how his chin trembled when he spoke of it, unable to contain it, to process it. A man still staggered by loss. All that grief and love on display, raw as an open wound.
She opens the door. “Hi, Erik,” she says brightly. He suddenly looks embarrassed and she remembers with horror that she’s just been breastfeeding Coco. Her shirt is only halfway buttoned, revealing a deep cleavage but mercifully not the full veined breast, and she hastily fixes herself as Erik darts his eyes away, first to the ground, then to the teenager standing next to him.
“This is my son, Dag,” he says.
Aurelia finishes fastening the rest of her shirt buttons with one hand and extends the other to Dag. He’s a pimpled, black-haired version of his father, maybe seventeen or eighteen years old. Tall, slender, the same pale eyes and bee-stung lips. He offers a smile and a surprisingly firm handshake. “How d-d-do you do?” he stammers shyly.
“Dag is finishing high school,” Erik says, his accent less refined than his son’s—Dag has immersed himself for the last four years in English-speaking TV shows. “I spoke to Tom about this, maybe he didn’t mention it . . .”
He trails off. She cocks her head, trying to recall.
“I’m c-commencing my studies at the S-School of Architecture and Design in Oslo next fall,” Dag says, before sliding his eyes to his father to fill in the rest.
“I had wondered if . . . maybe you and Tom would be OK with Dag volunteering on the site,” Erik says cautiously. “It’s a good idea for a trainee architect to get some experience, you know? Maybe he can help with the build . . .”
Aurelia frowns. She is still foggy-headed, words and meaning melting together. She forgets things often now. Just the other day she could not for the life of her remember what a kettle was called. She’d referred to it as the “silver thingy that boils water,” which made Tom laugh until tears pricked his eyes. At least she can serve some purpose, she thinks, other than producing milk.
“What sort of experience?” she asks. “Oh, and I’m sorry. Where are my manners? Would you both like to come in? I could put the kettle on.”
Kettle, kettle, kettle, she thinks, pounding the word mentally on her mind like the keys of a typewriter etching some gray-matter memory bank. She’ll master sleep deprivation and its brain-numbing effects if it’s the last thing she does. At sundown her mood tends to slide off a cliff, that’s the only problem. No real way to master that, more’s the pity, and then there are her dreams. Or nightmares. The boundary between sleep and wakefulness is frightfully porous.
The men shuffle into the kitchen in their boots and heavy jackets, the sight of them in this unfamiliar setting making for a moment of discomfort. She has brought them inside the bosses’ territory, made them cross a line, and she punctures the unease with bright, rambling chatter that draws a squeal from Coco’s bedroom. Damn. She’s woken up the baby, wrecked the fine work put into getting her to sleep by overenthusiastically greeting these men. They remain standing, shifting from foot to foot as they look over the messy kitchen, the cup of the breast pump still dripping with yellow milk, and Tom appears in the doorway. Coco is in his arms trying to latch on to his nose. He surveys the scene of Erik and the boy and his wife with her shirt buttoned up wrong with perplexity.
“Hello, Erik,” he says.
“Tom,” Erik says, blushing deeply. He begins to inch back to the door, keen to get outside, his natural habitat. Aurelia offers them a seat at the dining table, but her voice is drowned out just then by Coco, who senses her mother and wails loudly for her to come close and hold her.
“What was all that about?” Tom asks once the men have darted out the door. He hands the baby to Aurelia, who holds Coco to her shoulder and rubs her back, kissing her little forehead.
“That was Erik and his son, Dag,” she says. “He wants Dag to shadow you.”
“He wants him to what?”
“Shadow you. Like work experience. He wants to be an architect.”
Tom gives a rueful laugh. She watches as he strides across the kitchen to unhook his overcoat.
“He just wants some tips, Tom. A bit of mentoring, that’s all.”
She reminds him that Erik is newly widowed, points out that Dag looks like a nice boy.