Until I Find You (10 page)

“Andreas didn’t know anything,” Alice sobbed. When she got control of herself, she added: “If he’d known anything, he would have told me.”

They would be late for church if Alice paused now for breakfast; besides, she said, Jack had eaten enough breakfast for both of them.

Whenever they had their laundry done at the Bristol, it was returned with shirt cardboards; their clothes were folded among the shirt cardboards like sandwiches. Jack watched his mom take one of these stiff white pieces of cardboard and write on it in capital letters with the kind of felt-tipped pen she used to mark her tubes of pigment. The black lettering read:
INGRID MOE.

Alice put the shirt cardboard under her coat and they walked uphill to the Domkirke. The Sunday service had already begun when they arrived. The organ was playing; the choir was singing the opening hymn. If there’d been a procession, they’d missed it. Jack was thinking that the great (or at least
big
) Rolf Karlsen must have been playing the organ, because the organ sounded especially good.

The church was nearly full; they sat in the back pew on the center aisle. The minister who gave the sermon was the lightbulb man. He must have said something about Jack and Alice, because in the middle of his sermon a few anxious faces turned their way with expressions that were both pained and kind.

There was nothing for Jack to do but stare at the ceiling of the cathedral, where he saw a painting that frightened him. A dead man was stepping out of a grave. Jack was sure that Jesus was holding the dead man’s hand, but that made the boy no less afraid of the walking corpse.

Suddenly the minister pointed to the ceiling and read aloud from the Bible in Norwegian. It was strangely comforting to Jack that the parishioners were all staring at the frightening painting with him. (It would be years before Jack understood the illustration or saw the English translation, which was of that moment in John 11, verses 43 and 44, when Jesus brings Lazarus back to life.)

Now when He said these things, He cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!”

And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and his face was wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Loose him, and let him go.”

When the minister cried, “Lazarus,” Jack jumped. Lazarus and Jesus were the only words he’d understood, but at least he knew the dead man’s name; this was strangely comforting, too.

When the service was over, Alice stood in the center aisle beside their pew with the shirt cardboard held to her chest. Upon leaving the church, everyone had to walk by her and the sign saying
INGRID MOE.
A boy about Jack’s age was the acolyte; he led the congregation out, carrying the cross. He passed Alice in the aisle, his eyes cast down. The minister, whom Jack thought of as the lightbulb man, was the last to come up the aisle; normally, he was the first to follow the acolyte, but he had purposely lingered behind.

He stopped beside Alice with a sigh. The lightbulb man’s voice was gentle when he spoke. “Please go home, Mrs. Burns,” the minister said.

If she’d noticed the
Mrs. Burns,
Alice made no attempt to correct him; maybe, on his part, it was not a misunderstanding but another kindness.

The minister put his hand on her wrist, and, shaking his head, said: “God bless you and your son.” Then he left.

Jack concluded that, since even the cleaning lady had blessed him, they were big on God-bless-yous in Norway. Certainly Lazarus, leaving his grave, seemed predisposed to offer a blessing.

Back at the Bristol, Alice sipped her soup. (That was their lunch—just the soup.) But if Alice had lost her enthusiasm for spotting future tattoo clients, Jack thought he saw one. A young girl stared at them from the entrance to the dining room; she had a child’s face on an overlong body, and she refused to let the maître d’ show her to a table. Jack doubted that his mother would tattoo her. Alice had her rules. You had to be a certain age, and this baby-faced girl looked too young to be tattooed.

The instant Alice saw her, she knew it was Ingrid Moe. Alice told the waiter to bring another chair to the table, where the tall, awkward-looking girl reluctantly joined them. She sat on the edge of her chair with her hands on the table, as if the silverware were organ stops and she were preparing to play; her arms and fingers were absurdly long for her age.

“I’m sorry he hurt you. I’m sorry for you that you ever met him,” Alice told the young girl. (Jack assumed his mom meant his dad. Who else could she have meant?)

Ingrid Moe bit her lip and stared at her long fingers. A thick blond braid hung down her perfectly straight back, reaching almost to the base of her spine. When she spoke, her exquisite prettiness was marred by what an obvious strain it was for her to speak; she clenched her teeth together when she talked, as if she were afraid or unable to show her tongue.

