“I’ll need to read these,” Sigrid says, reaching over and patting the stack of letters.
The sun is finally behind the western hills. Though the sky is still blue, the kitchen grows darker and much colder. Morten stands and closes the window above the sink. He lights four candles on the kitchen table.
She actually needs an answer to a more pressing question.
“So. You were joking about America. We’ll make some more calls tomorrow.”
“I bought you a ticket. Even put a tour book in your room. Read the letters on the plane.”
“I’m not going to fly to another continent without a valid and considered reason. We have not, by any stretch, exhausted our options from here.”
“Two possibilities,” Morten says. “He’s fine. Like when this was sent. In which case, you have visited your brother after years apart and you rejoice in each other’s company while you use the opportunity to talk through the fact, my daughter, that you recently killed a man, only to have another die in your arms moments later.”
She begins to object, but he raises a hand. He is not finished.
“A reunion is long past due. Your circumstances alone warrant this. But if, by chance,” says Morten, shifting the second letter forward and pulling the first back, “he needs your help, which is the other possibility, you’ll be there to help him. There is no downside. It is the right thing to do. And it’s all better than you moping around the farm.”
“I wanted to come home and relax.”
“Do this instead.”
“America’s weird,” she says with confidence.
“And wonderful. It’s both. Or so I’m told. I’ve never been. They’re having an election in under three months where they might vote a black man into the White House. Go be a part of history. Your plane leaves tomorrow. Icelandair to Montreal. You’ll pass through customs and then take a small plane to a town called—unimaginatively—Watertown. I figure you can rent a car from there or take the bus to your final destination. You don’t need a visa from Norway. You can stay for three months as a visitor. Go. Have an adventure.”
“In upstate New York?”
“Adventures are mostly about the people,” he conceded. “You should know that his letters took a dark turn about two months ago. Something happened. He didn’t mention what. I tried to draw him out further but he wasn’t forthcoming with details. I suspected that his romance ended harshly, and perhaps on her terms. I don’t know what I did wrong that both of my children should be in their forties and not have a spouse and children.”
“Not this again, please,” Sigrid says.
“Women think they can wait forever these days. It’s an illusion. You know the rate of miscarriages after the age of . . .”
“I’m not waiting for anything, pappa. I’m living my life, which will be what it will be.”
“Ah . . . the Doris Day approach to planning.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“No. Why would anyone anymore.”
Morten empties the glass of aquavit and Sigrid reaches to fill it again, but he covers the glass with his palm.
“How’s your head?” he asks her.
“Fine. How’s yours?”
“Five weeks ago you were hit on the head by a criminal who popped out of a closet. How’s your head?”
“How’s your duck?”
“What is it with you and that duck?” her father asks.
“You named it.”
“Ferdinand. He has personality.”
“He has nutritional value. Which he is likely to lose if he has a name.”
“I watched a film recently about a farmer who trained a pig to be a sheepdog. There was a duck in the film. He was very funny.”
“We’re going to eat that duck, pappa.”
“It’ll be much harder now that he has a name.”
Sigrid leaves her father alone at the table shortly afterward. She kisses him on the forehead and wishes him a good night as he packs a Danish pipe with Cavendish tobacco and disappears into a cloud of aromatic smoke. Sigrid retires to her room with Marcus’s letters and the intention of trying to take seriously the idea of traveling to the United States of America on a plane leaving tomorrow for an adventure to reunite with her brother in order to please her father.
The suitcase from Oslo contains only one nightgown, and she slips into it and then under the soft white bed sheets that protect her from the itchy but warm woolen blanket on top. Under the reassuring weight of the blanket she switches on the reading lamp to her right and opens Marcus’s final letter.
It is typed—not handwritten. It looks as if it has actually been produced on a mechanical typewriter. She runs her fingers across the back of the page and feels the subtle embossing produced by the type hammer striking the page.
The paper is American-sized, eight and a half by eleven inches, rather than the nearly universal A4, which runs a bit narrower. She’s read a piece in Aftenposten about how America is one of three countries left in the world retaining imperial measures rather than adopting the metric system. The other two are Liberia and Myanmar.
“Weird place.”
The letter reads:
Dear pappa,
It happened again. You told me the first time that I didn’t understand. That I misunderstood everything. Well, I’m a grown man now and it happened a second time and this time I understand it all too well. And more than that. It has forced me to see it all with a line of sight unobstructed by the years and the events and the decisions in between. What I now understand is that it was my fault. It was also yours but you, I forgive.
Your son,
Marcus.
Side Effects
Sigrid flies out of Oslo’s Gardermoen Airport on an Icelandair Boeing 757. Her father had upgraded her to “Saga Class,” either generously or because he couldn’t resist the term.
Traveling internationally is still fresh and she admits to herself a certain excitement when boarding the plane and turning toward the
