Finally, he found a cell number and called that—it went straight to voice mail, so he left a message, but he wasn’t even sure if it was his brother’s cell phone because the message just repeated back the number he had dialed. Then when he tried that same number again, a message said the number was no longer in service. Something or someone appeared to be preventing him from reaching Arthur.
There was only one solution. They needed to hit the road and head to Cleveland to find him.
“We’re driving there?” asked Joanna.
“Why not? We can break it up. Drive five hours, find a motel, drive another five. How about it, Jo?”
“A road trip!” She removed the tray from her lap. One muffin and a few sips of coffee, and she suddenly felt invigorated. She and Norman were taking action, not simply despairing and sitting back. Inspired, she began to make preparations for their journey. Yankee practical, she thought: thermoses with coffee, crackers, cheddar and brie, fruit, nuts. Joanna loved thinking about projects in terms of food.
Arthur—of course! The old timekeeper had to possess the key to the passages she couldn’t unlock herself.
“You’re a genius, my dear! But I do hope Arthur’s all right. I hope nothing has happened to him.”
chapter nine
The Newlyweds
Freddie heard the shower turn off, followed by Gert’s loud sigh. The little New Haven off-campus apartment had walls that were so insubstantial that whatever anyone did in another room could be heard as if you were standing side by side. He could tell that she was annoyed because he had used all the bath towels again without putting out new ones. He had made a mental note, of course, to do some laundry and throw some in there, but it had slipped his mind when he put on Warhammer and just had to get to the next level.
“Freddie!” called Gert.
Gullinbursti, Freddie’s piglet familiar, snorted against his foot as if to tell him to get moving. “I know, Buster,” said Freddie, throwing the remote down on the little black couch, among popcorn kernels, crumbs, magazines, and fast-food wrappers. “I know I know I know!”
Married life. You had to get your wife immediately out of a jam if she were in one. That was how one showed everlasting love.
“Dammit!” he muttered to himself.
All the towels were dirty. He hadn’t done the wash. He smelled one and decided she wouldn’t notice. He was supposed to keep the house running while Gert was studying for finals, but he had stuff on his mind and had been busy, too. He was worried about Freya. It had been so long since she’d disappeared and the family seemed to be getting nowhere. If anything, his anxiety over his twin had driven him to play even more video games.
There was also his volunteer work as a firefighter. The local firehouse had given him a ton of shifts because—as Fryr, the sun god, which they didn’t know about, of course—he had a knack with flames. Fighting fires, observing RECEO (Rescue, Exposures, Confinement, Extinguishment, and Overhaul), was hard work, exhausting, and by the time he got home, he was just too tired to throw a load into the washing machine. Of course there had been a clean one for his shower after a day at the station with the boys and tromping around in flames in that heavy bunker gear. He felt just a tad guilty at that.
“Freddie!” Gert screamed.
“Uh-oh,” Freddie remarked to Buster. “Here goes nothing.” Best to play dumb. In a couple of leaps (everything was within a couple of leaps in this apartment), he made it to the bathroom, opened the door, and spied his beautiful wife hiding behind the shower curtain, dripping wet and looking angry.
He smiled. “Here you go!” he said in the lightest, most cheerful tone as he handed her the used towel.
Gert took a sniff and gritted her teeth. “This stinks! God, Freddie! I asked you to wash the whites—I left Post-its, I texted…” She shook her head. “Go! Close the door.”
Dejected, Freddie went and sat on the couch and turned off the TV. He should clean up the place. That would make Gert happy. He rose, ambled to the kitchen, got a garbage bag, and began throwing out everything that appeared superfluous: old magazines, newspapers, take-out bags, empty Chinese food containers, and so on.
Lately, things had just gotten too tense in this cramped apartment. He and Gert argued incessantly over the most mundane things. Who cared if the bathroom sink and mirror were spattered with toothpaste? Who cared if Freddie couldn’t find a video game after Gert had done the straightening up? They had both gotten so petty lately. They fought about the tight quarters, but they were together, and wasn’t that what was most important? Sometimes the brawls ended in mad, hungry sex, but lately it was just pointless arguments with no make-up sex afterward. How lame was that? He and Gert had been married for less than two months, and their marriage was already in the dumps.
He had to do something about it.
“All right!” he said. “I’m vacuuming.”
Freddie got the vacuum out of the narrow cabinet in the kitchen and plugged it in. In the living room, the machine sounded as loud as a Harley. No wonder they never used it. Buster ran for his life into the bedroom, where he hid under the bed on which Gert was now studying, books sprawled all around her.
In the living room, Freddie had begun to use the bare metal tube to suck the crumbs out of the couch. That felt satisfying. Then Gert was upon him, hands on her hips.
“What are you doing?” she boomed over the machine.
“Um… what does it look like?”
Gert flicked the button on the vacuum cleaner off. They stood in a silent face-off. Freddie admired his wife, thinking she looked incredibly hot standing there with her warrior face, a small glimpse of her true nature as the jötunn goddess Gerðr. He wanted to do her right there and then. He was so hard up, and sort of getting hard at the thought. But then she spoke.
“Can’t you see I’m studying? What are you doing—trying to sabotage me?”
“What? No!” he said. “I just thought you would appreciate some cleanliness and order around here.”
“What I would appreciate is a clean towel after a shower when I don’t have time to wash any!”
There was no winning. But Freddie was the bigger man. He wasn’t going to get into it and explain that he had decided to turn a new page and that doing laundry had, in fact, been on his agenda. First, he had decided to fix the pigsty aspect of the place (Buster had nothing to do with it… but he didn’t want to think about their other little problem—or more like problems, plural—at the moment, which was probably one of the main reasons Gert was so tense). He would get her what she wanted. He would be a model husband. He decided to give his spouse some space for now, take a walk and pick up some groceries. He would fix this marriage even if Gert had given up.