Change things into what?
For all the philosophy and verbiage, the growth and the pain, Marcus stands in the hallway by the kitchen and realizes that his life has never quite matured beyond these rooms.
Marcus opens the downstairs bathroom and looks at the vent over the toilet.
From inside that vent he heard a story. His mother and father were speaking. He listens carefully. There is only a whisper of air.
Marcus leaves and closes the door too quickly and as he does the wineglasses in the cupboard rattle as the swinging door creates a pocket of air that swells the entire house.
The family eats dinner together at home that first night. They talk about the farm. Marcus asks about the financials. Morten explains how the farm is working as much as it needs to and the expenses are low and his pension is coming in, so he has no trouble making a living wage that will ensure a stable retirement. He could probably stop now but . . . why bother?
To Marcus, Sigrid sits at the table like an adult—not a large child, which is how he feels. She has been here during the intervening years and has grown into her place. She eats her salmon and potatoes like a forty-year-old adult. Marcus is still eleven.
In his bedroom, after dinner, Marcus lies on the freshly laundered sheets he slept in as a child. Sigrid’s room, next door, was once decorated with rock posters and pop stars. No more. She grew in hers. His remained static. The only decoration on the wall is a poster of a U.S. Navy precision flying team called the Blue Angels. On the poster the pilots stand on the tarmac, straight as pines, beside their F-4 Phantom aircrafts. It is 1967. Their uniforms are yellow and blue. After his mother died he would stare at them. He’d imagine his own hand on the flight controls, watching the instruments and picturing the other men flying around him in perfect formation against a cobalt sky. They were high above the earth, working in unison, speaking only when necessary. They counted off the beats before a turn, completing a fleur de lis, leaving behind them white pillars of smoke as they rose ever higher into the sky. In 1973—the year Astrid died—the Blue Angels suffered a midair collision, killing two pilots and a crew chief. But Marcus did not know this. To him, everyone in the poster was immortal.
Lying there, Marcus decides it is time to take it down.
They remain on the farm, leaving only for provisions. Their daily routine involves more sleep than Marcus might have expected—part of which he attributes to jet lag. Conversation among them is calibrated to avoid upset. All three prefer reading to TV or films. They drink after dark and go to bed early. They do not “catch up” the way Americans do. They are present with one another again.
The market is far enough away to require the car and usually it is Sigrid who does the shopping, leaving the men alone. Marcus isn’t sure how much Sigrid has told their father about the events in America, and so far Morten isn’t asking, but Marcus assumes he knows most of it. Sigrid would have prepped him somehow. But the uncertainty, on this occasion, is what makes their relationship tolerable.
The days are bright and long but not warm. Not in the way New York is warm now. There, in the woods, the days pull moisture from the trees and earth. The air is so saturated it chokes you, and the only remedy is to plunge yourself into a lake and wash the sweat from your skin with the glacier water that collects in the Catskills. He liked to swim under the water there until his lungs begged for mercy; he’d resurface slowly and deliberately and draw in the cool air that hovers an inch above the surface. He’d drink it in, blue and nourishing.
He and Lydia camped one weekend. Marcus emerged from Lower Saranac Lake feeling like a Roman god, and he wrapped himself in a thick terrycloth robe. She had smiled at him as she lay there smelling like coconut.
Today, in Hedmark, the day is dry and the light is crisp. Summers here are brief, but they promise a perfection of balance that exists nowhere else. A Scandinavian summer day is a miracle; dry and endless. Full of woodland scents and optimism. Not a bug, not a mosquito. Beneath it, like a melody, is a subtle sense of melancholy because everyone knows it won’t last. So they breathe it in and relish it and hold on with the knowledge that they can’t.
As kids, he and Sigrid would run to the river every day through woods that were wild and unowned and uninhabited and they would dip their toes in and dare each other to go farther.
He would dive in and the water would hit his chest and constrict the muscles and force the air out, making it impossible to inhale. You could drown in open air, the river was so cold.
Every Norwegian child knows this feeling. Every child knows the feeling will pass.
“Is it warm enough yet?” he’d yell. Because Sigrid was always the first one in the water.
Downstairs, in the kitchen, Sigrid is fixing herself a snack of dark brown bread, herring, and sour cream. After she settles at the table with her food, Marcus silently shuffles into the kitchen and begins to rummage around in the drawer to the right of the sink.
He feels her watching.
“Have you talked with your boyfriend since you’ve been back?” he asks, his back to her.
“What makes you think Irv is my boyfriend?”
“I watched you say goodbye to him at the airport.”
“Hmm.”
“How’s that going to work?”
“It doesn’t have to work,” she says, taking a bite.
Screwdrivers. Tape. Stamps. Swedish coins no one needs. A calculator from the eighties. Glue. A red balloon. Layers of junk upon junk. He pushes it around and it makes a grinding noise.
“So it’s
