42 #2
‘That’s… kind,’ I say, standing up in mild shock, shedding the blanket they’d wrapped me in as I take a nervous step back. ‘I’m not sure I need marinat—preparing!’ I correct myself with a slap over my face. ‘Preparing for… uh… I need to talk to El—Jakob.’
‘Oh you can’t talk to him tonight,’ one of the cousins supplies. ‘The family calls this the wedding night.’
‘The wed—’
The word dissolves on a breathless exhale and I’m not entirely sure I haven’t bitten my tongue off.
There’s no air in this giant, kaleidoscopic cone made of hide. I should have known the moment Inga led me into a tent with a ceiling of crossed birch poles, reindeer hides and coloured woven bands that no ordinary night was coming.
I turn towards the low fire burning in the centre of the tent that Sunna had called a lávvu. Smoke slips up through the dark opening overhead, while a copper teapot hisses at the edge of the embers.
My legs turn me around again and I meet the red and blue cloth hanging from one pole – a gákti. My gaze flits from one silver brooch to another that winks from a carved wooden box on a chair below it. The one I found in the cabin’s bedroom drawer a while back.
Inga’s smile vanishes. She puts her cup down and rises slowly, palms open. ‘Okay. Look at me. One thing at a time.’
‘There’s no thing,’ I mumble, clenching my hands. My stomach is churning as I look to my feet that are still tingling from the cold.
Then it appears in my vision – the gákti, folded in Sunna’s hands.
And the room takes another spin around me.
‘The pattern was my mother’s,’ she says.
The panic doesn’t leave, exactly. It only hesitates, confused by grief wearing such a gentle voice.
‘The silver too. It was her mother’s, and her mother’s before that,’ she adds. ‘This was made for Frida.’
Every woman seems to hear the weight of the name. Even Inga goes still. The rush in my veins falters for a second, tripping over the sudden quiet.
‘Who is… Frida?’ I ask quietly.
Sunna’s hand remains on the fabric, her fingers holding it as if calming something that still lives in the seams.
The cousins look at each other, then at Inga. And I suddenly feel as if I’ve failed basic maths.
‘My youngest sister. Jakob’s mother.’
Sunna smooths her palm over the clothes, thumb catching briefly on the embroidered trim. ‘You do not have to wear it but… we would be honoured if you chose to.’
The hush closes in on me. Nothing but the crackle of fire rises from it.
Nearly two years. That’s how long I’ve known Elias. Seven months spent beside him, sharing a bed, a table and pieces of ourselves neither of us had given anyone else.
And I did not even know his mother’s name.
I had only ever pictured him like something made by prison, violence and Arthur Crane’s house of horrors.
Before I can rearrange my face into something less exposed, Inga’s eyes soften with the uncomfortable knowledge that she has just watched a window open in my head and found the room beyond it empty.
She reaches for the fabric and unfolds it carefully, its brightness piling down her arms in a rush of colour.
For a moment, she simply looks at it, thumb brushing over the trim with a fondness that makes my throat tighten.
Then she steps closer and holds it against my front as if measuring where another woman’s history might sit on my shoulders.
‘Aunt Frida was seventeen when Crane came here,’ she says quietly.
Sunna looks away and begins a slow half-circle around the fire, her fingers worrying at the edge of her sleeve as Inga continues.
‘They said he was much older. A rich foreigner. Beautiful, some would argue. But rich enough to make people listen when they should have told him to leave.’ Inga’s mouth twists, but her hands remain gentle on the gákti.
‘She was lovely,’ Sunna murmurs as her eyes take in the dancing flames. ‘Stubborn. Young enough for Arthur to make possession look like devotion. Some men do not fall in love. They acquire.’
Sunna looks at the fabric as Inga presses it down my side and lets me hold it over my chest. It feels too heavy in my hands. But it’s not just the weight of it that pulls me down.
‘He never told me the story,’ I whisper. Saying at least one truth aloud makes me feel a fraction better. But only a very small fraction.
Inga offers another weak smile. ‘Jakob was two when she died. She drowned.’ Her gaze keeps mine captive. ‘When he was little, Frida agreed to let Arthur take him to England for a visit.’ Her brows furrow as she offers the delicate memory a silent breath. ‘He was supposed to bring him back.’
