As a programmer, she’s never had trouble making money. She likes to chipmunk it away. Wishner mentions a guy named Lang Elliott who studied chipmunks in the Adirondacks. Elliott excavated a few burrows in the spring and found that most of the chipmunks still had plenty of winter food stored. One chipmunk had enough nuts for at least two more winters. And why not? You never know when the next asteroid will strike and block out sunlight for a few years, or when humans will find an opportunity to use all those missiles chipmunked underground. Or when you might need to buy at short notice an insanely expensive plane ticket involving multiple airlines from Seattle to Dublin to London to Denmark. Since she was digging into her stores anyway, she splurged on a suite at a fancy hotel last night in Copenhagen. (Home of the Copenhagen Interpretation! One of her first YouTube postings, when she was thirteen, was an animated whiteboard explication of the double-slit experiment.) This morning she treated herself to a sumptuous breakfast, then caught the train to the cutesy town, with the ferry leaving forty minutes (plus thirty-five seconds) later.
When she was fifteen, sixteen, she was often angry at her mother for being irresponsible about money, chasing her stupid actor’s dream while the two of them barely got by. Why didn’t she learn some programming, do it part time? Mette was willing to teach her. But she gradually became more tolerant. It must suck to want to do something you’re not very good at, or that the world has little need for, or both. When her mother started doing voice work for video games Mette thought, Dreamer, shake hands with reality. She started contributing a quarter of basic expenses such as rent and food when she was seventeen, upped it to a third last year. Now that she thinks about it, it’s kind of inexcusable that she hasn’t been contributing half. It’s also maybe a little embarrassing that she hasn’t considered what the loss of her income might mean to her mother.
Still, in the final analysis, not her problem.
The ferry is rounding a low headland at the end of the channel and she can see from the GPS on her phone that the island should be coming into view. That beige-gray line on the horizon must be it. According to the Danish Ministry of Tourism site, the island’s highest point is less than two meters above sea level. Meaning, So long soon. They’ve already built dikes, which have been breached twice in the past decade. (Dreamers, shake hands . . . ) All that work, plus this toy ferry running twice a day, for only twelve inhabitants, including the nutjob in the windmill.
Her mother always said she never knew where her father was when she was a kid. Mette finds it hard to imagine that information Dark Age. When she decided in Seattle to locate him, she knew only his first name and that he lived in a windmill on a Danish island. It took her seventeen minutes: database of old mills in Denmark narrowed to ones on islands, modern photos of same (Google Maps, plus mill-loving Instagrammers, who, it turns out, are thick as thieves), assessment rolls for owners of renovated ones. It helped a little that Thomas seems to be an uncommon name for Danes of his generation.
She watches the island creep closer.
Her mother has never liked to admit it, but she, too, often gets depressed. Mette wonders if the struggle to make money or to succeed in her career helped keep her going. Or maybe the struggle of being a mother to Mette. From Mette’s perspective, it’s been hard to see the point. Mette has always had the impression that her mother, unlike herself, doesn’t enjoy being alone. For evidence, there’s that parade of partners. Mette was always rooting for her. Maybe her mother only wants short-term fixes. But Mette doubts it. There were one or two relationships that, when they ended, really broke her mom up.
The ferry sounds its horn, a low B with a rumbly G-sharp underneath that starts and ends
