have meant?)

Ingrid Moe bit her lip and stared at her long fingers. A thick blond braid hung down her perfectly straight back, reaching almost to the base of her spine. When she spoke, her exquisite prettiness was marred by what an obvious strain it was for her to speak; she clenched her teeth together when she talked, as if she were afraid or unable to show her tongue.

Jack thought with a shiver of what an agony it might be for her to kiss someone, or to kiss her. Years later, he imagined his father thinking this upon first meeting her—and Jack felt ashamed.

“I want a tattoo,” Ingrid Moe told Alice. “He said you knew how to do it.” Her speech impediment made her almost impossible to understand, at least in English.

“You’re too young to get a tattoo,” Alice said.

“I wasn’t too young for him,” Ingrid replied.

When she said the him, she curled back her lips and bared her clenched teeth; the muscles of her neck were tensed, thrusting her lower jaw forward as if she were about to spit. It was tragic that such a beautiful girl could be so instantly transformed; the not-so-simple act of speaking made her ugly.

“I would advise you not to get one,” Alice said.

“If you won’t do it, Trond Halvorsen will,” Ingrid struggled to say. “He’s not very good—he gave William an infection. He gives everyone an infection, I think.”

Perhaps hearing the girl say William made Alice flinch—more than the news that he’d been infected by dirty needles or a bad tattooist. But Ingrid Moe misunderstood Alice’s reaction.

“He got over it,” the girl blurted out. “He just needed an antibiotic.”

“I don’t want to tattoo you,” Alice told her.

“I know what I want and where I want it,” Ingrid answered. “It’s on a part of me I don’t want Trond Halvorsen seeing,” she added. The way she contorted her mouth to say the name Trond Halvorsen made him sound like a kind of inedible fish. Ingrid spread the long fingers of her right hand on the side of her left breast, near her heart. “Here,” she said. Her hand cupped her small breast, her fingertips reaching to her ribs.

“It will hurt there,” Alice informed her.

“I want it to hurt,” Ingrid replied.

“I suppose it’s a heart you want,” Alice said.

Maybe a broken one, Jack was thinking. He was playing with his silverware—his attention had wandered off again.

Alice shrugged. A broken heart was such a common sailor tattoo that she could have done one with her eyes closed. “I won’t do his name,” she said to Ingrid.

“I don’t want his name,” the girl answered. Just a heart, ripped in two, Jack was thinking. (It was something Ladies’ Man Madsen used to say.)

“One day you’ll meet someone and have to explain everything,” Alice warned Ingrid.