I sobbed, only once, with a great gulp of air. He got up, strode over to me, and gathered me in his arms. I could hear his heart pounding when I clung to him. He stroked my back the way you’d stroke a cat.
“You must have wondered,” he went on, “why I clutched at you the way I did. Why I had to have you, why I wanted to move you in just as if we’d known each other for years and years.”
His arms tightened around me. My mind, the rational part of my brain, the part that had studied things like English composition and spherical perspective, began to rebel.
“This can’t be true. You can’t—I can’t know all that.”
“Yes, you can. You do know. You do remember. You’ve got to trust them, that’s all, the memories, the knowledge.”
I began to shiver, suddenly cold to my bones, aching and gasping for breath, just as if the salty water were pulling me under again, closing over my head, pushing me down into the final dark.
“I drowned myself not long after the duel.” I started weeping. “It was the only way I could get free of him.”
“Don’t,” Tor whispered. “Don’t dwell on it. You don’t have to go back to that. We’re together again now, and that’s all that matters.”
He kissed my face, kissed the tears away, held me, stroked my back, until at last I could stop crying. When I fished a tissue out of my skirt pocket, he let me go with a little pat on my shoulder. Everyday reality came into focus again. I blew my nose and tossed the tissue into a wastepaper basket.
“Do you believe me?” Tor said.
“Yes.” I knew I’d made a dangerous confession, though I didn’t know where the danger lay. “Only it’s more than that. I remember things, bits and pieces, visuals, not language or events.”
“If you want to recover really coherent memories, you’ll have to learn to meditate.”
“I don’t want to!” I shocked myself by yelling at him. “I just want to be who I am.”
“Okay. I’m not trying to push anything on you.”
“Oh yeah sure! You bring up a past life. You make me see things. Now everything, my whole life, looks totally different and creepy. You make me remember losing you—” The tears started up again. “Oh god, I hated him! He gloated about it, killing you!”
I covered my face with both hands. When I sobbed aloud, Tor reached for me, but I tried to shove him away. He caught my hands, pulled me close, threw his arms around me before I could twist away.
“Magda! Please! Stop!”
The tears deserted me. “What did you call me?”
“Magda. I’m sorry.”
“I suppose that was my name then.”
He nodded.
“But,” I went on, “that’s not a Danish name, is it?”
“No. It’s Hungarian, I think. From the gypsies, anyway. Like you were.”
“That why you thought I had gypsy blood now.”
“Yes. And then, in our last life, once the war started, all I could think of was the death camps. I was fucking terrified for your sake.”
“The Nazis rounded up gypsies, didn’t they?”
“Oh yes. And we knew about the camps, the men in the resistance. We knew where we’d die if they captured us. I kept worrying about you, what if you’d been born a gypsy again? What if you’d ended up in a camp?”
“I don’t remember anything like that.”
“Good. Don’t try. If it’s true, you don’t want to remember.”
I nodded my agreement. Tor ran his hands through my hair and pushed it back from my face, then kissed the tears on my cheeks.
“I love you,” he said. “You don’t have to say anything back, but I still love you. After all these years.”
I felt torn in half. One half wanted to scream “You’re crazy!” The other half wanted to say “I still love you, too.” Caught in the middle, I said nothing, just stared at him like an idiot.
“Come to bed,” he said. “I’ll make you feel better.”
“No, I don’t want to.” I pulled free of his grasp and took a couple of steps away. “It’s all too strange.”
“Maya!” His voice turned soft. “Please?”
I stared out the window as if the view could show me secrets. Tor came up behind me and laid gentle hands on my waist. He kissed the side of my neck, then pulled me close to lean against him. I started trembling. If I turned around and kissed him, I’d be putting myself in the worse danger of my life. His lovemaking meant death for both of us. I knew it, believed it—until I realized that I was only remembering. In the memory I was looking out of a diamond-paned window through lace curtains, not this clear glass view of a bridge and a city in California. Tor slipped his hands under my top. They slid up to my breasts, stroked them, found my nipples and rubbed them, gently, slowly, until I gasped aloud. He kissed the side of my neck again. I leaned back into his grasp. His hands stroked me, one on my stomach, one on my breast.
