Butterflies in November

THREE

Although no woman can ever fully map out her life, there is, nonetheless, a 99.9 percent chance that I will end this day at home in bed with my husband. And yet, to my surprise and precisely when I’m in a hurry to get back home, I find myself reversing my four-year-old manual car, with some difficulty, into a parking space close to my old house on the street I lived on two years ago. The curtains look unfamiliar to me and I suddenly remember I no longer have a key to this front door, that I’ve moved twice since I lived here, without, however, moving very far. As I’m about to drive away from the house, I see they’ve hung a crib mobile in the room that once hosted my computer. To be absolutely sure of it, I wait until I see a man walk past the window with a little baby on his shoulders. At least I know it’s not my husband, nor my child. Because I don’t have a child.

I’m still in the car when the phone rings. It’s the music teacher and pianist, my friend, Auður. She is a single mother, and has a four-year-old deaf son and is now six months pregnant again. In the evenings she sits up on her bed playing her accordion and rarely says no to a glass of brandy, if the opportunity presents itself.

She tells me she can’t talk long, because she’s busy dealing with a difficult pupil and an even more difficult parent, but it so happens, she adds, almost lowering her voice to a whisper in the receiver, that she has booked but can’t go to an appointment with a fortune-teller, although not exactly a fortune-teller, she says, more of a medium, and would I like to go instead of her? I hear someone crying behind her, but can’t make out whether it’s a child or an adult.

She stumbled on this medium on a whim two years ago and since then has been firmly entangled in the web of her own destiny; nothing that happens to her catches her unprepared any more. At least the child came as no surprise.

I’m still waiting for the baby to disappear. I don’t think about it. That’s how I make it disappear, by not thinking about it. Until it stops existing. I can’t say I never think of it, though. I’ve looked it up in a book and know that it is no longer a 2.5-centimetre creature with webbed feet and that it has started to take on a human form, that it has developed toes. Soon I won’t be able to fit into my flower-embroidered jeans. I hide it under my woollen cardigan with brass buttons so that no one will notice it, so that no one will know. Soon I will be going out into the world. When I’ve finished school. It’s all still purely imaginary.

Auður knows my scepticism regarding fate.

“What do you mean you’d rather not? There’s a two-year waiting list,” she blabs on, as if she were trying to firmly and rationally deal with a capricious child. “They say she’s the absolute best in the northern hemisphere, they’ve been doing tests on her in America with brain scans and electrodes and stuff and they just can’t figure it out, can’t find any pattern, no thread, you’ve got to be there in twenty minutes on the dot, so you need to get going right now. It’ll cost you 3,500 krónur, no credit cards, no receipts. If you let an opportunity like this slip by, you’ll never get a chance again.”

She has to stop talking now, but will call me later to hear how it went, she whispers in a hoarse voice, before hanging up.