Tom sucks in air, suddenly winded. “Right,” he says. “I’ll be sure to pay you for the rest of your time.”
Erik shakes his head, holds up his hands. “No, no. Please. Just for work we have done.”
“No, no,” Tom says, “I’ll pay you . . .” He can hear himself begin to sound like his father. Money as a defense mechanism. He swallows back the rest of his words.
“Keep in touch,” he says, as Erik climbs back into his van. With a wave, Erik pulls off, driving much too fast.
34
no longer needed
NOW
Can I have a story from the fairy-tale book tonight?” Gaia asked.
I was sitting on the edge of her bed with Coco on my lap, who was sucking greedily at a bottle of warm almond milk. “Which fairy-tale book?” I asked, glancing over at her bookshelf. We’d covered all of Julia Donaldson, Michael Rosen, Judith Kerr, Debi Gliori, some Shakespeare for Kids books. Only the C. S. Lewis box sets remained to be discovered. “Do you mean the one about Narnia?”
She shook her head and pulled back the bedcovers. “It’s on Daddy’s iPad,” she said. “I’ll ask him if we can borrow it.”
I waited as she raced to the living room, then returned with the iPad and flicked expertly to a PDF file.
“There,” she said, handing it to me and hopping back into bed. “I like the one about the elk. Can you read me that one, please?”
I scrolled through the file and found a story called “The Nøkk and the Elk.”
Once upon a time, there was a farmer who forgot to pay the nøkk who lived at the bottom of the lake. The nøkk—whose name was Egil, after the lake—became incensed. He had allowed the farmer to bring his cattle to the lake day after day to drink. He had permitted the farmer’s son to row his boat to the deep parts of his lake, filling bucket after bucket with fat silver fish. And he had often watched as the farmer’s daughter, a beauty with long golden hair, had swum on hot days, often warning her away from the pikes by causing the wind to blow cold, or the reeds to tickle her ankles.
The nøkk was used to receiving payment for use of the lake, and yet the farmer had never left him so much as a winnow.
One summer’s morning, the nøkk awoke to the sound of splashing from above. He swam to the surface and found himself face-to-face with a lamb caught fast in reeds. The lamb was bleating for its mother, and the nøkk could see the farmer trying to make his way to the lamb to save it. Both the nøkk and the farmer knew that he would never make it in time, for the lamb was young and weak, and the water was old and strong.
The nøkk approached the farmer, who fell to his knees in fright, as the nøkken are grotesque.
“I will save your lamb,” the nøkk said. “And I will allow you to continue fishing and feeding your herd from my lake. But in return, you must give me your daughter to wed.”
The farmer agreed, and informed his daughter, who produced a knife and swore to stab herself rather than receive such a fate. The farmer was sad, for he had many mouths to feed.
On the morning of the wedding, the daughter dressed as a bride, only she wore fish eggs instead of pearls, and pond weed instead of ivory lace, and upon her lips she smeared mud from the riverbed and garlanded her head with milfoil. She stepped into the lake until the water lapped at her chin, and it was then that she saw the nøkk. She gave a scream at the nøkk’s appearance, for he had holes where his eyes should be, and his teeth were those of a wild beast.
“Call his name!” her father shouted, for he had learned that a nøkk can be banished by a human voice calling his name, and his daughter was yet alive. But the water reached her lips before the nøkk told her his name, and she drowned.
Despite the farmer’s treachery, the nøkk accepted his sacrifice, and the farmer fed his other children for years to come.
Gaia was silent for a moment. “That’s not the elk story,” she said.
I scanned the story. “Oh, there’s more,” I said. “It’s about how the nøkken sometimes turned into an elk. Is that the one?”
Gaia shook her head. “I’ve never heard that story before. Mumma