The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken (acx book reading txt) 📕

“I didn’t. David,” he said. There it was.

Louis knew what year it was, and he could do nearly everything for himself, but thinking clearly when he was daydreaming was like standing while asleep—he could not do it. The puffins hopped in and out of burrows, as if into stockrooms. His confusion hung between them; they both understood they wouldn’t speak of it. Not till they’d been home for some months, and even then, it would be cautious. Dad, you’ve forgotten. Yes, I suppose I have.

“You got up here!” said a woman. “Good for you.”

They turned to look. It was the mother of the Eastern European family. Her English was confusingly accentless: not American nor English nor Scottish. “I wore the wrong shoes,” she said, lifting her foot to display a white sneaker half-browned with mud. “I didn’t understand.”

“No,” said David.

“Still it’s lovely. Puffin therapy,” said the woman. “They call it so.”

“I can understand that,” said Louis. He turned to look at the puffins. “They’re peaceful. They give you a sense of peace. Don’t you think, David?”

Well, yes, David looked at them and he felt better and he resented them. The birds indeed had the curvilinear heads of his father’s family. He could believe that they thought things, which he had never believed about birds. (Some people love animals for how alien they are—that was Louis—others for how like—that was David.) Already he had convinced himself that momentarily forgetting his name was something his father might have done any day of his life.

Little brothers. Fraterculi. His mizpocah. No brothers but puffins, no uncles but puffins, no cousins. He wanted to call his mother.

“It lifts your heart,” his father said to the woman, who answered, “All nature does, no?”

“No,” said David. He didn’t want it to be all nature. He wanted it to be something you had to travel for, a fairy-tale journey: a boat, another boat, a treacherous approach, an unhappy revelation, a comic one.

“Perhaps,” said Louis.

“Cormorants,” said David. “They’re not uplifting.”

“They are!” said the woman. “When they fly—”

“I’m not interested in birds when they fly,” said David. Then, to change the subject, “Where are you visiting from?”

“Tomorrow we fly ourselves. To Helsinki.”

“That’s home?” Louis asked.

“That’s home.”

“Ah,” David said, “you’re Finnish.”

“Finnish,” said Louis. “Like a fish.”

“Just so,” said the woman. “Ah, here are my people.”

Here they came. They seemed to have multiplied during their time on the island, led by the girl, laughing. She saw Louis, and waved, then her mother, to whom she ran. She said something in Finnish, a language David did not understand and therefore found irksome.

He repacked the bag, the glasses, the cheese with one wedge cut out. He drank as much of the bottle of water as he could, to make the bag lighter. For a flashing moment he thought, Maybe I’ll just walk off the cliff, then, Maybe Dad will—he didn’t want either of these things; it was all disaster or triumph for him, as usual. Why is life so easy for some people? he wondered, as he had many times in his life, though this time he wanted an actual answer. He thought it might be something you could study for.

The whole boat understood now: the old American man was their ward till the end of the day. The scramble across the rocks was no easier on the way back except that the picnic bag was emptier and it seemed more likely they’d survive. The Finnish woman took one of Louis’s hands and one of her teenage boys took the other, and the girl with the binoculars led them back. Robby stepped from the boat and pointed at good rocks to step to, as though coaching a game of chess. “There’s a flat one, and there’s another, and another.”

David knew his mother had not wanted to get rid of his father. Life did. His father had never been able to tell the difference between the two.

“We’re lucky with the weather!” the Englishwoman with the potato shoes said to Louis as they settled in the boat.

“Are you?” said Louis. “Good for you.”

The woman gave a wry smile, then said to David, “Did you get to the top?”

“My son has a fear of heights,” said Louis.

“Vertigo,” said the woman’s husband, pointing to himself. They both had white hair that showed the pink of their scalps beneath. “Just found out. Hell of a way to do it.”

“You’re all right,” said the Englishwoman.

“I bloody well am not,” he said.

Staffa was a monumental lump of rock with a green top, vertically ribbed around the middle like a midcentury juice glass: spectacular, hard to make sense of. The boat came round and showed the maw of Fingal’s Cave, dark and glittering, accessible only by a narrow ledge with rope bannister. If you stepped wrong you would end up on the rock below. It looked like the first stop in the afterworld, the place you’d come to in order to get sorted.

“Oh no,” said David.

“No,” agreed the septuagenarian Englishman. “You know, a bloke died here a few years back.”

Again Robby leaned in close to David, to menace or joke man-to-man. “Just the one. German. Backed off a cliff snapping his camera.”

“Shall we go together?” the Englishwoman said to Louis, then to David, “I’ll take him,” as though this was what happened all the time: the fainthearted, the stumble-footed stayed behind, and a swap was made. The brave must go with the brave. The chickenshit sat with the chickenshit. For a moment David felt a wave of relief—when his father dropped from a height, as he’d been trying to do all day, it wouldn’t be his fault. I didn’t even see it happen, he imagined saying.

“You’ll be my husband,” said the Englishwoman to Louis, taking his hand.

“I’ll what?”

“No, no,” said David. “I’ll come.”

“Well done,” said Robby, in a voice of doom.

You walked the ledge on the side of a sheer cliff, till you walked around the corner, and there it was, Fingal’s Cave, a cathedral half-built by fairy folk. The ledge sloped