I had an old photo on my driver’s licence. I know it was old because of my eyes. I was someone else before Alison’s death.
When they got to the footwear, Ulf rose from a Nike chair to let Jane sit down and went to stand by the till to chat with the owner. They glanced at her while she tried walking on the felt carpet in a pair of tall boots.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
But now Ulf was preoccupied by something the owner was pointing at outside the shop window.
She turned to the right to see herself in profile, wearing the hunting trousers and the walking boots: she could have been the first woman to cycle to Nepal in order to climb Everest without oxygen. Her mood grew still more elated as she produced her Visa card. All this gave her a quite different sensation from drifting on a river of alcohol. Pleasure was welling up from a glandular depth somewhere and wiped out the awareness of just how shallow the cause was—shopping.
The payment did not go through.
The sound of a terminated transaction brought the daughter to the counter. She stared searchingly at the card reader, as if the snag could possibly be due to it.
“Maybe there’s a limit?” Ulf suggested.
“There might be,” Jane admitted.
It was much more likely that she had emptied her account. She hadn’t checked the balance for months. There was a bundle of Norwegian bills in her wallet and she put all of them in front of the man behind the counter.
“Will this do?”
“You’ll even get one of these back,” he said and handed over a crumpled green bill from the till.
It didn’t matter.
12
ON HER FOURTH night with the Askeland-Nilsens, Eva was due at a meeting of the parents’ association at Martin’s school. Lars Christian was off to repair something or other in the neighborhood along with some of the other fathers. Who would take Camilla to her training session? She offered.
At dusk, as they smoothly joined the winding coastal road, she believed all would be well. The windshield looked out onto a rosy dream and she relaxed into a tourist’s sense of alienation. Kept her eyes on the road. Kept breathing.
Camilla asked, “Shall I put some music on?”
“I haven’t got any CDs here,” Jane said.
“CDs?”
With one sweep of her index finger across the screen of her cell phone, Camilla made the stereo in Jane’s rented car play songs by American “R&B queens.” Jane suppressed a question about how this could work wirelessly—she had struggled even to switch on the interior lights. She forced herself to focus on what she could see and keep her mind from picking out the trigger words in the lyrics, silly truisms about love and loss that all the same could feel like messages meant just for her.
“Turn left here.”
The girl’s raised hand briefly appeared in Jane’s field of vision. While Camilla looked the other way, Jane turned the volume down.
“Asker is the only town I can remember the name of,” Jane said. “If you say it quickly, it sounds like ask her! And if you say it slowly, like ass care.”
The girl laughed and Jane took the chance to look at her. She acted the ultra-cool teen, glancing out from under heavy eyelids, blowing a strand of hair out of her face in the way of fourteen-year-old girls. But only from the neck up. Underneath the gym club’s leotard, Camilla’s muscles were hard as raw vegetables, proof of a willpower and discipline that Jane had not felt a whisper of since she was in her thirties and determined to survive as a writer. Where Camilla’s long, blonde hair didn’t fall across her face, her skin glowed, spotless and faintly blue in the light of an oncoming car. The girl had no idea how much she mattered. Even if one told her repeatedly just how precious she was, the awareness would never truly reach someone so young. Her parents had to carry that burden.
Jane drew a breath, as if she had been under water for a long time.
“Do you like it?” Camilla asked.
“Like what?”
Camilla pointed at the car stereo. Jane nodded stiffly.
“Mom only listens to Bon Jovi.”
“Oh… I see.”
“Only when Daddy isn’t at home. And she sings along. It’s so-o embarrassing.”
She had a vision of Eva. The little red O in her freckled face. The glass of wine on the kitchen counter.
“I want to lay you down, on a bed of roses…” Jane sang. She tried to put on a Norwegian accent but it came out like the Lone Ranger’s Indian friend. Tonto, that was his name. Camilla laughed and snorted as she breathed in and then laughed even more at how bizarre it all sounded.
The oncoming traffic was moving slowly now. She felt that someone might suddenly open a car door or cut in ahead of them.
“Is it true that supermarkets in America keep these electric wheelchairs for customers who’re too fat to walk?” Camilla asked, her mouth hanging open as if Jane had just produced this remarkable piece of information.
“Yes, it is. More or less.”
Camilla sat very still. Jane tried to imagine the girl’s vision of the US.
“How long are you staying? Are you leaving after the weekend?”
“I’m not quite sure,” Jane said.
“Mom and Dad are much nicer when you’re here.”
“Really? How come?”
“I don’t know. It’s like, they’re less stressed.”
She could see it from their point of view. The relief when a guest broke the everyday monotony. How a stranger might, for a few hours or days, change your perspective on your immediate surroundings and on who you are. But she chose to say, “I suppose they sometimes can be a little… intense?”
Which was true, too, and anyway not necessarily a negative judgment. Eva and Lars Christian took turns to go out jogging so that one of them would always be there for the children. Lars Christian worked with people, as he put it, but was just as competent when dealing with the world of things. It was he who had taken the subtle black-and-white photographs of running streams and fir forests that hung on the sitting room walls. She had watched as he changed the tires on two cars within half an hour, using his own compressor and pneumatic wrench. Apparently, there were no cable guys in Norway. Anyway, Lars Christian had himself run fiber optic cabling into the house and set up a Wi-Fi network to which the family’s many devices were connected. It was obviously just lack of time that had made him delegate tasks to the young Polish couple. Eva knitted sweaters that might have been machine-made. She had also seen Eva do cartwheels on the newly sown lawn to demonstrate a move for Camilla.
Jane had become used to people who, at best, had one talent, one gift that might be taken as God’s justification for placing them on Earth. The Askeland-Nilsens excelled at all they undertook. She speculated about Martin, as yet an unknown, wondering if he would provide a natural balance. She had a vision of him: Martin would have a squint and some chronic breathing condition so they’d let him join the school soccer team only because it was in line with a gentle, embracing Scandinavian norm.
At the highway exit ramp, the line of cars crawled at a snail’s pace past the place where she had met the Askeland-Nilsen family on the first day. There were five cars scattered around the parking lot now, all with condensation covering the windshields and generally in much worse shape than typical Norwegian cars. Four pale, heavily built men stood talking in a cloud of frozen breaths next to a rusty, once-white van surrounded by empty bottles and plastic bags. Camilla saw her looking.