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Fantasy Stories

Singing Them Back

Written by Marissa Lingen

Illustrated by Jessica Douglas

Every fall, I was there when my grandmother sang the disir back.

They had an agreement with our family, back through the ages, carried over the sea when our ancestors came to the New World. They were ours and we were theirs, and every fall on the Disting holiday, we renewed our bond. We sang to them, to ask them to return to us after a summer apart, and they always came.

I'd never done it without her. I supposed I'd have to start now.

The university was generous with bereavement leave, but I had to go back to work the Monday after her funeral anyway. Like many old Norwegian ladies, my mormor had never been the sort to sit around moping when there was work to do, and I had plenty. The grad students could proctor the tests for the undergrads, could get themselves through the weekly meeting, but we had a grant proposal due Friday. I've never been the kind of advisor to make the grad students write the whole grant proposal without supervision. I had to do that too many times myself when I was a research assistant.

Hilary was already there when I got to the office. Hilary almost always beat me there in the morning. Most grad students are consumed by their work, but Hilary lit up with it. She was a joy to have in our research group, and the other students held her in some awe.

To tell the truth, so did I.

She was not waiting outside my door, but I could tell she had given me a discreet amount of time to check my phone messages and my e-mail before pouncing on me. Her section of the proposal was waiting in my inbox, annotated. It is difficult to quash such enthusiasm.

Sometimes it seemed that she was personally offended by the unproven nature of Thurston's geometrization conjecture. She had already written papers that would have made a thesis for any of my other students, but it wasn't enough for Hilary. She kept stretching her hands out for something more.

That, I understood. The disir had brought it to me.

The disir come to us in our homes, in our real lives, but also sometimes in our dreams. They have an old habit of revealing people's destinies in dreams. I don't recall ever asking for it, but apparently they decide, not the dreamer. So they came to me, and they showed me mathematics. They showed me such beautiful abstract concepts that I woke breathless and weeping, and the next night they showed me myself at the heart of it all, my hands tangled in the structure of the universe itself.

I was twelve. I dropped the idea of becoming a doctor as though it had never existed. I belonged in mathematics.

My mother was dubious about the whole affair, but Mormor convinced Mor that the disir did not steer us wrong. Mormor had sung the disir for longer than my mother's life, since she was a sturdy teenage farm girl, and she put a good deal of trust in their wordless assurances.

So when fall came, I joined the math club, and I spent Saturday afternoons at my grandmother's, learning to cook all the old-world foods my mother had scorned in favor of lentil dal and pesto pizzas. Mor thought of it as teenage rebellion until I finished my Ph.D. in topology. After that she was just relieved that I got a faculty position at the university in my hometown and took over Mormor's Saturday afternoons again, and she tolerated my apparently conventional cooking and adored my apparently conventional husband, who had his own Norwegian gran and fought Mormor for the last piece of pickled herring at holidays.

And even through my sadness, Mormor's memory and the disir's visions made me smile, and helped me to help Hilary and my other grad students reach for more.

"Hil, you have to calm down," I told her. "A grant application is a lengthy process. We're going to be sitting around twiddling our thumbs for a while now."

"It could make such a difference," she said dreamily. "If we just didn't have to spend quite so much time—oh, you know I don't mind teaching, exactly, but the time, the calculus, all the calculus—"

"I know, I know," I said, although I didn't mind the calculus sections. "Teaching is part of the job, Hil. I teach you and the others, you teach the study groups, and everybody winds up knowing more math."

She flushed. "I didn't mean to complain. I just—look through the files I sent you. I really think this is a promising direction."

"I do, too, at first glance," I said. "We'll pursue it. I promise. We're all doing what we can. I think you should get out and get some sunlight, all right? Think about something besides math for a while?"

"And something besides bureaucrats," she said glumly.

I laughed. "Yes, something besides bureaucrats, too."

After several hours of filling out more forms, checking over proposals, calling for signatures, I began to wish I could have taken my advice to Hilary. It was a relief just to get out of the building, to roll the windows down and howl tunelessly along with the radio and not think about who needed what and from whom I'd have to beg, borrow, or steal it. The disir had shown me a world of mathematics that was cool, orderly, ethereal. It wasn't the world mathematics had given me at all.

When I was in kindergarten, I drew a picture of the disir during coloring time. Nine women in white, nine women in black. Some of them were turning cartwheels, some brooding in corners. Even at that age, I knew you could never tell with the disir. My kindergarten teacher called my mother, confused and worried, and she and Mormor sat me down to discuss it.

"Darling, you can't draw the disir," said Mor. "They're spiritual beings. You can't just put them in crayon."

"I did."

"What she means is that you shouldn't," my grandmother jumped in. "They're not for the people at school to know. They're just for us."

I eyed her skeptically.

"The people at school don't have disir, Karin."

