“I mean adoption.”
“I think the window has closed,” Serena said. “I grew up knowing my insides were messed up, so I never really developed the kid gene. Jonny says he’s too old. I don’t see it happening.”
“Do you think you’re missing something?”
“Sometimes.”
“I feel like I’m missing something,” Maggie said.
“Then you should do it.”
The plane lurched as they descended into Fargo. On the ground, they rented a car and headed south out of the airport, past the university and through the straight, tree-lined neighborhood streets toward downtown. They parked near the main library, which was located within a block of the curvy ribbon of the Red River, which served as the border between North Dakota and Minnesota and separated Fargo from its Minnesota twin, the city of Moorhead.
Inside the library, Serena asked at the help desk for Fargo phone books from the early 1970s. Soon after, the librarian deposited a stack of AT &T directories at the desk where the two women were waiting. The books smelled faintly of mildew. Maggie grabbed the volume for 1972 and groaned when she turned to the M pages.
“There are dozens of Mathisens in here,” she said. “This place is like Little Norway.”
“Do we know the first names of Finn’s parents?” Serena asked.
“Ole and Lena?”
“Yah sure. Dat’s funny. God, I’m actually becoming a Minnesotan.” Serena peered over Maggie’s shoulder at the list. “Most of these people are probably dead or gone.”
“I’ll call the Wisconsin DMV,” Maggie said. “If we can get Finn’s birth date from his driver’s license, then we can look up his birth announcement in the local paper. That way we can get his parents’ names.”
“Clever.”
Maggie pulled out her cell phone and dialed the DMV number from her directory. “I’m on hold,” she said. She hummed for a moment and then added, “So Ole brings home a vibrator for Lena on her birthday. And Lena goes, Vat’s dis for? So Ole says, Vell, you stick dis between yer legs and use it to tickle your puddin’. And Lena goes, Oh, dat’s great, I already have somethin’ like dat. Is dis thing called Sven, too?”
“You are a sick woman,” Serena said.
“Too true. Hey, hello, I need you to look up a birth date for me.” She rattled off her Minnesota shield number and Finn’s name and address. A few seconds later, she scribbled a date on a piece of scratch paper. “Got it, thanks.”
Serena read what Maggie had written. “April 22, 1959. I’ll get the microfiche for the Fargo paper.”
Ten minutes later, they found a birth announcement for Finn Mathisen, sister to Rikke Mathisen, son of parents Nils and Inger. Nils was a feed corn farmer with a large plot of acreage west of the city. Maggie used her index finger to run down the list of Mathisens in the 1972 phone book.
“No Nils listed, but here’s Inger,” she said. “Same address.”
“I think the father died in a car accident when Finn was a kid.”
“So what are you thinking? We go out there?”
Serena nodded. “Right.”
“Who the hell is going to remember them after thirty-five years?”
“Farmers don’t leave home unless it’s feet first or to hand the keys to a banker,” Serena said. “Hopefully, a couple of Finn’s neighbors are still around.”
“Do you have any idea what we’re looking for?” Maggie asked.
“Not a clue, but I bet we’ll know it when we find it. Finn didn’t get screwed up in Duluth. Whatever happened to him, it started right here.”
Fargo was flat. The kind of flat where highways disappeared into the hazy horizon without so much as a bend or an overpass and where only the curve of the earth blocked a view as far as Montana. The kind of flat where Canada would suck in its breath and expel wind across the plains with nothing in the way to slow it down, rocketing walls of black dust, rain, and snow into the city in fierce clouds. The kind of flat where a trickling, muddy stream like the Red River could lazily swell over its banks and drown everything in its path, like a pitcher of water spilling across a table.
Serena and Maggie drove west out of Fargo, passing fields of high corn and sprawling lots of soybeans, barley, and rapeseed. Hot wind and sun beat against the windshield of their rental car. They left the windows open, and as a compromise, they kept the radio off. Every few miles, they passed a car on the two-lane highway, but otherwise, the land was open and lonely. Serena drove. Maggie had a map on her lap.
They turned south off the county road thirty miles outside the city, and three miles later, they turned again onto an unpaved road and kicked up a hurricane of dirt behind them. Half a mile farther, they parked opposite a well-maintained white farmhouse notched into a huge expanse of leafy fields, like a summer photo from a calendar of rural homes. A ten-year-old girl in a sunflower dress chased a Labrador retriever that barked wildly as it galloped toward them. The girl corralled the dog by its collar and gazed at the car and the two women with open curiosity as she pulled it back toward the house.
“This is where Finn grew up,” Serena said.
She guessed that the house and outbuildings would not have looked much different several decades earlier. There would still have been a dirty pickup truck parked in the grass. There would still have been muddy tractor ruts leading into the rows of crops. They climbed out of the car and began sweating in the sun. Serena wore blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and sneakers. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail. Maggie wore black jeans, an untucked button-down black shirt, and black boots with steep heels.
“Who wears heels in farm country?” Serena asked.
Maggie pushed her sunglasses to the end of her nose. “Hello,” she said in a rumbling voice. “I’m Johnny Cash.”
They crossed the dirt road and trudged up the driveway. Gravel crunched under their feet. The young girl they had seen a few minutes ago pushed herself in a swing set in the middle of the lawn. They waved at her, and she stared back at them without smiling. They heard the dog barking inside the house. As they got closer, Serena smelled flowers and the sweet-tart aroma of apples baking.
A thin woman in a summer dress, with dark curly hair, opened the screen door and let it bang behind her. She strolled to the edge of the front porch, watching them. She picked brown leaves from a hanging basket of fuchsias.
“Afternoon,” she said, with mild suspicion in her voice. “Can I help you?”
They introduced themselves, and Maggie produced her identification. The woman relaxed, but her eyebrows arched with interest. “Minnesota?” she said. “What are you two doing out here?”
“Chasing wild geese,” Maggie said.