When Marcus moved out Sigrid had her father mostly to herself from the age of six to eighteen, when she left for the university. And until recently, she has mostly had him to herself in her adulthood, as he never remarried and she never married at all. They keep each other company. Not that he was alone. He also had his library, of course. After Astrid died he filled the void of words unspoken with the new silence of books unread.
He built the library in the dining room after Marcus moved out. The urban hip would say he “repurposed” the room but Morten would have scoffed at the inaccuracy, as the room evidently hadn’t been serving any purpose at all.
Morten lucked upon a small municipal library in Elverum that was refurbishing and therefore dispensing with their gorgeous oak bookshelves at a very reasonable take-them-away-please price. He paid a few young men in town a fair wage to collect the shelves and directed the boys to place the units so they covered all walls but the windows. There was enough space remaining to place two of the long shelves in the center of the room, thereby creating “stacks” around a long table between them, which he and Sigrid used for studying. They spent as much time in there, together, as they did in the adjacent kitchen.
It was, perhaps, an affectation, but her father had placed a bronze-finished green banker’s lamp on the table; it warmed that already darkened wood and pushed away the hurried, the ephemeral, and the radical notions that come from direct sunlight. When Sigrid moved out and went to the Big City to study at the police academy, Morten placed an easy chair in the corner of the room too, which was as good for the nap as for the read itself. This room became his primary sanctuary.
She had argued with him, many times, to be more social, but he scoffed at her, saying that she didn’t understand the term. Time alone, he explained, need not be wasted or lonely. Yes, there are men who turn inward and reclusive when their wife dies and children move off. Depression and alcoholism are common. Norway is not alone in this regard, he said, though it has perfected the art.
He is not a candidate for this, he said. She shouldn’t worry.
“We’re only a three-hour drive away from each other in a country that is twenty-five hundred kilometers long,” he’d said to her. “Marcus is only five hours away. This is nothing. And although you have moved out, you haven’t really moved away. We talk almost every day. I’m not lonely. And if I become lonely . . .” he’d said, “I’ll get a pet.”
For the twenty intervening years Sigrid kept herself convinced that her father was happy enough. Now, unhappy herself, her optics have changed. She cannot tell whether she is seeing him more clearly through this new understanding or whether she’s projecting her feelings onto him. Either way, she has no place being a police investigator right now.
Early evening, Sigrid rolls her car across the packed earth of the farm’s driveway. The last time she was home the hills were covered in snow between her front yard and the Arctic. Now everything is green. The sun is still high. Night will not properly come. Dusk, at this time of year, only merges with the dawn.
Sigrid heaves the suitcase from the car and trudges across the driveway, dragging it into the hall. She parks it by the empty umbrella stand with its upturned mouth gaping like a carp’s.
Her father is in the kitchen and he does not interrupt his task to welcome her. He is adjusting a hinge on the back door that opens to the barnyard with its tractor and the few remaining animals. He is on his knees, which rest on a neatly folded towel. He wears a flannel shirt and old jeans with the washed patina that young people covet. His pharmacy-bought reading glasses perch on the end of his nose and he studies the hinge as if it’s an ancient text.
Morten is sixty-nine. His arms look thin to her. She watches him work.
“Planning to stay for a while, I take it,” he says, not looking up.
“What makes you think so?”
“The sound of your suitcase being dragged like a body across the pebbles.”
“It might do both of us some good.”
Morten sits back for a moment to study his handiwork.
“I’m using a lubricant to loosen the joint because it squeaks, but I’ve applied too much, and one of the defining characteristics of lubricant is its ability to attract grit, which creates friction, which creates the very problem I’m trying to solve, and that makes the entire process too ironic to tolerate. It’s this sort of thing, at a grander scale, that will eventually cause the universe to collapse back in on itself.”
“How about a napkin?” Sigrid says, and collects one from the kitchen table and hands it to her father.
He takes the napkin and cleans the hinge, saving the world.
“That was close,” she says.
Sigrid removes a bottle of Farris mineral water from her bag. She unscrews the blue top and pulls heavily. Her father scowls. “We have the finest water on the earth flowing through the taps. Why are you paying for that?”
“Convenience.”
“Save the bottle, then. Fill it with real water.”
“It came with water of its own. I wasn’t going to dump it out on principle.”
“What did you bring me?” he asks, rolling off his knees and joining her at the table. He rests a hand casually across his knee and for a moment he looks younger and strong.
“In the car. Supplies from civilization.”
“Is that what we’re calling Oslo these days?”
“You mentioned on the phone something about a duck. Where’s the duck?”
“Doing duck things. I don’t pry.”
“Is it a pet?”
“A pet?”
“You once said . . .”
“What?”
“Forget it.”
Sigrid takes two cans of pale ale from the refrigerator and pours them into glasses while her father places dark bread, cheese, and sausage on the
