December 2013
You wanted to talk to me?” Steph said, as she came in after tossing her school bag and leather jacket in her room.
Sofie nodded and pointed to the living room sofa. Her daughter glanced into the kitchen, as if she was making sure they were alone.
During breakfast, an innocent remark about a few mid-afternoon free periods at school had developed into a shouting match between Nigel and her; he thought she should stay in school and do her homework instead of going home with a girlfriend and hanging out.
While the walls shook from the angry shouting, Sofie had realized they couldn’t go on this way. It wasn’t so much the constant quarreling, though it had begun wearing on her. But it was affecting her daughter physically. A guarded insecurity entered her eyes now whenever she and Nigel were in the same room. At the same time, her daughter knew exactly which buttons to push with him. This isn’t working, Sofie acknowledged, when her daughter stormed out and slammed the door after the argument at breakfast.
“Do you want anything?” she asked when Steph sat down. “A sandwich, something to drink?”
Her daughter shook her head and sat straight on the sofa, legs pulled up under her, waiting. Her fingers played restlessly with three strands hanging from the long, black scarf wrapped tightly around her neck, like some stiff collar. Black, beautiful, and mysterious. Her insecurity was gone; she seemed happy and curious.
Where to begin? In her head, Sofie had gone through every possible way to open this conversation, one that couldn’t be put off any longer, that maybe should already have taken place.
She had always been in doubt. She regretted not telling her daughter long ago that Nigel Parker wasn’t her biological father. It would have made it easier for Sofie to let Steph in on the reason for her decision. On the other hand, she hadn’t thought her daughter needed to know until she was older, even older than now, at an age when she might be able to understand.
Sofie walked over and sat down on the sofa. She reached for her daughter’s hand and decided to wing it. “I left Denmark many years ago, right after your grandmother died. I wanted to travel around Europe for the summer. Just ramble around, no definite plans. I needed to get away, get some distance from my mother’s death. Something happens when you find yourself alone, all your family gone. And I had to figure out how to deal with that.”
For a moment she considered telling her daughter about Stig and the marriage she had abandoned. But that could wait. Right now this was more important. “I wanted to go to several places in France, and I also dreamed about seeing the Amalfi Coast and Rome. But before I got that far, I ran into a guy at the train station in Zurich. We’d been on the same train from Copenhagen, but I didn’t really notice him until we were on the platform. He was helping a mother with two small children haul a baby carriage up the steps, because the elevator was broken.”
Steph slumped a bit on the sofa. She’d stopped twirling the strands of her scarf, and she let Sofie hold her hand.
“We started talking, and we both had to find a cheap place to stay, so we decided to stick together. We ended up renting two rooms at an old boarding house. There was no hot water. And there were lice,” she suddenly recalled. They had already kissed that first evening, but she didn’t tell her daughter that. “He was on leave from his job, he was just traveling around, too, wherever his feet took him, so we decided to go to France together.”
“And you fell in love with him or what?” Steph wasn’t sure where her mother was going with all this.
“No. But it was the first time I’d traveled alone, and it was nice to follow along with someone who’d done it before.”
She paused a moment, thinking back. After she’d opened the bank account, they passed through Switzerland to France, where they spent two weeks before boarding a tourist boat to Corsica.
“One evening we met two guys, Christopher and Mark, at the harbor. We’d already spread out our sleeping pads at the end of a pier, we wanted to sleep surrounded by water, and they’d just sailed in from the mainland. They were having trouble tying up the boat, so we helped. It was typical for him to just start talking to people we met. The next few days we hung around with them. It was fun, and when they were ready to leave, they asked us if we wanted to go along. They were going to Italy, and as I said, I wanted to visit Rome.”
“And you still weren’t in love with him?” Steph had pulled her hand away without Sofie’s noticing.
“By then I was.” She folded her hands in her lap. The dark-haired Copenhagener had swept her off her feet. He was so different from the life she had wanted to put behind her.
“I tried to fight it. I really didn’t need another broken heart, I was already running away from one. But we had a fantastic summer…” She was caught off guard; suddenly she recalled the afternoon they sat on boulders by the sea, eating sandwiches, the smell of the water breaking against the cliffs. The scent of rosemary, the heat. And his body.
“You were wild about him,” her daughter said matter-of-factly.
Sofie nodded. “Yes. I was wild about him.”
“Then why didn’t you stay together? He sounds a lot cooler than the grumpy old creep I have for a father. But I guess if you had, I wouldn’t be here.” She tilted her head.
Sofie took a deep breath. “Yes you would. You would still be here. He’s your father, but I didn’t know I was expecting when we broke up.”
The silence was deafening. And long.
