How Nancy Drew Saved My Life (8 page)

“It's going to be okay,” I said.

George was still muttering, saying tearful goodbyes to his grandchildren.

“Really,” I said. “I've been through this kind of thing a hundred times.”

That stopped him. “You have?” he asked.

“Yes,” I lied, wondering if Nancy Drew ever lied to make someone else feel better. Probably not, I figured: one, she was probably morally against lying; and, two, with fifty-six cases under her belt, she really
had
been through everything a hundred times!

“Yes,” I said again, “and it always turns out okay in the end.”

“It does?” George asked, wanting to believe.

“Of course,” I said. “You'll have an exciting story to tell your grandkids the next time you see them. Why, you should just look at this as material for that story you'll one day write.”

“Ha!” he said, regaining some of his former spirit. “I thought
you
were the writer!”

Still, he clung to my hand right up until the copilot emerged from the bottom of the plane.

“Everything's fine,” the copilot announced to cheers. “It was just as the pilot said—must have been a malfunction with the light.”

Even still, it was treated as an emergency landing, fire trucks screaming beside the plane as we hit the runway.

“Thank you,” George said so softly I almost couldn't hear him over the sirens. “You made me feel better.”

And I realized that while I'd been busy making him feel better, I forgot about feeling scared myself.

After the plane came to a complete halt without incident, I managed to remove my carry-on bag from the overhead bin without giving myself a concussion, and I was on my way to my new life.

In Iceland, I would reinvent myself.

In Iceland, I would become a new person.

“I hope you figure this place out,” George said in parting. I thought that he was wishing me well, but then I saw from the look in his eyes that he'd forgotten about clinging together when we thought we were going to die and had now reverted to resenting me for being The Writer Who Refused To Tell His Story. I became sure of it when he added, “Not that I think that's likely.”

What do you say to something like that?

“You know,” George said, studying me, “some people don't deserve a helping hand.”

Now, where did that come from?

Then it hit me and I snap-pointed at him. “
The Bungalow Mystery,
#3! You're quoting
The Bungalow Mystery
at me!”

He gave me a look of grudging respect. “Got it in one,” he conceded.

I
surprisingly hadn't brushed up on my knowledge of Iceland before flying into the country. It was an adventure, right? I should just be winging it rather than overplanning it, right?

Just before leaving JFK, feeling a frisson akin to guilt that I should at least prepare in some way, I'd purchased a couple of guidebooks—Lonely Planet's
Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands,
Fodor's
Scandinavia
and a series that was new to me,
Hanging Out in Europe.

Then I'd shoved them in my bag and proceeded to spend the entire flight bumming about George and taking my scenic trip down Bad-Memory Lane.

Maybe I was in denial. Maybe I was in denial because I'd left a rarely beautiful, crystal and completely non-humid midsummer New York day for…

RAIN!

I heard it before I saw it, pelting the tiny windows of the plane as I waited in line to debark. In a sudden panic over my own unpreparedness, I rifled through my bag—passport, money, cigarettes, just in case I needed to become a smoker again—and whipped out Lonely Planet.

Index.

Let's see…climate, climate, climate…

It said this time of year I could expect a daily temperature of 10.6ºC. Great to know, but not fucking helpful. I was a Fahrenheit girl. Who made Lonely Planet, the Europeans?

I reached for the Fodor's instead. They seemed like reasonable people.

Climate, climate, climate…

Ha! This one said 14ºC—the guidebooks couldn't even agree with one another on average daily temperature! I mean, it's not something like a restaurant review, which would be subjective—“The lutefisk rocks!” “The lutefisk sucks!” It was weather, for crying out loud! Wasn't that supposed to be an exact science? Then my eyes saw that in the Fodor's, they gave average daily highs and lows and the high was 14ºC, while the low was 9ºC, which was closer to the Lonely Planet listing. So maybe the Lonely Planet people were pessimists. Then my eyes shifted to the right and I finally saw a Fahrenheit listing. Daily high: 57ºF.

In summer.

I switched to
Hanging Out in Europe.
They didn't bother with Celsius at all, which kind of made me like them more: 58ºF.

It also said that during summer months, now,
the warm season
—ha!—the nights stay incredibly bright with sunlight, with the sun only dipping below the horizon for a few hours every day, the sky never getting completely dark.
Hanging Out in Europe
seemed to be the optimist in the bunch and this didn't sound too bad, but then they spoiled the effect by saying the weather changes rapidly and that a beautiful summer day could be wiped out in an instant by cold rain and high winds.

