The Tricking of Freya (29 page)

"We're doomed, Freya min. Doomed."

"Then let's turn back."

"Impossible," she declared, after another long silence. You see, the doom
she referred to was not our own, hers and mine, but the world's. Slowly, as
if she were only just learning to speak, she explained it to me. Ulfur was a
sign. The second coming of the Wolf who will swallow the sun as the volva
foresaw. Only Birdie had the power to forestall the end. But she needed instruction. Freyja would tell us what to do. She alone of the gods yet lives. And
Freyja was at Askja. We were stuck in the jeep while the doom of the world
was unfolding! Excitement crept into Birdie's voice again, she brushed a tangle of hair from her eyes, the sand died down, and she was steering us back
onto that rutted wretch of a road, Askja Way. As we drove, the river turned
rougher, foaming and surging through banks of dark lava. We were nearing its
source, the Vatnajokull glacier. Then the road veered sharply west and we left
the river behind us. Now there was nothing between us and Askja, nothing but the Odadahraun: Burnt Land of Evil Deeds, in the old days a desolate
refuge for criminals outlawed to the interior of Iceland, the most expansive
lava flow on the island, training ground for astronauts.

"Astronauts?" I interrupted, and for once she heard me, spared a moment to explain.

"It's true, Freya win! I kid you not. NASA stationed them here in the
Odadahraun to train for the moonwalk in 'sixty-eight. It's the most moonlike spot on the planet."

For a time she was silent, navigating the jeep over the treacherous
mounds of lava just as Saemundur had trained her.

The road to Askja ended in snowdrifts. Not a problem, Birdie declared. We
would ascend the crater on foot. She turned off the jeep calmly, then began
preparing herself. First she belted the salmon pink coat tightly around her
waist, then reached in the back of the jeep and pulled out the animal skins
she'd stolen from the farm. One mink she wrapped around her neck; the
other she slung from her belt. The large one, a sealskin, she draped over her
shoulders like a cloak. Cat fur would be best, she explained. But Freyja will
understand. Everyone has to improvise. We trudged up a long rocky slope.
I carried the water jug and Birdie carried the antler high in the air like a
torch, though we had no need of one: the sun sparkled and the sky was
mocking blue. A fierce cheer. Wind knifed us in the back as we climbed, I
stumbled again and again in my slushy sneakers over the loose rubble. And
still Birdie talked. Her delusions gradually took on a clarity for me. Your
mother, Cousin, believed she was the next volva, a prophet, a seeress, chosen by Freyja herself to deliver to Iceland, to the world, the next fateful
prophecy.

As we reached the rim of the caldera she took my hand. Far below us
down a sheer slope of scree lay a milky green pool. Saemundur had told us
about it: Viti-an Icelandic word for hell-was the crater formed when the
volcano collapsed in on itself a hundred years earlier. Olafur's eruption.

"Greetings, light-mother!" Birdie called out. I shivered with shame though
there was no one to hear or see. And then to my horror she began making her
way down the slope, half-scrambling, half-sliding. The mink fur fastened to
her belt swung wildly. She was halfway down before I could bring myself to follow. This will be it, I told myself. This is why we have come. Birdie would
dunk herself in the steaming waters of Viti and emerge reborn. And then we
could climb back up the scree and down the other side and if we were lucky
and there was enough gas left we'd make our way back through the treacherous Odadahraun to Egilsstadir. Then Reykjavik. Then home to Gimli.

At the bottom of the slope Birdie disrobed. Animal pelts first, then salmon
pink coat. Then wrinkled blouse and pants, bra and underwear, socks and
boots. "Naked as the day I was born," she yelled gleefully, then plunged in,
laughing and splashing. "And they say there's no going back to the womb!"
Around us towered the ugly scraped raw rock of the caldera. Birdie swam out
toward the middle, a pale spot of flesh in milkish water.

She emerged skin steaming and began to dress. No clothes this time, only
the stolen sealskin draped over her shoulders. She was a volva now, sitting on
a rock that jutted over the pool of water, the antler gripped in one hand. She
began chanting herself into trance. A poem of some sort, the words seemed
to rhyme. Her voice was melodious with an undercurrent of urgency. I sat
mute at the water's edge, sucking salty licorice. The words went on and on.
Was she chanting the poem Voluspa? Her own Word Meadow?

