Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida Read Free Book Online

before it. Instead, they remained fastened, top to bottom to top to bottom. When I first came upon the stack on the floor, I lifted up the top page only to find the next one pulled up beneath it. I stood on his desk chair and continued lifting, the letters forming an escalator, rising.
    Initially, the letters gave me hope: Dad thought she was still alive. But then I remembered that he had written similar letters to his mother after she was dead.

    I let the papers collapse, each page folding obediently, and stepped down from the chair.

14.
    That March, I got lost while walking in the forest behind our house. I was plotting how I’d live out in the woods, surviving on berries, when Dad found me.
    As we made our way back to the house, I tried to explain to him how I’d loved the thrill of thinking I was lost. He looked at me and nodded. “You’re the way I was when I was young,” he said, “when I traveled constantly and had no home.”
    In his twenties and thirties, Dad had lived in Haiti, the Andes, Canada. He’d written a book, published by a small academic press, about extracts from plants, which some Haitians used to induce trances. At thirty-eight, Dad moved to the Hudson River Valley to take care of his dying mother. To pay the bills, he became a landscape architect.
    “Don’t you miss it?” I said as he led me under trees, over a creek, back home.
    “Miss what?”
    “All the travel. It must be boring being with me and Jeremy all the time.”
    “Being with you guys . . .” he said. “I’ll never leave. You know that, don’t you?”
    I nodded. I had taken the suitcases from his closet and hidden them under my bed.

15.
    On my sixteenth birthday, Virginia took me to a party in the next town. She dared me to lose my virginity that night. “I need to be able to talk to someone about what it’s like,” she said.
    I felt too old to not have had sex. In every other way, I felt thirty. “How much do you dare me?” I said.
    Virginia took a sip of beer instead of answering.
    Two boys came into the kitchen. They asked if we wanted pot, and Virginia said sure, and I declined. I wanted to keep my brain fresh, alive, a note-taking classification machine.
    “Oh my gosh,” I said, looking at one of their Tshirts. “That’s my dad.” At home, we had boxes of these Tshirts my father gave out to his clients. The boy looked down at his shirt. “Your father’s Richard of Richard’s Landscape?”
    I nodded.
    The two boys looked at each other and laughed. I had no idea what was funny, but I felt exiled by their laughter, so I laughed, too. The boy in my father’s shirt turned around, and I understood the joke. On the back, at the end of the list of services provided— SOD , STONE WALLS , TREE AND STUMP REMOVAL —it said BUSH TRIMMING .
    I took a sip of my beer, and then another, longer one. To explain the tears in the corners of my eyes, I made an exaggerated pretense of choking on the beer, on the hilarity of it all.
    It was someone’s idea that we go to the park. Christian, the boy wearing my father’s T-shirt, was leading me by the elbow.

    As we approached the playground, my feet sank, and I collapsed in the sand by the swings. The voices of the others surrounded us, sounding alternately loud and absent, like a stereo with only one speaker working.
    Christian led me to the small merry-go-round. I sat down, and he spun me. I lay on my back and saw the obsidian sky above and heard the quacks of ducks in the distance. Where were the others? Christian came and lay down next to me, and the spinning slowed slightly as my heartbeat quickened. He put his hands on either side of my face and kissed me. His fingers smelled of metal, of other people’s fingers.
    I was wearing a vintage dress with butterflies, and he searched for the zipper. “It’s on the side,” I murmured. But by this time, he’d given up. He lifted up the skirt, and the breeze against my thighs felt almost wet. My hands were flat against the