dad was trying to kill me. He chased me through the house and then he was going to kill Gaia and Coco so I ran out of Granhus toward the cliff and he pushed me off and I fell into the fjord.
Tom and I discussed divorce and I pleaded with him not to leave and then he offered to make me pancakes and George Clooney was there fixing the radiator???
She’s forgotten writing down most of these dreams. She pores over them now like a scholar deciphering ancient text, encountering the hasty cursive of her own hand as though they’re stories written by someone else. Why would anyone dream such violent, chaotic things? Hormones, she thinks, but still—she always held that dreams originated from reality. If you dreamed about something like divorce, it was because somewhere in the depths of your brain you were contemplating it. She hasn’t been contemplating divorce, at least not in any serious way. But yes, she has felt vulnerable after Coco’s birth. Not just the addition of another child—the physical effects left her vulnerable. The construction of a brand-new home. Somehow, she understands that building their holiday home here in Norway has mirrored the building of a marriage. Their marriage. She’s been surveying the construction of their own relationship, brick by brick, and with each setback she’s felt as though they, too, might be as easily broken.
37
the note
THEN
He wakes at dawn. The space in the bed beside him is empty, but there is nothing unusual about it. He can hear Gaia murmuring next door, presumably chatting to her mother, who has probably spent another night on the floor beside Gaia’s bed in an attempt to get her to sleep through.
Glorious sunlight fingers its way through the heavy curtains, and he sees the tall spines of the trees. Beyond that, clean blue sky. He sits up in bed and glances at his phone. Just after seven. He’s surprised how much better he feels after talking with Aurelia. Yes, they have wandered together through the ruins of their dreams. Yes, the destruction of Basecamp is one of the worst things he has ever faced. But he feels closer to her than ever. Financially, he’s ruined. His business will suffer. And there’s the logistical matter of the cleanup. Glass, metal, and even plastic is scattered all over the site, probably floating in the fjord, too. So much for his painstaking efforts to save the environment. Cheers, Mother Nature. What a payback.
As he sits there in bed, that gorgeous, buttery light dancing across the floorboards, their new house begins to take shape in his head, his ideas gathering texture and color. Quickly he grabs his notebook and pencil and begins to draw: the long right angle of the cliff, then a strange orb thing that sits half in, half out of the rock. Kind of nest-like; yes, a kind of hive. He recalls Aurelia staring up at the cliff from the fjord with her binoculars and noticing the jut of black rock. You could fit a house on there. The concept coheres rapidly: a three-story house partially cantilevered over the fjord, and perhaps the rock itself forming the back walls of the house—ancient, million-year-old Norwegian cliff inside some of the rooms, still patterned with scratch marks from the glacier that formed it. It makes sense—he’s wary of the land beyond Granhus, ruined by the river. But building on the rock—or in it—just might work.
How would he do it? He draws two lines that plunge down through the cliff to the bit that juts out. Then he stares at the drawing. He could hold the house in place with thirty-millimeter steel rods thrust down through the rock—thirty millimeters would be enough to bear the load if he drills deep, and it would also mean that the foundations don’t interfere too much with the landscape . . . The house will have seamless, electrochromatic glass wrapped around the front façade, with the ability to change from clear to frost at the touch of an app, meaning that the house will, for the most part, blend into the rock. Nothing ostentatious, nothing to signal that the landscape has been imposed upon. Locally sourced wood will provide additional cladding and infrastructure—Siberian birch weathers to pewter gray fairly quickly, so he could use that to provide both insulation and camouflage. The house will simply blend into the rock.
This time, this time, he’ll listen to his instinct. He won’t interfere with the land.