The Winter Place (11 page)

“I was so nervous that I forgot to tell them about the salami,” Otso said. “And I bought pickles!”

“It can wait,
ukko
.”

The sound of feet and wheels faded to the other end of the little flat. Axel approached one of the beds and prodded it, like he wasn't quite sure what it was made of. Then he hopped aboard, hardly wrinkling the tightly tucked sheets. Tess got on the other one, and the two of them stared wordlessly at the ceiling. They could still hear their grandparents talking in the kitchen. Jaana in particular made no attempt to quiet her voice, imagining Finnish to be all the hush she needed. She told Otso about Saara's grave and the Oakwood Cemetery—how big and showy it was, how totally unlike their daughter. Saara would have hated it, they agreed. Oh, Sam knew it. How could he not have known it? Saara would have wanted to be brought home. She would have wanted to be buried alongside her grandparents, up at Talvijärvi.

“She still can be,” Jaana said.

“It's too soon for that,” Otso said. “No. It wouldn't be appropriate.”

There was a silence, through which Tess could
hear the exertions of their obnoxious coffeemaker. At that moment she felt so adrift, and she missed her father so intensely, that Tess thought she might actually throw up.

“Shall I tell Dr. Virtanen about what happened this morning?”

“You mean downstairs? I hardly think that's worth mentioning.”

“I see. That's normal behavior for American children as you understand it?”

“Don't be snippy,
rakas
. Imagine the week he's had.”

Tess turned in bed to face her brother and saw that he looked just as lost. Axel rolled his shoulders so that she wouldn't see him crying and turned his face to one of the epic paintings on the wall. It was a picture of Väinämöinen, who was basically a pre-Christian Finnish wizard. Väinämöinen and his men were on a small boat, defending the magical Sampo from the flying hag queen of the north. The wizard held a sword in his left hand, the tiller in his right. A thicket of spears sprouted up at his knees. This painting had appeared on the cover of their illustrated
Kalevala
. When Sam used to read from it, during their Finnish lessons, he would do all the voices. His Väinämöinen was the best.

“I don't think so,” Jaana was saying from the
far end of the flat. “If anyone were to act out, it'd be the girl. The boy has hardly made a peep since it happened. And did you see how he looked afterward? Like he was surprised?”

“So what are you saying?”

“Just that it's foolish,
ukko
, to rule anything out.”

“Sam's letters never mentioned anything neurological.”

“And you think he'd have told us?”

“Hey,” Tess whispered, trying to get Axel to turn back around. But his gaze was anchored to the painting. The hag's name was Louhi. Her green-black wings darkened the upper third of the frame, and upon them sat her army, their bearded faces leering over her feathers.

“Well, all right. You can ask. But I don't want you to make him feel . . .” Their grandfather trailed off in the kitchen.

“I wouldn't. Of course I wouldn't.”

“Hey,”
Tess whispered again. Finally Axel turned back to face her. His cheeks were pink, and his shoulders jolted up toward his ears like he had the hiccups. “Don't be afraid,” Tess said. “I promise that I'm going to get us back home.”

Neither of them slept, but they were both still in bed when Jaana returned to collect Axel some hours later. She planned to bring him by bus to
Dr. Virtanen's office, which was all the way out in someplace called Vantaa—trust and recalcitrance kept them going to the same physician they'd always used, even after moving into the city center. “After that we'll meet at Kauppatori,” Jaana said. She was informing, not consulting. “It's the harbor market. We can eat, and we need to shop.” She took Axel by the hand and led him out of the improvised bedroom. “Your grandfather's in the sauna,” she said to Tess. “He can get in and out just fine by himself. There's no need for you to do anything.”

Excellent. As though Tess really would have helped a naked old stranger in and out of that upright wooden steam coffin. She followed them through the den, up to the front door. “Do you want me to come?” she asked Axel.

“No,” Jaana said. “It's not for you to worry about.”

Tess looked at her grandmother. She didn't want to be that girl, but if Jaana didn't back off at least a little bit, then things would get very ugly, very quickly. “If he wants me to come, I'm coming,” she said.

Axel must have heard the danger in her voice. “It's fine,” he said. “I'll see you at Kauppatori.”

His pronunciation was so good that it almost let the Finnish cat out of the bag right then and there. Janna eyed him for a moment, surprised. Then she
called out:
“Ukko! Rakas!”
Geezer, my love. “We're going!”

“Hyvä!”
came the muffled cry from the sauna.

Jaana shut the door, leaving Tess alone in the den. She waited until she heard the elevator chime and then hurried back into the study. Tess hadn't seen a telephone during the tour, but she still had her old cell phone from Baldwin. She meant to find it, call Grandpa Paul—he'd promised to sort things out with the phone company—and talk some sense into him. Because they couldn't stay here—it was
ludicrous
. They'd only even come this far because Jaana had Tess at a temporary disadvantage. Her father's death and the sudden appearance of surprise Finnish grandparents had tilted her off balance. But Tess's resolve had returned on the flight over, as she watched the incomprehensible Finns over the rim of her open book. Even more so during the taxi ride, as she listened to Jaana and Otso dismiss everything that made her life
hers
. She and Axel should be living with their grandpa—their real one; Otso didn't count—down in the Boils. It might not be home, but it was a hell of a lot closer than this. Paul had some serious problems; Tess wasn't denying that. It was pretty lousy the way he'd bailed on them without even saying good-bye. But really, what was worse: not showing up for a single—admittedly
important—afternoon, or not showing up for well over a freaking decade?

