My father’s eyes are Baltic lighthouse beacons, scanning the briny for my mermaid mother. On the chart table I’d watched him make from fine Honduran mahogany, I help him map what might be her progress: the Strait of Messina, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, perhaps the Bay of Bengal. But after a couple of mariners say they spotted her heading for the Sea of Japan, he lets the lamp burn low, lets his eyes grow dim.

My father’s spine is the ridge of a two-man tent in the Home of the Giants, the Jotunheimen mountains. Weary from sheep-dotted climbs and boot-sucking bogs, we boil our campfire billycan, feast on baked beans seasoned with breeze-blown flecks of scorched grass. As dusk settles, we toast marshmallows before hunkering into our bedrolls, a knight and his squire, ready for the damp chill of dawn, hoping for giants.

My father’s mouth is an igloo kitchen we build with his Swedish girlfriend and her twin daughters. They feed us sticky caramel almond cake and cloudberry sorbet, pour flagons of ice-cold meltwater. Afterwards, in our seven-league boots, we tramp on up the glacier, Father and Freja leading, me with Berit and Bolette, fourteen and giggly, promising they’ll kiss me if I guess which is which.

My father’s face is a gilded hall of mercury mirrors. Every morning, Freja sprays them with pure white vinegar, buffs each one shining with a fresh cotton cloth, repeats the cycle again and again. I take the cloths gently from her, tell her I’ll take over, don’t tell her that, no matter how hard we polish, we can never wipe away a mermaid’s shadow, the etched letters which spell Maja, the name of my mother.

My father’s heart is a Geppetto shed of ancient hammers and applewood offcuts. Out in the sunshine, everyone sweating in funeral black, Berit and Bolette, home from uni, pass around slices of savoury sandwich cake called smörgåstårta. From beneath the age-worn bench, I drag out the dusty chart table from long ago, set it on a pyre of scrumpled maps and hickory shavings. Then I whisper a prayer and put a match to the Sea of Japan.