The dark-haired cousin lowers herself onto a wooden chair, sighing. ‘She tried to go after him, but he had money and solicitors. Documents claiming she was unstable. Every letter became evidence against her. Every attempt to reach her son became proof that she was irrational.’
‘She became ill after that.’ Sunna’s gaze fixes on the smoke rising towards the opening overhead. ‘When she left the house that night, we found her coat near the lake in the morning. They found her three days later.’
I swallow the horror forming in my throat.
I don’t ask about the open wound. I feel as if the sky would come down and crush me if I did.
‘He just took him?’ I ask instead. Whenever Elias’ father came up in conversations, it was never with fondness.
‘He used Jakob to try to force her into living with him,’ another cousin puts in. Mee, they call her, but I can’t pronounce her full name. ‘He told her she would only see Jakob if she came to England.’
‘That was my fault,’ Sunna says solemnly.
‘No, mamma…’ Inga rounds a chair and embraces her mother from behind. ‘You knew he wasn’t a good man, and you tried to keep her in a safe circle.’
‘Our family,’ Sunna continues, ‘we searched for ways to bring my sister’s boy back, but men like Arthur have ways, too…’
Several intakes of breath fall into the nothing before Inga repositions her cheek against her mother’s back.
‘Arthur allowed him one summer here when he was ten,’ Sunna says, voice roughening over his name. ‘By then, he had papers, solicitors, everything on his side. We knew if we tried keeping Jakob, Arthur would make sure we never saw him again.’
She takes a deep breath and turns her eyes towards the flames. ‘That summer… Jakob came frightened and curious. But never as a stranger. He was the boy our family had lost.’
‘And he kept coming after he was eighteen,’ Mee adds with a comforting smile, though everyone is still looking at Sunna.
A loaded kind of silence takes over the space. Several heavy heartbeats live within it.
And then Inga unfurls from her mother with a brighter smile. ‘Remember that summer when he stayed longer for the first time?’
Sunna takes a deep breath, and it feels as if it were the room taking it instead.
‘Each summer after that, he stayed a little longer.’ She takes Inga’s hand in hers as they both look at me.
‘My mother said the land recognised him. He built with Anders and the men. Learnt to listen to the lake, to obey the weather. Slept outside when the house felt too full. Frida never got to see him grow into this place, but we did.’
My insides rearrange themselves. All those things he’s been teaching me suddenly feel more than mere lessons.
They are pieces of him handed down by people he loves, by people who loved him enough to give him that.
And maybe this is all Elias knows how to give.
Inga walks over to the trinket box with the silver spilling out and picks out a picture, then brings it over to me.
A girl in her late teens sits on a large boulder, her body turned away while her face looks back towards the camera.
‘Oh.’ The rest of the tent falls out of focus. The photograph is imperfect, but the girl commands every inch of the frame. ‘Is that her?’
Sunna hums warmly in confirmation from the middle of the tent, as history breathes life into the moment.
The picture keeps me enthralled. Because her eyes… they’re the same as Elias’.
And suddenly the sadness that lives on his face has somewhere to belong.
‘Frida never got a chance to wear this,’ Sunna says and touches the gákti. ‘Now it’s something for the woman who would one day love her son enough to bring him fully home.’
The air leaves me quietly, but once it’s gone, it doesn’t return.
‘And for that,’ she whispers, ‘you have our gratitude, Leah. With this, we would like to welcome you to our family.’
I look down at the fabric in my hands. All that colour. All the grief, labour and care woven through generations of hands.
My fingers give a quick shake, but it’s so abrupt that the silver at the edges makes a faint, accusing chime.
This… this is a mother’s absence. A family’s forgiveness and invitation. A place at a fire I haven’t earned.
‘I need a moment,’ I whisper, my voice breaking.
Inga reaches for me, but I’m already handing the gákti over to Mee as carefully as if it might turn to ash in my hands.
Sunna catches her daughter by the wrist. ‘Let her breathe.’
The lávvu tilts around me as I stumble. I make it as far as the hide flap before another blanket lands around my shoulders. I accept it because I know they won’t let me leave without it. No one argues with me further.
Outside, they guide me to a folded reindeer hide beside the bonfire. My body remembers the mountain too clearly for me to welcome the cold against my face.
And I clutch the blankets tight beneath the deep-blue northern sky with my heart trying to claw its way out.