Excerpted: Something That Helps

I have two photographs that my father took just before I was born. The one shows traces of my mother in the sand, very clear prints of her narrow feet. In the other, she’s standing looking out to sea. She’s holding her hands behind her back and has windblown hair and a big, protruding belly under the turquoise robe. It looks like she’s cold, but the light is warm and soft and granular, and I think she’s smiling. Magnus is sitting on the sand just behind her. He’s wearing a light-blue nylon balaclava, a white Greenland sweater with a multicoloured pattern, and brown velvet pants over his diaper. In his hand he has, as most children do when they’re on the beach, a shovel. A bright-red shovel in his marzipan hand, and his round face is beaming and happy. The photograph always makes me think of my mother as easygoing and friendly. That’s how I’ve chosen to remember her.

     It was summer when she died. I can still see her leaving the house, walking past the apple tree and up the slight hill to the gate. She might have stopped, as she often did, outside the lingerie shop to look at all the lovely things they sold there, before carrying on past the drugstore, past the telegraph company and the chapel. It may have been like that, it may not. What I remember is that I was in Grade 1, and it was a sunny day. I was wearing a dress. I remember the fluttering of the material, the light caress over my knees. Magnus came to get me from school before the last class was over. He didn’t say much, only that I had to come home, and his face gave nothing away. We ran. I don’t know why, but I was full of anticipation. I imagined a parcel, a gift of some kind.

     When we got home, there was something going on in the house. We heard voices from the kitchen, they were hushed, mumbling, as though they were sharing secrets. Magnus took me into the living room, and we sat there and waited. It was warm and stuffy, and I started to sweat. I remembered that I had a bottle of juice in my school bag that was out in the hall. I went and got it and when I came back, I absent-mindedly sat down on the electric heater. It had been cold in the morning, and someone had turned it on but forgotten to turn it off again. The fizzling sound was like an adder hissing when taken by surprise, or a spitting cat, and there was a smell of burning and I screamed.

     My father came in from the kitchen. His face was white, and I thought it was because he knew how painful it was to burn yourself.

     “What have you told her?” he asked, taking a firm hold of Magnus’s arm.

     “Nothing,” Magnus said. “She burned herself on the heater.”

     My father lifted my dress, and I twisted my body round so I could see as well. I had red stripes all down my thighs. I stopped crying when I saw them. They stung and were sore, but I wanted to be brave. My father dragged me out to the bathroom. He turned on the tap and let the water run into the bath. I started to unbutton my dress, but he sat me down in the cold water before I was done. The dress inflated like a bubble in front of me, but I didn’t laugh, because it hurt so much, and it didn’t stop.

     “You sit there,” my father said, and then he left.

     Everything around me fell silent. For a while it felt good to be sitting there in the cold water with my thighs pressed up against the cool porcelain, but then the pain returned and I started to shiver. I thought I should call for my father, but I didn’t, instead I just sat there and listened to the dripping of the tap. There was no other sound. No one talking, no one walking over the floor, no one closing a door.

     One of the chapel boys had said that Jesus could came back to earth at any moment, and then all the people who had not been saved would be thrown into the hell of eternal suffering. I wondered if that was perhaps what had happened. That all the people who had been saved had gone to heaven, and I was now sit- 17 ting in hell, and I would forever sit in a semi-dark bathroom, in the cold water with burns that just ached and ached. But it had to be a mistake, because I believed in Jesus, I certainly tried to, and I said my evening prayers every night when I remembered, and the teacher had told us that He would embrace all children. Jesus must have forgotten me, I thought, and that wasn’t so strange, really, given everything he had to think about, there were so many children in the world.

     I heard footsteps approaching and started to cry.

     “Jesus,” I said, out loud, “I’m here.”

     The door opened and my father appeared. “Where have you been?” I asked.

     “To the drugstore,” he said. “I bought some cream for you. You can get out of the bath now.”

     I put my hands on the rim and pulled myself up. I stood on the floor in my dripping dress, and my father looked at me in a way I’d never seen before. He seemed to stare right through me. I wanted to turn around to see if there was anyone behind my back, but I didn’t. I stood rigid in front of him, and the water from my dress formed a puddle around my feet, and when I looked down I saw my reflection. My face and body were faintly illuminated, and the ceiling light made a halo around my head, and I thought I looked like one of the angels in the children’s Bible.

     My father handed me a white tube and said I should rub it on.

     I took it, tried to open it, but couldn’t get the top off.

     “Shall I help you?” he asked.

     “Yes,” I replied.

     He unscrewed the lid, easily, just like that, and then he got down on his knees in front of me and his trousers got wet, but he didn’t care. He sat there without moving, without saying anything. Then he grabbed my arm.

     “There’s something I need to tell you,” he said. 

Excerpted from Something That Helps by Mona Høvring, translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson © 2026. Used with permission of Book*Hug Press.

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