As Black as Ebony (3 page)

Alla kvällar lät prinsessan smeka sig.

Men den som smeker stillar blott sin egen hunger

och hennes längtan var en skygg mimosa,

en storögd saga inför verkligheten.

Nya smekningar fyllde hennes hjärta med bitter sötma

och hennes kropp med is, men hennes hjärta ville ännu mer.

Prinsessan kände kroppar, men hon sökte hjärtan;

hon hade aldrig sett ett annat hjärta än sitt eget.

(Every evening, the princess allowed herself to be caressed.

But the caresser only satisfied his own hunger,

while her desire was a shy mimosa,

a wide-eyed fairy tale in the face of reality.

New caresses filled her heart with a bitter flush

and her body with ice, but her heart wanted more.

The princess knew bodies, but she sought hearts;

she had never seen any heart but her own.)

Lumikki read “The Princess” quietly to herself. The words calmed her. She had read her copy of Edith Södergran’s posthumously released collection
The Land Which Is Not
so many times she knew every poem practically by heart. The first words always brought back the rest of the lines. Familiar poems were like mantras. Their calming effect rested on the way the words flowed one after another in just the right order, without any surprises.

Lumikki couldn’t go straight home after reading the letter. Was someone really following her every step? She’d tried to rationalize away the fear. In all likelihood, the letter was just a bad joke. Black humor. A cruel game. Someone somewhere was laughing right now thinking about how frightened she would be, but soon they’d jump out and reveal the truth. Gotcha!

But what if the letter was real? What if she really did have a crazy stalker who was prepared to kill people? Lumikki couldn’t risk treating the letter too cavalierly. Her life experience had left her little doubt that people were capable of evil deeds. She’d endured years of brutal school bullying and then seen up close the ruthlessness of the international drug trade. Just that past summer in Prague, she had seen a charismatic leader use fear to manipulate his religious cult into attempting mass suicide.

All her life was missing was a deranged stalker, Lumikki thought with a bitter snort.

The sounds around her were pleasantly muffled. Calm footsteps, the rustling of pages, hushed conversations. Lumikki knew that if she went and sat by the base of one of the arches that made up the roof, she’d be able to make out every word being said at the base of the other side of the arch. Reima and Raila Pietilä had designed the Tampere City Library that way. However, Lumikki didn’t want to hear anyone else’s private conversations right now. She wanted to be wrapped in the protective familiarity of the library’s indistinct murmurs, surrounded by people but still alone so she could calm down and build up the courage to go home. The library was only a two-minute walk from the Alexander Church.

Lumikki had always found the building’s undulating dome and avian plume of arches soothing inside and out. There was just enough walking space between the shelves, but if you wanted, you could hide in them. The library was full of round reading tables and secret nooks where no one ever bothered you.

Lumikki wanted to text Sampsa and ask him to come over for the night after his family dinner. No matter how late that would be. But she had never done something like that before, so Sampsa might wonder. And then Lumikki would have to lie, and she didn’t want to lie to Sampsa.

No, she would have to make it through the night alone. Then she would have to find out as soon as possible who put the letter in her pocket. She’d have to do that alone too.

Lumikki had thought she wasn’t going to be so alone anymore. She had thought wrong. Suddenly, she felt that familiar emptiness and desolation filling her inside. She was always alone, in the end. Lumikki stared at the stanzas of the poem, unable to read any more.

Just then a deep, crisp scent of pine forest surrounded her and a warm hand gently brushed her neck.

“Edith Södergran. Are you reading our poems without me?”

Lumikki knew before she turned to look over her shoulder. She knew before the voice and the words. She knew from the smell and the touch.

Blaze.

He stood sideways behind Lumikki. Smiling. Real. He looked maybe a little more like a boy than he had eighteen months earlier. His hair was shorter and lighter, and there was a new calm and self-assurance in his posture, but otherwise he was exactly the same. Those ice-blue eyes were the same, and Lumikki sank into them instantly like breaking through a frozen crust as thin as thought and plunging into the black lake beneath.

