Free Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida Page A

same thing when my mother left home. Aside from her card catalog and a few of her books, Richard had stored everything in a rented unit in Poughkeepsie. When she hadn’t returned, he stopped paying the bills; her belongings were lost. And now, no trace of her was to be found here, either. She was gone from every corner of the world, every storage unit and bathroom.
    The dogs were waiting for me when I got out of the bathroom, and they followed me to my seat. Eero had cleared the table, leaving the coffee. I tried not to think about how many trips it had taken him to transport everything back to the cupboards, the refrigerator, the sink. He was now in the adjoining room, on his knees, opening and closing drawers. High drawers meant valuable things. Low drawers meant the past.
    “Here are some pictures of her,” he said, returning to the table with a large envelope. “You can keep them.”

    Instead of handing the envelope to me, he placed it on the table. It was as if he didn’t want to be responsible for what I might find, for forcing the photos into my life.
    I picked up the envelope. “Thank you.”
    “You are welcome,” he said. “I am thinking I take you back to where you stay. Tomorrow, you can come here again, if you like. I go to Ivalo in morning, but I am back in afternoon. You can meet Kirsi.”
    I nodded. I was thirsty from the reindeer meat, so, I helped myself to a glass of water, drank it all, and then put on my jacket and followed him out to the Volvo. We passed two cars on the road, one of which winked its lights at Eero. He honked in return.
    “Maybe you see the fires when you are here,” Eero said. “The fires?”
    “The fires,” he said, pointing to the sky. “The north lights.” “I hope so,” I said.
    “We believe they are our ancestors.” “Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say.
    We turned in to the complex of cabins where I was staying. “It was lovely meeting you, finally,” I said. And then, impul-sively, I leaned into him and hugged him. He stiffened with surprise. Perhaps he thought my mother would have spoken ill of him, when the truth was much sadder: she had never
    spoken of him at all.
    I took the photos in my hand and opened the car door. I turned and leaned down before closing it. “See you tomorrow,” I said.

    “Sleep well, my child,” he said.
    As his headlights faded, I walked back to my cabin, repeating his words. My child , my child , my child.

7.
    In my cabin, I sat at the table and opened the envelope. It was fastened with a black string around a red wheel. The wheel showed no sign of age. Eero had not opened this envelope often.
    There were five photos, fewer than I expected. The top one was facedown. My first thought upon turning it over was that Eero had given me the wrong file. The woman looked nothing like the mother I had known.
    But a second look revealed that it was her, younger and less restless—a woman who looked straight into the camera and whose eyes squinted with a smile. In another photo, her front teeth were biting down on her lower lip, as though to keep her from laughing aloud. From her ears hung the gold hoop earrings she had given me.
    She looked the same in all the photos—which is to say, she looked different. Three pictures appeared to have been taken inside Eero’s house. The other two on his porch, in the summer. In one, in color, she was petting a dog. A husky. Her brow was unfurrowed, and she was looking out into the distance, as though a bird or a sound had caught her attention in the moment before the click.

    She seemed more comfortable being observed, being admired, than the mother who raised me. I slid the photos back into the envelope and wound the string around the red wheel so many times that the string’s tail was no longer visible. Seeing the pictures was like spotting a former teacher swimming at a pool, or seeing a cop barking directions from the back of a taxi. Beyond the realm of Richard, Jeremy, and me, my mother