Life Among the Terranauts Read online

  “‘Milwaukee,’” the old man read when he flipped the picture over in his hand.

  Her grandmother had taken the train there after landing in New York, Annika told him, chasing some cousin’s cousin’s offer of work. She had met Annika’s grandfather there and fallen in love with the young man; he’d brought her north, where the mines were already starting to close.

  “Milwaukee?” the old man repeated.

  “A city,” Annika explained. “In Wisconsin.”

  “A city. Mistake number two,” Per said.

  Annika didn’t know what mistake number one was. She tried to style the tusse’s hair, but her fingers were too big, the head too delicate. “Tell me more about trolls,” she said.

  “Norwegian trolls are big,” Per said. “Bigger than other trolls, because they can hide in our mountains.” His voice swelled with patriotic enthusiasm for his oversize trolls. He talked about how, tradition had it, light turned them to stone, so many geographical features in Norway were really troll corpses. Trolls were afraid of both church bells and lightning and thus predated two religions. Trolls were older than Jesus, Per bragged, but also older than Thor. Then Per sneezed.

  “I should get to work,” Annika said. “I’m really sorry about the allergies. I wish I knew what it was.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Per said. “Don’t be late.”

  Annika changed into her scrubs but hesitated in the kitchen; she didn’t like to leave the dishes unwashed, as if she expected her guests to do them.

  “Go, go. We won’t steal anything,” Per joked.

  “There’s nothing here you’d want,” Annika said, not liking the appraising way Per looked around and agreed.

  She’d worked in the emergency room for a full decade after nursing school and never thought she’d be back. Diabetes counseling had regular hours, no on-call. The job was easy but demoralizing; she passed out pamphlets all day and later found them wadded up in the trash can down the hall—outside her office but before the main doors. The patients didn’t want to offend her, but they weren’t going to change. Laurium was a small place, and it was hard for Annika to watch people let themselves go. There’d been more hard-eyed men in her office than she could count who said, “If this is what kills me, that’s okay.” She monitored their gait so she could schedule them for foot care, trim the hard nails, sand the calluses, check for sores. After a few years, they’d lose toes anyway, and she’d see them limping into the diner, still ordering pie after their cheeseburgers. State funding for the counseling program had been cut four months ago, a few weeks after Evan moved downstate. She went back to the emergency department, asked her old supervisor about openings. “We only need nights,” he said apologetically.

  The first several hours of tonight’s shift were steady—stitches required for a mishap with a bread knife, a feverish baby, a vomiting teen stinking of booze—but then it quieted, and Annika retreated to the break room. Most of the other staff who worked nights were younger, people without enough seniority to pull better shifts. They shared a camaraderie, but Annika hadn’t made any particular friends. She’d been close with plenty of girls back in school, but they were scattered now to Wisconsin or downstate, or they just had families that kept them busy, jobs that kept them hustling. Annika peeled the foil top off her yogurt container, silently let the break-room conversations wash over and around her. She wondered if this was what it felt like to be Olav and then remembered that in his own country he might be a chatterbox, a sparkplug. He might be someone entirely different.

  A receptionist poked her head into the break room. “You have a visitor,” she said, and Per bounded in.

  “Surprise,” he said.

  Annika kept stirring her yogurt, although it wasn’t the kind that needed to be stirred. It was the same consistency all the way through.

  “I thought I would come see where you work. Is it okay?”

  “Sure, I guess,” Annika said.

  “Also my allergies are better here.” In his arms was a tray of supermarket cookies with a bag of what turned out to be Norwegian candies perched on top. He opened them both on the break-room counter. “Eat, eat,” he urged everyone.

  He wasn’t unkind, Annika thought, just oblivious. She took a cookie. They did the round of introductions, a tour of the building. “I can examine your photocopier,” Per said, and he looked at it gravely. “QuikImage L2940. Very old, very old. No one writes software for these anymore.”

