Well, if you take your first idea of what a house is, then toss it into a blender with some fairy dust and a handful of crazy, you get this. He even calls it ‘Aurelia’s Nest.’”
“That’s unfortunate,” I said, my thoughts cartwheeling to “the Eagle’s Nest,” Hitler’s gaffe in the Bavarian Alps, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, where Jack Nicholson gets lobotomized. Evidently Tom had overlooked the less salubrious connotations of the word nest.
“Or perhaps he knew very well what he was doing when he called it that.”
Maren laughed, and I realized I’d said this aloud. I widened my eyes and pressed a finger to my lips, telling her to keep quiet in case she woke Tom. Or the girls. She nodded, chastised, and fell silent.
“It seems . . . dangerous,” I observed in a low voice.
“It’s more than dangerous,” she said, her blonde eyebrows raised. “Building a family home right where his wife died? Right after the first house was destroyed?” She glanced again at the model of Basecamp. “Many people said the storm was a punishment.”
“A punishment?”
She turned solemn as a winter morning in Glasgow. “Mother Nature wasn’t happy that he built Basecamp where he did. She destroyed that house. He should have taken the hint. But he didn’t, and Aurelia died. But even now he’s pressing on, too stubborn to see . . .” She shook her head and gave a deep sob.
“You mean, Aurelia’s death was a punishment for the house?” I asked carefully. Surely I hadn’t heard her correctly?
“Everything in nature is connected,” she said with a sigh. “He stopped up that river to build Basecamp. So foolish. It’s not just one river, it’s the whole forest. The whole region. Countless animals and plants . . . the fjord . . .”
She moved to place the scale model back where she’d found it, and my eyes fell on a photograph of Tom, Aurelia, and the two girls. It was a happy photograph, placed on his desk. He looked very different in that photograph from the man who had thundered at Maren.
“Tom doesn’t realize what he’s done,” she said gravely as she followed my gaze to the photograph.
“Maren,” I said carefully, “I need to ask you something.”
She swiveled her eyes to me.
“You said Tom was manipulated into coming back here. Who manipulated him?”
But she’d already turned back to the model of the first house, and when she spoke it seemed as though she’d forgotten I was there and was addressing someone else. “It is madness, all of it. Who brings children out to a place like this, with the cliff and the forest and the beasts? Who builds a house right where their wife died just a few months earlier?”
14
she who is missed most
NOW
Gaia sits up in bed. It’s dark outside. Slowly she works out that she’s in her room. There’s a figure lying beside her on the floor, huddled beneath a blanket. A long strand of hair spills out from the top of the blanket across the floorboards. Gaia catches her breath. It’s Mumma. Her heart glows in her chest. You came back! She knew she would, eventually. Mumma always comes back. Mumma doesn’t leave, not forever. Mumma is always there because she loves Gaia with all her heart and she is back now for good.
She taps Mumma on the shoulder. “Mumma? Wake up. Wake up!” Mumma doesn’t stir. She must be really tired. Maybe Gaia should just let her be. Mumma is often tired.
Gaia sits for a few moments in her bed, her hands playing with each other in excitement. The objects in the room are a smudge because her glasses are on the nightstand, but she doesn’t mind because Mumma is here and she wants to scream with excitement. She has so many drawings she wants to show her. If she’d known Mumma was coming today she would have painted a big banner saying MUMMA WE MISSED YOU WELCOME HOME with rainbows and Viking ships, because she remembers how excited Mumma got that time they went to the Viking museum in Oslo. Well, she’d thought Mumma was actually sad, because she cried, but later she explained that she was just so overcome at the sight of a real Viking ship that she cried, because sometimes grown-ups cry instead of dancing when they’re excited. Gaia hasn’t danced in a long time, but she feels like it now. Her body is beginning to bounce in the bed and her arms want to move,