I switched one last time to see what the pessimists had to say about the weather beyond their mean and meaningless 10.6ºC. Lonely Planet said that, “Periods of fierce, wind-driven rain (or wet snow in winter) alternate with partial clearing, drizzle, gales and fog to create a distinctly miserable climate. It's mostly a matter of ‘if you don't like the weather now, wait five minutes—it will probably get worse.'” It said that in the month in which I was living, just one single fine day was considered to be the norm.

What in God's name was I doing here?

I'm a Jewish girl. We
hate
being cold! It is a
mistake
to let us get wet!

I hadn't even brought any kind of rain slicker.

“Oh, yeah,” George crooned from behind me. “You're doing just great so far, aren't you?”

What Would Nancy Drew Do?

She'd have read the damn guidebook, she'd have read all available information, she'd have done
research
before coming here.

Screw it.

Of course, she'd also still be nice to George, no matter what he said to her.

Screw that, too.

 

The first thing that struck me about the terminal at Keflavik Airport was all the duty-free shops. Everywhere I looked, there were these shops and the chief product they were all selling was chocolate, chocolate in massive industrial-size bags that were bigger than anything I'd ever seen in my own supersize-it country. You would think that with all of that chocolate, Icelanders would be the fattest people on the planet, but everywhere I looked, with the rare tourist exception, there were tall and beautiful and blond people making their graceful way through the airport, as though they were peopling the Scandinavian equivalent of Stepford, toting their duty-free booty.

One of the nice things about being employed by an ambassador is that there is a car and driver to meet you at the airport: I realized this as soon as I saw the man standing there holding a placard that said Nanny Bell. As George, who was waiting in line for the bus, shot daggers at me—I was sorely tempted to stick my tongue out at him, our brief flirtation with being friendly already a thing of the past—I let Lars Aquavit take my bag and lead me out to the embassy car at the curb.

Actually, his name wasn't really Lars Aquavit, but I doubt I could spell and certainly cannot pronounce the name he gave me, so let's just leave it at Lars Aquavit.

Lars was tall, blond and beautiful, and I was quickly realizing that those three adjectives were going to soon grow redundant for me. Oh, well. Maybe to these people I would seem exotic and they would crown me Miss Iceland and send me off as their emissary on an all-expenses-paid trip to the next Miss Universe Pageant.

Yeah, right.

Lars also had a slim silver cell phone glued to his ear. I would have thought this rude, but everywhere I looked, all the other beautiful Icelanders were doing the same. It seemed to be a cultural thing, even more than back home.

Somehow, Lars managed to use his cell-phone hand to also juggle an umbrella over our heads, so what had I really to complain about? At least I wasn't getting wet.

The other cultural thing about Icelanders that I noticed right away was that a lot of people seemed to be smoking. Back home, where smoking had replaced being a witch as the number-one reason to burn someone at the stake, I'd been forced to slowly quit over time and, of course, I'd certainly never smoked around the Keating kids. After all, what kind of an adulterous nanny would I be if I both slept with their father
and
smoked within sniff of their button noses?

But once Lars had me seated comfortably in the back seat and climbed behind the wheel, he lit up, drawing long and hard on his slim cigarette, and that curling smoke sure looked tempting.

Weren't Icelanders supposed to have the highest life expectancy on the face of the planet? I seemed to recall reading that somewhere several years back. Maybe those statistics—Best This, Best That—were revised every year and maybe some other country had outlived them, but still, I distinctly recalled the article saying the average Icelander lived eighty-four years. Eighty-four
healthy
years. So how come they could smoke like chimneys and we couldn't?

“Um, excuse me?” I called up to Lars.

“Yes, Ms. Bell?”

“Your cigarette,” I said.

“Oh, I'm so sorry.” He reddened, moved to stub his cigarette out. “I forgot how much you Americans detest—”

“NO!” I stopped him. “I was just wondering…”

“Yes?”

“Could I maybe bum one of those off you?”

“‘Bum'?”

“Borrow, obtain, get. I can pay you for it.” I reached in my bag, looked for my wallet.

“Don't be silly,” he laughed, handing the pack back over the seat, the flip-top lid open, a slim cigarette sliding out. I felt like I was in the middle of a Newport commercial, only the brand wasn't one I recognized. “Please help yourself.”