Tess fished her phone out of her bag and switched it on. The little screen said
Searching
for a good minute before giving up and settling for
No Service
. The cell phone contract that Sam had signed apparently didn't include coverage in Finland—hardly a surprise, now that Tess actually stopped to think about it. Plan B, then: She'd send her grandfather an e-mail. Paul didn't have his own computer, but Tess knew that he checked his messages at least once a week, down at the little public library in the Boils. It might take a few days, but he'd write back.

An old laptop sat on the desk in the converted study, emerging from a moraine of crumpled loose-leaf notes. It took a while to boot up, the icons landing one by one, speckling the wallpaper. The desktop background was a scanned photograph—a shot of a much younger Jaana, her hair waist long and nearly platinum. She was squatting in a flower bed before a single-story wooden house, holding a trowel in one hand, using the other to shade the sun from her face. There was a skinny girl with Jaana in the garden, about Axel's age, her hair sprouting sideways in stubby braids. Dirt smudged her bare feet and ran up past her knees. She was just standing there, staring into her own cupped hands.
It was impossible to tell what she was holding—maybe an earthworm or a quartz-veined rock—but whatever it was, it seized the little girl's attention completely. It took Tess a few moments to realize that this child was her mother. As soon as she did, her fingers jolted up and away from the keys.

Tess had seen pictures of Saara before, of course. Sam's old bedroom back in the A-frame had been all but a shrine to the lost wife and mother of the Fortune family, where framed photographs of her crowded the walls. There was a shot of Saara on skis and another of her in a flower-print dress, a shot of her sleeping on a picnic blanket and another of her treading water in a deep blue lake. But Tess's mother had looked the same age in all of those pictures—the only evidence that any time passed between them was that in some she was pregnant. This desktop background was the first picture that Tess had ever seen of Saara as a child. It must have been taken in front of the home that the Kivis had so recently sold. Otso wasn't in the shot, but the long shadow thrown up against the house was probably his. The shadow looked tall, like Otso was standing up, but that could have been a trick of the sun.

As the computer sputtered to life, it buried the young Kivi family under a slow drift of icons. Tess realized, with a chill, that these, too, were pictures. They were
all
pictures—all labeled with Saara's
name, followed by a date. Jaana and Otso must have gone through their old albums and scanned every last shot of their daughter. It was strange—they didn't hang it out in the open the way Sam had, but the Kivis had a shrine too. Tess moused over to one of the photos, but she couldn't bring herself to open it. Because Tess didn't know that little girl any better than she knew Jaana, or Otso. She didn't
want
to know them. Tess wasn't looking for a connection—she was looking for a way out. So instead she opened the browser so that she could write to Grandpa Paul and convince him to let them come home.

“It does not work.”

The sound of Otso's voice nearly startled her out of her seat. She hadn't heard him roll into the study, but there he was, right behind her. His thinning hair and beard were still damp, his cheeks a bright young pink—an envelope of heat had followed him out of the sauna. He wore a long white robe, and Tess wondered how he'd gotten in and out of the sauna, the robe, the chair, without any help.

“Not the . . .” Otso chewed his fuzzy lower lip and glanced up at the ceiling, as though there were an English cheat sheet scrawled up there. Then, finding the word, he smiled. “Not the
computer
—the Internet. We do not have it yet. A man comes, next week.”

“I need to write to my grandfather,” Tess said. No point trying to keep it hidden. Otso squinted a little, but she couldn't tell if it was because he didn't approve or simply didn't understand. She considered, briefly, switching to Finnish. “I need to write to Paul.”

“Paul,” Otso said. That he understood. “A man is coming next week. We will have Internet, and you can do it.” With surprising ease, he spun his chair around and started to leave the room. “You take a sauna?”

“No.”

“I will turn off.” Then, just as he was leaving the room, he turned back to ask: “We go to market now. There is
munkki
—you know
munkki
?” Tess didn't know if
munkki
was a person or an item or a beverage. Otso grinned at her silence. “It will be a nice surprise. Are you hungry?”

No amount of reticence could make her answer with a lie. “Very,” she said.

The Kivis' building let out onto a narrow street, scaled with neat, rectangular cobbles that glowed dully under remembered rain. Otso glided down the sidewalk with his polished loafers pointing the way in their little metal stirrups. He didn't look back, assuming Tess would follow. She did.

At the corner it got brighter, and the cityscape
opened up to make room for a sand-colored train station, big as a sporting arena. Legless stone giants stood out front, cupping lanterns of frosted glass and looking distinctly cool, withdrawn and Nordic. A copper-plated clock tower sprouted up at the front end of the station, beside an arched pedestrian entrance.

“We go there tomorrow,” Otso said, nodding his sharp-tipped beard in the direction of the station. “We must take a train.”

“Why?” Tess said.