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

waiting. “You were supposed to be home at nine. Were you at your girlfriend’s house?”
    He raised his briefcase like he was going to use it to hit me. Then he placed it down on the ground. It toppled over. “Who are you?”
    “You don’t remember?”�
    “No,” he said, shaking his head. “What’s going on?”� I asked him if he knew where my mom was.�
    “Your mom?”�
    “Olivia,” Virginia interjected.�
    “Jesus Christ. Is that what this is about? I haven’t seen that �
    crazy lady for three or four years.” “Don’t call her crazy,” I said.
    “You swear you haven’t seen her?” Virginia said.
    “Boy Scout’s honor,” Mr. Wells said, and started laughing. I almost spat at him.

    Virginia and I looked at each other, not knowing whether to continue pressing him for details, for proof, but his laughter defeated us.
    We headed back to New York that night. Going in this direction, we hardly said a word.

17.
    The year my mother disappeared, I began following missing persons cases. It had surprised me that when families found the bodies of their loved ones, they told news reporters they finally felt a sense of closure, of relief. But after Texas, I began to see how this could be true. If someone gave me a pile of bones and said they were my mother’s, I decided I would cry for a day and move on.
    Other girls in my class dated and went to school dances and proms, but I wasn’t interested. When I started college, I lied and told people I was in a long-distance relationship. I almost began to believe I was involved with someone. He lived in San Antonio, I told my new friends, and when I pictured him, he was the young man with curly black hair who lived in the house where my mother did not.

18.
    On the fourth anniversary of my mother’s departure, Dad and I had a funeral for her, behind my vegetable garden. We were

    the only ones invited, the only attendees. We had no proof she was dead, but we needed to feel that she was. We filled a soup terrine she had loved—a wedding present—with some of her favorite possessions: the earrings she’d given me, a golf ball she had found in the woods (she thought it brought her luck), a red silk blouse with three buttons missing, and a matchbook collection she’d started when she’d visited Lisbon in her twenties.
    “So long,” I said. I was on my knees, patting snow over the soup terrine, like I was firming the foundation for a snowman. “Fare thee well.”

    Family Portrait Above Altar � ‌

1.
    I woke at six-thirty and checked the hotel bathroom. I was surprised to see Kari was still on the floor, on his stomach. His feet were sticking out beneath the sheet, his heels dry and deeply cracked.
    I turned on the faucet, muffling it with a hand towel, which I used to rinse off. It was what my mother used to call a whore’s bath, and this seemed appropriate. After dressing in the same clothes I’d worn the night before, I slowly zipped my suitcase, joining only a few teeth at a time in an attempt to stay quiet. Kari’s pants, shirt, and sad sweater were nested together on the floor. I opened the door to the room gently and closed it silently. There was only the click as it locked behind me.
    I picked up my passport at reception. The woman at the front desk didn’t ask how my stay was, and for this I was thank-ful. Outside, snow fell like baby powder. I pulled my suitcase behind me and felt comforted by the steady sound of its one good wheel bumping over cobblestones.
    The train station was three blocks away. A cab stopped—I thought, for me, a likely suspect with the suitcase. But no: a man and a woman in their early twenties tumbled out of the backseat, holding beer bottles. They left their bottles on the street, propping them carefully upright, and disappeared into a

    doorway. Seconds after they closed the door behind them, one beer bottle fell over with a clamor. It rolled past four parked cars, gathered speed, and continued until it