A Solstice Journey

  A Solstice Journey

  THE HOLIDAY party was going full swing—had been for an hour or so—but I was working at my desk. It wasn’t because I was a workaholic trying to make points with the boss. Well, maybe it was, a little. But it was more because I didn’t know any of those people, since I had only been here a month. I did want to finish out one more account before I went and tried to be social.

  I really don’t have the personality to be charming and witty. I’m too serious and too geeky, and I never really know what to say to someone.

  But I was enjoying the music I could hear faintly over the distant buzz of voices. And I was talking on the phone with my mother, so I wasn’t actually working working.

  “Do take care of yourself,” she instructed. “I’m worried that you’re alone for the holidays.” This sounded a little more intense than my mother’s usual fussing.

  I broke up with my boyfriend when I transferred here, because we both knew a long-distance relationship wasn’t going to work for us. We just weren’t that committed to each other. Ted had been more of a fuck buddy than a lover, since we hadn’t really attempted to date. We each showed up at the other’s apartment, ate and fooled around, and then left the next morning. We’d been together for almost a year, and I hadn’t even left a stray book at the man’s place, never mind clothing or a toothbrush. That was what we had wanted at the time, since we were both rebounding from high-maintenance, messy relationships.

  “I’ll call,” I promised. “And being alone isn’t a bad thing.”

  Christmas and the end of the year were coming, but at this company, no one took a vacation, so I couldn’t go home for the holidays. I usually did, no matter where I was working. This was the first year I wouldn’t be able to.

  “It’s the Solstice today,” she murmured. “The beginning of the Yule. You received your presents?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. We celebrated Christmas when I was growing up; my parents had been devout but not pushy about it. They did the same thing every year—no matter how old the children were—and that was send new clothing for Christmas every year. And I teased them about it, because I felt I was too old for such things. The Yule Cat wouldn’t eat me because I didn’t have new clothing.

  “I got my packages, and I promise that I’ll open them when I’m supposed to. I love you,” I told her. “Give everyone my love, and I’ll call you on Christmas.”

  “Please remember that I love you,” she said in an odd tone of voice. “No matter what, I always will love you.”

  “I figured that out when you accepted me jumping out of the closet,” I teased, wanting to cheer her up. Christmas was hard for her with my father being gone.

  She laughed, even if it was a little strained. “A mother knows those things. And you didn’t steal your sisters’ boyfriends.”

  “I’m not stupid,” I replied. My sisters were clever, ruthless women who made Viking men look like wimps.

  “We love you,” she repeated and then hung up on me.

  I snapped my phone shut and put it next to my keyboard. I frowned at the screen and managed to add up another row of numbers before I was interrupted again.

  “C’mon, you’re making the rest of us look bad.”

  I had positioned my desk so my back was to a corner and I could see the door even as I hid behind my monitor screen. The voice belonged to an older man, in his midfifties, with silver hair and a curly beard, who was peeking around my door. He sort of looked like St. Nick, but he was wearing a blue suit—designer—not a red one.

  He smiled. “I’m going to get a reputation as a Scrooge,” he admonished as he glanced over my desk, probably looking for my nameplate. It was buried under a couple of piles of paper, so he couldn’t see my name. I recognized him, though. He was the VP of this section, Ben Scudder. “Um—”

  I stood up, skirted around my desk, and held out my hand. His eyes widened a bit when he saw how tall I was. “Gunnar Dagviðurson,” I said.

  He stared at me for a moment before shaking my hand, looking at me like I might crush it while I shook it. I was used to the reaction by now. I even found it funny. I had lived up to that name. I was big and brawny, and even in a suit, since I looked like I should have an axe in one hand and a shield in the other, because the suits never appeared to fit quite right, even when tailored. I looked like I should be out pillaging a farm someplace instead of running numbers. My appearance almost matched my name.

  When I was a teenager, I had thought my parents were insane for naming me Gunnar. I was adopted. I figured that out as soon as I learned to walk, I swear. It wasn’t hard. My parents were tall, blond, and blue-eyed, advertisements for the Swedish Bikini Ski team, although they were actually Icelandic. I had the blue eyes, but that was where it ended for me. My skin was the color of strong tea, and my curly hair was darker, cut short so I could impose some sort of control over it. I really didn’t look anything like either of them. My parents had adopted me shortly after they married. I had never asked them about it and had never wanted to find my birth parents, much to their relief. We weren’t blood, but they had raised me and treated me the same as they did their four daughters. That was why they had given me a traditional Icelandic name, no matter how odd it sounded with the way that I looked.

  “I promise I’ll knock it off soon,” I told him with a smile in return. “I just want to make sure I wrap up the Leup account.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said, waving his hands at me. “Now is the time for some Christmas cheer.”

  He looked guilty for a second, so I grinned and started to shut down my computer. I knew enough not to argue with a VP about working through the party. I could always come back to my spreadsheets later.

  “Protestant,” I reassured him. “I promise my parents weren’t pagan, even though they’re Icelandic. We always celebrated Christmas no matter where my father’s job took us.”

