She slept for another few hours, but more calmly and she woke up less and less frequently.

Then, around midnight, something finally happened.

I had fallen asleep, and was lying in bed directly across from her, but I woke up immediately when I heard her talking.

“Thirsty,” she said. “Daddy?”

I sat up quickly.

“Yes.”

I rushed to open the can. The sound was the most beautiful thing I had heard in a long time—the sigh of the bubbling carbonation when I lifted the aluminum tab.

“Soda?” Lou said. “Soda!”

“Wait,” I said.

I poured some of the salt into the soda. It fizzed upon contact with the carbonated liquid. I put one hand under her head and held the can up to her lips with the other.

She swallowed. She drank. Large gulps. Finally she was drinking. My child was drinking.

Chapter Seventeen: Signe

Chapter Seventeen

Signe

The sound of the storm is in my body. I awaken with a start and it is still roaring in my ears, but then it’s gone, because it’s the silence that’s creating a din inside me now. I am lying on the floor, can’t remember coming in here, I must have collapsed from exhaustion, all curled up halfway beneath the table, the ice containers looming over me. My body is stiff and sore. I push myself up into a sitting position and can feel how every part of me aches.

Magnus, you stood there at the party and looked right at me, steady and calm through and through, and after that it was the two of us.

Not dramatically and intensely, but slowly. Years passed before we did anything more than look at each other, before we had a proper conversation, before we sat down at the far edge of the pier, out of sight, and kissed tentatively the first time, before I let go of your hands to touch other parts of your body, under wool sweaters and singlets that smelled like a boy, the smooth skin on your back, before we clung to each other with all the desire we still didn’t know what to do with, before we walked down the gravel road and talked, talked, talked—about everything, and especially about how there was nobody else we could talk to exactly like this.

We walked, away from the fjord, away from the water and the valley and up toward the mountain, because there we could be alone. The mountain and the glacier were our landscape during these years.

And then we moved away from the village. I remember how we stood on the deck of the steamer, looking at Ringfjorden at the end of the trail that was the backwash, the village growing smaller and smaller and everything inside me growing lighter.

We chose Bergen. He was the one who wanted to move there.

“It’s a short trip home,” he said.

“You call it home,” I said.