I listened for as long as I could, until my entire body shook with cold
and my feet turned numb in the snow. We could die out here. It was the end
of August. The roads to the interior would close soon, that much I knew.
Saemundur had said so. Askja might not see visitors again until next summer. And what would they find? A pile of bones wrapped in mink stoles and
sealskin.

I stood up. Stared Birdie in the eye. She didn't blink, continued chanting. I braced myself against the wind and began scrambling up the scree.

I was found the next day inside Saemundur's sleeping bag in the middle of
Askja Way, lying between the twin ruts of jeep tracks. Not by tourists or scientists but by a search and rescue crew. In the midst of the Odadahraun.
Twelve miles from Askja, they say. I must have walked it, but I don't remember. Honestly. For once, I truly don't.

For my life, I have Saemundur to thank. Askja was his idea. The last
sighting of us had been at the gas station in Egilsstadir. After that, nothing. We should not have been hard to miss in Ulfur's tan jeep, a blond
woman in a pink coat and a teenage girl in a patched jeans jacket whose
photos were plastered on TV and in newspapers across the country. But
there were no sightings, anywhere. Vanished into thin air, the headlines
claimed.

That's when Askja crossed Saemundur's mind. At first Ulfur thought it
preposterous that Birdie and I could travel to Askja by ourselves ... until
Saemundur confessed to the secret driving lessons. Ulfur called the police.
A search crew left from Akureyri, the only other place in Iceland aside from
Reykjavik that could reasonably be called a city. Two sets of two men in
Land Rovers. After waking me, questioning me, feeding me a hard-boiled
egg and a piece of bread, they laid me in the back of one of the vehicles covered in blankets and drove me to Akureyri. I was in shock. The other group continued on to Askja in search of Birdie. You have to find her, I insisted.
Over and over. Please. I felt I'd betrayed her. Abandoned her. If she didn't
survive it would be my fault. And if she did?

At the hospital in Akureyri I was treated for exposure. Many people came
to visit me. Eirikur and Hrefna, our schoolteacher hosts from Brekka. A
woman named Thorunn, who said she was Sigga's niece. Even a television crew. Plus Ulfur and Saemundur. Everyone so sorry for what had
happened to me. Especially the Wolf. But I didn't feel like a victim, I felt
like a criminal again. I pretended to sleep whenever someone entered the
room. Once I opened my eyes and Saemundur was standing above me
with his dark waving hair. Eye-moon-lure. He smiled with his wide mime
grin and I forgot myself and smiled back. I told him I had his jacket. He
said I could keep it. I talked to my mother and Sigga by phone once a
day.

Birdie's mania reached its peak in the hospital in Akureyri. She was
revved so high she nearly expired, her heart beating so fast it almost burst. I
heard two nurses discussing her in the hallway outside my room. Shortly after, the mania collapsed into severe depression and Birdie was transferred
to Klepp, the mental hospital in Reykjavik.

A few days later I was flown from Akureyri to Reykjavik in a tiny plane
I think we flew directly over Askja but I couldn't be sure-and then from
Reykjavik to Winnipeg on the last charter flight of the summer.

Everyone met me at the airport, Mama and Sigga and Stefan. Birdie was
still in Reykjavik. Ulfur was not pressing charges. They were keeping Birdie
at Klepp until she had stabilized enough to travel. Then they would fly her
back to Canada and admit her to the Selkirk Asylum. After that, we didn't
know what would happen to her. At least, no one was telling me. We got
into Stefan's Rambler. I sat in back with Mama. She held my hand and
wept. Everything seemed flat: Winnipeg, the prairie, my life. I don't remember speaking at all. I couldn't look my mother in the eye. I just stared
out the window. I was surprised when Stefan pulled into the train station.

"Aren't we going to Gimli?"

We were not. School was starting in less than a week back in Connecticut, Mama explained. And besides, she added, holding back a
sob, you are never going back to Gimli as long as Birdie is alive.

