Alma

The first card came on the eighth of April, a week late, in a plain white envelope with an English stamp, and she knew the hand before she had it out of the post box.

She read it standing at the foot of the steps on Klosteret, in the cold bright wind, with her bag on her arm and her belly out in front of her like the prow of a boat. On the front was a photograph of a lighthouse on a rock, white against a blue sky: Portland Head, in some sun that never was. She did not look at it. She turned it over.

Rain. Forty-eight. Wind NE 15.

That was all. No name. No date. The hand was upright and small and slightly cramped, with the long fierce tail on the g that she had seen on a hundred prescriptions and a thousand birthday cards, and the ink had gone a little thin at the end of the last line, as though the pen had been running dry and she had not wanted to stop to shake it.

Corinne stood very still.

Rain, forty-eight. Somewhere, on the first of April, a woman had sat down at a kitchen table with a cup of tea and looked out of the window at the weather. She had thought about it. She had picked up a pen. She had written it down as she’d have written a dose, plainly, in a clear hand, and sent it to a house in Rye, to a friend who thought she was having an affair, and across an ocean, and into a post box on a wet hill in a city she had never seen.

That I’m sitting at my kitchen table, said Pip’s voice, in the wind, looking at the weather, and thinking about you.

She sat down on the bottom step with the card in both hands. She did not cry, particularly. She sat quite still with the baby turning slowly under her ribs, and the wind in the geraniums, and the card on her knee, and the thin white tail of a gull going over the roofs. After a time she got up and went inside and pinned it to the wall above the table with a drawing pin, face out, with the lighthouse showing. She pinned it a little crooked. She did not straighten it.

Alive, she thought. She’s alive.

* * *

Alma was born on the twentieth of April at eleven minutes past eleven in the morning, in a white room in the Haukeland hospital, with the sun coming through the blinds in long yellow bars, and a Norwegian anesthetist holding her hand and telling her about his sailboat.

It was not as she had planned. She had planned a calm, flat, orderly week of waiting, with the bag packed by the door and a plan of the bus routes. But the pains had begun at two in the morning, on the twentieth, in the narrow bed in the garden flat with the cat on her feet, and by four they were coming every six minutes; and by five, with her teeth set and her fist in the quilt, she was banging on the ceiling with the handle of a broom. She had not needed to do it twice. The stick came tapping down the garden path in the dark, and Solveig stood in the door in a flannel nightgown and a man’s overcoat, with her hair in a plait over one shoulder, and looked, and said in a voice of perfect calm, “Henrik.”

Henrik had a car. Henrik had a telephone. Henrik drove through the sleeping city at forty miles an hour with his hands at ten and two and his lip between his teeth, saying in a low steady voice that he was perfectly well, that it was perfectly normal, and that he had passed his test in two thousand and two, while the woman in the back seat gripped the strap above the door and swore, with considerable fluency and a wide vocabulary, in three languages.

At the hospital they took her away, and a doctor looked at the old scar through the paper gown, and then at the chart, and then at her face. He was a gray, rumpled, kind man with a hooked nose. He said, “Keisersnitt,” and then, in careful English, “We will not wait. The scar is too old and you have already waited long enough.”

“Is she all right?”

“She is perfect. She is only a little impatient.” He patted her hand. “She takes after her mother, I think.”

They gave her a spinal. She lay awake behind a green cloth with her arms strapped out and her heart going like a fist on a door, and felt a pressure, a tugging, a long strange rummaging sensation as of someone looking for a thing in a drawer. The anesthetist talked about his boat. It was a twenty-six-footer with a teak deck, and he had bought her in Stavanger from a widow, and he was going to take her out to the islands in June. She listened to him with the whole of her attention. She thought that if she did not, she would fly apart.

There was a sound.

It was a thin, furious, outraged wail, like a kettle coming to the boil, and it rose and rose and broke into a long ragged howl of pure complaint, and the whole room seemed to lean toward it. Somebody laughed. Somebody said der er hun, there she is. A nurse in blue came round the green cloth with a small red wrapped thing in both hands, and held it down, and said, “Here. Look. Here is your daughter.”

She looked.

She had braced for it. She had braced for it for eight months, in the dark, on the floor of a flat with a new bolt on the door, on a bus, in a snow-filled garden, and she’d thought that she knew. She would look, and she would see him. She would see the dark head, the long jaw, the quick wide brow, the certain tilt, and she would know in the first second whether what she had done had been wrong.

What she saw was a very small, very cross, very wet person, with a squashed red face and a cone of dark damp hair and a pair of tightly shut eyes. A fist waved. The mouth opened and shut. And then the eyes came open, slowly, with an air of the deepest suspicion, like a woman at an inquiry, and looked straight up at her.