  They finished the tour back in the break room. Annika wanted to check her phone before resuming her shift, but when she opened her locker in front of Per, she winced—she’d forgotten the picture of Evan she’d taped inside, like he was her middle-school boyfriend.

  “Oh-ho,” Per said. “Who is that?”

  “Nobody in particular,” Annika said, although as she pulled her phone out, she noticed that she had a missed call from Evan.

  “Whoever it is called you late,” Per announced, looking nosily down at her screen.

  Annika shrugged. “He calls when he gets bored grading exams.”

  “He told you that?”

  Annika shook her head. “No, he’s very tactful. He tells me he misses me. He doesn’t live here anymore.”

  “Call him back,” Per said.

  “I’m working. I should be working.”

  “Right. I will leave you alone.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. Thank you for coming. It was a nice surprise.”

  “But I really should go. I don’t want my father to wake up and worry.”

  She didn’t tell him how she liked to save her phone calls for evenings home alone, how the silence that had never bothered her before was expanding, filling the house like a gas leak. Evan always greeted her by asking if this was an okay time to talk, if she was alone. “Just me. Only me,” she’d tell him, imagining the trees watching her, her body trapped inside the lit windows like a puppet show. He ended most calls by asking her again to come to Ann Arbor, and she both hoped for and feared the day he’d stop asking.

  The first night of the new year, Evan gone just days before, she’d stood in her clearing under the stars, knee-deep in snow. When her feet had gone numb in her boots, she staggered into the trees. She’d knelt and scooped steadily with her hands, digging through the snow until she felt damp pine needles. Her hand closed around a pine cone and pulled it free. She blew the snow from between the spines, melted it with her fingers. She put the naked pine cone on the porch. Not for luck, she told herself, but for wisdom. Tell me what to do, nisse, she thought. And then: Nisse, how could I leave you?

  The next day Annika woke late to find Per and Olav playing cards on the back porch in a cloud of insect repellent, the bug zapper crackling. They’d carefully put the deck chairs in the middle of the porch, leaving unmolested the ring of pine cones around the edge. Per filled her in on their morning, how they’d driven the rental car along the Brockway Mountain scenic drive and taken a tour of the Copper Harbor Lighthouse. “How’d you like it?” Annika asked, dreading the answer.

  “The mountain drive is not much of a mountain,” he said. Then, relenting: “But if I want to see mountains I can stay in Norway. Lake Superior is very nice. Like the sea.” He slapped at his forearm; a blurt of blood appeared and his cards fanned briefly open. Annika saw Olav look.

  “They must like Norwegian blood,” Per said. “We sit outside because I think I am allergic to your house.” He went inside for more repellent, and Annika sat silently with Olav. She picked up Per’s cards and thought about playing his turn but couldn’t tell what the game was.

  They ate dinner outside, pizza with plenty of beer. Olav stared out into the forest as if the English conversation were only some unnecessary, inscrutable soundtrack to a narrative in the trees. Annika noticed for what felt like the first time in years her mother’s old truck up on blocks in the yard, still there partly because she hadn’t been able to bring herself to get rid of it and partly because of the expense of having it tak
en away on a flatbed. There was other junk in the yard, and rusty shovels and rakes propped against the tar-paper shed. It had all looked routine to her, but now she worried that the story Olav saw was about how her family had had three generations to make the property into something, and this was what they’d ended up with.

  They sat out until they could hear the rising whine of mosquitoes, eddies of bats rustling above the trees. They took refuge inside, and Annika put on coffee. Per opened a new box of tissues and placed it at the ready beside his elbow. Last night’s photo albums were still sitting on the dining-room table along with the trolls. Olav examined another picture, Annika’s exhausted-looking grandmother holding a screaming newborn.

  “She left before the oil,” Per said.

  “Olje,” Olav agreed.

  “No one knew about the oil then.” Per took the photo from his father, sighed, and placed the picture back in the album. Not in the cardboard corners, just facedown on the page as if she were dead. She is, of course, Annika thought. She has been dead for many years.

