By Franz Jørgen Neumann
Martin is smitten the first time he sees the woman with the sexy nose. Neither pixie nor Roman, Jenny’s nose is longer than most, with comely nostrils. He tries not to stare as he takes the key she offers him. He thanks her for the bag of warm rolls, then carries his suitcase into the cottage he’s rented from her. From inside, the old glass windows give a smeary view of the main house and of wheat fields and trees. Beyond, as yet unseen, lies Skagerrak, the sea. Not having eaten since his flight, Martin downs one roll after the other until all that’s left on his tongue is the taste of cardamom.
The effect of Jenny’s impish face recedes as Martin unpacks. The guidebook he’s brought still bears Kirstin’s name on the inside cover. She picked this area because her favorite Nordic crime series was filmed nearby. For a moment, it feels like the breakup didn’t happen, that Kirstin is in another room or getting something from the rental car. But the pall of failure catches up to him, and he casts the guidebook back into the suitcase.
The second time Martin sees Jenny is after midnight. Roused from sleep, he answers the knocking at the cottage door. The air outside is cold, like a night from another season. He can hear the wind hushing in the trees.
“Have you seen my son Jan?” Jenny asks.
“Nine years old, blonde hair to his shoulders?”
“No. Sorry.”
“He plays in the forest all day, but never so late.”
He volunteers to help Jenny look for her son. They walk down a gravel road, a field on one side, woods on the other. The road tucks along a ridge of glacier-gouged rock splotched with lichen. Trees growing in the lee of the ridge have remained thin and nimble, curving along the shape of the rock face in search of sky. The only light at this hour is a deep endless dusk a tick away from darkness. It’s hardly the land of the midnight sun he was expecting when he and Kirstin booked the trip.
Martin turns on the flashlight Jenny hands him, its light catching whorls of mist. He stops sweeping the woods and turns it off. Spending the light here, among the nearby trees, is a scene from one of Kirstin’s crime shows—the kind of searches that never end well.
“I bet he’s building a fort and lost track of time,” Martin says, to assure Jenny and himself.
“He does that,” she says.
“Becomes very focused.” She calls out to her son Jan. It sounds like she is saying Yawn! Yawn!
Martin genuinely wants to meet this boy who is unafraid of the dark and so preoccupied that even hunger and light don’t interfere with his will. It’s been years since Martin has experienced anything that could be so engrossing.
“The house and cottage were my mother’s summer estate,” Jenny says. “I want Jan to have adventures like the kind I had. But maybe that’s a mistake. Maybe he’s too young.”
“Kids need to explore,” Martin says, an adult who never did much exploring when he was young and now wishes that he had.
“I think so too, but it’s easy to get lost here.”
“We’ll find him soon,” Martin says, as though he knows these woods and the boy.
He can picture them returning to Jenny’s house after they find him. She’ll send her son to bed and invite Martin in for a drink to thank him for keeping her company. He’ll return the favor the next evening with a bottle, and maybe some pastries from town if store-bought isn’t a faux pas. He drops the fantasy to concentrate on his steps as they leave the gravel road. The path now winds through birch and pine, darkness pooling in the thick twiggy undergrowth, tree roots hoping for a trip.
Despite the late hour and the trail’s isolation, they’re not alone. From around a bend in the trail trots a German shepherd, followed by the limping gait of an older man wearing a coat and a flat cap. The man hasn’t seen the boy.
“Very late to be walking a dog,” Jenny says to Martin when the man is out of earshot.
The forest is a maze of trails. Theirs eventually leads out from under the trees and into a pale light, skirting a meadow of tall grass from which small deer rise into view. The deer examine them for a long moment before bounding into the perimeter of trees, leaving green strokes on the wet, silvery grass. The German shepherd returns. Martin runs his hand over its cold, dew-barbed fur and sees the dog’s owner coming their way. Martin understands that the man is asking Jenny for the boy’s age. One of the man’s hands trembles. And then they are three, plus a dog, searching for the missing boy.
Jenny and the man speak in Norwegian, the man making soft gasps that might be agreement or surprise—Martin can’t tell. In anticipation of the trip, Martin studied Norwegian with a mobile app. He can recall a few phrases, but Jenny and the man aren’t using any of them. They stop at the other end of the meadow, where the path forks. The man with the dog pulls up a map on his phone and has Martin bring up the same map on his. Jenny points out spots Jan has visited and might have returned to. They split up, Jenny heading north to a bay, the man with the dog continuing farther on the trail that rims the coast, and Martin taking a trail that leads steeply onto the rocky headlands. He can hear Jenny calling her son’s name, and the man’s shouts, but soon he only hears his own voice. He pronounces the boy’s name as John, which he hopes is close enough.
Martin doesn’t have any experience finding lost kids, or finding anyone, but he imagines that the missing are rarely discovered on trails. He leaves the one he’s on and listens for a reply to his calls as he makes his way by flashlight. Here, where natural steps in the rock are a tad too large for human scale, the trunks of young trees have been drawn into smooth, handle-like shapes by others seeking the same handholds he now grasps.