They were gray-green. They were the color of the sea off the Ledges in the first light.

She knew those eyes. She knew them as one knows a word in a language one has been speaking for years. And for the length of a breath, with a stranger’s hand on her forehead and a stranger’s voice somewhere saying the scar held, doctor, it held, it’s remarkable, it shouldn’t have, the whole of the white room tilted and went dark, and she was standing at the edge of a drop with the wind in her face.

Then the baby sneezed.

It was an absurd little sound, like a kitten. The fist came up, and the face screwed itself into a knot of outrage, and the red mouth opened on a second long reproachful wail, and Corinne burst out laughing. She laughed, and the tears ran sideways into her hair. She said, “Hello. Hello. I’m so sorry. I know. It’s very bright.”

“Hun er vakker,” said the nurse. She is beautiful. “What is her name?”

“Alma,” said Corinne. “Alma Lind.”

“And the father?”

It was a form. She knew it was a form. It was a plain white clipboard with a blue pen on a chain, and a box. She looked at the box, and at the red mouth, and at the thin gray-green line that was the eyes of a child looking at the world for the first time with complete and furious trust.

“Ukjent,” said Corinne.

Unknown.

The nurse wrote it down. She did not blink. She had written it perhaps a hundred times.

* * *

They took them home on the twenty-fourth, in Henrik’s car, wrapped in three blankets, with the tiny white cap with the border of green pines pulled down over her ears. Solveig sat in the back with the car-seat on her knees. She had put on her good coat and a hat with a feather, and she did not speak for the whole of the drive. At the foot of the garden path she stopped, and took off her glove, and put one finger into the small hot fist, and it closed on her at once.

“Å, du,” she said. Oh, you. And that was all.

She was a quiet baby, in the end. That was the surprise of it. She cried, certainly, in the way of babies, with the whole body, from the toes, like a siren. But when it was over she lay in the crook of an arm and looked, with those enormous steady eyes, at the lamp, and the cat, and the rain in the rosebush, with an attention so grave that Corinne found it hard to meet. She watched everything. She watched the door. At two weeks old she turned her head toward the sound of a key.

“She is very observant,” said Solveig, with approval.

“Yes,” said Corinne.

She did not say what she thought. She thought: I know where she gets it.

* * *

Four years went by like a tide.

She would not be able to say, afterward, how they went. They went in a way that she had not expected, quietly and without drama, in a sort of long warm gray blur, with one day laid over another like pages of a book gone soft with handling. There was the spring, with the light coming back as Henrik had promised, a yellow line on the wall that she watched with her child on her shoulder. There was the summer, short and green and absurdly bright, with the sun not going down until midnight and the whole city out on the quays in shirtsleeves. There was the autumn, and the rain. There was the winter, and the dark, and the lamps in the windows of Klosteret like a row of small oranges.

Alma sat up. Alma crawled, with a fierce rotary determination, backward. Alma said katt, her first word, to the cat, who accepted it as his due. She said mamma on the second Tuesday of her ninth month, apropos of nothing, in the bath. She stood at ten months, and walked at thirteen, and fell down the garden step on the fifteenth and sat there on the gravel with her mouth open in total astonishment at the perfidy of gravity. By two she was talking in two languages, as fluent in one as the other, in a high, clear, bossy, tuneless voice. By three she was a small stout determined person in a yellow oilskin, with a plait the thickness of a rope, who splashed in every puddle between Nordnes and the Torget with her lower lip stuck out.

She had his chin. She had his eyes. She had, it came out slowly, in a hundred ways that Corinne watched with her heart in her mouth, the way of tilting her head to listen. But she had something else, too, that was not his, and that grew with the years until it filled the flat: a great gusty rude unabashed laugh, a laugh that came up from the bottom of her stomach like a bell, and set the cat to flight and the old woman upstairs to banging on the floor with her stick. It was nobody’s laugh. It was hers entirely.

“She has Per’s mother’s lungs,” said Solveig. “That woman could be heard in Kirkenes.”

She stopped being tante, in the second year. She became bestemor. She did not discuss it; she only answered to it, one morning, when a small hand pulled her sleeve, and went rather red. By the third year there was no one in the house who could have said which of them the child belonged to. There was a high chair in Solveig’s kitchen and another in the flat. There was a toy box in the hall. Billett was demoted from the best chair to the second best, and bore it with the dignity of a deposed king.

