Life Among the Terranauts Read online

  “You are Annika?” the younger man asked, turning as the screen door flapped shut behind her. “This is the place?”

  “This is it,” she said, stepping down off the front porch.

  “Per,” he said, holding out his hand. Annika shook it, hard enough that he blinked in surprise or discomfort. “Difficult to find, this house.”

  He looked down the dark road at the way he’d come and then up at her house. Without any neighbors to draw shades for, the windows glowed baldly, both welcoming and barren. Per’s gaze moved from the windows to the peeling siding to the flower beds, empty except for weeds, and the handful of cracked, spindly shrubs. Annika thought about explaining how last winter’s heavy snow had bent and broken the branches, about how deer had eaten her flowers and her mother’s flowers and her grandmother’s flowers until Annika had given up. But all she said was “It’s easier to find the place in daylight.”

  She’d meant this as fact, not accusation, but it launched Per into a litany of the day’s delays. Their flight had arrived late, and the rental-car clerk had been rude. They’d lingered too long in Detroit, ogling the ruins, the skyscrapers with sky visible straight through them. They’d stopped to eat at a place recommended on the internet for Coney dogs, the meat sauce dripping on their hands, then eaten more of them at the Coney shop next door, each restaurant founded by a Greek immigrant, brothers who were locked in a family hot-dog rivalry. There had been long toll lines at the Mackinac Bridge crossing into the Upper Peninsula. Past Marquette, the GPS had blinked out, and they’d gotten lost wending their way up the Keweenaw Peninsula.

  “No landmarks,” Per said. “Just trees, trees, trees.”

  “Welcome to the U.P.,” Annika said.

  The glow from the light of the open trunk lit the face of Per’s father, Olav, who merely nodded at her. The two men removed their suitcases and rattled them across the gravel.

  “He doesn’t speak English,” Per explained.

  Inside, the house had distinct geological layers. The original rooms Annika’s grandparents had built featured wide yellow-varnished floorboards and a fireplace rimmed with green tiles; the back of the ground floor had been added later, successive strata of linoleum piled directly over the subfloor so that there was a small step up into the kitchen. There was a working stove from the 1940s, aluminum cabinets from the ’50s, a red rag rug that Annika’s mother had made. There were yellow curtains that Annika had been pulling down and laundering twice a year since she was a child. They framed and brightened the windows about as well as they ever had, so she hadn’t felt the need to replace them. She didn’t neglect the house, though. She’d bought a new refrigerator just last year, when the old green one died. The salesman had tried to talk her into French doors and stainless steel and she’d laughed in his face.

  Olav tipped one of the suitcases flat onto the floor of the dining room and unzipped it.

  “There are bedrooms for you both,” Annika said. “Should I show you where you’ll sleep?”

  Olav ignored her, pulled out a crushed gift bag printed with Norwegian flags, tissue paper sprouting from the top.

  “A hostess present,” Per said.

  Annika lifted the tissue paper, and a half a dozen little brown figures spilled onto the table, cheap ceramic trolls with matted artificial hair and maniacal grins.

  “Norwegians believe in trolls,” Per said. “I mean, not anymore. An old folk thing. Your grandmother, maybe she believed.”

  Annika nodded. “She told me to leave pine cones for the nisse on the back porch so it’d take care of the house.”

  Per looked at her quizzically, and she wondered what had been lost in translation. He had contacted her out of the blue several months earlier, her grandmother’s brother’s son’s first cousin. Something like that. Annika couldn’t get it straight. Per had a passion for genealogy, and she trusted his research. He was planning a trip with his father, he’d explained in e-mails from Oslo. To Minneapolis, Chicago, northern Michigan—all the places that the Kristiansen descendants had ended up. Annika offered to host them for however long they wanted to stay. She wouldn’t pretend Laurium was as exciting as Chicago, she’d written, but there was plenty of room and it would be nice to have the company.

