Close to the Heel (5 page)

The first thing that surprised me was how many people were going to Iceland this time of year. The plane was full, and we were jammed in like cargo. I have long legs, and there was no room for them. My knees became best friends with my chin on the way over. The movie selection sucked—there was nothing first-run and nothing worth seeing a second time. I tried to sleep, but a baby somewhere behind me started to shriek. When I couldn't stand it anymore, I got up to see if I could locate the kid. I had it in mind to make a helpful suggestion or two to the parents. But the parents turned out to be just the mother—she didn't look any older than me—and she was doing her best to shush her baby before some jerk complained. I sat down, put on my earphones, jacked up some Björk, and tried to figure out what kind of country would make someone like her a rock diva. Before long, the baby settled down.

The next thing I knew, we were making our descent into Keflavik airport. Then it was like airports anywhere—get off the plane, stand around to get your luggage, stand around again to be quizzed by a stone-faced customs officer, get your passport stamped, and welcome to Iceland.

I went out through the doors of the customs hall into the arrivals area along with everyone else and peered around, wondering how I was going to recognize Brynja Einarsdottir. I had no idea what he looked like. All I knew was that Mr. Devine had given him my email address and he'd emailed me to tell me he'd meet me at the airport and take me to a guide named Einar Magnusson, who was going to take me to the interior.

I peered around nervously. What if this Brynja and I didn't connect? I realized—too late—that I didn't have a phone number for the guide. I wasn't even sure where he lived, except that it was near some place that sounded like Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, but wasn't.

It turned out that I had nothing to worry about. As soon as the customs hall doors swooshed shut behind me, I saw a big cardboard sign with my name printed on it in block letters. I walked toward it—and the girl who was holding it.

“I'm Rennie,” I said, looking over her shoulder for the guy named Brynja.

“I'm Brynja,” she said. I guess the surprise must have showed on my face because she said, “Didn't you get my email?”

“Sure. But…” Some thoughts are better left unfinished. At least, that's what they said at the camp, usually when some guy—usually me—started to say something he wasn't supposed to. Like, say, calling some other guy one of the names that were officially banned.

“But what?”

“Never mind,” I mumbled.

“You seem disappointed.”

“No.” I looked into Brynja's clear blue eyes. She was a little shorter than me, slender, with thick blond hair that hung down over her shoulders. “No, I'm not disappointed. Really.”

“Surprised perhaps?” she persisted.

“Well…” I glanced down at the toes of my sneakers. “Maybe a little. I was expecting…”

“What?”

“I thought you'd be a guy.”

Her eyes widened. “You're kidding,” she said.

I shook my head.

“But I signed the email with my patronymic.”

“Huh?”

“My whole name.”

“Yeah, but I've never heard of anyone called Brynja before. I thought it was like Bernie, you know? That's a guy's name.”

“But it's Brynja
Einarsdottir
,” she said, emphasizing the last name as if it was supposed to mean something to me. It didn't. I must have looked pretty blank, because she said, “
Dottir
means daughter.”

I thought about that for a second. “So your last name means something like Einar's daughter?”

“That's exactly what it means.”

“Wow. What are the chances?” I mean, what
were
the chances?

“Chances?”

“It's like meeting a guy named Luke Robertson who is taking me to meet a guy named Robert. You're Brynja Einarsdottir and you're taking me to meet a guy named Einar.”

She let out a long sigh. “You don't know much about Iceland, do you?”

I tried to hold my anger in check. “I did my homework.”

“Well, you obviously missed a few things. Most Icelanders don't have last names the way you do in America.”

“I'm Canadian,” I pointed out.

“Whatever. My name is Brynja. My father's name is Einar. So I am Brynja Einarsdottir. If I had a brother, he would be Einars
son
. My father's father's name was Magnus, so my father is Einar Magnus
son
.
His
father's name was Olaf, so my great-grandfather's name was Tor—”

“Olafsson. I get it,” I said. What I thought was, Whatever. “And I'm from Canada, not America.”

She shrugged. The look in her eyes said that she either made no distinction or didn't care to make one.

“Is that your only luggage?” she asked, glancing at my duffel bag.

I nodded. Before I could move, she grabbed it and headed for the terminal doors, leaving me with no choice but to trot after her. When the doors swooshed open and a blast of icy wind hit me, I wished I was wearing my parka.

The duffel bag was heavy. I knew that for a fact because I had toted it from the Major's car to the check-in at the airport back home. But she was swinging it along in front of me as if it was a handbag. She wove her way through the parking lot, stopped beside a four-wheel-drive
SUV
and tossed the duffel bag into the rear cargo area. Without even a glance at me, she climbed in behind the wheel and started the engine.

“I'm supposed to have a car,” I said through the open passenger-side window.

“My dad has one for you. You have a driver's license, right?”

Jeez, what did she think?

She put the vehicle in gear and glanced inquiringly at me.

I jumped in and hadn't even begun to buckle my seat belt when she stomped on the gas and we shot forward.

“Hey!” It came out automatically.

She chuckled.

I wanted to be mad at her—she had real attitude. Like I was supposed to have known she was a girl, like I should know every damn thing about her country when she obviously knew nothing at all about mine. I hoped I wasn't going to have to spend a lot of time with her. I sincerely hoped she wasn't planning to hike to the interior with me and her father. If she was, I had news for her. After all, my grandfather was paying for this. If that didn't give me the right to say who came and who didn't, then I don't know what did.

We had just got underway when it started to rain—an all-out downpour. Brynja had the windshield wipers going flat out. We drove in silence. There was no way I going to make small talk with a girl driving in a storm. The gray sky and the dismal rain were a perfect match for the fields of black rock on one side of the road and the slate-gray ocean on the other.

The rain stopped suddenly, about the same time a cluster of buildings appeared up ahead.