Corinne worked. She worked in the mornings, while Alma was at the barnehage on the corner, a green wooden building with a fence painted in primary colors and a staff of kind, brisk, large young women in fleece. They had asked, on the first day, whether she consented to have the child photographed for the newsletter, and she had said no. They had asked if there was a reason. She had said, in her careful Norwegian, that there was a family reason, and that she was very sorry, and that she would be grateful if it could be respected in every case: in the autumn photograph, the Christmas pageant, the class photo on the steps. They had looked at one another. In Norway, one learns, there are a great many reasons why a family might ask for a thing, and the polite thing is not to inquire. Selvfølgelig, they had said. Of course. For four years Alma Lind was the only child in the barnehage who turned her back, gravely, when the man with the camera came, and put her hands over her face, and was not asked why.

She translated eleven books in four years, under a name that nobody had heard of. Ingrid placed them. She placed them with small houses in Sydney, and Toronto, and Dublin, with respectable print runs and no marketing, in places where a person with a notebook in Maine would be unlikely to look. Translated by Nora Lind. The reviews said that the new translator had an icy elegance. They said she had a steady hand. They said that her rhythms were cool and unshowy, which she read three times, in the kitchen, with a sort of shiver of pleasure, and a sort of dread that she did not examine.

The cards came every April, in the same white envelope, from Rye.

Clear. Fifty-two. Light westerly. That was the second year. The third said Fog. Forty-one. Calm. The fourth said, in a hand a trifle shakier than the first, Showers. Fifty-five. Wind SW 10. The geraniums survived. She pinned them in a row above the table, one under the other, lighthouse side out. Alma, on her third birthday, asked who was the lady with the lamp. Corinne said, “A friend,” and Alma said, “Where is she?” and she said, “Far away,” and Alma considered this with her head on one side and said, “Does she have a cat?”

“I don’t know.”

“She should have a cat.”

Henrik came on Sundays. He came with a fish, or a bag of apples, or a library book, or a bag of nails, and sat on the garden step with his long legs folded under him in the sun, and took the child on his knee, and read to her. He did not touch Corinne. He did not look at her too long. In the second winter, on the second of February, on the step of the flat with the sleet driving across the garden, he said, in a voice of such studied unconcern that it was like a hand held out with a coin in it, “I wonder if you would care to have dinner. With me. Somewhere that is not this kitchen.”

She had known it was coming. She had known it for a year. She stood with her back against the door, with her hand on the bolt, looking at his hat.

“I can’t,” she said. “It isn’t you. It’s — I have a thing about doors, Henrik. I have a rule. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“No,” he said. “You don’t have to.” He turned the hat in his hands. “I can wait.”

She flinched. She couldn’t help it. It went through her like a thrown stone, and she saw him see it: the long mild face, stricken, bewildered, realizing at once what he’d done, though he could not have said what.

“Not that,” he said quickly. “Not that phrase. I do not know why, but I have said something wrong, and I am sorry. I’ll not say it again.” He put the hat on his head. “I’ll simply be around. Is that permitted? I’ll be around, on a Sunday, with a fish. And if the day comes that you want something else, or if it does not come, then I’ll be around anyway, because I am fond of the child, and I’m fond of the cat, and I am rather fond of you, and none of it is conditional.” He tried to smile. “I teach the subjunctive. I am used to things that might not happen.”

She said nothing at all. But she stood in the doorway until the gate had clicked behind him, and then she sat down on the floor of the hall with her face in her hands, and Alma came out of the bedroom in her nightdress, dragging a rabbit by one ear, and climbed into her lap.

“Why are you wet, Mamma?”

“I’m not. It’s only rain.”

“It’s not raining indoors.”

“No,” said Corinne. “It isn’t.”

* * *

The fifth card came on the seventh of April, and she did not like it.

She stood in the post office with the envelope in her hand, in a long wet queue, and looked at the writing before she opened it. It was Pip’s. It was always Pip’s. But the letters, on the outside, had been written very slowly, with a deliberate steadiness, like a child copying out a line. She tore it open. A lighthouse. A blue sky. She turned it over.

Rain. Thirty-nine. Wind NE 15.

And under it, in the same careful hand, in a space that had never held anything, two more words.

Don’t worry.

She stood with the card in the middle of the post office with the people moving round her and the water running off her umbrella onto the floor. Don’t worry. It was not weather. It had never been weather. They had agreed it, at a lake, by a fire. The postcard said the weather, and nothing else, and if there was ever anything else, it would be because there was something she could not bear.

I’ve a scan I haven’t read, said Pip’s voice, on a dark cushion, in the firelight, four and a half years away. I’m going to read it after.

She put the card in the pocket of her coat. She did not pin it up with the others. She carried it home through the rain with her hand over it, and she did not take it out again for three days.

* * *

Alma was four on the twentieth of April, and wanted a rabbit.

