My grandmother: she was something else. Long, tangled hair the colour of sea foam that she wore wavy and loose over her shoulders and down her back. Eyes like crescent moons when she smiled. Her skin had been toughened by a lifetime of North Sea wind. She lost two babies in childbirth, my father being her only child who lived, and her skin had been toughened by that, too.

For breakfast, she fed me as much salami, eggs, smoked salmon and leverpostei as I could eat. She wanted to fatten me up before sending me home to my mother and father in Stavanger. When she could, she would come with me to the beach, but she was busy at home. There was wood to split, and there was the baking and the painting; there were vegetables to tend, chickens to feed, various dogs and a one-eyed cat.

Most days, I came home with shells and stones, a piece of driftwood, or a sweaty clutch of the pale wildflowers that grew in the grassy dunes that backed on to the beach. Once, I returned with a washed-up glass bottle, scratched and tarnished and chipped at the mouth. I believed it must have, at one time, contained a paper scroll. A message from Denmark or England or France. I kept this collection on the windowsill in my bedroom, which had a view of the sea. It was a very small room with a very big view, in a red-roofed house of white clapboard.

In the front room there was a basket of wood next to the stove. There was a comfortable sofa, two armchairs and a low table. If there was a windstorm, which there often was, the windows shook in their frames. On the wall hung a few paintings: a dry-docked fishing boat, a vase of daisies, the koie my grandfather built up at the lake, with its grass-covered roof and tin chimney. My grandmother painted these and I never considered whether they were good or bad.

Also on the wall: a clock manufactured in England. An oval mirror, speckled. And a plain white plaster mask, smooth as buttermilk. So milky that I often thought about licking it. The face was a young woman’s and it was very realistic, almost alive. Her eyes were closed, with matted eyelashes, and her cheeks were high and round and youthful. She smiled, a little. She smiled a little and it was one of those smiles that could not be contained, as if she were on the cusp of telling me something.

3

Anouk

Ottawa River, Canada, 2017

It’s september, anouk’s birthday. She’s turning forty. Her mother Nora has come with her up north because it’s a big deal for Anouk, turning forty. When she was born, doctors predicted her life expectancy to be far shorter than that. They’ve come north, away from the city, because Anouk would like to see the river, the place she was born, before she’s called for surgery. She’s on the donor list for a new set of lungs.