“Reykjavik,” Brynja said. “We're going past it.” She glanced at me. “It's good you got here when you did.”

“What do you mean?”

“So you can see my
afi
.” She glanced at me. “My grandfather.”

“What for?” What did her grandfather have to do with anything?

“If it wasn't for him, you wouldn't be here.”

“Huh?”

“I mean, you wouldn't even be alive,” she said. “You know the story, right?”

“What story?”

She rolled her eyes. I was fast getting the impression that I was a huge disappointment to her—not that I cared. I mean, what did it matter to me what she thought?

“Your grandfather's plane crash-landed in the interior during World War Two.”

“Yeah. So?”

“My afi saved his life.”

I stared at her. “Your grandfather is the Sigurdur my grandfather told me about?” She nodded. “But I thought—”

Her sigh was downright theatrical. Yeah, she definitely had attitude.

“You thought what?” She made it sound like,
What ridiculous notion popped into your head
this time?

Well, if she was going to be like that…

I took a deep breath. “I thought he died.”

Tears welled up in her eyes. Uh-oh.

“What I mean is…my grandfather and yours exchanged cards at Christmas. But last year, my grandfather didn't hear anything, so he assumed…”
When you assume
, my most recent school principal said,
you make an ass out of u and me. Get it, Rennie?

“He's not dead,” she said. Her tone was sharp. Accusatory. I remembered what she had said: that it was good I'd arrived when I did. I hoped that didn't mean what I thought it meant. I also wondered how it might affect what I was supposed to do. Did Mr. Devine know all this when he chose Brynja's father as my guide? Did it matter? “When he heard you were coming, he was so excited,” Brynja said. “He wants to meet you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She said it as if she couldn't imagine why. She was quiet for a long time, which was okay by me. Then she said, “Tell me about your grandfather. What was it like growing up around a man who had so many adventures?”

“I don't really know,” I said.

“What do you mean, you don't know?”

“I mean, I didn't even know he existed until after my mother died.”

She looked at me so sharply and for such a long time that I was sure she was going to miss the turn in the road up ahead.

“Uh, Brynja…” I grabbed the steering wheel. She looked straight ahead, her whole body went rigid for a moment, and she wrenched the wheel, sending gravel cascading down the sharp drop into the sea below. She eased off the gas pedal.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “It's just—I didn't know about your mother.”

“It's no big deal.” That was my standard line. I killed my mother, no biggie, right? But this time, as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wished I had chosen different ones. Her eyes were hard and her look sharp. “I mean, it's no big deal that you didn't know. Why should you? It was a couple of years ago.”

“How did it happen?”

“It was…an accident.” That's what they'd called it, a freak accident. Falling rock in Northern Ontario. There were signs posted along the road warning about it, but I'd never heard of it happening and I'd never seen it until that day. We were cruising along, just my mom and me, with the top down on her little convertible. My dad was away, as usual, and we were on a road trip to visit my grandmother, who lived in Toronto. Then, just like that, something crashed right onto the car. I remember hearing it. I remember thinking, Holy %@$#! The car swerved and slammed into the rock face. Despite my seat belt, I hurtled face-first into the airbag. Everything went black. When I finally lifted my head, I looked over at my mom. But all I saw was rock.

“It was an accident,” I said again. “It was a long time ago.” But I remembered it as clearly as if it had been yesterday.

She didn't say another word. Neither did I. I stared out the window, where there wasn't much to look at except ocean, rock, the occasional farm and sheep. Lots of sheep, all over the place, usually in groups of three. And waterfalls. I'd never seen so many waterfalls.

SIX

We seemed to be moving inland. I heard a bell-like sound. Brynja frowned at the display on the dash. She was low on gas. Forty minutes and another warning ding later, she turned off the main road, and the next thing I knew, we were approaching a small town.

“Borgarnes,” she said. “We live between here and Reykholt.”

That was it. That was the name of the town I couldn't remember at the airport.

She slowed and pulled into a gas station. She jumped out, grabbed a pump and began to fill up. I got out to stretch my legs. I was walking toward a tourist information center when I heard someone shout in a language I assumed was Icelandic. I turned and saw Brynja, gas pump in one hand, push a woman away from her. The woman was jabbering at her the whole time and came at her again as soon as Brynja had shoved her. I doubled back, and Brynja pulled up the nozzle and thrust the gas hose at me. The woman was still talking. While I stood there holding the hose, Brynja shoved her again, harder this time, and the woman went flying backward and landed on her butt on the ground. I stared at Brynja. Her face was completely transformed by anger and hatred.

“What's going on?” I said. “Are you okay? Do you—?”

“Get back in the car,” she said, grabbing the nozzle from me.

Right. Like some girl I didn't even know was going to start ordering me around as if she was the Major.

Brynja jammed the gas nozzle back into the gas tank and the numbers on the machine started spinning again.

The woman struggled to her feet. Brynja looked at her and hissed something in Icelandic.

The woman turned and said something to me.

“I don't understand,” I said.

“Get in the car,” Brynja said.

“Please.” The woman turned to me and spoke in English this time. “Please, I just want to know where my husband is.”

Her husband? I didn't know who this woman was. How was I supposed to know anything about her husband?

“I'm sorry, but I—” I began.

Brynja finished filling the tank. She slammed the nozzle back into its slot and spoke sharply to the woman. To me she said, “I'm going to pay. Get in the car and don't talk to her. She's crazy.”

With that, she marched toward the gas station. I circled around to the passenger side. The woman followed me.

“Please,” she said. “Please, I know he wouldn't desert me. Please, talk to her. I just want to know where he is.”

“Look, lady, I'm not from around here.”

She grabbed my hand and held it tightly.

“You look like a good person. Ask her. Just ask her, that's all I want.”