Free Until I Find You by John Irving

north.
    Given all their tattoo paraphernalia, they had a lot of luggage. Upon their arrival anywhere, they never looked as if they were visiting for a short time. At the Hotel Bristol, the front-desk clerk must have thought they’d come for an extended stay.
    “Not your most expensive room,” Alice informed the clerk, “but something nice—not too claustrophobic.”
    They would be needing a hand with their bags, the clerk was smart enough to observe; he called for a bellboy and gave Jack a friendly handshake, but the handshake hurt the boy’s fingers. Jack had never met a Norwegian before.
    The Bristol’s lobby was not so grand as the Grand’s. Jack hoped he wouldn’t have to get used to it. It didn’t matter to him that the organ was an old one; for all he cared, the stupid organ could have had two hundred and two stops.
    So far, Jack and his mom were indebted to three tattooers, two organists, a small soldier, and a tattooed accountant. In whose debt would they be next ? the boy wondered, as they followed the bellboy and their luggage down a dark, carpeted hall.
    Their hotel room at the Bristol was small and airless. When they checked in, it was already dark outside—it almost always was—and the view from their room was of another building. (There were some dimly lit rooms with their curtains closed, which spoke to Alice of dull, silent lives—not the life she had once imagined with William, anyway.)
    They’d not eaten since their last breakfast at the Grand. The bellboy told them that the Bristol’s restaurant was still serving, but he urged them not to dally. Jack’s mother had forewarned her son that the restaurant was no doubt expensive and they should order sparingly.
    Jack didn’t much care for the bellboy’s suggestions. “You must try the cloudberries,” he said, “and of course the reindeer tongue.”
    “Have the salmon, Jack,” his mom said, after the bellboy had gone. “I’ll split it with you.”
    That was when the boy began to cry—not because his fingers still throbbed from the front-desk clerk’s handshake, or because he was hungry and tired and sick of hotel rooms. It wasn’t even because of that winter darkness special to Scandinavia—the absence of light, which must compel more than a few Swedes and Norwegians to jump into a fjord, if it’s possible to find one that’s not frozen. No, it was not the trip but the reason for the trip that made him cry.
    “I don’t care if we find him!” he cried to his mother. “I hope we don’t find him!”
    “If we find him, you’ll care—it’ll mean something,” she said.
    But if they were his father’s abandoned responsibilities, didn’t that mean that his dad had already expressed his disappointment with them both? Hadn’t William rejected Alice and Jack, and wouldn’t finding him mean that he might reject them again ? (Not that the boy, at four, could ever have expressed these thoughts, but this was what he was feeling—this was what he was crying about.)
    At his mother’s insistence, Jack stopped crying so that they could go down to dinner.
    “We’ll share the salmon,” Alice told the waiter.
    “No reindeer tongue,” Jack said, “no cloudberries.”
    Virtually no one else was eating in the restaurant. An elderly couple sat in silence; that they had nothing to say to each other did not necessarily predispose them to wanting a tattoo. A man was alone at a corner table. He looked depressed beyond desperation, a candidate for a fjord.
    “A tattoo can’t save him,” Alice said.
    Then a young couple came into the restaurant. It was the first time Jack saw how his mom was affected by a couple in love; she looked like a surefire fjord-jumper, one who wouldn’t even hesitate.
    He was thin and athletic-looking, with long hair to his shoulders—like a rock star, only better dressed—and his wife or girlfriend couldn’t take her eyes or her hands off him. She was a tall, lanky young woman with a wide smile and beautiful