  In the dining-room light, Annika took a better look at her guests, searching for some family resemblance. All three of them were tall, and Per had her thick, unruly blond hair, but that was about it. Olav was solemn-looking and slightly stooped, a broad man eroding with age. Per was pale and beaky, younger than she’d expected, and wearing jeans so slim-fitting that Annika doubted she could stuff more than her ankle down one of the leg holes. He made her feel like a giant, powerful but lumbering in her flannel shirt and sweatpants. She’d never been a beauty, and now on the far side of forty she prided herself more and more on her strength, unambiguous and useful. She could ski for miles, hoist a deer into a tree to be bled. At the hospital where she worked, she could lift the patients from a stretcher to a bed, pull them up to get a look at their backs or buttocks. Her breasts she kept tucked away in sports bras. “Those may give lift, but they can’t give separation,” her mother used to warn her, as if separation were something to which Annika aspired. She didn’t particularly like her body but she was proud of it. She saw no contradiction in this.

  As she held up the trolls, Per pointed out details: The painted leg on the tobi-tre-fot, who supposedly sneaked up behind people and kicked them with its wooden limb. The tusselader carried little chisels and hammers, which Per said they used to chip away at sleeping people’s teeth. The unarmed tusse might whisper in your ear to seed family arguments. The dolls were hideous, but Annika lined them up carefully, like a centerpiece.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You must be tired.”

  Per nodded, stretched theatrically, and translated her words for Olav, who nodded too.

  “I’ll show you where you’ll sleep,” Annika said and swept Olav’s suitcase up off the floor before he could protest. Climbing the narrow staircase, she held the unzipped front panel closed. In her childhood bedroom was a twin bed made up with her old sheets, freshly laundered but ancient, patterned with stars and planets (including discredited Pluto), Saturn’s rings gone fuzzy with wear. Olav said something that Per smirked at but didn’t translate.

  “Nothing fancy,” Annika said apologetically.

  “No, no, this is very much space. In Oslo, this would be a castle.”

  Annika led Per down the hall to the third bedroom. When she was young, the room had been kept nearly empty, a vigil for the other children who never came. Later it filled with flotsam; it became a craft room, an exercise room, a TV room, a sickroom, a junk room. Annika had tidied away the junk, unfolded the foldout couch. Those sheets at least were a plain navy. She told Per where the bathroom was, the clean towels, crept back downstairs to turn off the lights. Upstairs, she shut her bedroom door behind her and listened to the strange sound of someone else in the bathroom, flushing the toilet, running the sink. The shower came on and she thought she should have remembered to warn them how long it sometimes took for the water to turn hot. The first night Evan slept over, she’d woken to him shrieking like a girl, nearly tugging the curtain down from around the claw-foot tub after he’d hopped in without checking the temperature. She’d laughed almost immediately, as soon as she knew he was okay, and he’d joined right in. She’d felt like it had to mean something, how quickly they could laugh with each other. But things hadn’t turned out that way.

  There was a box of Evan’s stuff still in one corner of the master bedroom, things she’d found around the house and kept meaning to mail to him. In her head she’d written and rewritten the note she’d send with them, something lighthearted, like Didn’t mean to steal these! She mentally added two extra exclamation marks, mentally erased them. There was nothing very important in the box—a pair of thick, expensive wool socks, two bandannas, a metal water bottle. They’d gone hiking together one of his last afternoons in Laurium.
At the bottom of the box was a set of photos she’d printed from his going-away party at a bar in Hancock, the guests mostly forestry colleagues from Michigan Tech and a few people from the hospital. He’d taken several photos of the two of them together, his arm held out, their heads squeezed close. He’d asked her to print and send these photos, which at the time she had chosen to interpret as a gesture of seriousness, a desire for their time together to have resulted in tangible objects and for her to know that he felt that way. But the longer she failed to make it to the post office, the more the pictures felt like an inconvenience and then like artifacts from a concluded epoch. What would he want with them now, when all that was over? And what was she still doing with his photo in her work locker?

