The Tricking of Freya Read Online Free PDF Page A

was over Mama and I would sit at the kitchen table
for an afternoon snack. If the call had taken a particularly bad turn, Mama
wouldn't eat anything. I'd dip vanilla wafers one by one into my glass of milk.
    "Well, Birdie's sick again."
    "She didn't sound sick." I swirled the cookie crumbs into the milk with
my finger. "She didn't cough or sneeze or blow her nose."
    "Well," Mama insisted. "She is sick."
    "Will she be better by summertime?"
    "I don't know, honey. Why?"
    "She wants us to come visit her and Amma Sigga this summer." I often
imagined it, me and Birdie soaring over the lake, swooping and twirling like
trapeze artists, then diving off the edges of clouds into the sparkling water below. Mama and Amma Sigga watching from the beach, mouths open in awe.
    "When you can behave, then we can go to Gimli for the summer."
    But I did not behave, not well enough, not often enough. More summers
passed, and as each approached I'd hear my mother arguing with Birdie on
the phone. "I did not abandon you! I married an American. Really, Birdie.
Everything doesn't have to do with you."
    But it did. In the end it did.
    In addition to the phone calls there was a steady stream of letters back
and forth between Mama and her best friend, Vera. Vera had flown from
Winnipeg to help my mother after my father died, but I was too young to remember her. The letters came in blue airmail envelopes, the kind where
the letter and the envelope are one and the same piece of paper. Vera's neat
slanting script would fill the page. Mama would read Vera's letters at least
twice, and she always seemed sad after. "Homesick," she would say. "Vera
makes me homesick." I decided I didn't like Vera very much, not if she
made my mother sick.

    It was not until I was seven and safely out of first grade that my mother announced we would spend the summer in Gimli. She bought me a suitcase
for the trip, and each morning the week before departure I squirmed under
the bed to slide it out for a look. The suitcase was a red so bright it made my
cheeks tingle sour cherry, with brass hinges and irresistible brass locks:
nudge the button with your thumb and snappity-snap the latch popped
open with a crisp metal ping like a popcorn kernel exploding itself against
the lid of a pot. Snappity-snap! Snappity-snap! Snappity-snap! Snappitysnap! Snappity-snap! Snappity
    "You'll break it, Frey."
    "I won't." But quit for fear of it. "Could a person travel inside a suitcase?"
    "I don't suppose."
    I imagined a shrunken version of myself settling onto a bed of dungarees, my mother latching me snugly in, my head resting on a pillow of socks
while Foxy whispered me to sleep. In the morning my mother would carry
Frey-in-the-suitcase to the train station, swinging me lightly in white-gloved
hands until the train screeched its arrival and everyone climbed all aboard,
all aboard.
    The night before we left, Mama called Canada one last time. I was not
allowed to talk. "You'll see them soon enough." The call was mostly arrangements: what time the train would arrive, who would meet us at the station.
Then: "Is Birdie all right?"

    "If she's not, we could always postpone."

    "Of course we're coming. I never said we weren't. We'll wait for them at
the station then."
    "Not go?" I asked as soon as my mother hung up.

    "We're going, we're going!" Mama untangled the black phone cord coiled
tightly around her wrist. "Why does everyone think we're not going?"
    Aside from an alarming episode when I got stuck between cars and had to
be rescued by a conductor, I behaved on the train. While Mama stared out
the window or knitted, I played endless games of solitaire. As we came
within a few hours of Winnipeg she began dropping stitches left and right,
sighing and ripping out whole sections of scarf. Every once in a while she
would sound a warning. "Your amnia Sigga is a proper lady, Frey. You're going to have to be very well behaved."
    "I will." Red seven on black eight. Black