The Faces of Strangers (21 page)

At first, the thought bypassed Paavo like a breeze. So many people are left-handed. But as he watched Claudia fill in an octopus's arm with varying shades of red, he stared hard at her face. Claudia wasn't a spitting image of Mari, not really. She had a ski-bump nose. She had stubby digits in contrast to Mari's graceful piano fingers. She had a heart-shaped hairline. He did some quick math in his head. Claudia had been born exactly nine months after Nico left Tallinn. It couldn't be. Could it?

The questions nearly tumbled out of his mouth to Claudia, who wouldn't have known the first place to begin. When had it happened? Where had Paavo been? Why, when Mari hadn't shown the slightest interest toward Nico during his four months with the Sokolovs? Did Nico know? Did
Claudia
know?

By the time Mari came in the door, Paavo had worked his brain into such a state that he was impressed with his ability to settle Claudia on the couch with a DVD and a snack without arousing her suspicions. The inner workings of his mind were frenetic with pulses, synapses firing rapidly one after the other in quick succession. He was pacing in the foyer as Mari came back in, holding several bags, her cheeks rosy from the chilled air.

“How was it?” he asked. He couldn't keep the sneer out of his voice. “Did you get everything you needed?”

Mari looked taken aback. “Yes. Thank you for staying with her,” she said. “What's with the attitude?”

“Claudia. She's left-handed.”

“Yes, so?” Mari said, setting her bags down. “Don't tell me you believe in all that handed mumbo jumbo.”

“Nope. That's not it at all,” Paavo said, continuing to pace back and forth across the perimeter of the foyer. “You know who else is left-handed? Do you?”

“Well, lots of people, I'd imagine,” Mari said. “What's this about, Paavo? Stop pacing—you're making me nervous.”

“Nico.” Paavo stopped in front of her. “Nico Grand is left-handed. Who is Claudia's father, Mari? Enough of this impossible secrecy.”

Mari looked down at the floor, pushing her shoes off with her toes.

“I thought I was the one who was obsessed with riddles. But I solved this one, didn't I? What prize do I win?”

“Okay, enough, Paavo. Yes. It's him.”

“Obviously, it's him. Claudia has his nose, his fingers, his brow... Did you think I was stupid, the two of you? All those years ago just because I was so timid, you decided to parade around my back together and get, well, pregnant?”

“It wasn't like that, Paavo,” Mari said. “It's a lot more complicated.” She reached her hands out toward Paavo but he shrugged away.

“Please, Mari,” Paavo said, rolling his eyes. “I may be inexperienced with women, but I know how some things work. The crazy thing is, he was
my
exchange student. You barely showed the slightest interest in him while he was there. I can't believe you hid this from me.”

“I don't know what to say,” Mari said, looking down at the ground. “This is the whole reason I didn't want to tell you.”

“What, because I would get upset? Damned right I would. At the very least,” Paavo said. “Does
she
know?” He nodded toward the living room. Mari shook her head. “Are you going to tell her?”

She put her hands on Paavo's to calm him, but he shrugged them off. “Maybe someday I'll tell her,” Mari said. “But right now, it isn't relevant. We don't need anyone else. We have each other.”

“That's so far beside the point, Mari,” Paavo said. “I feel like a complete moron. You've completely duped me. And Ema, Papa, and Nico—”

“They know,” Mari interrupted. “But Nico doesn't. You can't tell him.”

“What, Nico doesn't know that he slept with my sister? Did you drug him? Was he unaware of having had sex with you?”

“Paavo! No, of course not. I meant that he doesn't know about Claudia.”

Paavo shook his head. “This is too much. I can't believe this, Mari. I can't believe that had CallMe not sent me here, I'd never have seen you. I'd never have figured this out. What if Claudia hadn't wanted to color? I'd still be left in the dark. I need to clear my head. I'll see you later.” He pushed past Mari and walked out the door into the chilled night air.

“Don't go like this, Paavo. Claudia really loves you. And you're my brother.”

“Exactly my point.”

Paavo stalked the five kilometers back to his hotel, muttering and exploding in anger every so often. By the time he let himself into his room, he had worked himself into such a state that he fell into the bed and fell fast asleep. He dreamed of little Claudia taking a position on a padded wrestling mat in a purple singlet, and Nico, stepping forward to show her how to take down an opponent.

