Midsummer Inheritance

The midsummer sun sat at just the right angle to make it impossible to find Anders. Turning away, I scanned the handful of people gathered in the shadows of the cabins that lined the beach. No Anders. He wasn’t the old man in a pilling wool sweater I’d imagined when AncesTree called to tell me I had won the Heritage Sweepstakes, but he wasn’t a stereotypical tall, bright-blonde Scandinavian either. He had dark loose waves and glacial blue eyes, stood almost nose-to-nose with me, and was guiding me through Norway on a month-long trip through my mother’s homeland. All I’d had to do was spit in a tube and send it off. Best case, in my mind, I’d win $10,000 and a personal genealogist. Worst case, I’d have my ancestry mapped. Maybe I’d find some relatives on my mom’s side. Maybe even learn my mother’s name. For only the price of a DNA kit, I figured it was worth it. Turns out it was.

I turned back toward the sun and, shielding my eyes, walked toward the mass of people gathering around an unlit bonfire. It looked like a Nikolai Astrup painting. The honeyed light shone across the fjord, sparkling as the children skipped rocks across the water and glowing on the women’s faces as if they were lit from within. The men stood in loose circles, arms crossed and laughing. I was so focused on picking Anders out of the crowd that I didn’t notice passing under a large floral arch. Two women in traditional Norwegian dress rushed in front of me, smiling. One woman’s arm was draped in flower crowns from shoulder to wrist. The other woman held a wide wooden bowl of water. Balancing the bowl on her forearm, she dipped her fingers in the water and flicked it at me. My vision flashed white as I flinched. A stream of Norwegian spilled through the other woman’s gap teeth as she placed a flower crown on my head.

I repeated my most-used Norwegian phrase of the entire trip: I don’t understand.

“Now you are reborn!” They took my hands and didn’t let go. I could see their chests rising and falling in a strange way, as if they were silently panting, still smiling.

“Ah-nah-lee-suh!” Anders called, adding an extra syllable to my name and pulling me from my stupor. I ducked my head, smiled back at the women and, wrenching my hands free from their grip, half-jogged toward my guide.

“That was weird,” I said, motioning toward the floral arch. “What’s that all about?”

“I don’t know. What did they say?”

“They splashed some water at me and said I was reborn or something?”

“Hmm, maybe it’s a midsummer tradition in this region...it’s not typical in the rest of Norway. Look,” he said, changing the subject. “We are lucky on your last night.”

Anders waved a black notebook triumphantly in the air.

“What is it?”

“I believe it is a journal belonging to your mother.” After a month of travelling through the country, we had found no living relatives of my mother- no relatives at all- though my DNA results pointed to this area as the source of my maternal lineage. “Your father’s marriage record led me to an old stave church near the forest here- it was barely functioning then and is in complete disrepair now but we can go tomorrow before your flight if you’d like. The priest who married them passed some time ago. It seems his secretary, Marit Kartveit, may have kept sporadic contact with your mother and received this journal somehow. She has also passed away but her daughter kept it all this time.”

It stunned me how some things survive through the years purely by chance. I turned the journal over in my hands. It’s smooth leather was unblemished despite its age and it was heavier than its size suggested. The irregular cursive handwriting inside was punctuated by blacked-out words and crossed out sentences. I lightly traced the letters, my mother’s handwriting.

“Are you sure- completely sure- this was my mother’s?”

“I believe it to be, yes.” Anders grinned. “I can send you a translation if you leave it with me when you go. But tonight, we celebrate!”

He pulled me onto the cool grass beside him and poured two shots of aquavit. We tossed them back just as the last fingers of sun lost their grip on the sky. Firelight replaced the sunlight, extending the longest day of the year. Cheers and singing burst forth, everyone clearing their lungs of winter’s harsh cold and spring’s sweet dampness.

“Anders!” I shouted over the euphoria. “What was her name?”

“Helle.”

Anders’ head turned too slowly back to the fire. His arm moved as if through honey as he raised another glass of aquavit to his mouth. Climbing into the sky like a slow-motion explosion, the bonfire made no sound. There was no sound at all anymore. My tongue buzzed and I blinked hard to clear my vision. Shadows danced in a blur before me. I looked down at the journal, still in my hands, and, like dreaming in a foreign language, the handwriting, my mother’s words, became clear.

…

I watched him on my mountain for days. I thought he might love me. I thought he might love me in spite of what would happen after. I thought of my mother, who had sung my father to her, entranced and entrapped him, forced him into marriage. I thought of how he had abandoned her after, abandoned me, because he didn’t love her. I thought of my parents and knew I would do differently. I wouldn’t sing a spell.

