Five Tuesdays in Winter(27)

That afternoon, Oda made tea in the kitchen and brought it up to the room. She turned the pink-and-burgundy chair around so that it faced the two windows that faced the sea and sat in it. The ferry came in. Oda watched it empty out— day-trippers with bicycles, repairmen in work outfits, islanders carrying crates of groceries—and fill up again. Her man was there. He guided the mail truck onto the boat then stood chatting with people boarding and with people who had no plans to board. There were many of these, folks milling about simply because the ferry was in, not because they were coming or going. The sky was still gray but not as low and compressive. Gulls skimmed the water then rose up so high their bodies evaporated into cloud. Up from the harbor came the sounds of men on boats talking over the engines and the rumble of the ferry as it pulled away from shore. The air through the windows came in gusts of hot and cold and after a while she could not smell the tang of the sea that had been so strong when she first sat down.

When Hanne came back, Oda had not yet sipped her tea or lifted her book from her lap.

“What happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why are you back so soon?” Oda looked at her watch. Three hours had gone by. “Oh,” she said, confused.

“I rode a horse.”

“You rode a horse?” Oda said but with too much surprise.

Hanne scowled. “That was the plan, wasn’t it?” But she couldn’t cover up all her pleasure. Oda could see it in the flushed streaks across her face.

“How was it?”

“It was okay.”

She wasn’t going to share any part of it. A few years ago she would have told Oda everything, wide-eyed and shrill, spinning around in what she and Fritz used to call her happy dance, unable to contain her joy. Adults hid their pain, their fears, their failure, but adolescents hid their happiness, as if to reveal it would risk its loss.

“Are you wearing my socks?” Hanne said.

“My feet were cold and these are so fuzzy and warm.”

“Take them off. I was saving them.”

Also, there was no correlation between happiness and kindness.

Hanne rode every afternoon that week. More than half a month’s salary. Oda put it on a credit card she had only recently paid off. But those hours were Oda’s respite as much as Hanne’s, her vacation from her vacation. She didn’t walk to the lighthouse Hanne refused to visit or go the maritime museum or have a beer in the lovely garden of the pub she heard the innkeeper tell guests about. She sat in her chair with her book and her tea and looked out the window. The sky rarely cleared and never for more than an hour or two. The ferry came in and out. Sometimes if she leaned all the way to the glass and looked far to the left at just the right moment she saw Hanne on the back of a horse on the long East Beach, hooves flashing through shallow water.

After a week, Hanne became more amenable to excursions in the morning. She even came back from the stables with ideas of places she’d like to go. They walked several kilometers to a place called the Burger Meister run by Americans. Instead of the whaling museum, Hanne showed her the graveyard of whalebones in the woods behind it. Every few weeks, Hanne told her, people from the museum removed the pile, but after a few days another stack of bones took its place. If their morning together went well, Oda would tell herself that tonight, tonight she would insist that they talk in the dark, that Hanne listen to one of the stories Fritz used to tell her about his childhood in Fürth or about their courtship or the strange trip they’d taken to Luxembourg before Hanne was born. She felt like a suitor, a seducer. She bought Hanne a bracelet and gave it to her at dinner. She encouraged her to have coffee or caffeinated tea with dessert. But no matter the good mood she might have lured her daughter into during the day, once in bed if Oda tried to start a conversation, Hanne shut it down. “Can’t we just listen to the sea,” she might say, or more violently: “I cannot listen to your voice anymore today.”

At lunch one day, Oda tried to explain herself and the stories about Fritz she wanted Hanne to hear. “We don’t talk about him enough. Or about his death. I don’t want you to think I can’t talk about it. I can. I will. I want to.”

“Okay,” Hanne said.

“So would you like to?”

“I don’t know. Not right now.”

“Tonight?”

“No.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I don’t want you to say anything in particular. I just don’t think the silence is healthy. I grew up with parents who never talked about the things that mattered, the things that pained them.”

“The war?”

“Yes, the war was one of those things.”

“So Papi’s death is like the war and I’m like a Nazi who won’t talk about it?”

“Hanne. You know what I’m saying. I don’t want you to believe when you’re older that you had a mother who didn’t want to talk about things, because I do.”

“Okay, if I promise never to say that you didn’t talk about things can we stop having this conversation?”

“I met him in French class.”

“Yeah, I know. He thought it was a history class but he didn’t leave because he saw the back of your head.”