  She listened until Per’s and Olav’s doors were closed, the pipes gone quiet, and crept out wrapped tightly in a bathrobe. She wasn’t used to guests, especially ones that weren’t sharing her bed, and she hadn’t realized how squirrelly they’d make her feel, tiptoeing down her own hallway, wincing when she dropped her own toothpaste, worrying about what they thought of her house, her refrigerator, her silly space sheets. There was a row of family photographs in the upstairs hallway, and as Annika tiptoed back to her room in the almost dark—a night-light left on in the bathroom—their faces looked shadowed and sinister. The house didn’t feel livelier with the cousins; it felt threatening, full of ways to embarrass her, to make her life look like something other than the one she thought she was living.

  Annika had owned the house and twenty acres of forest since she was twenty-four years old, managing the property taxes on top of her student-loan payments. Her father had left when she was a toddler. When her mother got sick, Annika finished nursing school and left her cramped apartment in Green Bay to come home. Her first night back, she’d stood in the driveway looking up at the same stars Per had admired, trying to figure out how she felt about them. She’d missed their milky brightness, and she’d missed the dark forest that made them possible, but when she thought about all that emptiness, she felt it wrap like a hand over her mouth.

  Her mother had stood on the porch. “It’s good to have you back,” she’d said, tossing the words out into the night like pennies into a fountain, unsure whether the wish would be granted.

  “It’s good to be back,” Annika had told her, choosing in that moment to mean it.

  For over fifteen years now, it had stayed mostly true. She’d accommodated herself to the quiet, learned not to startle at her own reflection in the curtainless windows. In high school, she’d invited boys over for bonfires and ATV rides. Now she liked to walk or ski the property on weekends. She carried binoculars and heels of bread for the birds. She still, every so often, placed a pine cone on the back porch and felt the nisse watching over her.

  Annika had taken the night off work to greet the cousins, but her body still expected some emergency or just the grinding boredom of a slow night at the hospital, and it took her a long time to fall asleep. She woke late the next morning and worried she’d been a poor host, but the cousins were still in bed. Some days she jerked awake worrying that she hadn’t brought her mother her pills or remembered the glass of water her grandmother had wanted. “Vann,” the old woman would demand, “vann,” one of the handful of Norwegian words Annika knew. In waking, she had to float back to herself, remember the year, the generation.

  When Per finally stumbled downstairs, Annika was drinking coffee burned from sitting on the heating plate too long. “Jet lag,” he said, gesturing apologetically to the clock. He had a wad of toilet paper clutched in his fist, his nose red and raw.

  “Are you sick?” Annika asked.

  “I think I am allergic to something,” he said. “You are all out of tissues.”

  Per woke Olav, and Annika drove them to Houghton for lunch. Per insisted on paying but didn’t tip. Maybe Norwegians never tipped? Annika wondered. She sneaked a few dollars onto the table while Per was in the bathroom blowing his nose. They stopped at a drugstore for three boxes of Kleenex and two bottles of Benadryl and then headed for the Quincy Mine and the world’s largest steam hoist.

  “Do you want the full tour or the surface-only?” Annika asked them at the ticket counter.

  Per shrugged but then insisted on paying for the full, brushing the top of his wallet like a fly had landed there. “Please,” he said. “You are hosting. Besides, everything here is so cheap. It’s like nothing. With the exchange rate, the money here is like nothing.”

  The woman at the ticket counter raised an eyebrow, and Annika shrugged apologetically. They watched the video tour of the No. 2 Shaft-Rockhouse, and then a guide took them to the Nordberg steam hoist, which had been powerful enough to pull ten-ton ore skips up a vertical mile. The bottom of the shaft had long since flooded, the guide explained, the groundwater rising and rising. As the tour group entered the mine itself, Per struggled to keep up with the increasingly esoteric commentary. “This was the first copper mine in Michigan to transition from fissure to amygdaloid mining,” the guide announced. Olav waited for the translation and Per puffed out his cheeks in frustration.

  “I don’t even know what that means,” Annika whispered. “Not all the guides are this technical.”

  “You have come here before?” Per asked.