His name was Lukas. He spoke to me like a small animal he didn’t want to frighten and his dark eyes hid no thought or emotion. The corners of his lips rested in the slightest of smiles, as if at his core he was delighted simply to be in the world, as if he needed nothing more than sunshine to sustain him. I let him come and go as he pleased, a thing my people never did. He brought me treats and trinkets from town and didn’t question why I never went myself, why I never left these woods. He truly saw me. He knew everything about me...except for the tail I was born with. Being from Germany, he knew nothing of my people and I told him nothing. I kept my tail hidden from him, under long skirts or coiled painfully beneath me when we were together. I had learned years before that human men feared what they didn’t understand, what they couldn’t explain. I believed when we were married, when the tail disappeared with the promise to have and to hold, that it wouldn’t matter, this secret I kept.

He knew nothing of my tail nor the pain it caused me. I hid the white-hot burning that lived in my spine, from the nape of my neck to the tip of my tail. It had been with me since birth, this fiery companion; and it grew more stabbing, more unbearable by the day. This is why we tricked men, sang them to us: to escape the agony.

Near the end of that summer, he told me he must return to his country for a time but promised to come back to me. He told me he loved me. I panicked, a new secret growing in my belly. I told him I wouldn’t show him the way out of the woods unless he agreed to marry me. He laughed, not sensing my fear, and said of course he would marry me when he returned. I told him he had to marry me now, today. He became serious. We argued. I wanted to let him go, wanted to trust he would return to me; but the pain lancing up my spine, the pain in my tail from being wrapped and crushed against my back, hidden from his sight, the fear of the pain that would come if he never returned was too much. In the end he agreed and I led him to the decaying black church at the edge of my forest.

The priest pronounced us man and wife. We sealed our vows with a kiss and I collapsed to my knees. This is what I had spent my whole life waiting for. The spaces between my teeth grew and, as I ran my tongue across them, I could feel their sharpness. My brow became knotted, my hair rough, as branches grew from my head, crowning me. My ears pulled to points and my skin, no longer rosy and plump, became thin and grey.

But the pain was gone. The pain that had been with me for years disappeared with my tail.

A new pain took its place as I looked into Lukas’ eyes and saw fear and disgust. He looked at me now, my sallow skin, jagged teeth, naked branches in place of shining black hair, and saw only ugliness. Nevermind that I was the same woman he had, only minutes before, vowed to love till death. He stumbled, backing away, and stammered, “What are you?”

“A huldra,” the priest spoke for me. “A siren of the woods.”

I tried to meet Lukas’ eyes but he wouldn’t look at me. “I’m sorry Lukas, it was the only way. I didn’t mean to trick you. I’m still me. I’m-”

“Get out!” He screamed.

Months later, I gave birth to our daughter alone. But he must have known, must have guessed when she would enter the world. He came in the darkness of the new moon, a coward and a thief, and stole my heart just as he had when we first met. Only this time, my heart beat inside my daughter’s chest. He snatched her away while I slept.

Heartbroken and desperate, I tried to find her. Marit, my friend at the church, sent the letters I wrote but they all returned unopened and unanswered. I couldn't leave my woods, not after.

A new pain emerged...the pain of knowing my daughter would follow my footsteps-

…

“Annalisse?”

My eyes stung as they opened and I threw my arm over them. I groaned in response as Anders lightly touched my elbow. I felt a pain in my lower back and sucked in a breath. Images of my mother, her tail brushing against her ankles, a fiery pain running down her spine, sparked behind my eyes.

“Are you hurt? Annalisse?”

I groaned again in response, rolling over to reveal a large stone on which I had somehow fallen asleep. Anders laughed and I tried my best to glare through my watery eyes.

“Ah, aquavit, the water of life. It does wonderful things, no?” He pulled me to sitting. He laughed again, untangling the crushed and wilted flower crown from my hair. “Now you are a real Norwegian.”

...

At the airport the next morning, I already felt a thousand miles away. I had no sense of whether the strangeness of the night before was an aquavit-fueled dream or reality. There was no way my mother was a creature of folklore, no way a creature like that even existed. And besides, I couldn’t read the signs in the airport much less my mother’s journal. I had tried this morning and come up with nothing.

And yet deep inside, settled at the base of my spine, it felt true.

Anders pointed at my mother’s journal held securely in my hands.

“Did you need me to translate that for you?”