“Come to bed?” he whispered. “Please?”
I wanted to say no, to talk things out, to ask him how he could be so sure about that ever so distant past. My body could think of nothing but his body, pressed against me, so close and so desirable.
“All right.” I could barely speak.
He laughed, just softly in victory. He stayed behind me, his arms tight around my waist, and walked me into the bedroom.
Chapter 8
In the morning, the click and hum of the air conditioning turning itself on woke me up. Tor still slept, nestled against my back with one arm over my hip. I listened to him snoring and watched the sun brightening the yellow curtains of the bedroom. Before I’d been thinking of it as his room, but that Sunday I started thinking of it as ours. I wondered if I was sharing his delusions as well as his bed. Not about the sorcery or the bjarki—I’d seen too much evidence that both of those were real. Why couldn’t I have known him in a past life as well? Why would I remember drowning if there weren’t any such thing as past lives? My mother certainly believed in them.
I wanted to talk to my mother. I wanted to call her and hear her voice and ask her if she thought I was crazy or if I’d found the love of my life. But she’d gone far away to a place where they had no telephones, no wireless access. Not even paper mail would reach her unless the abbess approved the letter. Visitors, even daughters, had to make arrangements months in advance—if they could even afford to travel to Bali to start the trek to the nunnery.
You’re a big girl now, I told myself. You can figure it out for yourself. I’d have to. I’d always had to make all my big decisions by myself. My mother had believed in encouraging her children to be independent. That way she could abandon us when we turned eighteen.
Tor woke up, yawned, stretched, and kissed the back of my neck. I turned over to smile at him. He was stubbled and touseled, but I liked the sight of him anyway.
“Good morning,” he said. “But my mouth’s too dry to kiss you.”
I laughed, just because it was such a normal thing to say.
“We should get up,” he went on. “I want to start car shopping today. This is going to be fun.”
We’re not in Denmark anymore, I reminded myself. We might have known each other long ago in Europe, but he was a Californian now, with a California guy’s definition of “fun.”
There are a lot of foreign car dealerships in the East Bay. I swear, Tor dragged me to most of them. I looked at more models of luxury cars than I’d known existed. Salesmen followed us around from car to car and talked the whole time. When we left a sales floor, they handed us brightly colored flyers on expensive paper and all but begged us to come back. By the seventh dealership I couldn’t remember what I’d seen where. And god, the prices! My idea of a solid safe car was a used Volvo. Tor had other ideas.
“I want you to have a really well-engineered car,” he said. “That means top of the line.”
“Some of these models, you can buy a house for that kind of money.”
“Only in places you wouldn’t want to live. Rural Ala
bama, maybe.”
“Look, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. I’m just overwhelmed.” I felt a sudden pang that explained my bad mood. I waffled around the subject in my mind, then decided that I might as well be blunt. “You know, I think I’m getting my period.”
“Oh. We can stop for today. I’ve got all these fact sheets to study, anyway.”
By the time we got home, I had cramps. I hurried to my bathroom for tampons. Once that was taken care of, I curled up on the sofa with my laptop and the print-out of Liv’s email while Tor rummaged around in the kitchen. He came out with a glass of dark beer and set it down on the coffee table in front of me.
“This should help,” he said. “But let me try something else first.”
He sat down next to me and took a felt-tip pen out of his pocket.
“I see you’ve got those jeans already unzipped.” He grinned at me. “Pull up your shirt, okay?”
I set the laptop down and did as he asked. With the pen—water-based ink, he assured me—he drew a rune right at my bikini line. The way he’d placed it, it looked like a little table with bent legs.