  “When they found the North Sea oil. Everything changed.”

  “The oil,” Annika echoed dumbly.

  “Money for roads, for tunnels. Money made the mountains go away. You just sit in your car and drive, and when you come to a fjord you drive the car on a ferry and then drive away at the other side. You should come to Norway sometime.”

  Annika noticed that he did not say, You should come stay with me.

  “Money for people. The government would have paid your grandmother just to keep living in her village. Distriktspolitikk, to maintain the rural population. To keep people in the places people want to leave. Like this.”

  “Like this?”

  Olav looked at her, then said something to his son. “Små kommuner,” Per added hastily. “Small towns. Not for everybody. For some, okay, just not for everybody.”

  “Mistake number two?” Annika said.

  “Mistake number one, to leave before the oil,” Per said. “Mistake number two, to come here after the mines.”

  “They weren’t quite over,” Annika said, “not when she came. It wouldn’t have seemed like a mistake.” She heard the disloyalty couched in her defensiveness. Is that what it had been, a mistake?

  “She should have stayed put.”

  “In Milwaukee, or Norway?”

  Per blew his nose, added the tissue to the cluster of damp wads on the table.

  Annika brought a trash can from the kitchen and set it pointedly beside him. “I’d never have been born, then. You realize that, right?”

  Per shook his head. “I am speaking only of income. Standard of living. Nothing personal.”

  Annika took the photo from the album. She held it too tightly, the scalloped edges bending inward.

  “I’m sure Americans don’t talk about this kind of immigrant,” Per said.

  America, then Milwaukee, then Michigan. A bad roll. Snake eyes. Annika’s grandmother had lived in this house until the end, when the only language left had been her mother tongue. She’d kept crying out, asking for things that Annika and her mother could neither understand nor provide. Her mother had cried out the same way; in English, but Annika’s helplessness had been just as great.

  “She was happy here,” Annika said. “She said the house had a nisse. Its very own troll.”

  “Troll is not nisse.”

  “A little household troll. She’s the one who taught me to leave it pine cones.”

  “Ah,” Per said. “The pine cones on the porch?”

  “She said it was traditional.”

  “Nisse is different from troll. And they do not like pine cones. It was tradition to give nisser porridge, with butter. A nisse is good luck, but also very…choosy? There is one old story, a farmer who gave porridge with no butter, he woke up and his milk cow was murdered by the nisse.” Per laughed a little. “Families who had nothing to spare, the nisse just left. Giving pine cones, I think you are lucky the nisse did not get so angry it burned your house.”

  Annika felt herself flush. “If nisse is nisse, what is ‘troll’ in Norwegian?”

  “Troll,” Olav interjected emphatically, rolling the r, and Annika looked at Per.

  “‘Troll’ is troll,” he affirmed. “It came from us.”

  Annika had the night off, but she didn’t tell the cousins. Instead, she got into her car and drove to Houghton, to the duplex Evan had rented on a quiet residential street. There were no pines, just a tidy maple in the front yard. She cut the lights and engine and rolled into the spot where she’d always parked, up on the grass along the road. She wondered what Milwaukee tenement or rented room her grandfather had been living in when her grandparents first met. She imagined peeling wallpaper, grimy light from a single window, a few shirts hanging from pegs. Still, her grandmother had been sure enough of him to try. She’d been sure enough to follow him here. Or desperate enough, a voice added in Annika’s head.

  The lights on Evan’s side of the house were out, but she didn’t know if it was the late hour or if the unit was vacant. There were empty homes throughout the region. A thousand miles of mined-out tunnels unwinding beneath her feet. The cousins had not needed to visit Detroit to see ruins. To witness a bet gone sour.

  “Nursing,” her grandmother had once told her. The woman’s hands were knotted in her lap, her feet bruised-looking and bulging out of her shoes, a result of her diabetes. “It’s a good profession. You can take it anywhere.”

