“Irv may have mentioned something about vacation time owed to him. Frequent flier points. You’re looking for batteries, aren’t you. For those old American flashlights.”
“How did you know?”
“I saw you playing with one.”
“I want to get them working and I can’t think of why.”
“We used to explore with those.”
“Yes,” he says.
“You’re ready.”
“For what?”
“Exploring.”
“I’m just getting the flashlights working.”
“I’ll come with you when it’s dark enough.”
“Where?”
“We’ll take a walk,” she says. “See if we remember our secret code. Do you remember it?”
“I haven’t thought about it since visiting here in 1977.”
“Me either,” says Sigrid.
At ten o’clock, when they are both tired and would normally be in bed, Sigrid and Marcus leave the farm behind and walk into the forest. Marcus pushes the small signal button located above the switch and tests the light. Sigrid, twenty meters away through the trees, flashes back, and they diverge in the wood on two separate paths. The moon is up but the sky is not dark. Even now the horizon is a palette of pastels. They walk softly to hide from each other—from the enemy forces, from the aliens, from the Nazis—and succeed in disappearing into a memory.
Marcus breaks the moment with an encrypted message flashed from his hidden position inside a bush. She reads it:
Put the dog in the bucket and don’t tell the monkey.
One of them does not remember the code.
Sigrid is leading them in a direction that Marcus does not quite remember.
Marcus abandons his post with the Resistance and connects with Sigrid, who leads them through a thicket he vaguely remembers. At the end of the path there is a simple white church and Marcus immediately realizes where Sigrid has led him. What surprises him, though, is that his father is waiting by his mother’s gravestone with his hands in his pockets and his pipe in his mouth.
“I’ve been ambushed,” Marcus says, turning off his flashlight and clipping it to his belt.
“Sigrid told me everything, Marcus.”
“Told you what?” he says.
“About what you heard when you were eleven years old that caused you to fall off the toilet you’d been standing on to overhear our conversation. Which you shouldn’t have done.”
“You’re going to say I misunderstood.”
“No. You didn’t.”
The moon is a sliver of white above the steeple. From where Marcus stands, it looks like a replacement for a missing cross.
“You heard correctly and I’m sorry. But you still don’t understand. She did say that. And we did have that conversation. We even considered it. But in the end, she didn’t do it, Marcus. She died in her sleep months, months later. You have it backwards. You didn’t kill your mother, Marcus. Your silent fear didn’t convince her to kill herself to save you. You’re the one who saved her. We had that conversation, but we never returned to it because of you. You and your little broken arm. You needed us both for as long as you could have us. It struck us as obvious after that. There was no leaving you. Every day she lived after that was a blessing that you gave to her and to all of us. But in return—if I understand correctly from Sigrid—you were waiting for something to happen that wasn’t going to happen precisely because you prevented it, if it was ever going to happen in the first place. People say dark things in the dark of their rooms. Sometimes the talking helps. But I assure you it never came up in conversation again. I can never explain to you how sorry I am for what you went through. But I never knew.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Morten placed his hand on his wife’s gravestone. “I promise you.”
“You’re asking me to see my entire life as a lie. My entire life as a mistake. My entire life has been lived in the cloak of a misperception?”
“A misunderstanding.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I think you do. I think you need to make room in your heart for how much your mother loved you and how much I did too. You were angry at her for dying and me for letting it happen. But you blamed yourself. Your letter about Lydia proved that. It is my opinion that your guilt has prevented you from mourning. It may have also prevented you from fully living. If you can accept what you’re hearing, you might be able to come home again. I would like you to come home again, Marcus. I miss you.”
Marcus reads his mother’s name and the dates on the stone.
“I can’t stay here alone,” Marcus says to Sigrid.
“I’m staying for a while.” Turning to her father, she says, “I’m thinking I might resign from the police force.”
“You don’t want to fight crime anymore?”
“Criminal investigation is about solving riddles from the past when the damage is done, and it is already too late,” Sigrid says, looking at Marcus. “What I saw in America made me want to get ahead of things rather than show up behind them. Maybe step into the fray. See things from another perspective. Make things better.”
Morten smiles at her. “That’s the spirit.”
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Lauren Wein and Pilar Garcia-Brown at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for their editorial assistance, ideas, and good humor. Thanks to Alison Kerr Miller, and also the entire team at HMH including the late Carla Gray, who believed in my writing. Thanks to Bill Scott-Kerr and the Transworld team at Penguin Random House, who embraced this book with open arms and hearts. Thanks, as always, to my UK agent, Rebecca Carter, for her uncompromising judgment and professional guidance, and also my American agent, PJ Mark, for his support and outstanding (or possibly just similar) sense of humor. Thanks to the full team at Janklow and Nesbit.
Thanks to Dr. Lesley Inker and Dr. Howard Stevens for their guidance on how to set up and address Astrid’s cancer. All errors are mine. Some are even deliberate.
Thanks as always to my wife, Camilla, my son, Julian, and my daughter, Clara. It is not always
