Free The Sunlit Night by Rebecca Dinerstein

asked in a quiet voice, knowing that the answer was no, knowing that his father would hardly have been in flood-fighting condition had the news been broken, but needing to check, all the same.
    “Only Dostoyevsky,” his father said. “Mr. Dobson is too soft to handle a second goodbye. I told Dostoyevsky to get his sourdough at Ilya’s this summer. He looked very upset. I told him that I would read to you while we’re away. I told him not to bother reading to old Ilya.”
    Yasha laughed, not at old Ilya, their fat, friendly competitor of seven years, but at his mother. She was incapable of doing anything, Yasha thought, feeling some relief, and some pity. She was incapable of showing up, even when she needed to for her own sake, even to make her own gross wishes come true.
    “Put that flour in the garbage,” Vassily said. “I’ll get the pump.”
    Vassily and Yasha worked together for an hour. Vassily, sweating, chattered on the subjects of suitcase name tags, a brown dress Yasha’s mother had once worn, airplane drink menus, walking shoes, and a haircut he would get from a man in Kitai-Gorod. Yasha filled three garbage bags with pounds of wet white bread flour. Vassily finished pumping the basement and ushered his son upstairs, with modest shoulder dances and some clapping, for one last Brooklyn night. Yasha, seventeen, wanting to get his mother back but refusing to take her back, wanting distance, wanting the place he was from, wanting a little time, wanting his father to breathe air that had been blown through the sky and not baked, said nothing to stop their journey.
    •    •    •
     
    The next day, Yasha carried Septimos to the fence of Mr. Dobson’s yard, kissed his head, and lowered him into the garden. Around the cat’s neck, a red string was tied with a note that read Call me Sam .
    •    •    •
     
    Olyana Gregoriov placed an international call from Ian’s apartment at 480 Leonard Street. When Daniil picked up, she spoke clearly: “Vassily will soon be in Moscow. When he asks for me, tell him I am in New York, in love. My cousin is on his way to your house with some papers. My youngest cousin. You needn’t spend any time with him. See that Vassily signs immediately. Once he has signed, call this number, and calm him down. I’ve heard he isn’t well.”
    •    •    •
     
    That evening, a new upright piano was delivered to Ian’s apartment. Yasha’s mother christened it with Scriabin. Daniil had fallen asleep reading through the divorce papers that Evgeny had delivered, and the pages fell to the floor as he rolled in bed, dreaming about his brother and a pack of hounds. At the back of a Delta Airbus, Vassily stretched his legs into the aisle, while Yasha looked out the window. Alexa looked for Yasha on the Sunset Terrace at Chelsea Piers. It was prom night.

PART THREE
     
    •    •    •
     

 
     
    To get to the Leknes Artist Colony, I had taken one train from Oslo to Trondheim, another from Trondheim to Bodø, and completed the journey by boat. The boat’s name was Hurtigruten, and it had been commercially crossing fjords since 1893. A man named With had captained its maiden voyage. A man named Nils would fetch me (they used the word fetch a lot, the Norwegians, and never in a canine context) from the Hurtigruten’s landing dock in Stamsund.
    In Stamsund, in a loading area surrounded by small red houses, a man stood beside a brown car, holding a green can of beer and a kitchen rag. Seeing me, he waved his rag in the air, not smiling. I smiled furiously. I was sweating from working my suitcase down the Hurtigruten’s loading ramp. I wheeled it to him over loud pebbles. He popped open the trunk and said, “Nils.”
    I was delighted. Here was a man so blank, so short, so clearly unflustered by these raging mountains, so disinclined to make a new friend—he couldn’t have had less to do with pregnancy, or divorce, or New Jersey. Here was mankind