  She’d thought her grandmother had meant as a backup plan, for emergencies. But maybe she’d been saying, Get out. However much you love this place, it isn’t your problem. Unwind the rope from your waist, slide down the cliff face, trust that something better will catch you. Let the forest take the house, let the winter take Laurium. Let the trolls come.

  Annika’s own house was dark, not even a porch light left on for her. This made her feel lonelier, and then it felt infuriating. At the back of the house, her bug zapper was still glowing. She hadn’t meant to let her world get so small and silent. It hadn’t felt small until Evan had entered and left. Until the cousins arrived, two men who traveled all the way from Norway to make their family, their world, bigger. She swept up an armful of the pine cones and began throwing them at the house as hard as she could.

  Olav’s light snapped on, and she saw his silhouette standing in the window. He disappeared, but then another light went on in the stairwell, and then the kitchen, and then Olav was stepping onto the back deck.

  “Sorry I woke you,” Annika said and then threw two more pine cones that landed just below Per’s window.

  Olav watched her and shrugged. “Benadryl,” he said, pointing upstairs. “Per, Benadryl.” He made a pillow with his hands and laid his cheek down.

  The bug zapper crackled furiously. Someday it would short out, Annika thought. Someday this house would burn. It would take the photographs with it, the prayer book, the wedding veil.

  “Zzztttt,” Olav said, like he was conversing with the zapper, the one thing in this country that understood him. Someday he would die, and Per would cry at his funeral, perhaps remember to send Annika an e-mail about it months later.

  “Zzztttt,” Annika replied. Someday she would die. If she could do it over—no. Best not to think of it. If her grandmother could do it over—no. Best not to think of that either.

  Annika jumped onto the low deck of the porch and climbed on a plastic chair. She switched off the zapper, and in the sudden dark she could still see the filament glowing before her, superimposed on the house, the forest, Olav’s face as she turned. In the silence they could hear the wind high above, at the tops of the pines. Something snapped a branch in the forest.

  “Troll,” the old man said, pointing toward the sound, toward the troll-riddled forest she’d thought she loved more than any person. Now she was no longer sure.

  It was very late, but her phone began to ring, programmed to sound like chiming bells. The screen lit up, and the glow showed through he
r pocket. A moth landed lightly there, then fluttered away as she pulled the phone out and saw Evan’s name.

  “Is this an okay time?” he asked. “Are you alone?”

  As if sensing her need for privacy, Olav went into the house, from which there soon came the faint sound of a beer tab popping and the low click and giggle of the television. She filled Evan in on the cousins’ visit, obtuse Per and the mockery of the family artifacts. He talked to her about ash trees, mentioned his kids: school play, concert band. She waited for him to ask her again to come to Ann Arbor. The conversation trickled down awkwardly to weather until her chest was so tight and panicked it squeezed the question out of her: “Is there someone else?”

  “What?”

  “Are you seeing someone else? Is that why you called?”

  “Huh? No. Why?”

  “There’s no one else?”

  “Do you care?”

  “I care.” There was a long silence. With the bug zapper off, Annika could hear a truck drive by in the distance. She thought of the dark road leading out of the forest, the way Per and Olav’s car would crunch down the gravel and leave her. She looked up through the tunnel of trees into the stars and felt like she was standing at the bottom of a drain, already washed away. “Look,” she said. “If I hate it, I can come back here, right?”

  “If you hate it? That’s not really comforting.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Are you saying you want to come here?”

  “Do you still want me to?”

  There was a long pause, and her breath curdled in her lungs before he finally said, “Yes. If you’re sure. If you’re sure about trying.”

  “Then ask me again. Please, ask me again.”

  Inside, Olav was sitting on the couch watching an infomercial, the volume nearly silent. “Okay?” he asked her.

  Annika was grinning despite herself. She left the back door open, and the summer breeze followed her in through the screen. She looked around the house: the rag rug, the strata of linoleum, the family photos, and the ceramic trolls. She felt like she was seeing it clearly for the first time in many years. “Okay,” she announced, and she held up the phone, still smiling.