“It comes with the room so you’ll eat now.” She never imagined she’d be using this tone on their vacation. “I’m going to take a shower,” she said, before Hanne claimed it. “You can take one after we eat.”
When she returned from the shower, Hanne was dressed. “You took so long. I’m starving.”
At breakfast, Oda threw out some ideas for the day. They could go to the beach or walk into town or out on the breakwater to the red-and-white-striped lighthouse they saw from the ferry. They could go to the public pool or hike up the hill in the center of the island. Hanne made a face after every idea. Oda would have liked to ask the innkeeper what other sullen, ungrateful twelve-year-olds did on the island to amuse themselves, but she feared he’d mention the horseback riding. She worried that even without her asking this he would mention it, so she let him deliver their food and coffee without making any eye contact or saying anything but thank you.
Oda had a clear view of the Australians across the dining room. It was a struggle to get all three children to stay in their seats. None of them could have been older than six, yet none was a baby you could strap down. The parents looked like tired zookeepers, not angry, just overwhelmed by the physical demands. He was a tall, skinny man with a thick batch of blond ringlets and a nose that came to a sharp pencil point. His wife was probably his age, early thirties, but could have passed as a teenager in her sari and long unbrushed hair. She looked like the older girls Oda remembered from school, the girls her brother had liked but could not get, who never had rides home and whose eyes were pink and slitty from smoking pot and whose lips were always red and puffed up, like they’d been kissing all day. The Australians’ children required so much of their attention that they were turned away from each other for most of the meal. But Oda caught one moment when he gave her a spoonful of something from a bowl, and he watched her reaction and smiled after she nodded that it was good.
“How are your eggs?” she asked Hanne.
“They’re okay.”
“Would you like to try mine?” She cut a corner of her waffle and added a strawberry to the fork.
Hanne looked horrified. “I know what waffles taste like.” After a few more bites of egg she said, “You’re being really weird, you know.”
Oda asked for a second cup of coffee, then followed the innkeeper back into the kitchen, startling him when he turned back around with the coffee pot. “I’m wondering if you have the name and number of the woman with the horses. For my daughter. For lessons.”
That afternoon, Oda made tea in the kitchen and brought it up to the room. She turned the pink-and-burgundy chair around so that it faced the two windows that faced the sea and sat in it. The ferry came in. Oda watched it empty out— day-trippers with bicycles, repairmen in work outfits, islanders carrying crates of groceries—and fill up again. Her man was there. He guided the mail truck onto the boat then stood chatting with people boarding and with people who had no plans to board. There were many of these, folks milling about simply because the ferry was in, not because they were coming or going. The sky was still gray but not as low and compressive. Gulls skimmed the water then rose up so high their bodies evaporated into cloud. Up from the harbor came the sounds of men on boats talking over the engines and the rumble of the ferry as it pulled away from shore. The air through the windows came in gusts of hot and cold and after a while she could not smell the tang of the sea that had been so strong when she first sat down.
When Hanne came back, Oda had not yet sipped her tea or lifted her book from her lap.
“What happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why are you back so soon?” Oda looked at her watch. Three hours had gone by. “Oh,” she said, confused.
“I rode a horse.”
“You rode a horse?” Oda said but with too much surprise.
Hanne scowled. “That was the plan, wasn’t it?” But she couldn’t cover up all her pleasure. Oda could see it in the flushed streaks across her face.
“How was it?”
“It was okay.”
She wasn’t going to share any part of it. A few years ago she would have told Oda everything, wide-eyed and shrill, spinning around in what she and Fritz used to call her happy dance, unable to contain her joy. Adults hid their pain, their fears, their failure, but adolescents hid their happiness, as if to reveal it would risk its loss.
“Are you wearing my socks?” Hanne said.
“My feet were cold and these are so fuzzy and warm.”