"That's enough of that, Anna," said Sigga. "Time will tell."

"Time will not tell," my mother answered. "I will tell. I will decide. If you
want to see us, you can come to Connecticut."

At first I was relieved to be back home in Connecticut with Mama. She was
no Birdie, and suddenly I loved her for that. Her moods did not turn on a
dime or shift like lake weather. She did not hate me one moment, then profess to adore me the next. Her love was constant and, now that I had been
returned to her, even more intense. She never blamed me for going off with
Birdie, and for that I was grateful. But she never let me mention Birdie's
name again. As if she could erase her sister completely.

I worried about Birdie constantly. In our monthly phone calls, Sigga assured me Birdie was "recovering nicely" at Selkirk. I couldn't imagine it being
very nice. But what could I do? My mother was true to her word. We never
went back to Gimli while Birdie was alive, which wasn't long. She killed
herself six months after I was flown back from Iceland. On my fourteenth
birthday.

Cousin, I'll tell you what I know about your mother's death, which isn't
much. When Birdie was finally able to talk, to feed and dress herself, the
Selkirk Asylum released her to Sigga's care. Two days later she was found
dead of an overdose in her bedroom at Oddi. That was all my mother would
tell me. It was my fourteenth birthday. My mother insisted that was coincidence, that Birdie no longer knew one day from another. I knew better, I
knew how her mind worked. When I left her side at Viti, when I turned my
back on her world-saving prophecy, when I sent the men to capture hershe put me in the enemy camp. I was no better than the Wolf. Maybe
worse.

If Birdie had lived, would we all have reconciled eventually? I like to
imagine so. That each sister would have forgiven the other. That Birdie
would be cured and understand that I was only trying to save us both. And
our strange little Gimli summers would have resumed again. But I doubt
that. I think the rift would have been permanent. Vague, befuddled Mama
became suddenly sharp and clear on one thing: she would never forgive Birdie for kidnapping me and endangering my life. Even after Birdie died, I
don't believe she ever did.

I had trouble wrapping my mind around death. I dreamt of Birdie constantly, woke weeping. By day I hid behind my veil of long hair and somehow sleepwalked through my first year of high school. Mama never trusted
me again. I tried hard, but it didn't matter. My fateful cartwheel she would
never remember, but my Iceland escapade she could never forget. Suspicion clouded her eyes. She looked at me like I might disappear at any moment. And so I lived up to her expectations. I became a sneaky teenager, an
escape artist. I started hanging around with bad kids. Smoked cigarettes,
then pot. Drank beer under the train trestle. Had sex with a boy while supposedly bowling. Made friends with a small circle of girls. Listened to their
secrets, kept my own.

How did I feel? you ask. As little as possible. Whipped off my homework
in half an hour after dinner and got straight A's. I figured as long as I kept
up my grades and didn't get caught, no one could really complain. And no
one did. I was just one more girl with long straight hair parted in the middle
wearing a patched jeans jacket and rolling joints through the late 1970s. I
didn't stick out. I was invisible, Hidden Folk. I studied French, pushed Icelandic out of my head. Airy-singing words replaced lilting-throaty ones. I
was mistress of the double life; I continued keeping track of my mother's
canes and habitually lied about my whereabouts.

The summer after eleventh grade my mother suggested we go back to
Gimli. Just for a week? Sigga was very old, didn't I want to see her again? I
wouldn't go. It was a way of punishing my mother for not letting me see
Birdie again. And I couldn't bear to show my face in Gimli. All those good
people searching Lake Winnipeg for me while I was cavorting at Thingvellir. My mother, rightly, did not trust me enough to leave me alone, so neither of us went.

I drifted through high school, then on to college in Massachusetts. Yes,
I'm rushing, Cousin. I realize that. But I'm trying to get back to your story, or
rather, my story as it relates to you. And Birdie. And those years in between
relate to nothing. I was a shell. So I'll be brief. I couldn't wait to go away to
college, but once I arrived I was aimless. I studied some (psychology, history, more French), drank my way through semesters, found a new crowd of bad
kids who were good to me.