Kersti leans back in her seat and stares out the window, tuning out the flight attendant’s safety speech. Her thoughts return to her earlier conversation with Jay and she can feel herself getting angrier and angrier. How dare he give up? He knows what’s at stake, how much it means to her.
After he left the house, Kersti paced around rehashing their argument and then impulsively decided to book a flight to Boston. As the plane lifts off now, veering sharp right over Lake Ontario and leaving the island airport behind, Kersti closes her eyes. When did this happen to them? How did it happen? She thought they would always be partners, always on the same page about life’s most important decisions. She sees now how childish that was, how idealistic.
She remembers the night they told her parents in a burst of optimistic solidarity that they were going to try IVF. It was the night of the festival of St. John’s and her whole family was gathered around the bonfire in her parents’ backyard. The sun had set and the sky was dark and smooth and speckled with stars. Jay and Kersti were sitting side by side in the red and white plastic lawn chairs her parents have been hanging on to since the seventies. They touched their bottles together. She was feeling hopeful again for the first time in a long time.
The festival of St. John, which falls on the eve of the summer solstice in June, is one of the more important Estonian holidays—not just for its religious significance but also for its rituals and traditions, which include jumping over the bonfire, drinking, dancing, singing, and, for the Kuusks, more drinking. Like all good Estonians, Kersti’s father, Paavo, believes that lighting the bonfire is a way of guaranteeing prosperity and avoiding bad luck. He’s a huge, hulking man. Tall, uncomfortably overweight, silver-haired and bearded, his cheeks are always dangerously flushed, his nose red and pocky. He is not a man of moderation.
That night, he rose unsteadily to his feet—much vodka had been consumed—and kindled the fire. “Who is jumping first?” he thundered in his thick accent.
Kersti’s sister, Jutta, shouted her husband’s name, “Rasmus!” and everyone began to clap and chant. Ras-mus! Ras-mus! Ras-mus!
Her six nieces were running around the fire, all with white-blond hair, round faces, and the trademark Kuusk blue eyes. Kersti was the only one in that circle without kids.
Jay was the only one with dark hair. Together, they were a pair of misfits in a clan of procreating blonds.
Ras-mus! Ras-mus! Ras-mus!
Rasmus leapt over the fire, rolling on the grass after he landed, looking like a break-dancing giraffe. “I never get tired of this,” Jay whispered to Kersti.
After the rest of them jumped, Paavo boomed, “Jay’s turn!”
Everyone started chanting as they passed around a bottle of vodka. Jay! Jay! Jay!
“I’m going to skip it this year,” Jay said. “I charred my Varvatos pants last summer—”
“You have to jump,” Kersti said. “Or we’ll have bad luck all year.” She gave him a meaningful look.
Jay downed his beer and reluctantly stood up. He removed his Sperry Topsiders and carefully set them aside. He took a breath, made the sign of a cross in front of his chest, and jumped over the fire. The Kuusks exploded in applause and Kersti ran over and lay down beside him in the grass. She was happy. It felt like a perfect night to share their news. So when the little girls were dozing in their mothers’ arms and the adults were drunk and sleepy and the air smelled of high summer, Kersti said, “Jay and I are going to do IVF.”
No one cheered or clapped the way they had when people were jumping over the bonfire. Anni shook her head disapprovingly. There was a long, terrible silence that made the crackling fire and buzzing crickets seem deafening.
“This goes against nature,” Kersti’s father thundered. Even in his late seventies, he was no less intimidating.
“Why can’t you keep trying the old-fashioned way?” her mother said. “You know some women just take longer. It’s in our family. You’re just like me. You probably just need your tubes cleaned—”
“My tubes are closed,” Kersti said. Her brothers-in-law were squirming in their plastic lawn chairs. Her sisters were quiet and typically unsupportive.
“Then it’s not meant to be,” Anni said pragmatically. “You have to give up now, Kersti. You don’t always have to be so j??rap?ine.”
J??r meant ram, so the literal translation was “ram-headed.” Growing up, her parents always used to call her that.
“You should have married an Estonian,” her father said. “We’re not being racist, Kersti. Understand, it’s not because you’re Jewish, Jay. It’s because you’re not Estonian.”
“Is there a difference?” Jay said, baffled.
“Of course there is a difference!” Paavo roared, his face dark red in the firelight. “This is all we have! Our community. Each other.”
“Well,” Jay said. “Happy Jaanip?ev, everyone.”
Kersti broke away from him and ran inside her parents’ house. Jay followed her.
Her parents’ kitchen was shabby, messy, outdated. The last time Anni did anything to it was in the eighties when she made the girls get on their knees and replace the original rotting linoleum with a stick-on version. She adhered to her husband’s philosophy of not spending a nickel on anything that made their home feel permanent.
Kersti poured herself a chipped mug of vodka and slumped down in a chair.
“You’re father’s an ignorant bigot,” Jay said, pouring himself a glass.
“No matter what I do,” Kersti complained, “I can’t fit in with them. I look like them, I talk like them, but I just don’t belong.”
“Look, we’re going to have a kid. And even if he or she has brown hair like me—God forbid—we’ll still find a way to love it.”
Kersti giggled.
“And Adolf out there, with his pure, undiluted blood, can go fuck himself.”
Jay took a deep gulp of the warm vodka, gagged, choked, and slammed the mug on the table. She’d never loved him more than in that moment.
The plane touches down, bounces on the tarmac, and comes to a deafening stop in the fog. Boston. A city she could have loved, if circumstances had been different.
A thick cloud of dread descends on her. She has Lille’s letter in her purse and a fresh purpose for the visit. Maybe it won’t be so bad this time.
Chapter 8
LAUSANNE—October 1995
Monday morning in English lit, Mrs. Fithern is going on about the love triangle in Sons and Lovers. She has a cold and keeps coughing and blowing her nose. She draws a diagram on the blackboard.
PAUL & WILLIAM—MRS. MOREL & WALTER—MIRIAM/GYP
She circles Mrs. Morel and beside all the names, writes: flame of life. Turning back to face the class, she says, “Tell me about the flame of life.”
Without raising her hand, Cressida responds. “The flame of life is Lawrence’s metaphor for that part of a person’s soul that no one else can control or possess,” she says confidently. “Mrs. Morel tries to control all the men in her life, destroying them all in the process.”