A storm of emotions washed over Lumikki. She wanted to curl up in Blaze’s arms as close as she could and tell him everything about the letter and how afraid she was and what had happened in the past year and all the longing and loneliness and dreams and black thoughts and ask him to protect her and save her from solitude and evil and take him home and tear off all his clothes and her own and get tangled up with him on the floor and kiss and kiss and kiss and press every hungry inch of her skin against him and burst into flames and forget herself and the world and that they were two different beings because front to front they were one, as seamless as could be with no boundaries, and Lumikki wanted to burn and burn and burn without fearing the fire for once.

Lumikki swallowed. A tremor ran through her. She couldn’t speak.

“It’s nice to see you. Wanna go get coffee? Or are you busy?” Blaze asked as if it were perfectly natural to chat like normal people.

“No,” Lumikki managed to say.

“Good. Should we go upstairs to the cafe?”

“No. I mean we can’t go get coffee.” Blaze stared at Lumikki, a little confused, but then he smiled mischievously.

“We can do something else if you want to.”

With trembling hands, Lumikki put her book back on the shelf and pulled her knitted cap down over her ears.

“No, we can’t. I’m busy. I can’t see you. Now.” Lumikki heard the words coming out of her mouth, haltingly, breathlessly.

“Okay. Well, some other time then. Is your phone number the same? I’ll call or text you.”

Blaze’s voice was warm and composed. Don’t, Lumikki should have said. That was what she wanted to say. But she also didn’t.

“I have to go. Bye.”

Lumikki’s legs wanted to run out of the library, as fast and as far as possible away from Blaze. But she forced herself to walk. Briskly and purposefully. Without looking back.

Not until she was outside in the fresh air did Lumikki realize she should have said she was dating someone.

She hadn’t said it though, because after diving into the burning ice water of Blaze’s eyes, she had forgotten that fact completely.

I love you.

Three words that are so easy to say but so hard to mean. I mean them. I breathe each word and they become a part of me. I say them to you and they become a part of you. My love moves into you. It makes you burn even more beautiful, strong, and radiant.

I make you brighter than the brightest star of the nighttime sky.

You become mine, completely. As was always meant to be. Because it is your fate. And mine.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9

Sister, sister, sister, sister.

The word pounded in Lumikki’s head, as it always did now when she was visiting her parents in Riihimäki. It would just never come out of her mouth. Her mom had made goat cheese lasagna for lunch, which was one of Lumikki’s favorites, but today she could barely taste it. Lumikki felt as if all of her pleasure centers had been numbed. Food was just necessary fuel. Even coffee didn’t taste good.

Lumikki figured it was because of the letter. She was still convinced that it was just a nasty prank, but the message bothered her anyway, lurking somewhere behind her thoughts. It made colors grayer and covered the world in a thin haze. Tastes disappeared. If Lumikki could just figure out who the letter was from, she would get her revenge, which would be civilized but definitely served cold.

But at her parents’ house, the only thing Lumikki could think about was that she still hadn’t found out whether she really used to have a sister. The memories awakened in Prague by Lenka’s lie had felt so real. She had been sure that she had once had a sister. Since returning to Finland, she wasn’t as confident, though. She’d thought she would just slap the question down on the table as soon as she got home, but that hadn’t happened.

When Lumikki had told her mom and dad about Lenka, she left out the part about Lenka claiming she was Lumikki’s sister. Over the fall, Lumikki had exchanged a few e-mails with Lenka, who had started studying math, chemistry, and biology on her own, hoping eventually to get into medical school. Lenka had also subtly let Lumikki understand that she had never moved out of Ji
ř
i’s apartment. Ji
ř
i had found a new job at a local paper. Lumikki had read between the lines that, after saving Lenka from the burning house with Lumikki, Ji
ř
i had found he liked taking care of Lenka. Lumikki was happy for them.

Sometimes, Lenka signed her e-mails “your sister in spirit.” The word filled Lumikki’s thoughts. But she avoided saying it out loud.

Why? Wouldn’t it have been easiest just to talk about it? Lumikki didn’t know what was holding her back.

Maybe it was something in her mom and dad’s concern and earnestness, all the warmth and love they had shown since she returned from Prague. The uncharacteristic intimacy. The idea of interrogating them just felt wrong. Her dad’s trip to Prague years ago had turned out to be just a coincidence without any connection to the sister issue at all, so Lumikki hadn’t grilled them about that either.

