Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida

I finished my tea and scratched Pia’s ears . Could he really not have told her that he and Olivia had had a daughter?
    Eero was home in minutes. With two long strides, he was in the living room. He pulled a chair close to me, sat down, and rested his clasped hands on the table. He looked distressed.
    “Oh, child,” he said. “What does your mother tell you about your father? Who does she say he is?”
    I told him that she had told me Richard, her second husband, was my father. But my birth certificate had disclosed the truth: that it was he, Eero.
    He said something to himself in his own language. And then he looked at me. “Come with me to the church.”
    We walked out the door without saying good-bye to Kirsi, who, I gathered, was still in the bathroom. I started to ask Eero a question, but he looked out of sorts, mumbling something. He was, I realized, praying.

9.
    We sat in the front pew, and he told me a story, a nasty fairy tale with no moral. In the story, an American woman traveled to Kautokeino, near the town of Masi, to protest the building of a dam that would destroy a Sami village. It was winter and dark, and late one afternoon, while the woman was crossing the frozen Alta River, she was raped.

    When she returned home to her husband in Inari, she told him about the rape, and he held her. During the days and the nights, he held her.
    The woman didn’t want to report the crime, because the man who had raped her was Sami and, at that time in particular, the incident would have been blown out of propor-tion. The protest was the first thing in her life she had felt connected to.
    After seven days, she didn’t want to be held anymore. She flinched from her husband, closed doors on him. First, she bathed frequently, and then, after a month, not at all. Her bur-nished hair turned oily, her slender figure plump.
    After three months, the woman told her husband she was with child. They had not been together in the weeks before the trip, nor since her return. She wanted to be rid of the child. She said she felt toxic. That was her word. The husband, who was a religious man and did not believe in abortion, knew that he would die for his wife, if it ever came to that. He said he would raise the child as his own. Together, they would raise the child. No one would know. “Not even God?” the woman said. She practically spit when she said it.
    After the child, a daughter, was born, the mother grew bel-ligerent toward her husband. Why had he not gone after the man in Masi? Why had he not been a man? “Because you didn’t want me to,” he said. But that didn’t matter now. “You should have known,” the woman screamed, “you shouldn’t have let me stop you. I was not in my right mind.”

    You’re not in your right mind now, he wanted to say. But he no longer fought with her.
    The priest had been invited to a conference in New Mexico, for indigenous leaders. Eskimo and Native American and Maori priests and politicians and thinkers would be there. He bought a ticket for his wife as well. The child, who was only six months old, would sit on their laps. He believed being in her own country would be good for his wife, that being so far away would be good for them all.
    On the third day of the conference, he returned to their room to find the air-conditioning on high and his wife and daughter gone. Their belongings had disappeared with them. The man traveled to his wife’s hometown—Davis, California— and rang the doorbells of her sisters’ homes. The sisters were stunned by his arrival. The woman, it turned out, had never told her sisters she had married.

10.
    I could taste the tears, and I tried to open my mouth, but it was salty and dry, and I had no voice. Eero curved his arm around me, to steady me, as we walked down the aisle of the church, like a couple after a funeral service. “Please, my child, please stay the night.”
    I thought of his new wife. I couldn’t face her; I could barely look at him. I