I have never seen my dad cry, not once in the sixteen years of my life. Not until now. His sobs are ugly and loud and his nose is running, and I want to go back and change everything, remake every decision I’ve made since that night the Northern Lights came to Wellfleet.
“You were trying to tell me,” he says.
“I should have tried harder.” I want to get out of bed and climb onto his lap, but my arm is broken and there are tubes connecting me to things.
He shakes his head and pulls a tissue from a box beside my bed.
“She asked me to tell you goodbye and that she loves you,” I say. “But I guess she sort of already did that.”
“Do you think she’s gone for good?” he says.
Every electron in my body wants to say no, but I nod. “She was breaking. Falling apart.” I hate, hate the words I’m saying. “She said her body was somewhere else, that she hasn’t been in it this whole time.”
He doesn’t correct me, doesn’t try to explain away the unexplainable. He just listens, bleary and silent.
“Right before I left, she said to look on the eastern face of Tolstadfjellet,” I say. “Do you know where that is?”
“It’s a mountain not far from where you just were,” he says.
“We have to go there. She said to bring you.”
My dad glances at the mountains outside my window. “What are we supposed to do there?”
A wave of cold hits me all over again, and my teeth start chattering. “Find her body, I think.”
He stands and peers out the window, lost in thought. I wonder if he’s looking for her. I know I can’t stop, even after everything.
“Your body temperature was ninety-three when we got you here,” he says finally. “There’s no way you’re trekking out to Tolstadfjellet anytime soon. I’ll go with your uncle.”
It takes a monstrous effort to drag my leaden body upright, but I do it. “If you go without me, I’ll never forgive you.”
He returns to my bedside and pulls my blanket up, tucking it around my shoulders. “Let’s give it a few days and see how you’re feeling.”
“We can change our plane tickets?”
“I’ve already called the airline. I told them I wasn’t sure when we’d be able to leave.”
Fatigue tugs at me like underwater weeds; I tip my head back and shut my eyes. “Okay. Good.”
“Why don’t you try to sleep?” he says, brushing a lock of hair from my forehead and kissing the place it covered. My mother was right: he does smell like home.
“I’m sorry, Dad. I really am.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He smooths my hair one more time and tucks my blanket tighter. “Just sleep. You’re okay, you’re safe, and I’m here.”
My dad has been snoring in his chair for hours now, and even though I ate some soup earlier, my stomach rumbles. It’s silent and lonely in the hospital, and all I want is my mother, even that scary, hollowed-out version of her. It’s been years since she’s taken care of me, and this irrational, instinctive need for her should be gone by now, but it isn’t; it never even faded.
Gingerly easing myself to sitting, I pick up my phone from the bedside table. A string of messages from Iris fills the screen.
Iris: Your yard is completely covered with black and white birds. I can’t even see the ground.
I didn’t know what kind they were so I looked them up.
They’re Arctic terns.
Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.
I hope you’re OK
Write back to me
Your house is covered now too. I’m almost expecting it to fly away like in the Wizard of Oz. Look at this.
In the photo beneath, my house and yard are unrecognizable under the swarm. I wonder if they’re the same birds who took my mother over the mountains all those years ago. Maybe they came to take her back, but they were too late. We were all too late.
Iris: Now they’re all gone. No sign they were ever here. Feels almost like I imagined it.
Text me back, dammit
Oh and also, I got into the Stanford online program. FULL SCHOLARSHIP.
I wanted to tell you in person but I couldn’t wait :)
I’m not moving to Amherst. Not yet anyway.
It takes me several minutes to type a response with my one good hand and tears leaking all down my face.
Me: THAT IS AMAZING!!!!!!! I’m so happy you’re staying.
I have so many things to tell you, I can’t wait to see you again.
I want to pour my heart out to her, but the pain from my elbow is grinding all the way up into my shoulder and jaw, and I also can’t stop crying. Outside the wind wails, and I miss my mother so much it’s nearly dissolving me. I even miss the days before she came back, when anything was possible. When I didn’t know the whole story and its sad ending.
But Iris isn’t leaving me, at least not for another year. Buried deep underneath all the pain, sorrow, and loss, that one tiny fact is a seed. And it’s sprouting.
As I set the phone on the table, I notice a folded square of white paper. The machine counting my pulse chirps and stutters as I grip the page in my teeth and pull the folds open with my good hand. But it’s not my mother’s writing, and my elation plummets. This cursive is immaculate and old-fashioned, marching in neat lines across stationery branded with the words HOTEL LUND at the top.