NICO

St.
Louis
June 2009

When Nico was in Buffalo, he dreamed of Mari for the first time in years. He hadn't thought of her since college, when each night before a wrestling match, he would picture her face with its electric-blue eyes and tight lips and masturbate silently, his roommate asleep in the bed a few feet from his. The first time he'd done it, he'd felt so ashamed, staring at his reflection in the dorm room bathroom, his face flushed from the exertion. But it had helped him wrestle so well the following day, that it became his routine. His college coach had clapped him on the back after he had stepped off the mat and removed his headgear. “Grand—that was fantastic. Where did that come from?” Nico had shrugged humbly, but he knew the exact origin of his strength and focus and he'd grinned to himself. Conjuring Mari became his good luck charm, one that he would never share with his teammates because he was embarrassed, and because he felt proprietary over her, over his ability to perform because of her. It was a little pathetic; he knew that. But it worked. And at the end of the day, winners weren't pathetic.

On that first day on the campaign trail in St. Louis, he awoke in the middle of the night, his throat parched and his knees aching. He felt inadequate; as the youngest chief campaign advisor on any senatorial ticket, there were constant reminders of his youth and inexperience. It seemed that every other staffer was a campaign veteran who all seemed to start their conversations with, “Back on the Dukakis trail...” or “When we were working the Mondale polls...” It didn't seem that Nico could ever catch up. But the congresswoman was using Nico's speech in the morning, to address a convention hall filled with ironworkers who were losing faith in the ability of their union. Nico hoped that his words would renew and reinforce the bonds between unions and the congresswoman's campaign, and had industriously peppered the speech with metaphors like “forging ties,” “welding us together,” “soldering our best parts to create a stronger union.” He felt sick; was there time to rewrite the whole speech? Nico flipped through channels and scrolled through his cell phone in an effort to distract himself. Just as he was about to call the front desk to see if he could score some NyQuil, Mari's face flashed across the screen. There she was, stalking the runway, wearing oversize fluffy white wings and a barely there black lace bra and matching underwear. She walked on sky-high heels, moving forward with poise and ease, with the slightest smirk on her face. She'd made it across the Atlantic divide. There she was, on national television. Did that mean she'd made it here, as well? He felt momentarily betrayed. She'd promised to get in touch if her career brought her stateside. But perhaps the commercial had been filmed in Europe. As soon as she'd been there, she was gone.

He quieted his indignation and focused on the task at hand. Muting the television, awash in the flickering lights of a late-night talk show, he performed his ritual and was asleep in no time. He knew it was shameful, imagining the woman who had taken his virginity six years ago.

“It's just this once,” he told himself that evening. But then the following night, after a treacherous Q-and-A session with a dozen degenerate journalists who poked holes in his responses and bullied him into near submission, he begged out of drinks with the rest of the staff and retreated to his hotel room, flipping channels for that ad again, and when he failed to find it, he Googled her. He'd had no idea she had hit it so big; there were pages and pages filled with her, scantily clad, or zoomed in to her perfect features. He clicked and scrolled for hours, reintroducing himself to her adult self. Her cheekbones had become more angular and her lips soft and pillowy. He remembered how she held her body erect, posture being of utmost importance above all, the slant of her tweezed eyebrows, her nervous habit of drumming her long fingers against her thighs.

At breakfast each morning, where he disciplined himself to have two cups of black coffee, a banana and a small bowl of yogurt while on the campaign trail, his fellow staff members would eat warily, their faces down to their meals, but their eyes alert toward everything happening around them. Nico couldn't help but smile into his coffee with each sip and think of all the goodness that Mari had brought him. He was sure she had no idea what that afternoon had meant to his life's trajectory. Unknowingly, she had charged his confidence levels, increasing his ability to speak up for himself, and in turn, pushing him into the spotlight. Nico was no longer timid about what he wanted; he saw and went after it. And when he felt the slightest weakness or doubt, he would remember how strong he'd felt in those weeks after he'd returned from Tallinn, how capable and assured, helping him to ultimately retrain his eye on the prize.