To tell the truth, she had enjoyed all the warmth. She hadn’t wanted to jeopardize it by talking about something that might have been only her imagination anyway. People could invent memories if they really wanted or if they thought that something had happened in the past.

Days without bringing it up had turned into weeks, and weeks had turned into months. Eventually, Lumikki realized that there wasn’t any natural way to bring up the topic anymore. Her parents’ burst of tenderness had subsided, and all three of them had returned to their old, familiar roles where they talked about general things, kept in touch just as much as necessary for it to seem normal, and tried to avoid too many awkward lulls in conversation during a Saturday lunch like this.

“Would you like some more?” her mother asked to fill one such silent pause.

“No, thank you,” Lumikki replied. “Could I look at some of those old pictures though?”

“Again?” her dad asked. “You’ve already seen all of them.”

“Yeah, but I’ve been thinking that I might be able to use them for a project at school,” Lumikki explained.

“I’m going to make coffee,” her mother said, clearing the plates just a little too hastily.

Lumikki sat on the living room sofa with the photo album, slowly turning pages. She knew every picture by heart. She had looked at them so many times, this fall especially. She had tried to find some solution in them, some key.

There was her mom and dad’s wedding picture. Some pictures from a cottage in Åland. A couple of fuzzy shots of their home in Turku, where they lived until Lumikki was four. She only had dim memories of it. It was an idyllic, two-story wooden house in the Port Arthur area. Nothing like this stubby row house in Riihimäki. It seemed strange that they would have moved into a much less expensive house. For the price of their place in Turku, they should have been able to buy a big one here. Apparently, there were money problems no one had ever told Lumikki about.

“Why did we move from Turku?” Lumikki asked. Looking up from his newspaper, her father furrowed his brow.

“For work.”

That explanation didn’t make a lot of sense. Her father had always traveled for work, and most of his trips took him to Helsinki. And you would have thought library jobs for her mother would have been easier to find in a big city like Turku than a tiny town like Riihimäki. Lumikki didn’t press the matter.

She wondered yet again why there were so few pictures. There were just a couple from each year of her life and most of them weren’t very good. Not that Lumikki needed hundreds of baby pictures like people took nowadays, starting at the actual birth, but it was still strange for there to be this few. Lumikki had seen childhood photo albums at other people’s houses, and they were always much thicker and there were usually more than one. Maybe her mom and dad had just never been interested in photography. Or maybe they hadn’t been interested in taking pictures of Lumikki.

Lumikki paused longer on one picture than the others. In it, she was seven years old. She stood in the middle of a schoolyard. It was winter. She remembered Mom suddenly wanting to take a picture after dropping her off at school.

“Come on, smile!” her mom had said.

In the picture, Lumikki stared straight at the camera seriously, without the slightest hint of a smile. She simply didn’t have any reason to grin in that place. The bullying had started that winter, and Lumikki had hated every day she had to go to school. Now she looked at the picture and saw the chilling fear behind her defiant gaze.

Lumikki never wanted her eyes to look that way again. But she recognized it all too often in the mirror even now.

Lumikki closed the album. It wasn’t going to tell her anything new today. It wasn’t going to reveal the secrets hidden in the past.

After coffee, her mother asked Lumikki, “Are you going to stay for a sauna tonight?”

The question was more rhetorical than a real invitation. It was the question you were supposed to ask.

“No. Schoolwork,” Lumikki replied.

Just as she was expected to reply.

Walking to the railway station, Lumikki passed her old middle school. Seeing the building and the yard always brought the taste of iron to her mouth. Those had been the worst years of the violence and humiliation. The hitting and shouting. The isolation. All the lies to get Lumikki to come to school at the wrong time, to bring the wrong PE clothes, to do the wrong homework. She had tried to be careful and only believe what she had heard with her own ears from the teachers, but she had still been tricked time and time again. It was easy for the bullies to forge messages and get other kids to play along.

Just as nauseating was the memory of how she had finally risen up against her bullies, Anna-Sofia and Vanessa, brutally attacking them.

