still see her now at the ironing board amidst clouds of steam, sawing back and forth across curtains, towels, and table runners until they succumbed and became as flat as she desired. For all her effort, though, I have to say she wasn’t much of a housekeeper. Black mold crept along windowpanes, caterpillars of dust slept snug atop picture frames, and the girls’ washing was regularly stuffed into their drawers instead of being folded and laid neatly flat. I figured Maren’s strengths lay in baking bread, which she did every morning, filling the house with mouthwatering smells. She also spent an hour a day barking Norwegian nouns at Gaia.
Why bring Gaia and Coco out here at all? I wondered. There was nothing for them to do beyond the dour realms of the creepy red house: no parks or play areas, no trampoline or dodgy wooden swing in the garden. Just past the trees toward the cliff, men in work clothes and hard hats shouted and drilled all day long.
Granhus was noisy, too, with pipes that groaned anytime you turned on a tap or flushed the toilet, and a strange high-pitched wail that drifted from the bowels of the house. “Old air vents,” Maren said dismissively, but it was loud and sounded very much like the yowl of a cat, or a baby crying. Granhus was bracketed by thick woods inhabited by wolves, bears, and probably witches, and a towering cliff that overlooked the fjord. At night, when the girls were finally asleep, I’d tiptoe outside to look at the silhouetted forest, the shimmering fjord, and the galaxies that jeweled the sky. The woods became conscious with owls, foxes, bats. Moonlight fell on elaborate spiderwebs and glinting demon eyes hiding in the shrubs.
It was at once mesmerizing and slasher-movie sinister.
The wildlife seemed determined to get inside. Mice and spiders roamed so freely that Gaia began to name them, and often the mice wouldn’t even budge when I stumbled upon them in the larder—they’d stare me out until I swiped at them with a broom. Day and night, enormous black birds—crows, or maybe ravens, but on steroids—circled the house, predator-like, as though they were just waiting for the moment when they might swoop down and peck us all to death.
By far the strangest thing was the morning I woke to find muddy hoofprints—like two devil horns—on the floor of my bedroom. They came all the way through the hallway right up to my bed. Actual hoofprints. I touched the mud with my fingertips to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. The prints stopped by the side of my bed, as though a moose had crept into the house at night and then stood over me as I slept.
When Gaia held on to me that night, and as I watched her sleep, I knew it wouldn’t be fair to leave her. The reason she woke screaming every night was clear to me—she was missing her mother in a way that she could barely understand, and a hot, surging undertow of confusion and grief coursed through her so strongly I could almost feel it in my arms.
That night, I held her until morning. And she didn’t scream at all.
8
the river
THEN
Tom wishes he hadn’t agreed to this. The land, and therefore the river, belongs to him, and despite a nerve-shredding visit from a stern surveyor earlier in the week, he is free to build their house as planned. Well, he’s free to build once full planning consent is granted, but the paperwork has been filed, the plans have been drawn, and Clive is drafting contracts for the construction team. In the meantime, he is trying to figure out how to divert the river so that they can build on the section of land that offers the best view of the fjord. Aurelia’s correct—the part of the cliff that noses outward over emerald-green hills and plunging valleys all the way to Ålesund is by far the best spot for their house. Better yet, he won’t have to cut down any more trees if he builds here, as the site is in a clearing—but he will have to sort out the minor problem of the river that winds all the way down the hill and over the cliff into the fjord.
“I can’t do it,” the engineer says. Mr. Ragnar Saltvedt, recommended by the head of the construction team that has agreed in principle to build Basecamp. A big square-shaped man with an acne-scarred face and shaggy brown