  “Ah, that’s why you don’t have much of an accent,” he said as he started to shoo me out the door. “Even though your name makes me think of the Swedish Chef from the Muppets.”

  “Bork Bork Bork,” I said with a grin. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that joke, and I doubted it would be the last. “But I’m Icelandic,” I repeated, “not Swedish.”

  I glanced back, shrugged, and decided I could be seen without my suit coat for once. I still had my tie on, at least, not that the dress policy was very strict, but it was the principle of the thing.

  “I hate to ask this, but how long have you been here?” Scudder asked as we walked down the hallway to the party in the boardroom. The food and alcohol were in there, while the rest of the party had spilled out into the hallway and surrounding cubicles because of the number of people.

  “I transferred in about a month ago,” I said. “From the Tampa office.”

  The company moved employees around every couple of years, either as a lateral transfer or a promotion. Smart people took the moves, no matter how much it screwed up their lives. Those who didn’t usually didn’t get promoted after the second refusal.

  He looked at me questioningly, and I smiled. “I like snow, even though I didn’t see a lot of it growing up.”

  “But I thought you said you’re Icelandic?”

  I shrugged, very aware of the people looking at us and trying to guess why we were together. I had found out over the years that office politics were at their most cutthroat during the Christmas season, and I wondered how many people thought I was kissing his ass instead of Scudder just being a nice guy.

  “My father’s job moved us around a lot, so I’ve spent a lot of time other places,” I explained. “My sisters and I grew up all over. A lot of them weren’t cold, though. I didn’t see snow, re
ally, until I went back to Iceland for university.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  We stopped in front of the bar. He grabbed a couple of glasses of red wine and handed me one. I took it, not wanting to make a fuss. At least it wasn’t some sort of mixed drink. I didn’t drink a lot, and getting drunk at the office Christmas party wasn’t a good idea. I made the mental note to start eating as soon as I could. Breakfast had been a while ago.

  “Italy, Egypt, Brazil, France, and a couple of other places I probably can’t remember,” I said. “My parents were sent all over until my father died two years ago. My mother lives in Blönduós now, and my sisters are scattered all over Iceland. I’m usually home with them for Christmas, since the whole family tries to make it, but not this year.”

  I felt guilty about not going home. But there just wasn’t any way for me to take the time off. I was going to visit after the holidays, but it wouldn’t be the same.

  “You seem to have led a really exciting life,” he said. “And I stayed put in good ol’ Beantown.”

  I could have guessed that, since he had a Boston accent so thick it was almost a caricature. But that didn’t mean he was stupid; he had his MBA from Harvard and his undergrad from Amherst College. My education wasn’t as highbrow. I had earned my BA and my MBA from the top universities in Iceland, although they weren’t as impressive as an Ivy League education was to Americans. But I didn’t know what to say about his comment, because while growing up, I had thought everyone lived like that. It wasn’t until I got to university that I found people who hadn’t moved all over the world because of a parent’s job.

  We moved into the boardroom to get something to eat. People moved out of our way, mainly because of Scudder, but also because I think people didn’t want to get between me and food. Scudder moved off to spread more cheer, and I soon finished piling my plate with odds and ends, which was kind of difficult while juggling a glass of wine. I was figuring out where to eat when Ida Minos thankfully relieved me of my glass of wine. She was the departmental administrator. Her age was somewhere between thirty and retirement; she didn’t look old but had been working for the company for decades. From the flush on her cheeks, she’d had a couple of glasses of something herself.

  “Follow me,” she said, then worked her way through the crowd with ease. No one wanted to peeve the woman in charge of the office supplies. It wasn’t quite the parting of the Red Sea, but close. We ended up near her office.

  “Thank you for the cookies,” she told me as she handed back my glass.

  I had baked her cookies and dropped them off in a tin earlier in the day. It wasn’t really a bribe, but I was in the mood to bake, and it wasn’t like I knew a lot of people I could give them to. I could only eat so many chocolate gingersnaps without either getting sick, or sick of them.

  “You’re welcome,” I answered sincerely. “You’ve been very good to me.”

  She snorted. What had been happening was I was polite enough to actually ask her for office supplies instead of just raiding her closet like so many people did.

  “Finish that and let me show you around,” she said. “I want you to meet some people, and this is the time to do it.”

  I LEFT the party very drunk. It was late, but not too much later than I usually left the office. Ida had made good her promise to introduce me around, and I had met everyone who was someone in the company. The Christmas party was always a good time to network.

  The streets were deserted. It had been snowing all afternoon. It came down in bursts of light flurries that didn’t seem to mean anything until you realized how long it had been snowing and the flakes had piled up into deep drifts you had to deal with.

  I knew a couple of people snuck away early, worried about getting caught in the storm. I hadn’t cared since the transit system deposited me almost on my front step. I had an apartment in Quincy, and the Red Line station was an easy walk away. The city had been shoveling and plowing, keeping up with the accumulation. I just needed to walk across the Public Garden, through the Boston Common, to the Park Street Station, and once on the T, it was a straight shot to the Quincy Center Station and my apartment.

