It wasn’t madness. It could only mean one thing — that Sheldon was headed north and east along the Glomma river into the hinterland, where the cold-water summer house hid two rifles he’d learned about just yesterday.
Lars had made the case plainly back at the Continental.
‘If we’re wrong, we can be back here in four or five hours to keep looking for him, though I’m not sure what good that would do, and we should probably stay there, given that we can’t go home. If we’re right, we get there before him, I can lock up the rifles more safely, and we can wait for him. Then, depending on what we think, we take him in, we take him to the hospital, or maybe we even take him to the police.’
Rhea had been wringing her riding gloves like dishtowels.
‘The guns aren’t locked up?’
‘Well, yeah, sure, but he can get to them.’
‘How do you figure?’
‘He was a watchmaker,’ Lars shrugged. ‘I’m sure he can pick a lock. Don’t you think?’
‘That’s not very reassuring.’
‘No.’ Then Lars asked, ‘Was he really a sniper in Korea?’
Rhea shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. My grandmother told me that he started saying that after my father was killed. She thought it was a kind of fantasy.’
‘He wanted revenge?’
‘No. He always blamed himself. There was no one to take revenge on.’
After that, they had mounted the bike and left.
It took more than two hours to get to Kongsvinger and the little town past it, out in the forest, by the Swedish border, way beyond the edge of Sheldon’s known universe.
‘It all started when you came to live with us,’ Rhea’s grandmother had said. ‘First he lost one marble, then another. After a while he’d lost all his marbles. But he kept playing.’ Mabel never said that Sheldon got worse because of Rhea. But she did say it started around the same time.
She was only two years old in July 1976 during the bicentennial celebrations when America rejoiced in itself. Wide-eyed and frightened, with nothing but a one-eared blue bunny, she was handed over to her grandparents. They were near strangers.
Her mother? Gone. One day she didn’t come back. Saul had been dead for more than a year. She drank, she yelled, and then she disappeared when the flags started coming out. It was simply more than she could take.
Sheldon and Mabel had both tried supporting her during the pregnancy. Her own parents were disgusted with her, and she clearly needed help. Unfortunately — for her, for the child, for them all — she was beyond reach. They didn’t know her well enough to know why. There was an anger inside her that, they were sure, preceded Saul and her predicament. Why he was attracted to her they could never say. Beyond the obvious curves and invitations, Mabel had speculated that Saul had wanted to disappear, and the only way to do that without being alone was to find a woman incapable of seeing him.
In the end, none of this mattered. Only the child did.
Rhea asked her grandfather where she she’d gone. She was a little older then. Five. They were in the shop, and she was holding a brass sextant that she’d found in a purple box. Sheldon had been working intensely on something small and complicated.
When she asked, he was momentarily diverted.
He’d put down whatever he was holding and said, ‘Your mother. Your mother, your mother, your mother. Your mother… grew wings one day and flew off to become the princess of the dragon people.’
Having answered, he put on his eyeglasses and started working again.
Rhea pulled on his leather apron.
‘What?’
‘Can we go find her?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Aren’t you happy with us?’
Rhea did not know how to respond to this. She wasn’t sure if it was related to her question or not.
Sheldon sadly accepted that Rhea wasn’t going to let this go.
‘You got wings?’ he asked.
Rhea frowned and tried to look behind herself, but couldn’t.
‘Turn around.’
Rhea turned. Sheldon lifted the back of her dress, exposing her red panties and pale back, and then dropped it.
‘No wings. You can’t go. Sorry. Maybe some other day.’
‘Will I grow wings someday?’
‘Look, I don’t know. I don’t know why people suddenly fly off. But they do. One day some grow wings, and then they’re gone.’ Seeing her expression, he added, ‘Don’t worry. I won’t grow wings. I’m a flightless bird.’
She remembered from when she was five. But 1976, when she arrived, was too far back. She was too young. She couldn’t remember the flags everywhere. The streamers. The bands playing in the streets. The speeches by politicians. The newly minted coins and toy drums. It was two years after the near-impeachment of a president, one year after failure in a twenty-five-year war, in the midst of civil-rights turmoil, an emboldened Soviet Union, a declining economy, an oil crisis, a baffled intelligentsia, and a movie about a giant shark that ate people. America celebrated its existence as this little girl was transferred to a new life, set on a new course, and would forever live in the shadows of the dead and disappeared.
Under fireworks and a combat-jet escort, Rhea was dropped off by social services with her grandparents — thumb in mouth, bunny in tow — in a parking lot by a Sears department store, way past her bedtime. She’d been alone for two days by the time the neighbours realised that her crying was not being soothed by anyone, and they placed a call.
Mabel put her in the back seat of the borrowed Chevy wagon, and pulled the thick black seat belt across her with a click. Rhea watched the explosions in the sky, and the clouds turn green, then red, then orange.
But she didn’t remember any of this. Mabel told her. Just like she told her how Sheldon started slipping and became a sniper.
‘I remember the conversation. We got you home, put you into some of Saul’s old baby clothes because that’s all we had, and your grandfather said, “Well. We killed the first one, but God’s giving us a second chance to get it right. I wonder if we get a prize if this one makes it to adulthood.” It was a horrible thing to say. To even think. Only a madman could have uttered a sentence like that. He started making up stories about the war shortly after that. Dementia was the only explanation I could imagine.’
Rhea sits on the back of the motorcycle and wonders. She wonders when personality lapses into eccentricity. When genius merges into madness. When sanity gives way to — what? Insanity is merely the absence of sanity. It is not a thing in itself. It is everything but sane. And that’s all we know about it. We don’t even have a real word for it.
She knows what Sheldon would say, and can’t help but smile herself. ‘Sanity? You want to know what sanity is? Sanity is the thick soup of distraction we immerse ourselves in to keep us from remembering that we’re gonna bite it. Every opinion and taste and order you place for brown mustard instead of yellow mustard is just a way to keep from thinking about it. And they call our ability to distract ourself “sanity”. So when you get to the end, and you forget whether you prefer brown or yellow mustard, they say you’re going nuts. But that isn’t it. What’s really going on is this. In those little senior moments of clarity, when your head is flipping back and forth between brown and yellow like a tennis match on fast forward, and you suddenly pause, you find yourself undistracted. And it happens. You look straight across the net at all the other people trying to choose between brown and yellow mustard and… there he is! At the seat on centre court! Death! He’s been there all along! Mustard on the left and right, distractions everywhere, and Death straight ahead! It hits you like a swinging vat of onion soup.’
The ride grows wilder. The trees thicken as the still, blue water of the fjord is left far behind and forgotten in