The days were getting longer and longer, each one feeling as though there were five or six of them packed into a single one. Nico wrote each speech as though he were delivering them. He sat in his hotel room, estranged and removed from the rest of the team, composing sentences and ideologies in his head before committing them to paper. He imagined the roar of the crowd upon the oration of a paragraph, the tension and the voice mounting over and over again. The drama was what engaged him, the excitement of the enormous host of people looking over the room or the hall or the arena. Nico longed to be behind the podium for longer than just sound check. He wanted to feel the charge of it, but most of all, he wanted the people to know that they were his words. He'd thought that having his words aired and applauded might be enough, but instead, each speech made him increasingly bitter that someone else was passing off his own work. Watching the congresswoman deliver his work was proof that Nico could turn a phrase beautifully, that he was insightful and thoughtful. He knew he could bring a crowd to its feet, even if the intonation and the elocution weren't his. His desire to conjure Mari each evening turned from a pure and simple need to a fulfillment of frustration. He knew he was getting complacent by imagining her each night, but by the sixth week on the trail, he had dug himself into a hole so deep, there was no getting out.

The next morning's speech was of the greatest magnitude; the teacher vote was the widest margin they had of that election year, and to be able to clinch them would mean a certain win for their team. The speech was to be given to a hall filled with educators, and the congresswoman was going to discuss her devotion and commitment to the future of education, to the sense of self that had been lost in the power of teaching young people recently. The idea was fueled by the one that all teachers should take a huge sense of pride in teaching because they were the ones that would be remembered above all else, above the lessons and the exams and the final papers. It would be their style, their voices, their presences that students would ultimately recall years later. Nico had written it as a lecture in a school hall, with audience participation, modeled after a TED talk, complete with slides and clicker that he would control as the congresswoman would stroll across the deep stage, offering Nico's words, accepting Nico's applause.

But the congresswoman hadn't emerged at breakfast that morning and after a few urgent calls to her room, which were answered and met with dead silence, Nico found himself rapping on her door with one hand while he held his cell phone in the other, with the congresswoman's chief of staff on speakerphone. Mike Raimi's wife had delivered their third son the morning before, and Mike was taking the call from the waiting room of the hospital on the Upper East Side in New York City. The congresswoman opened the door wrapped in a hotel blanket, sniffling and hacking into a tissue. She held up a hotel memo pad, upon which she'd scribbled, “Lost my voice. Can't talk.”

“Shit,” Nico had muttered. “Shit, shit, shit. Mike, she lost her voice.”

“Shit. Fuck.” The words lost their gravitas through the tinny quality of the speakers. “I'll get on the next train.”

“Absolutely not, Mike. Your wife will kill you. You can't leave your family. Let's think, let's think. What if...what if we just do a meet and greet instead of the speech?” Nico asked, stepping into the room. “A handshake op or a...a press conference? I could field the questions.”

“No way, Nico,” Mike said. “This one is way too important. We can't lose this opportunity. Figuera already deposited the remainder of his campaign fund into the Board of Ed. We have to make our mark. That speech is our only hope. It has to be delivered.” The congresswoman nodded vehemently, before collapsing into a round of hacking coughs, and pointed at Nico.

“No. No way, Shelley.”

“What? What's she saying?” Mike asked.

“That I should give the speech.”

“You know, it's not a terrible idea, Nico,” Mike said.

“Me?” Nico said, his voice rising higher. “I'm just behind the scenes.”

“Look, we're going to lose them unless we deliver with gusto. If it were anyone else, I'd be on the next train there, but you can handle this. You've got presence, charisma. Just add a prologue explaining the circumstances and who you are. They're your words—you might as well deliver them.”

Nico couldn't deny it: he'd imagined this day from the moment he had set foot inside Francis Foley's ad hoc campaign office. Each sentence he crafted on behalf of another person was another layer of proof of how much he desired for the people to truly pay attention to the man behind the curtain. But other than reading his words aloud to ensure rhythm and cadence, he hadn't practiced at all. Just like that first day when he'd learned he had two days to apply for the Hallström program or miss his chance altogether, he seized it.

“Okay,” Nico said, looking at the congresswoman, lying supine and camouflaged amongst a barricade of plush white pillows. “I'll do it.”