get a boat,” Tom had said when they came to view this plot of land. “We’ll take day trips up the fjord. Maybe sail all the way to Ålesund, have high tea, then turn around and head back home for supper.”
Ålesund is where her father spent his childhood and where her grandparents lived. They’re buried there now, along with aunts and uncles and cousins she never met. It’s a charming port town on Norway’s west coast, and she has fond memories as a child walking around the colorful art nouveau quarter.
“Come and see what I’ve found in the shed.”
The sound of Tom’s voice makes her drop the mug she is holding and it shatters across the floor in a dozen pieces. He rushes forward to gather up the pieces with a dustpan before she steps on them in her bare feet.
“Are you all right?” he says, laughing. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
She recovers, smiles, though her heart is racing. She can still feel the burn of her cheek from where dream-Tom slapped her. The crack in her heart.
“I found this massive thing in the shed,” he says, before she can mention the dream. He tips shards of mug into the bin. “Do you want to come and see?”
She raises her eyes to the ceiling. “What about the girls?”
“It’ll only take a minute,” he says.
She slips on her padded coat and a pair of Tom’s wellies and traipses after him out the back door toward the old woodshed at the rear of the house. It’s barely eight in the morning and the forest is carpeted in snow, but it’s unseasonably mild, sunlight picking its way through the towering pine trees all around the house.
“Be very careful,” Tom says as he approaches the door to the shed. He holds out a hand and she wonders for a moment if a wolf or lynx has got trapped inside. No. He’d have locked her in the house with the girls if that were the case, and taken down a shotgun. She watches, nervous and excited, as he digs his mobile phone out of his back pocket, switches on the flashlight, and shines it inside the shed.
She follows after and watches the light as he shines it toward the ceiling.
“There,” he whispers, grinning. “Isn’t that incredible?”
At first she thinks she’s looking at a ceiling lamp, a kind of Frank Gehry–esque ceiling lamp, cone-ish in shape, about the size of a medicine ball and patterned with art deco swirls in peach and mauve. With horror, she realizes what it is, and takes a step back in case its inhabitants wake and come seething out in a frenzy.
“Hornets!” she hisses at Tom, grabbing on to his arm.
“Wasps, most likely,” he whispers back, not taking his eyes off the cone.
“I’ll call pest control,” she says, inching backward, not daring to tear her eyes away from it.
“Shame,” Tom says.
She looks at him as if he’s gone mad, so he explains. “Well, it’s beautiful, isn’t it? A perfect papier-mâché cone made by thousands of tiny creatures.” To her horror, he reaches up to trace it dreamily with his fingertips. “It’s a work of natural art, the texture of papyrus. Like finding something from an ancient world.”
“You won’t be saying that if they sting you,” she says.
Back in the house, she hangs up the phone, relieved that pest control will come imminently to destroy the nest. Tom is still banging on about how they’ve intruded on the wasps’ territory, Anthropocene this, biodiversity that. She’d forgotten how much of Norway feels off-limits to humans. “Haven’t the wasps merely done what we’re attempting to do?” Tom says, lightly but fully serious. “They just created a home for their babies.”
Vile that the nest should take the shape of a womb, she thinks. With a shudder she imagines a baby inside, its head lowered into the cone.
She turns back to the window to drink in the view of the fjord, or rather the bits of blue she can make out through the woodland. She can’t imagine why the previous owners of this place didn’t cut down the trees that obscure such an amazing vista. If just a handful of trees were removed she’d be able to see all the green pleats of the valley crimping on forever and that navy ribbon of fjord stretching to the city.
She tells this to Tom, who frowns. “They’re pretty ancient, those trees,” he says.
“All trees are ancient, Tom. And it’s not like there’s a shortage of trees around here.