“It has a submarine,” the medicine woman said to Leo. “It is the largest in Europe, I believe. I took my son. Also minigolf close by. A good place to holiday, if you do not come here. Wouldn’t you like to come to holiday here someday? That is what we do. We put on the clothes and—puh!—we are Vikings.”

“Yes!” Leo said. “You mean, you stay here? You sleep here?”

“Of course!” She turned to the corner of the hut and said a sentence or two to a pile of blankets. Perhaps it was an ancient incantation. Nothing happened. She said it again. They could not find a single English cognate among the syllables.

The pile of blankets shifted. An animal? No. The blankets assembled themselves into a shadow of a man.

The shadow became an actual man, sitting up.

The actual man was Aksel.

He was eleven years older and much thinner and he had shaved his beard, even though he was now a Viking. He’d always had long, squintish eyes; they had acquired luggage. He yawned like a bear, working all the muscles of his jaw; that is, he yawned like Joanna’s long-ago love, the foreigner she’d fallen for when they had worked together on a college production of True West. Joanna had been prop mistress, and had collected twenty-seven working toasters from yard sales and Goodwills. Aksel directed, and had broken every one of those toasters in a single impassioned speech to the actors, sweeping them off a table while declaring, “I don’t want you to act, I want you to react, I want you to get mad.”

The medicine woman said, “Aksel’s mother told us you were coming here with the boy.”

Joanna nodded. She still didn’t know what millennium they were supposed to be in. “You get mail here?”

“She texted.” The medicine woman mimed with her thumbs.

“Johanna,” said Aksel. That needless, endearing h.

How many time frames was she in? College, mid-twenties, the Iron Age, the turn of the last century. He was recognizable to her—she’d worried he wouldn’t be—and beloved to her, too.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, in a serious voice.

It was a good question. He didn’t look like her father. That might have been what brought her here. The watch could be mailed; Legolands were legion; but where in the world was a man like the man she’d just lost?