The rage. The loss of control. The hunger to kill.

Afterward, Lumikki didn’t know whether she was more afraid of the bullies or herself. Everything she knew she was capable of and how it felt to want to take another person’s life just to put an end to her personal hell. Lumikki wasn’t proud of her feelings, but she also didn’t try to deny them. That was why she had tried so hard to teach herself composure and self-control. She didn’t intend to give other people the upper hand, but she also didn’t want to act in anger.

At least Lumikki tried to make that her guiding rule. Following it wasn’t always so easy.

Sunny memories of Riihimäki were few and far between for Lumikki. One of them was of the Riihimäki Theater where Lumikki had seen a play when she was nine. She couldn’t remember what the play was anymore, but that didn’t matter. Lumikki had loved the smell of the auditorium, the hush that replaced the hum of conversation in the audience, and the moment when the lights had dimmed but the performance had not yet begun. The sense of tension and expectation when everything was still possible.

Lumikki had sat right in the front row, obliging her to tilt back her head to see properly. The actors had been almost close enough to touch. Lumikki had been able to see even their slightest expressions.

Lumikki remembered one dark-haired actor dancing, jumping, and running especially lightly and effortlessly. The hem of her aquamarine skirt undulated like rolling seawater. When the actor jumped right to the edge of the stage though, Lumikki caught a glimpse of a knee brace under her skirt. After that, Lumikki started watching the actor’s expressions more carefully, noticing under the winning smile and bubbly laughter and flowing words a hint of pain. With every jump and step of the dance, a shadow passed over the actor’s face so subtly it probably didn’t register for anyone else. It was like a fog fell over her eyes for a split second.

Lumikki watched the actor, spellbound. She forgot to watch the rest of the play. The plot wasn’t interesting anymore. Lumikki stared at the changing shades of the actor’s gray eyes, thinking. It was possible to take on a role no one else could see through. You could hide pain.

That carefree dancing and the laughter that filled the stage like apple blossoms had become a symbol of hidden strength and power for Lumikki. She thought that she could be like this actor someday too. She could choose her role and step onto the stage or sit in the audience. Lumikki could be anyone.

Seen from the window of her train home to Tampere, the December afternoon seemed to darken even more quickly than normal. It was gray. Just as gray as it had been for all of October, November, and the beginning of December. Today it wasn’t sleeting, it was drizzling. The ground was black. The bare branches of the trees were black. Lumikki saw her reflection in the window. Her eyes looked black.

Fifteen minutes outside of Tampere, Lumikki had to go to the bathroom so badly that she decided to use the restroom in the train instead of waiting until getting home. When she returned to her place, a folded sheet of paper lay on her seat. Lumikki glanced around. No one else was in the car. Just then, the train pulled up to one of the Tampere suburb stations.

Lumikki unfolded the paper with trembling hands.

Bile rose in Lumikki’s throat. Whoever had left the note, there was no way he was on the train anymore. He would have gotten off at that stop. The stalker’s timing had been perfect.

The thought that whoever wrote this had followed her to Riihimäki, kept watch to know when she was coming back, and waited to see whether she would go to the bathroom nauseated Lumikki. All just to be able to leave her this anonymous message.

This wasn’t a practical joke.

And no one could know the things this note said. There were things Lumikki had never told anyone. Things like the names of her tormentors.

Lumikki could barely dial her phone, her hands were shaking so much.

Thankfully, Sampsa answered immediately.

“Can I see you today?” Lumikki asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

“No.”

Lumikki swallowed.

“Why not?”

“I have band practice tonight and I’ve got an important project to finish, namely buying you a Christmas present,” Sampsa said with a laugh. “So you’ll have to wait until tomorrow, beautiful.”

“Okay.”

Lumikki would have liked to draw out the conversation and hold on to the safe warmth of Sampsa’s voice, but she didn’t dare say anything that might reveal everything wasn’t alright. So she made small talk, telling him about her parents’ vacation plans and remodeling plan. The sort of chitchat Lumikki never indulged. But Sampsa was in a hurry, so soon Lumikki was sitting with a mute phone in her hand, staring at her reflection in the window.

In her eyes was the same defiant fear as when she was seven years old.