I made so much noise that I didn’t hear the truck. It was only when Mommy asked me to come to the courtyard that I understood that something was up. She took my hand and led me around the corner, while she waved at the guests and said that they had to come too. She laughed in their direction, and at me, but there was something unusual about her laughter. She laughed the way I usually laughed, wildly and a little too loudly, and I laughed as well because I felt that I had to.

I turned around and looked for Daddy. I found him, way in the back of the crowd of guests, alone. I wanted to hold his hand instead, but Mommy was pulling too hard.

Then we turned the corner and I jumped. I didn’t understand what I saw: the entire courtyard was white, and the light reflecting off it sparkled, making me squint.

“Ice,” Mommy said. “Snow, winter. Look, Signe, it’s winter!”

“Snow?” I said.

She stood beside me and I could tell that something about this was important to Mommy, about the snow, which was actually ice. But I didn’t understand what it was, and now Daddy had also come over to stand beside her, and he wasn’t smiling.

“What’s this?” Daddy asked Mommy.

“Do you remember,” Mommy said to me, “that you said you wished your birthday was in the winter?”

“No.”

Mommy continued, “That you cried when Birgit had her birthday and it snowed? And you wanted a snowman, do you remember?”

Daddy said to Mommy in a hard voice, “Have you driven it all the way down from the mountain?”

“Sønstebø brought it for me. He was going to pick some up for the fish landing station anyway,” she answered.

I turned around and discovered Sønstebø, the farmer from Eidesdalen. He was standing beside the truck, looking at me, smiling. I understood that he was waiting for something from me. Behind him stood his son, Magnus.

There you were, Magnus. I knew who you were before, because you sometimes came with your father on his truck when he delivered ice. But nonetheless, I think of that moment as the first time I saw you. You stood there, barefoot, your feet brown from the sun and dirt, and you waited for something—like all the others, you were waiting for me. You reminded me of a squirrel, with round, brown eyes that noticed everything. You were just eight years old, but you noticed that something was at stake, I believe, something that wasn’t said—that somebody needed you, or would come to need you. That’s how you were. That’s how he was.

“So Sønstebø had to make an extra trip?” Daddy asked softly. “All the way from the mountain?”

I hoped that he would put his arm around Mommy, the way he did sometimes—put it around her and squeeze her against him. But he didn’t move.

“It’s Signe’s birthday, she wished for this,” Mommy said.