Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name Read Online Free Page B

the music, which was not good.
    Within four months, Pankaj and I moved in together. After two months of living together, we were in love. Despair was a thing of the past, discarded like a scarf through the window of a moving car.
    —
    After we’d been together three years, Pankaj got a position teaching philosophy at Hunter College. He was working on his dissertation. I quit waitressing and started my subtitling job at

    Soutitre. I was happy there, but I knew that I would soon have to move on—there was no promotion to be had, no position I coveted. The company was a way station for Czech and Swiss and German expatriates needing a reason to stay in New York for a few years. But what was my excuse? I had no excuse.
    Years passed, and I was still working at Soutitre, and Pankaj was still finishing his dissertation on free will. The stagnation in our separate and joined lives prompted Pankaj to propose. Atlantic City. He’d lost fifty dollars at blackjack. I’d won three hundred quarters on a Yosemite Sam slot.
    At the end of the night, we took the elevator up to our room. Somewhere around the twenty-fourth floor, Pankaj got down on both knees. I thought he had fallen.

16.
    Kari and I got our dinner at the bar.
    “So why are you here only one night?” Kari asked. I told him I was going to Lapland.
    “Which part?”
    “Finnish Lapland,” I said. “Around Inari.”
    “You’re going to see some Sami,” Kari said. “They’re like your, what do you call the people who wear feathers? Indian?”
    “Native American.”
    In my guidebook, I had read about discrimination against the Sami, that they’d become Finnish or Swedish or Norwegian citizens only within the last generation.

    “My parents work at tourist agency for ski area in the north,” Kari said. “One year they can’t open the ski ride because a Sami man said his reindeer likes to eat there. He said the reindeer was there first. That stupid reindeer made everyone lose much money.”
    Kari picked the cherry out of his drink and made a slow production of biting it off its stem. This was supposed to be sensual.
    “You know how you can tell a Sami?” he offered. “They’re short and they walk with their legs like this.” Kari got up from his bar stool and stood bowlegged.
    “Sit down,” I said. He did.
    “This is because they hang their babies from sacks on the wall and that’s how their legs grow. And typical, they are darker and shorter than other Scandinavians.”
    I stared past Kari.
    My mother had light hair, even before she dyed it lighter. I had black eyes (like Dad’s—or so I had believed), hair the color of bark, and at five foot three, I was four inches shorter than my mother. I knew her height from the missing-person report Dad had had to fill out. From the top of the stairway, I’d listened as he’d told the detectives: “Olivia Ann Iverton . . . a hundred and thirty-five pounds, five foot seven . . . People who have reason to be upset with her? Where do I start?”

17.
    Our third round of drinks arrived. I was drinking to keep awake. Kari looked toward the television above the bar. I strained my head to see what he was watching. Some sport.
    “Handball,” Kari explained. “I play it, too. I’m good.”� I asked, stupidly, if it was a hard sport.�
    “Oh, yes,” he said, tucking his dirty-blond hair behind his �
    ears. “Men who play are very strong. Good athletes.”
    We watched the handball game in silence. “Not an exciting game, this one,” Kari said, turning his attention back to me.
    “What do you want to do next?” he asked.
    “What are our options?” I pictured myself lying in my hotel-room bed, alone, dark shadows crowding my head.
    Kari turned in his chair so his legs were on either side of mine. “You know what our options are,” he said, and pressed my legs together. I fought my reflex to press outward. I had terrible taste in flings.
    “And don’t worry,” he added, now tightening his knees’