  It was cold, and I was glad for my wool scarf, gloves, and the boots I toted to work when the weather looked bad. The sun had set a while ago, and the snow was sticking to the streetlights, making them dim. I crossed the street to the Public Garden. I walked across the park, admiring the snow and how picture-perfect it all looked. It could have been a scene out of a painting, from any time period, since the streetlights seemed to have all but disappeared. I thought it was odd, but it could have been because I had walked off the main path, instead following a tramped-out path that was getting more and more obscured.

  I thought about getting home, wanting nothing more than to get out of my suit and relax. I didn’t think I’d get out much after that. It would take a while for people to dig out. It would be like the first Christmas I’d had in Iceland, when I was a freshman at the university. My parents had just bought their place and my sisters were there—they were all younger than me. We had been all together, a perfect Christmas: the first Christmas we had all seen snow. It seemed like a miracle to all of us. There had been snowball fights, as well as other games. My parents had been amused—and a little worried, it seemed to me, no matter how much fun we were having in the snow.

  I’d been walking for a while and figured I should have gotten to the other side of the Public Garden by now, even if I hadn’t been following the walkway. The place wasn’t that big. I could have gotten turned around when I was daydreaming about Christmases past, but I hadn’t stumbled across the lake or any of the other landmarks or statues. I knew enough to keep walking until I found some sort of landmark so I could figure out where I was and then where the nearest MBTA station was. I needed to get home before the system shut down. When I’d looked at the weather report earlier, it had mentioned snow, but not this much. The drifts were getting to be a couple of feet deep, and it didn’t look like it was going to stop anytime soon. At this rate, the entire city would shut down before I managed to get home.

  I was still walking when I heard something besides the crunch of my boots in the snow as I waded through deeper and deeper drifts. The wind had died down, and I didn’t know how long I had been walking, because I didn’t want to take my phone out to check. I was chilled and knew I’d be colder if I stopped moving. I was lost—I felt like an idiot—and welcomed the sound of someone else because I was beginning to get worried. I knew a little about surviving in the snow, but nothing more than someone would pick up from watching a documentary or a reality show. From what I could tell, the noise sounded like a horse galloping. I didn’t think Boston had any sort of mounted patrols. I hadn’t seen any in the month I had been there. And no one but an idiot would be doing that sort of thing with a horse in this weather, unless he wanted to injure it.

  I stopped, trying figure out where the thudding was coming from. It was quiet, too quiet, as stupid as it sounded. I wasn’t hearing the background noise a city produces, the cars and trucks, people and the noise they make, even the sound of planes overhead, though Logan was probably closed because of this weather. For a long moment, I wasn’t even hearing anything that wasn’t me, and that scared me more than I expected. It took a few seconds, but I could again hear the horse. It was coming closer, with some sort of jingling, too, as if there were bells on the horse—horses actually—because now it sounded like more than one. It sounded like there was a whole herd coming toward me. I quickly looked around, wondering if I could find something like a tree or a rock to hide behind. Not that I didn’t want to be found, but I didn’t know if the riders were going to see me in this snow. My coat was dark, but the snow flurries seemed heavier the closer they got, until I swore it was swirling around me like a small snow tornado. I shivered, feeling colder than I thought possible and wanting nothing more than to be home, safe, and most importantly, warm.

  The horses sounded like they had
slowed down to a walk, and I took a step in the direction of the soft thuds. It felt like I was walking through taffy, an almost impossible task to get my right foot off the ground and take a step forward. The snow was suddenly to my thighs, and I felt I had been walking for a thousand years…. I resisted the urge to fall to my knees when two horses appeared—out of nowhere, I swore—in front of me.

  The horses were white, somehow paler than the snow, with a silver sheen to them. Their eyes shone blacker than coal and their bridles and saddles looked to be made of pure silver. The horse on the right snorted, and I was relieved to see its breath frosted in the air, because these horses didn’t look real to me.

  And the riders were as unearthly as their mounts.

  I assumed they were men because of the armor they were wearing. It was also made out of silver or some metal that looked like it, because even I knew that silver wasn’t a good metal to make armor out of. It was pretty, though, made from tiny, tiny chain links that seemed too fine to be real.

  They seemed to be tall, or maybe that was because they were seated on horses and looking down at me. The horsemen’s features were fine, with long noses, and their eyes were almond-shaped. They were blue, almost the same blue as mine. I couldn’t see the color of their hair because their helmets hid it.

  The horseman on the right looked down at me and demanded in a cold voice, “Do you know where you are, Álfr?”

  I stared at him, confused, rolling the language and especially that last word around in my mind for a second or two. I had been expecting some sort of law enforcement or Good Samaritan coming to rescue me, not someone looking at me like I was the dirt beneath him. And the word was close enough to Icelandic for me to guess what it was: Elf. The man was calling me an elf. I didn’t know what he was speaking, but it did sound like Icelandic, and it wasn’t one of the other Northern languages, either, instead an echo of all of them.

  “Boston,” I told him slowly in Icelandic. “The Public Garden.”