“We can’t discuss the state of the investigation, Professor. I’m sorry,” says Irv.
Sigrid expects Gloria to cry at this, but instead she absorbs the emotion and her face becomes strangely calm and devoid of expression.
“Is there anything else you can tell us about Lydia that we might not know?” Irv asks. “Or Marcus?”
“I think Lydia felt that Jeffrey was the son she’d never have,” Gloria adds. “She was forty. She was smart. She knew that kids probably weren’t coming her way. Jeffrey was much more than a nephew. And he wasn’t just a substitute for a son. He was such a nice person! So curious. So empathetic. So interested in the world. There was this . . . expansive sense of possibility with him. He wanted to know so much. Bugs. Dinosaurs. Star Trek. Video games. How you grind glasses. What makes something beautiful or not. It was enriching watching him grow up, watching how one excitement led to another. I think I kept judging my own boys against that. Unfairly, I guess. When the grand jury let that man go and didn’t even make him stand trial, she was . . .”
“Depressed?” Melinda says.
Irv and Sigrid both give Melinda a look that silences her immediately.
“I was going to say despondent. I explained this already to . . . Cory.”
“Yes, ma’am,” says Irv.
“She spent most of her time alone after Jeffrey died. With the grand jury decision, though . . . she was simply done. We didn’t talk much after that. Everything that started to build and swell . . . all that momentum that we could have turned into something, something that would have given Jeffrey’s death a legacy if not a meaning. All that stopped when Lydia died. Now you’re saying Marcus is missing?”
“Yes,” says Sigrid.
“I’m not surprised he left. There’s nothing here for him anymore.”
It Is Only a Paper Moon
An amber moon hangs like a plate over the black hills of Hedmark, Norway, during the few hours of night, but Morten Ødegård is uninterested in the glories of the cosmos; he has photographs to find. They are in here somewhere. They have to be.
He sits in his kitchen with his eyes closed, roaming the house in his mind to find them.
He definitely put them in a box of some kind.
Probably.
Not a shoebox. It was something larger. The color gray comes to mind. Not a neutral gray. More an administrative green. This was probably an unwise choice for a box of memorabilia. That is a color for camouflage, a color to aid forgetting. He should have chosen a nice safety green—the kind that decorates every baby carriage and kindergarten class in the winter months here, a color that the brain is unable to ignore. That’s how to store something meant to be protected and retrieved.
And there were rivets.
Not in the basement. It wouldn’t be there. The basement is an unfinished place. Damp, too. And Dank. And Dark. Not a place for paper, let alone photos of a dead wife.
He’s had to do this before—this forensic process of introspection. Call it remembering, but in fact he’s studying himself. It’s all that works now. Memory as a device doesn’t deliver results when you’ve lived someplace too long as Morten has lived in the farmhouse. Each object, over the years, has been placed in every possible or available spot. And his memory is fine so he can remember them all. It’s ordering the memories that creates the confusion. The mind, after all, rebels at chronology. Ours is a pattern-seeking machine, always forming connections and creating webs of associations. It lives. It moves. It morphs. It creates and changes and invents.
This is not what you want your files doing.
So in the end the only solution involves consulting his former self and hoping that he was a reasonable and logical man. If the present you can trust the former you, and anticipate the future you, it becomes possible for all three to engage in a little intertemporal teamwork and select the right place for objects. No, it isn’t remembering per se, but the collaboration brings the body to the same place, in this case being . . .
“. . . i soverommet,” he says aloud.
The bedroom. The wife in the bedroom. Of course the wife in the bedroom. “What a stupid conversation this has been,” he mutters to himself. See how you can trust your former self more than the current one? That can’t be good. And there’s the problem, he thinks as he trudges up the stairs. If you start losing your capacity for reason, then the dance comes to an end because it doesn’t matter how helpful the former you was, or whatever you plan on doing for the future you, because it’s the current you—now and always—who has to do the legwork.
On entering, Morten tries to estrange himself from his bedroom. It is quite familiar, so it is not an easy task. The bed. The windows. The dresser. The end tables and lamps. The rug. The closet. All where he’d left them and planned for them to remain.
The closet.
He opens the closet.
He closes the closet. He knows exactly what is and is not in the closet, and his wife is not in there.
He turns to the bed.
Their bed. The one in which she died.
Morten works himself downward to his knees, takes to