  “Sure. Everyone does. For school field trips or with visiting relatives. This is where we go.”

  “Underground,” Per said. Olav had given up entirely and was staring at the rock walls in silence. Per turned back toward the guide, his head tilted like a dog’s, as if his left ear were the one that might know amygdaloid. He perked up when the guide began to describe Quincy mine tragedies, most recently a local geology professor who had fallen two hundred and twenty-five feet while installing emergency ladders. “I understood that!” he said excitedly to Annika. “He died!”

  An older woman on the tour turned to glare at them. Per began translating for Olav, presumably about the dead professor. Olav remained expressionless, which seemed callous to Annika, although of course what reaction was he supposed to have to some dead stranger?

  Annika wondered idly if Evan had known the professor. Evan wasn’t in the geology department, but Michigan Tech was a small university, the whole region a fistful of small towns between forest and lake. Evan had been at Tech only for the fall semester, working on an ash-tree mortality project during his sabbatical from his permanent job at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He’d been married once, he told her. There were kids, now nine and twelve. His wife had primary custody, but he had the kids every other weekend and some weeknights. “Except this semester, of course, since I’m here.” Evan liked camping and hiking; when the weather turned cold he couldn’t keep up with her on the ski trails but he didn’t fall embarrassingly far behind. He was a big man, and Annika liked the way they felt together, the way he never seemed fragile or outmatched. He said nice things about the family land, the overgrown trails threading through the woods, and he hadn’t made fun of the space-patterned pillowcases that had ended up on her bed during laundry day. But the house was a complication, he allowed, because he needed to return to the U of M at the end of the semester. When he asked her to come with him, she’d started tabulating her own life in her head: Job, house, land. Lake Superior and the constant forest, oceans of blue and green. In winter, white and white and white, trees bristling from the earth like a porcupine’s quills.

  “Ann Arbor’s still Michigan,” he offered.

  Ann Arbor, she thought, was an expensive, stuck-up college town a full nine hours south. It might as well have been another country.

  At the house, Annika cooked dinner, family recipes that Per and Olav were polite about, although she couldn’t really tell how authentic or tasty they found the meal. Per chatted about how happy he was to take this vacation from his work writing software for photocopiers. It was a good job, he said, and it paid for a two-bedroom apartment in a nice Oslo suburb, but still—a bit dull. They needed the second bedroom because his wife was
expecting, he confided. No one knew yet, not even Olav, because Per’s wife wouldn’t let him tell people. “But I can tell you,” he said. “You will tell no one.” Annika made a toast to this next generation of Kristiansens, then glanced guiltily at Olav as the older man dropped his fork and lifted his beer to join in whatever they were celebrating.

  After the dishes were cleared, she retrieved a single box from the basement, hoping to create a show-and-tell activity Olav could participate in. She unpacked it slowly: a pocket watch, a prayer book in Norwegian, a hand-tatted wedding veil. “Did she make this? My grandmother?” Annika asked. “Before she came here?”

  Olav laughed when Per translated. “He says he is not that old,” Per said. “It was from your grandmother’s grandmother. No one makes lace for very many years.”

  Annika’s grandmother had described Norway as a land so vertiginous and un-arable that children played with ropes tied around their waists, the other ends wrapped around the boulders that made the plowing crooked. If they slipped over the cliff edges, they could be hauled back up, their waists rope-burned and their sides scraped, but alive enough to die slowly of hunger. Still, the siblings had thought she was a madwoman for leaving, for surrendering what she had on mere rumors of better. A ship passage like a dice roll, a lady gambler. Already, in that way, an American.

  “Perhaps her family thought a tusse put the idea in her head,” Annika said, picking up the little gift troll. “Goaded her into leaving.”

  “Perhaps,” Per said. “In old times, tusse took the blame for many bad decisions.”

  Annika wasn’t sure she’d understood him but didn’t ask him to repeat himself. Olav took a photo from one of the albums, removing it from the black cardboard corners: Annika’s grandmother as a young woman, with round cheeks, careful hair, a dotted dress.