"How do you know?"

Mormor smiled. "A fair point. They might, and they might just not tell me about it, the way I don't tell them."

"Why don't you tell? Why is it secret?"

"They don't like to be talked about. Do you like it when people talk about you?"

I thought about it. "It depends on what they say."

Mor threw her hands up, but Mormor smiled again. "That's true, Karin. Sometimes it's not good enough to treat people the way we want to be treated. Sometimes we need to treat them the way they want to be treated."

"And the disir don't want people talking about them?"

"It's part of our bargain with them," said Mormor. That was the first I heard of the bargain. I must have looked confused. Mormor leaned forward. "When our ancestor Kjersten was packing to leave the old country, her disir came in and flung her clothes back out of her trunk again. She spread her hands to them in despair. 'What can I do?' she said. 'There is no food for another mouth here; the land can only hold so many. Shall I push my brother's family into starvation?'

"'But we want you,' said the disir. 'Jonas's family is not sure of us. They treat us like skittish beasts, and they would ignore us if they could. You would never ignore us. We would have a family with you.'

"'I can have no family here,' said Kjersten. 'Lars and I must go to the New World. Can you not come with me?'

"The disir thought about it. 'All the way to the New World?'

"'Yes.'

"'Over the ocean and farther still?'

"'Yes. You could come. We will have a farmstead again.'"

I interrupted her. "The disir don't talk."

Mormor smiled. "No, they don't, do they? But they manage to communicate with us just the same. And when they agreed to come to America with Kjersten, our ancestor, they didn't want her to talk to others about them. They knew they would be strange spirits in this land, and they didn't wish to be the topic of gossip for miles around.

"You can keep their secret, can't you, Karin? If you can't, they might not come back to us."

I was flatly incredulous that anyone would attempt to punish the mountain that was my grandmother for something my small self had attempted. "They could just ignore me."

"No," said Mormor, gently insistent. "It's all our family or none. You and your cousins are part of them with me. If they won't come back for you, they won't come back for anyone. Will you promise?"

"I promise not to tell anyone outside the family," I said, awed by the totality of their needs. And from that time on, I was theirs, and they were mine. My whole life was colored black and white around the edges, the wondrous family secret setting me apart in my own head. But it couldn't separate me from all of the world's demands, and losing Mormor shook my world all the way down.

The days slipped past, and Indian summer turned to true fall. Hilary could not understand why I was so calm about the grant application. "Do they give you serenity with your doctorate?" she demanded.

"If you're lucky, I suppose they might," I said. "Heaven knows I didn't get any until I was done with my first postdoc at least." I saw that she was only half-kidding. "Hilary. Dear. It will be fine. We have all the administrative t's dotted and i's crossed, thanks in no small part to your attention; we have rewritten the proposal until the prose sings and the math—" I waved my hands helplessly. "It pops off the page. Go, go home, do your laundry, buy yourself groceries, think about something else. I don't care what. I'll send out the packet on my way home, and tomorrow you can come in and think about math again and not marketing."

She smiled. "That will be a change, won't it? All right. I'll do that."

I scuffed through the leaves and managed to get the application to the post office two blocks from campus long before it closed. The late-afternoon sunlight turned too quickly to dusk. By the time I got home, it was almost dark, and Eric already had the bread in the oven and was working on the chicken. His best friend Andy was there, drinking a beer and offering commentary on Eric's cooking techniques. I collected hugs from both of them and a kiss from my husband.

"How's the world of numbers?" Andy asked, as I washed my hands and dug into the crisper to start the salads.

"I haven't seen a number in weeks," I said, "unless you count all the damned phone numbers and identification numbers and all that with this grant application. And anyway, you know mathematicians try not to deal with numbers whenever they can."

"Grad school takes away their ability to do simple arithmetic," said Eric. It was the same joke— half joke —he'd made a dozen or a hundred times before, but we smiled anyway.

And we made more of our old jokes over again, and Andy told us the latest installment in his office drama, which had acquired Greek proportions, though we were not yet sure whether it would turn out a comedy or a tragedy. As he was leaving, Andy promised to make sure he was not in the final body count if there turned out to be one, which reassured us immensely.

"Disting is coming, honey," I said.

It took Eric a minute to know what I meant. "With your grandmother's . . . spirits. Disir."

"Yeah."

"I'm a lot more used to this sort of thing from your mom than from you, y'know."

"They're very . . . solid," I told him. "You'll see. Assuming I can do it right, that is."

He kissed the top of my head. "I'm sure you'll do fine, honey."

"You shouldn't be," I said. "You've heard me sing."

"But maybe it's not about the singing. When Andy's niece sings him 'Row Your Boat' on the phone, he's not analyzing it for pitch-perfect performance."

"Thanks," I said.

"No, but you know what I mean."

I thought about it. "I suppose. That it's more the symbol than the song."

