Read Online Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida - Free Book Online Page A

had missed when threading his belt around his waist.
    Eero pulled out a chair for me. “Welcome,” he said. “Thank you.” Dad had had good manners, but he had never
    pulled out my chair.
    I looked around. This could have been the house I grew up in. The kitchen table matched the wood throughout the house. It was blond, the kind that looked fitting in a summer cabin but seemed too light, too unsturdy for winter. The refrigerator was smaller than American refrigerators, with paneling that matched the wood of the floor. The kitchen led into what looked like a study, filled with dark furniture, its leather the color of men’s dress shoes. Where would my room have been?
    Eero moved around the kitchen the way he had when he was setting up the communion table at his church: he was judi-cious, and took more steps than seemed necessary. He opened

    a cupboard and returned to the table with a basket lined with a napkin and filled with crisp Wasa bread. Then he went to the refrigerator and came back with butter. Next, he opened the freezer, took out something wrapped in plastic, sliced it up, and approached the table with what looked like brown licorice. “Reindeer meat,” he said, offering me a plate. He sat down across from me.
    I picked up a slender slice of reindeer meat and took a small bite. It was salty, the texture like beef jerky. “Delicious,” I said. I exaggerated a smile.
    “How is your mother?” Eero said suddenly. He had buttered a piece of Wasa bread, but it lay resting on his plate.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “She took off when I was fourteen.” “Took off?” he said.
    “Left. She left me and Richard, her husband”—I looked to see if he knew, but his startled expression showed that he hadn’t known she’d remarried—“and my brother, and never came back. This was in New York.”
    “Does she pack anything?”
    “No.” I was used to this line of questioning. Everyone thought they were a detective. “Did you call the police?” they’d say. “Did you look for a note?”
    “I’m sorry for you,” Eero said.
    I studied his face. I was unaccustomed to sympathy without judgment, sympathy without condescension. I nodded at Eero. He knew how she did it. He knew it was not a matter of interrogating past lovers or combing a lake.

3.
    There was still plenty of bread on the table, but Eero brought out more. “When she leave me she doesn’t say anything, either,” he said, arranging the new bread.
    He paused. I could hear a neighbor calling out for their dog or perhaps their child.
    “It is not so easy to be the wife of priest, to be the wife of Sami priest, in a town like this,” he said. He gestured around the room, as though indicating that the kitchen was the town, or the town was the kitchen. “Yes,” he said, agreeing with himself. “It is quite difficult.”
    “Did my mother pray?”
    “Of course,” Eero said. “Doesn’t she raise you with religion?” “No,” I said. “I never saw her pray, either,” I added. I
    couldn’t picture her with her eyes closed.
    “Your mother has no patience for this life here,” Eero said. “She has her studies and her project.”
    “The indigenous peoples thing,” I said, more to myself than to him.
    “Indigenous,” he repeated. “I think that’s why daily life here disappoints her. Yes, she is disappointed.”
    He tapped the fingers of his left hand on the back of his right.
    “She comes here thinking this place will give her wisdom into the Sami, that she helps with their cause. But people here are not aware of this cause of the Sami. We do not think of it

    that way back then—things are different now. I think for her research, and for the idea she has in her head, this is disappointing for her.”
    “It was disappointing for her,” I said, trying to get him to use the past tense. Speaking about her in the present made me uncomfortable.
    “I never forget how I meet her. I come back here from sem-inary school and she comes to