Chapter Thirty-Five: Signe

Chapter Thirty-Five

Signe

The house is run-down, he is run-down, the grandchildren have only been here on a single occasion, there is no swimming pool, and Trine has left for good. I don’t ask why.

We go out into the garden. He serves instant coffee, stirring the cups with an unpolished silver spoon until the powder has dissolved.

I sit holding the mug, watching the steam form droplets along the inside of the rim. I hold the other hand over the cup and feel how the warmth rising makes my palm damp.

“I knew it was you. There’s nobody else who could do something like that,” he says. “And then I heard you’d been home, that someone had seen Blue in the harbor, so then I knew for sure.”

“I know of a lot of other people who could have done something like that,” I say.

“In your world, sure. You live in another world.”

“We live in the same world.”

“Do we?” He smiles.

“Do you think it’s ridiculous?” I ask. “That I dumped the ice?”

“No . . . I don’t think so. I don’t think anything you’ve ever done has been ridiculous.”

“But it hasn’t done any good,” I say.

“You don’t know how the world would have been if you’d refrained,” he says.

Neither of us speak—we drink the coffee. Slowly it cools off and becomes lukewarm.

“You’re running,” I say.

“Every day,” he replies. “Had to find something to do.”

“What about the garden? The house?”

“What about it?”

“That’s the kind of thing retired folk like to do.”

“I don’t like carpentry. Or gardening.”

He studies me over his cup. Again there’s laughter in him; his eyes are shining even though he is serious.

“You still want to laugh at me,” I say. “You can’t stop. People laugh at what they don’t understand.”

“No,” he says. “No, I don’t want to laugh at you.”

“Well, what is it, then?”

“Signe, don’t you understand anything?”

I look at him, not knowing what to say, because no, I really don’t understand a thing.

“Don’t you understand that . . . every time I went out running, ever since I started running—no, long before that, for my entire life, every time I left the house, all the houses I’ve lived in, all the hotel rooms, every time I left them . . . I wished, not always strongly, sometimes it’s only been a flicker, but lately stronger and stronger . . . every time I wished that when I returned . . . you would be sitting on the front stoop?”

And then he hugs me again, leans forward and throws his arms around me. My coffee cup comes between us, a warm, hard lump of pottery in the middle of the hug. I try to pull it away—we are both clumsy, two thirteen-year-olds.