"I think so."

"I hope so," I said, "or I am so screwed."

"Karin, relax," he said. "You've been so caught up in your grant proposal, and now this. When was the last time you made cookies, or just sat down with a book?"

"I don't know."

Eric shook his head. "Neither do I. You're always shooing your grad students out for a break, but you need to listen to that yourself. Don't worry about it. You'll do fine."

"I guess."

When I was fifteen, I joined the debate club at my high school. It was a distraction from math, but not a terminal one, and besides, people were always telling me that colleges liked to see well-rounded people, and they didn't seem to mean people who spent time with their families or entertained themselves well.

I took to debate readily, arguing with almost as much glee as I learned math. The similarities leapt out at me without my seeking them, with almost synaesthetic glee—the firm lines of an argument carrying through, the curves of insinuation, solid points of reference. I cultivated a cool style, sometimes contemptuous as only a teenager can be, other times gentle and nearly imploring. As I went on, I found that I liked to implore more and sneer less, and I won more rounds.

In my junior year, I argued my way to the final round of the state debate tournament. In the middle of my rebuttal, I saw flashes of black and white out in the hall. I finished my speech with a glow of the joy that comes of doing things just right.

I don't know what family spirits my opponent had at her disposal, but she won anyway.

I was less bothered than I would have expected; I had done well, and I had done my best. The disir were behind me, always waiting. I went back the next year and won the finals.

They had always been the source of my confidence. I had never needed to be confident about them before. Mormor had always taken care of it. But I didn't need a reminder that I could never rely on that again.

I got into the closet and fetched out the long red dress. It hung loose around me, the way it had around Mormor the last year. I went out to the fireplace in the living room—I had only considered houses with fireplaces, because in the back of my mind I was always thinking of the ritual for Disting. Mormor's house had smelled like the things she had left behind her, her hairspray and her cheap green perfume and her tired old body; but it also smelled of her almond cookies, and very faintly of the ritual fires at Disting. Now mine would, too. I laid the fire. Eric sat in our old wooden rocker and watched me.

I lifted my hands like Mormor always had, and I threw my head back, and I sang.

I would like to say that nothing happened. Nothing would have been an improvement. Instead I had to know that with each note I missed, each interval that was not even a near approximation, I was slipping further and further away from bringing the disir back. I'd seen Eric blank-faced before, but he'd gone so far past it that I had to wonder if rigor mortis had set in. I finished the song doggedly—inasmuch as I was singing it at all—and let my arms drop. I flopped on the couch.

"They're not here," I said.

"Are you sure—" He hesitated, trying to be gentle. "Are you sure they'll come for anyone but your grandmother? Maybe it was just—just a thing they had with her."

"She said it was all the generations." I picked at the tassel on the blue afghan Mor had made us for a wedding present. "She said it had been passed down from her grandmother and before that through all the years in the old country, from the time our ancestors pushed the Saami north."

Eric, who had a Saami grandfather, raised an eyebrow at me.

I waved a hand at him. "When we have kids, the Saami will come back to the disir again, so can we go on with this without ethnic politics?"

"All right. They have come back and come back."

"But all the others sang for them. Sang right."

"Could you try it again?" He saw the look on my face and grimaced. "Yes, all right, I can see why not. What else can we do?"

"I don't know. Mormor never said."

He put his arms around me. "I'm sorry, hon. Maybe they . . . had the wrong day."

"Eric."

"Sorry."

Mormor and I had talked about a lot of things, but the worst-case scenario was not one of her strong points—at least, not as long as she could avoid it. It was to her credit, I suppose, that she didn't try to dodge her diagnosis in the end.

I could hear from her voice on the phone that there was something wrong, but I tried to have a normal visit with her. "We should get the cousins in to clean out your cabinets," I said. "You shouldn't have to do spring cleaning at your age, even though I know you can."

"Karin."

"It's no trouble, really," I rattled on, "and Tove and Siri will say the same, and the others. Do you want to make some spritz? I could do with fresh spritz."

"Sit down, Karin."

Mormor and I almost never just sat. We always did things, projects. I sat.

"I asked your mor not to tell you this because I wanted to say it myself. Karin, my kidneys are failing. They were damaged when I was sick as a little girl, and they're not going to last me more than a few years with dialysis."

I sucked in a breath. One of the white-robed disir put a hand on my shoulder. "Can't you get a transplant?"

She fixed me with one of her stubborn looks. "Maybe. I might be able to find a match eventually. But what would it buy me? A year, two, five? The odds

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Marissa Lingen is a freelance writer living in the Minneapolis area with two large men and one small dog. She is currently at work on a trilogy about early computing, Finnish mythology, and Cold War spies.

(To read the rest of this bio, and see other stories in Jim Baen's Universe visit Marissa Lingen's author page.)

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