After an hour of wandering the rocky, forested headland, Martin is lost. He can see where he is on his phone’s map, but not in relation to anything he knows. Back when he and Kirstin were together, he could zoom out on the map and see her as a small icon at home, work, the gym, or crawling along in traffic. Now he sees Northern Europe, the entire continent, the Atlantic Seaboard, the whole planet. Kirstin is somewhere out there, but not on his map. He puts away his phone.
He shouts for the boy, then again louder, hoping Jenny or the man with the dog will hear him and that they’ll re-form into a proper search party. He detects nothing but the trickle of the stream he’s following and an irregular patter as a night breeze shakes the wet canopy above. Each step he takes wrings water from the soil and moss underfoot. His shoes and socks—and his pants below the knee—are drenched. He doesn’t mind the physical misery. It’s nothing compared to emotional misery, which doesn’t understand how to end.
Martin follows the stream as it cuts between two folds of rock. Ahead, a cluster of enormous boulders are wedged between the two stone ramparts, leaving something like a cave in the space beneath, where the water runs. Exposed tree roots dangle in the air between the boulders. Martin imagines them as arms. He flicks the flashlight up as he passes beneath them. It’s the boy.
The boy is lodged upside down in a crevice, his arms slack, his long, unruly hair matted and crusted with dried mud. Martin can just reach the boy’s hands overhead. They’re rough and bloated, but warm, and they twitch when he squeezes them. Martin tries to pull him down. The boy grunts. His face is red and his eyes, opening now, practically glow.
“Anything broken?” Martin asks, but the boy only blinks against the light.
“Good day. My name is Martin,” Martin says in his paltry Norwegian. “Your stomach. Breathe out.”
He shines the flashlight at his own gut as he tries to model a sense of slippery litheness. The boy imitates him, his arms swimming in the air. After a torrent of grunts and cries and no small amount of pulling, the boy begins inching lower, freeing leaf litter, twigs, and clods of moss-sided soil that slop into the stream in which Martin stands, ready to nab the boy. The boy falls suddenly and with surprising speed. Martin ends up in the muddy water with the boy. The boy’s shoes have come off in the effort to free him, but what are a pair of lost shoes compared to a found boy? Martin turns to examine the boy when the stench hits him: earth, rot, piss, shit—and somehow something worse.
Martin doesn’t know the Norwegian words for hurt, for broken, for pain; the language app didn’t stray from sunny subjects. But before he can check the boy for injuries, the boy scrambles to his feet and climbs onto Martin’s back. He swings his wet limbs around Martin’s waist and neck. Trusting, grateful—the poor boy just wants to go home.
“Alright, kid. Hold on.”
Following a gleam of light on the surface of the stream, Martin finds that the cave-like space opens to an unexpected sight: the sea. He follows the stream to where it disappears into the wash of surf-rounded stones. The high walls of rock dive into the dark water and surface again as skerries further out, where the sun is close to rising. Martin feels contentedly weary. Not happy—too flighty a word—but present and whole in a way he hasn’t felt in a long time. Even the stench of the boy seems alive.
He carries the boy along the shoreline of smooth, fist-sized stones, imagining the joy on Jenny’s face when he delivers her son to her. Distracted, he stumbles and goes down. He hears the scrape and clatter of stone on stone, and worse: the boy’s cry as he strikes his head. Martin pulls back the boy’s hair. On his dirty temple a fresh abrasion beads with blood.
“Sorry, little man. You okay?”
The boy’s eyes scowl, but he climbs onto Martin’s back again and holds on even tighter. Martin senses that there’s something wrong with the boy apart from any injuries he may have. Maybe he doesn’t speak or carries an emotional or physical challenge that Jenny didn’t want to mention for fear Martin would judge her for allowing her son to explore on his own.
Martin heaves them both off the stones and continues to the cove’s other end, where bedrock rises—sculptural, sensuous, like the mottled back of a beast breaching the surface. He places his feet with care and thinks how he would have been here with Kirstin had she not decided that life owed her more than what she’d been given. He had suggested getting married, having a kid, but she said that he didn’t understand her at all, didn’t understand anything, not even himself. She was suffocating, she said, and he was acting like there was plenty of oxygen. Or, rather, that’s how his impression of her unhappiness has condensed itself in his mind. Even if they had remained together, they would never have come here in the middle of a cold, wet summer night like this one. They would have wandered aimlessly at noon collecting selfies until Kirstin’s guidebook dictated their next destination. Time wasted and nothing rescued. But with the boy on his back, Martin feels he has trekked here a hundred times before, passing the miniature lochs filled with rainwater and reeds, coming to where soil, grass, and wildflowers begin and where an old fire ring sits at the beginning of a trail that instinct has guided him to. He has a reason for being here now. A connection. He is no longer simply redeeming a nonrefundable trip.
“Can you walk?”
