The Origin of Species by Nino Ricci

own nature.
    He had managed to dig up a few cassettes she had sent him over the years. The instant he heard her voice he felt her real and alive before him again, saw her garden and smelled its smells, felt the wonder of those first weeks they’d spent together. What was he thinking, not jumping at the chance to go back to that? And yet; and yet. There was the age difference; there was the fact that she lived in bloody Sweden; there was Jesus. Try as he might, Alex had never quite been able to take her seriously after her conversion. Of course, all that was beside the point—he didn’t have to marry her to have a relationship with his son. And yet that phrase kept coming back to him, and what it might mean in her Christianized brain.
Be a father
. But what was a father if not a husband? The time he had visited her post-conversion—the fateful time, it turned out—she’d had sex with him only because in some corner of her mind she had believed, he knew, that he would stay.
    It had been different the first time. They had met on the Helsingborg ferry—he had noticed her from the start, an attractive blonde of the sort who made his knees go weak, with that sheen of knowingness and ease that made him think of adulterous trysts in wooded motel rooms or alpine chalets. He’d stood at the rail, backpacked and bearded and unwashed, wishing he was the sort of person who could talk to such a woman, when suddenly she was there beside him, speaking to him in a foreign language.
    She was holding some sort of net on a pole over her shoulder, a fishing net maybe.
    “I’m sorry?” he said, alarmed, certain she’d mistaken him for someone else.
    “Oh! I thought you were Swedish.”
    Somehow, he’d managed not to make a mess of it. It was Ingrid, really, who’d managed it—she’d made the thing seem so natural, drawing him out, so that he didn’t simply mumble some half-hearted courtesy and slouch back into his not-yet-quite-post-adolescent shell. He’d been en route to a home stay, something he’d set up with a group called The Experiment in International Living, though all he’d had in the way of direction was an address for the Experiment office in Stockholm, where he’d been planning to head.
    “But you must telephone them,” Ingrid said. “Perhaps they will send you to Malmö or some such. It’s very far.”
    She made the call for him from a pay phone just outside the ferry terminal, taking the coins from her purse and carrying on an animated exchange with someone at the other end, casting looks at him the whole time as if to hold him in the sphere of the conversation. She jotted down an address.
    “You see,” she said, “you are very lucky not to travel all the way to Stockholm because you are going to Gothenburg.”
    “Oh.” Alex had never heard of Gothenburg. “Is it far?”
    She laughed.
    “I will show you on a map. In my car.”
    After that, things took on a kind of inevitability. There was the question of time: it was mid-afternoon and the town was a hundred miles or more; it didn’t make sense to set out and risk waiting hours for a ride. Ingrid had a guest house at the back of her garden, “a little cabin,” she said. If he wanted to stay the night.
    “It’s not so easy in Sweden, to take rides and such. People are shy. Then they see a man with a beard—”
    Nothing in this was out of the ordinary. In the month and a half since he’d set out, on the remains of a student loan from his first year at university, Alex had come across any number of people who’d been willing to look after him, to feed him, put him up, go out of their way to drop him at borders or good spots for rides.
    The net she was carrying was a butterfly net for her seven-year-old, Lars. She had a daughter as well, Eva, who was nine.
    “You seem too young,” Alex said, but relieved somehow that there were children.
    “I am thirty,” she said at once. “And you?”
    Alex flushed.
    “Twenty. I’ll be twenty in