I helped myself.

“I'm sure,” said Lars, “that Ambassador Rawlings would want you to have every comfort you need, so smoke as much as you like.”

I could get used to this, I thought, lighting up, but I still wasn't going to smoke around Annette.

Lars Aquavit was chattier than I would have expected an Icelander to be. Weren't these people supposed to be reserved or something?

Perhaps “the master”—more likely, Mrs. Fairly—had told him that it was part of his job to make me feel at home and that “at home” for an American meant gabbing up a storm until the cows came home on the range.

“Did you know,” said Lars Aquavit, “that Iceland is so small in population that we all feel as though we know one another?”

As I looked out the window, and saw pairs and groupings of people walking companionably with one another, it looked as if it might be true.

“It's true,” Lars Aquavit nodded at my reflection in the mirror, as though I'd somehow tried to deny it. “And some of us really
do
know everybody!”

“That sounds wonderful,” I said, wondering even as I spoke if I really meant it.

Would it be great to know everybody? Would it be great to have everybody know you? I had my doubts.

“Tell me something,” Lars Aquavit said, in what sounded to me to be an uncharacteristically challenging tone of voice, “in your country, if you wished to meet the president to discuss some small matter with him and you just tried to call him up on the phone, what kind of response would you get?”

“You mean before or after the FBI and CIA came knocking on my door with questions about what I was really after, perhaps taking me into detention until they could ascertain that I was a harmless nut as opposed to a harmful one?”

He gave the matter some serious thought.

“I suppose,” he finally said, “it would need to be after.”

“They'd say no,” I said. “They'd probably suggest making a campaign donation, but even if I did that, they'd still say no.”

“Ah, you see?” he said. “Here it is much different. Here, any citizen can call up the president's secretary and request an audience to discuss whatever they want.”

“You're kidding,” I said.

“No,” he said, “kidding is not something that I am prone to. Why, just last week, I called up the president and we had lunch together the very same day.”

What a country. A chauffeur could call up the president and, rather than finding himself in someplace like Guantanamo, wind up with an invitation to eat.

It seemed impossible. I wanted to accuse Lars Aquavit of kidding me again but remembered that it hadn't gone over well the first time.

“Wow,” I finally said, “the same day? That's amazing.”

He shrugged.

“I suppose it helps,” he said, “that, of course, the president is my cousin.”

“Your cousin?”

“All right, my second cousin. But still a cousin, of course.”

Of course.

What a country. It was like Lilliput, except that everyone was tall.

If I had been less exhausted and less jazzed—I'd left at six in the evening, hadn't slept, and now it was the morning of a new day!—I'm sure I would have looked out the window some more, enjoyed the scenery, taken in my new surroundings.

But I was beat and teetering on the edge of an “I'm starting a new life—HELP!” breakdown. All I had the ambition to do was lean back in the black leather seat, with the driver who was the second cousin to the president of the country steering the way, close my eyes and puff away until the nicotine rush transported me to a heady place. Iceland and I could get to know one another better at a later time.

One other thing I'd noticed at Keflavik Airport, even while rushing to keep up with Lars at the time: in addition to all the big chocolate, all the ubiquitous cell phones, all the superfluous height, all the blinding blondeness and beauty, an inordinate number of Icelanders had been walking around with copies of Nancy Drew books in their hands.

What was up with
that?

Up until a couple of months ago, Nancy Drew had been no more than a dim memory from my childhood. I'd managed to live basically without her all my life. But now, it was as though she was everywhere!

So, really, what was up with that?

I took another puff and sighed.

I would figure out that mystery later.

 

The United States embassy was on Laufasvegur 21.

When I walked through the front door, Mrs. Fairly was there to greet me, dressed in what I now assumed was her ever-present black, every single blue strand of hair perfectly in place.

I had opened my eyes long enough on the drive from the airport to note that Reykjavik was a low-lying city, which to me meant no tall buildings like I was used to, and that the houses were all close together, all painted white but with sloping roofs that were painted in bright jewel tones: reds and blues and greens and yellows and purples. It was somehow tropical looking, like what you'd expect to find in the Caribbean, not on a place with a cold and unforgiving climate, one whose name had even been taken from the word to describe what results when the temperature drops below 32ºF or 0ºC for that matter—ha! I was learning conversions!