Jack thought with a shiver of what an agony it might be for her to kiss someone, or to kiss her. Years later, he imagined his father thinking this upon first meeting her—and Jack felt ashamed.

“I want a tattoo,” Ingrid Moe told Alice. “He said you knew how to do it.” Her speech impediment made her almost impossible to understand, at least in English.

“You’re too young to get a tattoo,” Alice said.

“I wasn’t too young for
him,
” Ingrid replied.

When she said the
him,
she curled back her lips and bared her clenched teeth; the muscles of her neck were tensed, thrusting her lower jaw forward as if she were about to spit. It was tragic that such a beautiful girl could be so instantly transformed; the not-so-simple act of speaking made her ugly.

“I would advise you not to get one,” Alice said.

“If you won’t do it, Trond Halvorsen will,” Ingrid struggled to say. “He’s not very good—he gave William an infection. He gives everyone an infection, I think.”

Perhaps hearing the girl say
William
made Alice flinch—more than the news that he’d been infected by dirty needles or a bad tattooist. But Ingrid Moe misunderstood Alice’s reaction.

“He got over it,” the girl blurted out. “He just needed an antibiotic.”

“I don’t want to tattoo you,” Alice told her.

“I know what I want and where I want it,” Ingrid answered. “It’s on a part of me I don’t want Trond Halvorsen seeing,” she added. The way she contorted her mouth to say the name
Trond Halvorsen
made him sound like a kind of inedible fish. Ingrid spread the long fingers of her right hand on the side of her left breast, near her heart. “Here,” she said. Her hand cupped her small breast, her fingertips reaching to her ribs.

“It will hurt there,” Alice informed her.

“I want it to hurt,” Ingrid replied.

“I suppose it’s a heart you want,” Alice said.

Maybe a broken one, Jack was thinking. He was playing with his silverware—his attention had wandered off again.

Alice shrugged. A broken heart was such a common sailor tattoo that she could have done one with her eyes closed. “I won’t do his name,” she said to Ingrid.

“I don’t want his name,” the girl answered. Just a heart, ripped in two, Jack was thinking. (It was something Ladies’ Man Madsen used to say.)

“One day you’ll meet someone and have to explain everything,” Alice warned Ingrid.

“If I meet someone, he’ll have to know everything about me eventually,” the girl responded.

“How will you pay for it?” Alice asked.

“I’ll tell you where to find him,” the girl said. But Jack wasn’t listening; Ingrid’s speech impediment disturbed the boy. The girl might have said, “I’ll tell you where he wants to go.”

So much for rules. Ingrid Moe was not too young to be tattooed after all. She was no child; she just looked like one. Despite her baby face, even Jack knew that. If he’d had to guess, Jack would have said she was sixteen going on thirty. He didn’t know that a world of older women awaited him.

At midday, the amber light that suffused the hotel room made Ingrid Moe’s pale skin seem more golden than it was. She sat stripped to her waist on one of the twin beds, Alice beside her. Jack sat on the other twin bed, staring at the tall girl’s breasts.

“He’s just a child—I don’t mind if he watches,” was how Ingrid had put it.

“Maybe
I
mind,” Alice said.

“Please, I’d like to have Jack here while you do it,” Ingrid told her. “He’s going to look just like William. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know,” Alice answered.

Possibly Ingrid didn’t mind the boy seeing her because she had no breasts to speak of; even so, Jack couldn’t take his eyes off her. She sat very straight with her long fingers gripping her knees. The blue veins in her forearms stood out against the gold of her skin. Another blue vein, which began at her throat, ran down between her small breasts; that vein seemed to have a pulse in it, as if an animal lived under her skin.

Alice had outlined the whole heart, which touched both the side of Ingrid Moe’s left breast and her rib cage, before Jack got the idea that it was
not
a broken heart—not a heart ripped in two, as he’d thought Ingrid had requested—but an
un
broken one. (Without a mirror, Ingrid couldn’t see the tattoo-in-progress; besides, she kept staring straight at Jack, who was paying more attention to her breasts than to the tattoo.)

Even when Alice did the outlining on Ingrid’s rib cage, the girl sat completely still and didn’t make a sound, although tears flowed freely down her cheeks. Alice ignored Ingrid’s tears, except when they fell on the girl’s left breast; these errant tears she wiped away, as perfunctorily (with a dab of Vaseline on a paper towel) as she wiped away the fine spatter of black ink from the outlining.

