Stein sees the reason, if not the way
It was a spring evening, pearl-gray and warm, following a gleaming spring day.
Lathir had loved bright, sunny days, but in the evenings she had always craved clouds. It was she who had made Stein notice that a cloudless sunset was nothing worthy of notice, that the sky was at best a monochrome backdrop for the fleeting glory of twilit clouds.
The glory had already drained out of these clouds. The sun was sinking low. Soon he would go up to bed, alone.
Stein had not noticed until he had sat down to write to her father that Easter had fallen on the 20th of April this year. Lathir had first come to Lothere on the 20th of April of the year before, and they had never spent a day apart afterwards.
She had died on the 19th of April. They had thus spent precisely three hundred and sixty-five days together. He had known her in every season. He knew what she loved about every time of year.
He told himself he should be happy to have had the privilege of knowing her so long. He would never be confronted with a shade of light or a star or a season without knowing what Lathir would have thought of it.
But it made the rest of his life seem a dizzying, wearying succession of trips around a wheel. He would live the same year over and over, noticing over and over all the things she had made him see for the first time, pretending it was again the first time, trying to see it all with her eyes.
The glory had gone out of it. This monochrome life did not seem worth living.
“Stein?”
The voice was far too high, too plaintive, too squeaky to have fooled him into believing it was his dead wife. He was not startled, only annoyed at having been interrupted at the weighty business of doing nothing. But his little sister must not know it.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. And then, “Aren’t you supposed to be getting ready for bed?”
Astrid shrugged. “There isn’t anyone to make me.”
That was true.
“What about me?” Stein asked.
“You’re just sitting here.”
That was also true.
“Since you’re just sitting here,” she asked, “do you suppose I could sit in your lap?”
When he did not respond, she cast her eyes down and tried to minimize the audacity of her request by adding, “For just a moment?”
Never had Stein met a person who asked so many hopeful questions while seemingly laboring under such a burden of despair. Perhaps she was too young to have learned to stop asking.
“Of course you may, if you don’t mind ‘just sitting here’ with your brother.”
“I don’t mind,” she said gravely. She pulled herself up onto his chair.
Stein had neither expected nor wanted to have his siblings returned to his house so soon. He had thought he ought to be allowed some time to grieve alone. But when Father Faelan had come down from Raegiming for the funeral, he had stopped at Sir Godefroy’s and brought the children with him.
No one had offered to take them for a while afterwards, and Stein had not dared to ask. But they were quiet children, and he had scarcely seen them since the funeral the day before. He supposed he ought not to complain—even to himself.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Or are you simply bored?”
“No,” she sighed. “I just wanted to ask you a question.”
“What?”
“Are you going to send us somewhere else now?”
“What?” he gasped, startled to think his interior grumbling was so obvious.
“Because every time someone dies, we have to go live someplace else.”
Stein was petrified. He had only thought to send them away for a week or two…
Thinking he was simply confused, Astrid explained, “When Papa died we had to go live with Uncle Harald. And when he died, we had to go live with our brother Harald. And when he died, we had to go live with Finna. And when her husband died, Guthrun had to go live with big Tryggve, and Olaf and I had to go live with you and Lathir. And now Lathir died.”
She had never looked at him once during this tale of anchorless drifting, and afterwards she only stared off at the carvings on the wall. Perhaps she had already learned not to ask the important questions.
“Would you like to stay here?” Stein asked.
“For how long?” she countered.
“Until you are all grown up and ready to get married and have a house of your own.”
She said nothing.
“What’s the matter, honey?” Stein asked gently. “Don’t you like it here?”
“Yes, but how long before I can have a house of my own?”
“I don’t know… eight or ten years. When you’re a young woman.”
She sighed in weariness. “I want a house of my own now.”
Stein passed an arm around her waist and squeezed her. “This is your house now.”
“But what if you die?”
“Then it will be baby Gamle’s house, and you must stay with him to teach him Norse and other useful things.”
“But what if baby Gamle dies too?”
“Then it will be Olaf’s house, and I’m certain he will let you stay with him.”
“But what if Olaf dies too?”
“Then it will be your house, and you may stay in it as long as you like.”
She considered this for a moment. “But if you don’t die, you will still let me and Olaf stay here for eight or ten years?”
“As long as you like.”
“Then I hope you won’t die. We still need someone to take care of us.”
“Such as putting you to bed in the evening?” he said ominously.
To his surprise, she did not protest. “Yes,” she sighed happily. “And to come and check on me before you go to bed, like Mama did.”
“And put the blankets back on you if you kick them off,” Stein said. He had lived more years with their mother than Astrid had.
“And take care of me when I’m sick. And make me something special to eat for my birthday. Nobody did that this year. We were on a ship, and Mama was dead.”
“Astrid, shhh,” Stein whispered.
His fond memories of his mother had been swept aside by the stark realization that his son would have none of his own. Gamle had lain naked and wet and squalling for a few minutes on his mother’s chest before her heart had stopped beating. That was all.
“We shall do all that,” he said painfully. “But you must help me a little, yourself. I must be father and mother to baby Gamle. And to you and Olaf, too.”
“I know.” Astrid patted his hand gently with her soft palm, as her own had surely been patted many times by people who scarcely understood her sorrow. “That’s why I hope you won’t die.”
For their sakes he would have to find a way to go on living. But even the way was not the same without Lathir. Even the evening, even the day.