She was quite clear about it. She had been clear for eleven weeks. She had a rabbit already, a gray one, the worse for wear, with one ear gone soft and a blue scarf and a name of such tortured complexity that it could be rendered in no known alphabet; but it was not, she explained, the right rabbit. It was a boy rabbit. She wanted a girl. She wanted a girl rabbit with long ears, and a pink nose, and her own house.

“A real one?” said Corinne, in dismay.

“A small one.”

In the end it was Henrik who found the answer, as he found most of the answers. He arrived at half past ten on the morning of the twentieth, with the sun coming through the kitchen window in long yellow bars, bearing in both arms a wooden hutch he had made himself, with a slanted roof and a window and a tiny painted door, and in the hutch, on a bed of straw, with a very pink nose and an expression of boundless imbecile contentment, sat a young white rabbit with one gray ear.

“Oh,” said Alma.

She said it in a different voice. She said it in the voice of a person who sees a thing that she has wanted for so long that she had ceased to believe in it. She stood in the middle of the kitchen with her hands at her sides in her party dress and looked at the rabbit, and the rabbit looked at her, and neither moved.

“What do you say?” said Corinne.

“Can she live in my room?”

“Yes.”

“Can I call her Kanin?”

“That means rabbit,” said Henrik gently.

“I know what it means,” said Alma, with scorn, and sat down on the floor.

They had cake. Solveig had made it, a fantastic edifice of cream and strawberries and four candles, and the child blew them out in a single gust that put out the stove and scattered the napkins. They sang. Billett sat on the windowsill with an expression of the profoundest disgust. At four o’clock, when the sun had gone round, and the old woman had gone up to her nap with her stick, and the flat was strewn with torn paper and crumbs and bits of straw, Corinne put her daughter to bed.

It was an ordinary bed. It was a narrow one, against the wall, under the window at the height of the grass, with a quilt that Solveig had made and a lamp in the shape of a moon. The hutch stood on the floor beside it. In the lamplight, Alma lay on her back with the old rabbit under one arm and a pair of long pink ears poking out of the hutch, and looked at the ceiling with the particular grave attention that she brought to everything.

“Mamma.”

“Mm.”

“Billett has a pappa. He told me.”

“Did he.”

“In his head. His pappa is a big orange one with a torn ear. And Kanin has a pappa, Henrik said, he’s in the shop. And Linnea at the barnehage has a pappa with a boat.” She turned her head on the pillow. Her eyes, in the lamplight, were the color of deep water. “Where is mine?”

Corinne sat on the edge of the bed with her hand on the quilt.

She had known the question was coming. She had known it for four years. She had gone over it, a hundred times, in the dark, with the taste of tea in her mouth, as one goes over a speech. She had it ready. She’d had it from the first day. It had been given to her by a fire, in a camp on a lake, by a woman with skinned knuckles, and she had turned it over and over, and found no fault in it but the one.

A kindness, said Pip.

That’s what he said, she’d answered. About the envelope.

“Your pappa died,” she said. “Before you were born.”

She heard it come out. It came out quite smoothly. It was not a lie, quite; it was something else, a thing with a shape of its own, which she could look at from several sides. It had no half-beat in it. She had seen to that. She had practiced it in the bathroom mirror, in the dark, for four years.

“He was a man who loved boats,” she said. “And he was very, very kind. He would have loved you more than anything. And he died, and he couldn’t come.”

Alma lay and considered this for a long time.

“Was it in the sea?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Does he know me?”

“He knows you,” said Corinne, and her voice cracked, and she steadied it. “He’d know you anywhere.”

The child nodded slowly. She seemed to be satisfied. She turned her face to the window, and lay looking out through the glass at the gray roots of the roses, and the long gray slice of water at the bottom of the garden, where the afternoon ferry was going up the fjord with its lights on. It gave a low, long, melancholy note. It was the sound of a horn that she heard every day of her life.

“Then I’ll wave,” said Alma.

She sat up. She pushed back the quilt and climbed out of bed in her nightdress, and padded across the cold boards to the window, a small straight stout figure with a plait down her back and a rabbit under one arm. She pressed her nose to the glass. She lifted one hand, and held it up, flat, to the water, with the fingers spread, and waved it slowly back and forth, back and forth, to the ferry and the gray bar of the sea and whatever lay beyond them, in the dying light.

“Hello, Pappa,” said Alma.

Corinne sat on the bed with her hands over her mouth and watched her daughter wave at the sea.

It was so kind. It was so perfectly and entirely kind that it was a moment before she understood what she was afraid of, and then she could not breathe at all. The ferry went on up the fjord. The horn sounded again, long and low, over the water. And at the window of a basement flat in Nordnes, in the light of a paper moon, a small child stood waving with her whole arm at a man who was not dead; and Corinne thought that she had taught her daughter to wave in precisely the right direction.