It wasn’t until Alice began to shade the heart red that the strangeness of it became apparent. Given the slight contour of Ingrid’s breast, the plump little heart seemed capable of beating. The rise and fall of Ingrid’s breathing gave the tattoo a visible pulse; it looked real enough to bleed. Jack had seen his mother tattoo a heart in a bed of flowers, or frame one with roses, but this heart stood alone. It was smaller than her other hearts, and something else was different about it. The tattoo held the side of Ingrid Moe’s left breast and touched her heart—the way, one day, an infant’s hand would touch her there.

When Alice was finished, she went into the bathroom to wash her hands. Ingrid leaned forward and put her long hands on Jack’s thighs.

“You have your father’s eyes, his mouth,” she whispered, but her speech impediment made a mess of her whisper. (She said “mouth” in such a way that the mangled word rhymed with “roof.”) And while Alice was still in the bathroom, Ingrid leaned farther forward and kissed Jack on the mouth. The boy shivered as though he might faint. Her lips had opened so that her teeth clicked against his. Naturally, he wondered if her speech impediment was contagious.

When Alice came back from the bathroom, she brought her hand mirror with her. She sat beside Jack on the twin bed while they watched Ingrid Moe have her first look at her finished heart. Ingrid took a good, long look at it before she said anything. Jack didn’t really hear what she said, anyway. He’d gone into the bathroom, where he put a gob of toothpaste in his mouth and rinsed it out in the sink.

Maybe Ingrid was saying, “It’s not broken—I said a heart ripped in two.”

“There’s nothing the matter with your heart,” Alice might have said.

“It’s ripped in two!” Ingrid declared. Jack heard that and came out of the bathroom.

“You only think it is,” his mom was saying.

“You didn’t give me what I wanted!” Ingrid blurted out.

“I gave you what you
have,
an actual heart—a small one,” Alice added.

“Fuck you!” Ingrid Moe shouted.

“Not around Jack,” Alice told her.

“I’m not telling you anything,” the girl said. She held the hand mirror close to her tattooed breast. It might not have been the heart she wanted, but she couldn’t stop looking at the tattoo.

Alice got up from the twin bed and went into the bathroom. Before she closed the door, she said: “When you meet someone, Ingrid—and you will—you’ll have a heart he’ll want to put his hand on. Your children will want to touch it, too.”

Alice turned on the water in the sink; she didn’t want Ingrid and Jack to hear her crying. “You didn’t bandage her,” Jack said—to the closed bathroom door.

“
You
bandage her, Jackie,” his mother said over the running water. “I don’t want to touch her.”

Jack put some Vaseline on a piece of gauze about as big as Ingrid Moe’s hand; it completely covered the heart on the side of her breast. He taped the gauze to her skin, being careful not to touch her nipple. Ingrid was sweating slightly and he had a little trouble making the tape stick.

“Have you done this before?” the girl asked.

“Sure,” Jack said.

“No, you haven’t,” she said. “Not on a breast.”

Jack repeated the usual instructions; after all, he was pretty familiar with the routine.

“Just keep it covered for a day,” the boy told Ingrid. She was buttoning up her shirt—she didn’t bother with her skimpy bra. “It will feel like a sunburn.”

“How do you know what it feels like?” the girl asked. When she stood up, she was so tall that Jack barely came to her waist.

“Better put a little moisturizer on it,” he told her.

She bent over him, as if she were going to kiss him again. Jack clamped his lips tight together and held his breath. He must have been trembling, because Ingrid put her big hands on his shoulders and said: “Don’t be afraid—I’m not going to hurt you.” Then, instead of kissing him, she whispered in his ear: “Sibelius.”

“What?”

“Tell your mom he said, ‘Sibelius.’ It’s all he thinks about. I mean going there,” she added.

She opened the door to the hall, just a crack. She peered out as if she had a recent history of being careful about how she left hotel rooms.

“Sibelius?” Jack said, testing the word. (He thought it must be Norwegian.)

“I’m only telling you because of
you,
not her,” Ingrid Moe said. “Tell your mom.”