The Memory Painter

After Anssonno had been born, Bjarni would play his pipe softly to lull him to sleep at night. And when Anssonno had grown old enough to wield a carving knife, Bjarni had taught him how to make his own.

Bryan played his song, listening to it carry over the waves, and he wondered where Anssonno’s soul was. There were over seven billion people on Earth—did the likelihood of crossing paths with someone again boil down to random statistics? Or did a soul’s path adhere to a pattern, like the connecting lines on a mandala? Bryan seemed to be connecting with certain people again and again. He could only hope Anssonno would one day come back to him. Perhaps it would heal the loss that lived in his heart.

As the boat skimmed over the sea, Bryan sensed the ocean speaking to him. A whale breached in the distance, puffins dove into the water, and a lone iceberg floated to the west like a silent witness. He closed his eyes and prayed to Odin, Allah, Yahweh, Zeus, Shiva, and every deva and deity he had ever worshipped to bring him peace and understanding. This pilgrimage had to be for a purpose.

He opened his eyes and the shore loomed in the distance just as Bjarni had seen it. A national historic site now called L’Anse aux Meadows, Leif Erikson’s settlement symbolized the path Bjarni had not taken. If only he had brought Garnissa to the new land, how different their lives would have been.

Bryan’s head was still filled with these thoughts as he came to shore and wandered through the park, touring the reconstructions. It was a living museum, and the staff reenacted what it must have been like for Viking settlers. But it became too much for Bryan, and he broke away from the other tourists so no one could see his grief.

The journey had provided no answers, no glimmer of understanding. Before he got back on his boat, he debated calling Linz on a public phone but changed his mind.

*

Linz went to sleep every night wondering when Bryan would come back home.

Maybe he would just disappear. But she found that hard to believe. While he was gone, she tried to forget about him and get her life back to normal by immersing herself in her research.

Her latest round of candidate plasticity genes had begun to show promise. Using a multiphoton microscope, she had been imaging the same neurons in a group of mice and had finally identified a gene that showed a special ability to absorb synaptic proteins. Identifying a gene’s function was always a huge breakthrough, and it usually took years. In the lab, Linz’s photographic memory and obsessive tendencies worked to her advantage.

Normally she would have brought a bottle of champagne over to her father’s house so they could toast her success, but she limited the celebration to a formal e-mail to him and addressed it to the other directors as well. She did not reply to his congratulations, or his offer to take her out for dinner. He would only want to talk to her about Bryan’s file, which she had yet to open.

Her estrangement from her father did not sit well with her, and now that Bryan was consuming her thoughts, work didn’t fulfill her as much as it had before. Several times, she found herself cutting short her usual long evenings at the lab to stop by the gallery to visit Derek and Penelope—but really it was an excuse to see Bryan’s paintings. Looking at his work, knowing what it meant to him, made her feel closer to him somehow. Afterward, she would go home and work on puzzles, blasting Vivaldi’s Four Seasons until she couldn’t stay awake anymore. She had even wandered over to Harvard Square to play chess with the irrational hope that she might see him, even though she knew he was thousands of miles away. When she went to the symphony, for the first time, she felt the emptiness of the seat beside her. And every night when she fell asleep, she imagined that she was in Newfoundland with him.

*