A Blessed Child Read Free Page A

tourists between the mainland and the island. Then it would take two and a half hours or even longer. For Erika, it was like a small eternity. Going to Hammarsö was something she did every summer. She sat beside Laura in the backseat and followed their route on the road signs, saying: Now there are only fifty kilometers to go, now only forty, now we’ve passed the halfway oak and now there are only twenty kilometers to go. Rosa! Rosa! Are we nearly there? Can’t you speed up?
    “No!” said Rosa. “Do you want us to crash, for the the police to come and pull bits of our bodies from the wreckage?”
    Erika looked at Laura, who was to be her sister for a whole month, and laughed.
    A kilometer is like a minute.
    Ten kilometers are like ten minutes.
    Rosa said the girls could watch for the kilometer signs and work out for themselves how far they had left to go without whining.
     
    But it wasn’t just waiting in traffic or even the prospect of seeing Isak again that made the ride from the airport seem like a small eternity. It was anticipating the white limestone house and her room with the floral wallpaper. It was her half sister Laura and eventually Molly, too. And it was Ragnar.
    It was Hammarsö itself, Erika’s place on Earth, with its flat heath, gnarled trees, knobbly fossils, and vivid red poppies. It was the silver-gray sea and the rock where the girls sunbathed and listened to Radio Luxemburg or her friend Marion’s special tapes. It was the scent of everything as the ultimate confirmation of now! now it’s summer!
    The summers in Hammarsö were the real eternity.
    The drive was a small eternity on the way to the real one.

Chapter 7
    Erika drove slowly, talking out loud to herself. Talking out loud to herself was something she had learned from her driving instructor, Leif.
    Erika knew she should have failed when she took her driver’s test nine and a half years before (the day before her thirtieth birthday), and having somehow failed to fail she should have refused to accept her driver’s license, simply giving it back to the authorities.
    “You’re not relating naturally to others on the road,” Leif would say.
    “I don’t relate naturally to anybody,” said Erika.
    “Neither do I,” admitted Leif. “But if you’re going to drive a car, you have to relate naturally to others on the road. That’s just the way it is.”
    Erika had never really intended to take the test. But when she and Sundt got divorced, she decided to learn to drive, and that was how she met Leif. He was a white-haired, quiet, melancholic man who opened his mouth only to pronounce sarcastic statements of the obvious, usually related to vehicular traffic. Erika drove around Oslo in Leif’s company for a number of months; she paid for a hundred and thirty-four driving lessons.
    “The older you are, the more lessons it takes,” Leif said.
    The newly divorced can latch on to the strangest people, and Erika latched on to Leif. She viewed him as a wise man, a mentor, if a bit gnomic. Every time he said something, one of those sarcastic statements of the obvious,
a stop sign means stop,
for instance, she would interpret it at a more profound level.
    Laura, Isak, and even Molly had thought Erika was spending too much time with Leif. Nevertheless, in that time she did learn to talk out loud to herself when she was behind the steering wheel. This prevented her concentration from lapsing so she could stay focused on the act of driving, if not quite the direction of her trip. It was like this:
    Now I’m at the roundabout.
    Now I’m stopping at this red light.
    Now I’m joining the motorway.
    Now I’m keeping my eyes firmly on the middle of the road.
    It was winter; she was on her way to Hammarsö she was driving. She passed a roadside café. She didn’t want to stop yet. Although she was hungry, she didn’t want to stop yet.

Chapter 8
    Whenever Erika spoke to Isak on the telephone, and that was often, this was how she visualized