Lina had turned up the evening before with three bottles of wine and two new CDs. Kristiane had been safely delivered to Isak and her best friend was right, Johanne did not need to worry about tomorrow as she didn’t have to be at Gardemoen Airport until midday. And there was no point in going to work first. Lina’s wine disappeared, along with a quarter bottle of cognac and two Irish coffees. When the airport express train rolled into the platform at the new international airport on the morning of May 22, Johanne had to dash to the toilet to rid herself of the remains of a very good night. It would be a long journey.
Fortunately she had fallen asleep somewhere over Greenland.
Finally it was her turn to show her passport. She tried to hide her mouth. The cloying taste of sleep and an old hangover made her uncertain. The passport inspector took longer than was necessary; he looked at her, stared down, hesitated. Then he finally stamped the necessary documentation in her passport with a resigned thump. She was waved in to the U.S.
Normally it was so different. Coming to America was usually like taking off a backpack. The feeling of freedom was tangible; she felt lighter, younger, happier. Now she shivered in the bitter wind and couldn’t remember where the bus stop was. Instead of renting a car at Logan, she had decided to take the bus to Hyannis. There was a Ford Taurus waiting for her there, which meant she didn’t need to think about the traffic in Boston. If only she could find the damned bus stop. It was chaotic out here too, with temporary detours and temporary signs everywhere. Despondency sank over her and she still felt a bit nauseous. The cologne of the angry Frenchman clung to her clothes.
Two men were leaning against a dark car. They both had baseball caps on and were wearing the characteristic rain jacket. They didn’t need to turn around for Johanne to know that it said FBI in big reflective letters on their broad backs.
Johanne Vik had the same jacket herself. It was hanging in her parents’ cottage and was only used in the pouring rain. The F was half-faded and the B had nearly disappeared.
The FBI men laughed. One stuffed a piece of chewing gum into his mouth, then straightened his cap and opened the car door for a woman in high heels who crossed the road quickly. Johanne turned away. She had to hurry if she was going to catch the bus. She still felt a bit lousy and sick and hoped that she would sleep on the bus. If not, she would have to find a place to stay overnight in Hyannis; she was hardly in any state to drive in the dark.
Johanne started to run. Her suitcase bumped along on its tiny wheels. Breathless, she handed her luggage to the driver and climbed on board.
It struck her that she hadn’t given Aksel Seier a single thought since she left Gardemoen. She might even meet him tomorrow. For some reason or another, she had built up a picture of him. He was quite good-looking, but not particularly tall. Maybe he had a beard. God knows if he would want to see her. To travel to the States, more or less on a whim, with no agreements, no actual information other than an address in Harwich Port and an old story about a man who was convicted of something that he probably didn’t do-it was all so impulsive and unlike her that she smiled at her reflection in the window. She was in the U.S. In a way, she was home again.
She fell asleep before they had left the Ted Williams Tunnel.
And her last thought was of Adam Stubo.
EIGHTEEEN
Johanne Vik could not remember what day it was when she woke up on Tuesday morning.
The evening before, she had picked up the car from Barnstable Municipal Airport, which was no more than a couple of small airstrips alongside a low, long terminal building. The lady behind the Avis desk had given her the keys and a slightly embarrassed yawn. It was still two hours until midnight. Even though it would only take her about half an hour to drive to the room she had booked in Harwich Port, she didn’t want to chance it. So she checked in at a motel in Hyannis Port, five minutes from the airport. She took a shower and then went for a walk in the dark.
Down by the dock, the anticipation of summer was tangible. Pubescent boys, who had been bored by an uneventful winter, now cheered and laughed in the night and waited for the town to explode. Children as young as ten fled from their mothers and bedtime and zigzagged between the bollards and old barrels on their scooters. Memorial Day was only a few days off. The population of Cape Cod would increase tenfold in the course of one weekend and then remain constant until September and Labor Day, and the start of another idle winter season.
Johanne fumbled for her watch. It had fallen onto the floor.
It was just past six in the morning. She had only slept for five hours, but she felt good all the same. She stood up and pulled on a T-shirt that was too big, the one she normally slept in. The air conditioning gave a strained sigh and then was quiet. It must be about 77 degrees in the room. The morning light poured in when she opened the curtains. She looked to the southwest. The express boat to Martha’s Vineyard sat at the dock, newly painted and white; there was an offshore breeze and the mooring ropes were straining between the jetties and boats. Beyond the ferry, in the shelter of a copse, was the massive gray Kennedy memorial. She had gone there last night and sat on a bench looking out to sea. The night air was already saturated with early summer, salty and sweet. She sat with her back to the memorial, a huge stone wall with an unimaginative copper relief in the middle. An expressionless, dead president in profile, like on a coin-a king on a gigantic coin.
“The king of America,” Johanne said to herself as she connected her laptop to the Internet.
Only one e-mail was worth the cost to download: a drawing from Kristiane. Three green figures in a circle. Kristiane, Mommy, and Daddy. The hands they were holding were enormous, with fingers that were interwoven like roots on a mangrove tree. In the middle of the circle stood a beast with lots of teeth that Johanne found hard to identify at first. Then she read the message from Isak.
“He’s given the child a dog,” she groaned, logging off abruptly.
When she got into the car just after nine, she felt resigned. She had been away from home for just over twenty-four hours and Isak had bought a dog. Kristiane would insist on keeping the animal with her in the weeks when she stayed with Johanne. And Johanne had absolutely no desire to have a dog.
Isak could at least have asked.
Her irritation had in no way subsided. She followed Route 28 along the coast. It wove its way from small town to small town, with sudden vistas of Nantucket Sound beyond the marinas and river mist. The sun hurt her eyes. She stopped at a garish tourist shop to buy a pair of cheap sunglasses. She’d left her own prescription sunglasses at home in Norway, so she had to choose between seeing very badly without lenses or being blinded by the sharp light. The store clerk tried to tempt her to buy a cowboy hat-as if there had ever been a cowboy within a mile of Yarmouth, Massachusetts. She eventually gave in. Thirty dollars straight into the garbage, literally. She hoped that he wouldn’t see her stuffing the hat into a green trash can. The man didn’t have a right leg; he had presumably been nineteen and a private in 1972.
Mid-Cape Highway would have been a more sensible choice in every way, a four-lane road that divided the peninsula down the middle. She suspected that she’d chosen the coastal road to delay her arrival. Yesterday she had smiled at her impetuousness. Today it was no longer funny.
There seemed to be something wrong with the gearshift.