“Perthro,” Tor said. “Some scholars call it a dice cup. I’m willing to bet it represents a woman’s legs bent in childbirth. Drawn with the legs pointing down and open like this, it should help you get rid of what you need to.”
He put the pen away, then laid his hand on my stomach right above the rune mark. Maybe it was just the warmth of his hand, but I felt the cramping ease.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s working.”
“Of course.” He took his hand away. “I just charged the rune. Here.” He retrieved the glass of beer and held it out.
“Thanks.” I took it and had a sip. “I’ve logged onto your wireless connection, by the way. I thought I should see if I can locate your uncle online.”
“You can do that?”
“Well, maybe. His last name is Thorlaksson, right?”
“Wrong. It’s Halvarsson, like my father’s last name.”
“Wait. Then how come you’re Thorlaksson?”
He grinned. “It’s the Icelandic way. You take your father’s first name as your last name. So Liv’s Thorlaksdottir and I’m Thorlaksson. My father, Thorlak, was Halvarsson and so is Nils, because they’re half-brothers. If Grandfather had had a daughter, she would have been Halvarsdottir.”
“I get it now.” I glanced at the print-out. “So this friend of Nils’s mother—her father’s name must have been Leif.”
“Right. And her son’s father’s name must have been Arngrimm. Do you really think you can turn them up? I was planning on searching later.”
“Online, you mean?”
“No, of course not! Anyway, I’m going to make dinner first.”
Although Tor believed that he could find his uncle with sorcery, I preferred the Internet. I had good starting points: Nils Halvarsson, banking, New York City. Sure enough, I found a number of limited references, including a nasty blog post from one of his ex-wives—he’d been married several times, judging from what she said. She didn’t post much about the man himself, except that he was a “pig dork who never paid his child support on time even though he was rolling in money.” Maybe that’s why he’d become so good at hiding where he was. Uncle Nils was a lot more web-savvy than his nephew, because all mentions of his current address, phone number, and other such useful information had been blocked on every phone book site I tried.
I did, however, dig up some possible gold on the cached public announcement site of a major New York financial firm. Two years previously, Nils had been forced to take early retirement because of a rare blood disease. The site never gave the disease’s name. According to the write-up, he was seeking treatment in a specialized clinic in California. Although the site never mentioned the exact location, I already knew that he lived in the Bay Area.
A color photo showed the man I’d seen that day at the cafe. He looked perfectly healthy in his expensive three piece suit. Maybe the picture was an old one, I thought. Judging from his comments, his hobby was backpacking and camping in the Catskills and on the Appalachian Trail, an activity that would have kept him in great shape until the illness hit him. Various co-workers and clients had filled up the rest of the page with farewells and regrets. As if his ex-wife’s bitterness wasn’t bad enough, Nils had been a popular man in his specialty field, mortgage-backed securities, which made me mistrust him more than ever.
Because like everyone else in the world I think of my own troubles first, I wondered if Nils suffered from vampirism, but it seemed highly unlikely. When my mother had been dragging me from doctor to doctor in an attempt to find a cure for my genetic disorder, we’d seen several specialists in the field of hematology, because our regular physician’s best guess had been some odd form of anemia. I knew the long scary names of a lot of candidates for the disease behind Nils’ retirement.
Yet, as I thought about it, the man I’d seen had looked as healthy as the photo. Had he been cured? Maybe he’d never really been ill. Why would he pretend to some disease he didn’t have? I was willing to bet that he’d made enough money to retire just on a whim if he wanted to. No one would have thought twice about it. I bookmarked the page to show Tor later and moved on.
Bryndis Leifsdottir was an easier proposition. I found her son, a computer scientist, immediately. He had a Wordpress blog and home page where he’d posted pictures of a white-haired but vigorous-looking woman smiling at her seventieth birthday party. He’d given the captions in both English and a language I assumed to be Icelandic. Most of his posts were in Icelandic, too, but I found plenty of English references on other sites. Apparently he felt he had nothing to hide, because I located him on various phonebooks.
