Карин Фоссум - Hell Fire

After Shiba had lifted her leg a few times, he turned around and walked back to the house. The dog immediately padded into the kitchen and lay down in the corner.

“Those clay layers you were talking about,” Eddie said. “In our blood vessels. That can come loose and go to your heart. Do you think I’ve got a lot of them? I mean, I am fat.”

Mass shook her head. “No, let’s just hope that everything’s OK. It’s a good thing you don’t smoke. And you don’t drink either, so you’re actually very healthy.”

Eddie leaned his elbows on the table. “And what about you?” he asked. “Have you got any of those layers? Can you see them on x-rays?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Maybe. Why do you ask?”

He gave it some thought. “Well, because if you did, we could do something about it. There are medicines that thin the blood so that it flows better. You know, you need to keep the system moving!”

His mother looked at him and smiled. “Why give it so much thought? Are you scared of dying?” She pulled out a chair and sat down at the table, taking his big hand in hers and patting it gently; it was white and soft, the nails bitten to the quick.

“I want to die long before you,” Eddie said, “because I don’t want to be left on my own.”

Mass looked pensive. “Eddie,” she said, “I’m fifty-six. And you’re twenty-one. You can work out for yourself what that means.”

His heavy head sank and he looked despondent. Mass, who was christened Thomasine, a name she couldn’t stand and had never used, wanted to comfort him.

“Don’t think about it. It won’t happen for a long time yet. We’re both fit and healthy, and we’ll live for many more years. So we should just enjoy every single day of the time we have left.”

“What stops first? Your heart or your breathing?” Eddie asked.

“Depends,” Mass said. “But I don’t really know about things like that. Come on, let’s go into the living room; Tracker Tore is about to start.”

The light from the screen flickered across Eddie’s face. The blue and white shadows illuminated his heavy features and brought his face to life. He chewed the cinnamon rolls slowly, sipping from his can of Cherry Coke every so often. He loved the sweet, sickly, prickly cold feeling on his tongue.

His mother sat beside him with her feet on a footstool and a blanket over her knees. She glanced over at her son from time to time and wondered what would become of him. Eddie was special; he didn’t fit in with society. He had once gotten a job sorting mail but gave up after only fourteen days. He had struggled to get there on time in the morning and found it hard being around strangers. There was no doubt that he had talents. He had once built a church with sugar lumps and confectioners’ sugar, which took him several weeks. It even had a spire. He was brilliant at doing crosswords and his memory was impressive. It was often he who had to remind her of things. When they sat together in the evenings, watching quiz shows on TV, he knew more than she did even though she was thirty years older. Presumably he had gathered a lot of knowledge from the Internet, which she couldn’t make head or tail of, whereas he could sit in front of the computer for hours at a time. If she made the mistake of promising him something, he would never forget about it and would not stop nagging until she had done what she promised. Like when he started to beg for a puppy eight years ago. She had said, let’s see, but not right now. Well, when then? he asked. In the summer maybe, I don’t know, she said wearily. But is it more than a year? He pestered her like a horsefly. Eddie, she said, let’s not talk about it anymore. But when can we talk about it, then? he persisted. Can we talk about it this evening? Or tomorrow perhaps? They had the same conversation at regular intervals. She had to give in eventually. And so Shiba arrived in the house, a soft champagne-colored puppy who chewed everything she could find: wires, several pairs of shoes, the book spines on the bottom shelf. An old thirteen-volume encyclopedia, bound in red leather, had been stripped of its spines. But Eddie soon grew bored with the dog, and she knew for a fact that he taunted Shiba when she wasn’t looking. But he still did some duties. He had to take her out for a walk three times a day. They were short walks because both he and Shiba were overweight and slow.

She looked sideways at him now. There was something else that Eddie had begged for. He had wanted them to go to Copenhagen to look for his father’s grave, and she had given her usual reply: we’ll see. To be honest, she didn’t even know where he was buried.

Eddie reached out for the last cinnamon roll; it was fresh and soft. He was glued to the screen, where Tore had boarded a plane for Lahore with a dark-skinned teenager named Susann. They were going to look for the girl’s mother.

Every time Eddie saw someone, either on the road or at the store — or simply on television — his imagination ran wild. He could see that they had their own smell and taste, and he could feel their resonance, like an instrument. Or he would match them to an animal or a fruit or vegetable. He had always loved to play this game. He made a snap decision and never changed his mind. Their neighbor Ansgar, for example, was a sneaky hyena. Knut Nærum, whom he saw on television every Friday, was a chirpy little meerkat. And the old lady in the house next door, Irene, who had Parkinson’s, reminded him of jelly-like lutefisk because of the way she wobbled. His mom sounded like an alto saxophone, and he himself was a beautiful, sonorous bassoon. Almost no one could master the bassoon. But Mass, who was also a woodwind, always managed to get him to make a sound.

But now, Tracker Tore.Tore was a turnip. Or a half-baked baguette.

“Do you think they’ll find Susann’s mother?” he asked, bright with anticipation.

“Of course,” Mass replied, “otherwise they wouldn’t have made the program. But what’s the point, really? She’s got such lovely parents in Norway. I’m sure she’s much better off here than she would have been in Pakistan.”

Eddie didn’t agree at all. “But she’s not the same color as us. Of course she wants to see where she comes from; that kind of thing is important.”

“But things will just get more complicated with two sets of parents,” Mass continued. “I mean, who should she listen to? Maybe they won’t even want to see her; after all, there must be a reason she was adopted.”

“Maybe they didn’t want to give her away,” Eddie said. “Maybe she was taken from them.”

“In that case, her mother isn’t a good mother,” Mass retorted. “If she let them take away her child. And there’s no reason to get in touch with a bad mother.”

The plane landed in Lahore, and Tore and Susann and a television crew found a taxi to take them through the hot streets. The sheer volume of traffic and noise and people and heat took their breath away. It seemed inconceivable to Eddie and Mass that they would be able to find Susann’s mother at all in the chaos. But Tracker Tore knew what he was doing; he’d done his research. Susann’s parents in Norway had given him the address of the children’s home where she had been left sixteen years ago. When she was but a baby with no name.

They were met at the children’s home by a friendly woman with a scarf over her head. She showed them into an office, where she opened a large book and started to read in good English.

“ ‘Seventeenth of August, 1989,’ ” she read. “ ‘A woman came in with a baby wrapped in a blanket. The baby had more or less just been born, and she didn’t even have a name, so we christened her Adelina. The woman had had four children and given them all up for adoption. We know nothing about the father.’ ”