Sofie reached over for her daughter’s hand again, stroked the back of it with her fingers, all the way to her black fingernails. “I didn’t find out until I was three months along. And by that time I was far away.”
“But why did you break up? Why did you go on alone?”
“There was something I had to do.” Sofie paused. She had made up her mind to be as honest as possible with her sixteen-year-old daughter about her past. But there still were things she didn’t want to get into, like her time in Switzerland, and why she returned to work at a suicide clinic.
“I wasn’t ready to commit,” Sofie said, content to leave it at that. “And then when I found out I was expecting you, he was back in Denmark. It was a summer romance, with a bonus for me.”
She squeezed Steph’s hand.
“Does he even know I exist?”
“We haven’t spoken since I left the boat.”
“When you two split up?”
“It was time for me to move on. I found out I’d received my inheritance from my mother, so I had to go back to Switzerland and take care of my finances.”
Steph looked astonished. “So you chose your money over the man you were in love with?”
“Back then I did, anyway. I’d begun traveling to start a new life. At the time I really needed to be able to take care of myself. Be independent. An adult.”
“What did he say to your just leaving?”
“We had an argument on the boat one morning. We’d just tied up at a small fishing village not far from Rome. I wanted to wash clothes, he wanted to sightsee, and I blew up because he wouldn’t help. I knew I’d be moving on anyway, and the argument gave me extra incentive. I found a telephone booth on the way into the village, and I called the bank, like I’d been doing regularly to hear if my money had arrived. And it had.”
She recalled how it had felt back then, at the telephone on the corner of a small square. Nearby stood a small, dimly lit café and a narrow spit of land with booths, crushed ice for the boxes of fish and shellfish being hauled up from the harbor by shouting men in white aprons. A dewy morning, the sun had yet to peek into the narrow streets winding up the mountainside.
“I walked around looking for him, to make up. So I could tell him in a decent way I had to leave. But when I finally found him in the town square, he’d been smoking dope, and he was sitting around playing music with a bunch of kids he’d met.”
He’d been leaning back against the fountain, a guitar on his lap. When he spotted her, he’d waved her over and told the others to make room for her in the circle. She tried to get him to come with her. Said she wanted to talk to him, asked him to get up. But he just sat there, took another hit on the joint being passed around, and soon it seemed he’d forgotten she was even there. They kept playing, and at the sight of him bent over the guitar, his long hair hanging in his eyes, suddenly it was much too difficult for her to say good-bye.
“I walked back to the boat and packed my things. I felt terrible, and I was still mad at him for going his own way.” She smiled; that was the very thing about him she’d fallen in love with. “I wrote him a note, and then I left.”
“So you didn’t even say good-bye to each other?”
Sofie shook her head.
They sat for a while without speaking.
Finally Steph asked, “What was he like?”
“He was everything I didn’t have in the life I’d left behind. He was open-minded, open to life. Reckless, and yet warm. You look a lot like him.” She smiled. “He was beautiful, free, his own man.”
“Why have you waited so long to tell me this?” Steph’s eyes were moist.
“I’ve been thinking, maybe we should try to find him. The way things are between you and Nigel, I think it would be good for you to meet your biological father. And you have the right to know that Nigel isn’t your father, even though he’s taken care of you since you were very little.”
Steph grimaced, but she didn’t say anything.
Sofie felt it now, sharply: she’d been treading water. Of course, Steph should know who her biological father was. She saw Eik in her daughter—she, too, went her own way, and Sofie couldn’t bear watching that part of her being slowly swept away by her husband’s irritation.
“If you want to, if you think it’s a good idea, I’ll try to find him.”
“Maybe I could live with him?” Steph blurted out.
“You can visit him anyway, if he decides to answer.”
“So Nigel isn’t my father at all?” She pulled the long sleeves of her sweater over her hands and rested her chin on her covered palms.
Sofie shook her head.
“Does he have other children, my real father?”
The fact was that Sofie didn’t know. She shrugged. “Probably. He’s forty-two or so. If he was going to have children, he’d probably have them by now.”
She studied her daughter for a moment, her serious, dark expression. But she also saw curiosity, expectation. “Of course we have to be prepared, he might not know how to deal with finding out he has a daughter.”
“He might not even believe you when you tell him.”
Sofie shook her head. “Even though it’s been a long time, I don’t think he’ll react that way. I think he’ll be happy when he hears about it.”
She tried to sound convincing. Because Eik Nordstrøm had been anything but happy when she had contacted him. She’d probably come off as being pushy and meddlesome, too, but she’d had to know about his life before deciding if she should bring him and his daughter together.
“I’d like to meet him,” Steph said, her voice small.