“They live in Daly City,” I told Tor.
“You’re sure it’s them?”
“How many guys named Orvar Arngrimmsson are we going to find in California?”
“Good point. Okay.”
“Maybe you should call him.”
“On the phone?” He looked alarmed. “What about I send Bryndis a note? After the way my grandfather treated her friend, she might not want to hear from anyone in my family.”
“Yeah, you’re right. The note would be better.”
I felt a brief but odd sensation. We were being not watched but listened to, and the eavesdropper meant serious business.
“Tor,” I said. “Someone’s spying on us.”
“You’re sure?”
I paused, tried to be aware, picked up nothing.
“It’s gone now,” I said. “The sensation I felt, I mean, but I really did feel like someone was listening to us.”
“That damned illusionist, I suppose.” Tor got up from the couch. “I’m going downstairs to see what I can see. If you feel the sensation again, yell down the heating vent.”
I never did feel it. When Tor came back upstairs, he told me that he’d picked up no hostile “emanations”, as he called them.
Thanks to Tor’s runework, I felt well enough to go to school on Monday—luckily, because our instructor gave us instructions for mounting our final project, which we needed to finish during the current week. In the last week of school, the class would critique each other’s work, with of course comments by the instructor. I had the awful feeling that my attempt to render the model’s shiny vinyl vest was going to doom me.
Brittany, Cynthia, and I went to our favorite cafe to discuss the coming ordeal by criticism. The vinyl vest was worrying both of them, too. We went over the hand-outs from class while we ate lunch. With dessert, Brittany filled me in about my brother’s progress.
“He’s really trying,” Brittany told me. “He’s going to the group. When we’re alone, he keeps bringing up the war, like he’ll maybe tell me what hurts so bad, but then he draws back.”
“It’s a start,” I said. “He never got that far when I tried to talk to him.”
“Good to know. He says stuff like, ‘if I could only turn off the video in my min
d.’ But then he won’t go any further with it.”
“It’s the war that’s the real problem,” Cynthia put in. “Not the drugs qua drugs.”
“Yeah, I agree,” I said. “That and then Dad dying while Roman was in Iraq. It happened so fast I didn’t have any time to get him home on leave to say goodbye. I had an awful time just trying to call him. I finally got hold of the officer in charge of Ro’s unit, and he moved heaven and earth trying to help me. But it was too late by then.”
“God.” Brittany laid her fork down. “I didn’t know that.”
Cynthia stared at me so sadly that I was afraid she’d cry. I realized that other than Roman, I’d never told anyone about Dad’s death before.
“It was really horrible.” My voice shook from the memories.
“I bet.” Cynthia considered me for a moment. “What did he die of?”
I hated to lie, but I had no choice. Dad had died of the same disease that was going to kill me, and how could I tell my friends the truth about it?
“A heart attack,” I said instead. “He’d never been really well. It was something genetic, the doctor said. A problem with the main arterial valve.”
Both of my friends winced. “What about you?” Cynthia said.
“My mom had strong genes.” I managed to smile. “I’ll be okay.”
“I wondered, because you get so tired.” Brittany picked up her fork again. “You need to make sure you’re getting enough B-complex.”
“I’m taking those vitamins you recommended.”
Brittany gave me a brilliant smile and licked chocolate frosting off her fork. Her practice at times didn’t match her theories, but then, chocolate is one of the major food groups. You can only ask someone to sacrifice so far.
“I haven’t been as tired lately,” I said. “Thanks to quitting that awful job. I really should look for another one. I can’t expect Tor to just support me.”
“Why not?” Cynthia said. “It’s obvious he worships you. And I’m betting that he’s got money to burn, just from the way he acts. He doesn’t walk. He strides everywhere. Head up, lord of all he surveys—that kind of swagger.”