Martin asks, pausing to catch his breath. The boy grips him more tightly. Martin reaches for his phone to let Jenny know that she can relax; her son is fine. But he can’t find his phone. He could go back and search for it, but he doesn’t want the boy telling his mother that his rescuer was more concerned with a lost phone than bringing him home. He continues inland, the boy still managing to hold on, as though the ordeal of having been trapped upside down for a day and a night has flowed the entirety of his strength into his arms. Martin wonders whether the boy contemplated death while he hung there in the night-stained cave, wedged between boulders. Probably not. The boy knows he is loved, and those loved are those searched for.
The trail makes a final turn toward the sea. The sun is almost up, and the air is so clear that Martin can see clouds cut in half by the horizon rather than disappearing into haze. He can’t recall having sensed the roundness of the world from the ground this way before. Maybe if Kirstin were here and could see what he is seeing and feel what he is feeling—the enormity of the world but also of belonging to it with a purpose—she would not have decided she needed horizons set to her own specifications.
Martin listens for the others calling the boy’s name. He hears nothing, not even birdsong. He shouts Jenny’s name. Silence.
“Guess I’m your ride all the way home.”
He imagines catching up to Jenny on the road and watching her run to them. No woman has ever run to him. Maybe he’ll return next summer and rent the cottage again, perhaps after a year-long correspondence with Jenny. Maybe he’ll move in and Jan will become the son he never had with Kirstin. They’ll build a proper forest fort and stock it with pinecone grenades and quivers of homemade arrows, prepared for any century of mock warfare. The thought strengthens his steps as he heads to this place the boy calls home and which—perhaps, probably not, almost certainly not, but maybe—he might call home too.
Martin feels hot breath at his ear; the boy is asleep. He holds the boy’s legs more tightly and bows forward a few additional degrees. In his fatigue, his imagination flirts with the notion that it is Kirstin he is bearing on his back, a different Kirstin. She’s an amputee, or narcoleptic, maybe partially paralyzed, some condition where she is grateful for his steadfast assistance and knows she’d be lost without him. A woman who would crawl to him. But the idea lasts only a moment; the breakup poisons even sad fantasies.
Martin catches sight of the rooftops of summer cabins. Soon they are back on the gravel road that leads all the way to the wheat fields. The crunch of gravel underfoot feels fresh and sharp, like the ground is awakening. He sees Jenny’s house and cottage in the distance, windows gleaming brightly with the reflection of the golden sun. If it wasn’t for the boy’s stench, nothing could be better or more purposeful than this moment.
When he’s halfway to the house, he sees a police car coming down the main road in the distance. It turns, disappears behind trees, then reappears in the courtyard between the house and cottage. Martin picks up his pace. The man with the dog climbs from the back seat of the police car, while from the passenger side emerges a boy with shoulder-length hair. Martin stops, straightens. He sees Jenny run from the house and hug this other boy. A man follows behind her: a husband, a brother, a friend, someone.
The boy on his back stirs, then sniggers, then grips him with frightening intensity. Martin, fighting against this hideous strength, feels his spine might snap. Something hot and rough travels along his neck, a lick, and then the boy pushes off his back so forcefully that Martin is thrown to the ground. He sees the boy scuttling on all fours through the field, leaving a trail of bent stalks under the darting swifts. The creature emerges at the far end and disappears into the woods. A deep instinctual disgust ripples through Martin where he lies, panting into the gravel. The man with the German shepherd approaches. The man sniffs the air, leashes his dog, then nods gravely.
“Best to forget,” the man says, holding out his hand and helping Martin upright.
“The boy,” Martin says.
“Best to forget.”
The courtyard is empty when Martin arrives. He is cold, shivering, weak. From his cottage he can see across into the main house. The boy, Jan, is seated at a kitchen table eating something the man puts in front of him. Bread with something thick and dark on top. Two slices, and then an added third that just fits on the lip of the plate. Jenny rakes her fingers through the boy’s hair and pulls something from it, a leaf or a twig. She shows it to the boy, and the family laughs.
Standing under the scalding spray of the cottage’s shower, Martin tells himself that what he’s experiencing is due to jet lag, to the melatonin he took an hour before Jenny knocked on the cottage door, to the damp or the cold or the darkness, the spooks of an unknown wood, something in those cardamom rolls, that Nordic crime series, the lingering—no—crushing stress of his breakup. A conspiracy of reasons that can make sense of the night and allow him to make a fresh day of the dawn. But he can’t shake the boy. He can’t forget. He dresses and goes out again, retracing his steps. Within an hour he finds his phone in the cave-like space where he pulled a living creature from the rock. He heads upstream, into the deep wood. He sniffs at the air. He calls out for the lost creature that no one is looking for—rank, barely clothed, alone. The lost boy’s shadow being, or maybe his own.
Franz Jørgen Neumann’s stories have received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and have appeared in The Southern Review, Colorado Review, and Water~Stone Review. His previously published work can be read at www.storiesandnovels.com.