The Winter Place (22 page)

“Rakas . . . ,”
Otso called.

“Can it wait?” came Jaana's voice from the kitchen. When Otso said nothing more, she emerged, one of Sam's frying pans in her hands. “Do you think this would be good for eggs?” she said.

Otso didn't answer. He handed her the Moomin book, glancing sidelong at Tess as he did so. Jaana flipped through the pages and set it on the shelf. She looked into the crate and must have seen that there was a whole set down there—the complete adventures of Moomintroll and his family. Without a word, she and Otso began to go through them. They pulled out an unabridged
Kalevala
. They pulled out Finnish translations of Holdstock, Tolkien, and Lindgren. They pulled out picture
dictionaries, grammar readers, and exercise books. Tess and Axel had filled in the blank spaces with careful recitation in number-two pencil—
My mother is from Finland. Finland is in Europe. I live in New York. New York is in America.

Jaana's calm was worrying. “Do you speak Finnish?” she asked—though her tone, and the fact that she'd said this
in
Finnish, made it not so much a question.

Tess nodded.

Her grandmother was silent for a moment. “Both of you?”

Again Tess nodded.

Jaana's anger, or maybe her embarrassment, made her all but vibrate. “What is wrong with you?” she hissed. “It's a total invasion of our privacy. It's . . . disgusting.”

This was, of course, true. But Tess wasn't the type to bring an apology to a knife fight. In this way, she probably took after her grandmother. “It's not my fault if you're ashamed of what we heard. Maybe instead you should be ashamed of what you said.” After more than a week of listening to the language, it didn't even feel that strange to be using it.

“And how would you like it if I snuck into your room tonight,” Jaana said, taking an almost menacing step forward, “and listened to you and
your brother? Or maybe I should have gone to that party with you. You've said nothing about us? Nothing you wouldn't want us to hear?”

“We deserve our confidences as much as you do,” Otso said. He sounded severe, and worse, deeply disappointed.

Tess had no answer to this. She let the silence stretch, giving her grandparents a chance to continue. When they didn't, she picked up her box of clothes and retreated to the converted study. Jaana caught her by the wrist as she passed by. “And your accent is
atrocious
,” her grandmother said. “You sound like you're speaking Italian.” Like Italian was some semiadvanced form of baby jabber.

Jaana discarded Tess's wrist and turned back to the overflowing bookshelf. Tess was a little confused—she'd taken it for granted that this fight, when it came, would be a bloodbath. Certainly she hadn't expected it to end with a little burp of steam and a turning of backs, as it just had. Still, Tess took her time in the shared bedroom, giving her grandparents a chance to cool off. Giving the blood a chance to drain from her cheeks. When she returned to the living room to get another box, she saw that Jaana and Otso were still there, still fussing over the bookshelf. They'd rearranged the spines to give prominent space to
this new Finnish collection, elementary workbooks and all. Otso didn't even try to hide the fact that his eyes were streaming. He and Jaana looked so unaccountably proud, so unexpectedly grateful. Tess understood that her father had meant for this. Whatever had happened between him and the Kivis, Sam hadn't taught her and Axel Finnish simply for this little moment of shock. Nor had he done so to make Jaana and Otso feel lousy for assuming he wouldn't. He'd taught them Finnish for the larger moment, in which this smaller one was set—the kids and their grandparents together in the first place. He must have planned for this to happen, must have assumed it would one day. But what on earth had he been waiting for?

“Dad spoke it too,” Tess said.

“Of course he did,” Jaana said, turning from the bookshelf. Her smile was tired, and sad, but still it was a smile.

The regular work of upkeep had had the effect of elongating their days at Talvijärvi, but in Helsinki life sped up again. Now that their grandparents knew that Tess and Axel had a decent foundation in Finnish to work with, they moved even faster to get them enrolled into school. An entrance exam was scheduled for the following week, and by Friday Tess and Axel had each been assigned a
tutor to drill their Finnish into better shape. Tess's truce with her grandmother lasted throughout this limbo, and she even gave up on trying to get in touch with Grandpa Paul. Escape didn't just seem unfeasible now. It also seemed like the worse alternative. Besides, Tess hadn't heard a peep out of her grandpa since she'd called him from the marketplace. She wondered if this was calculated on his part—maybe Grandpa Paul was trying to convince her that she'd be better off once she learned not to rely on him for anything. If that was the case, it was working.

Axel's behavior also helped distract them from their smoldering fight. Tess's little brother had gotten over the fatigue that had walloped him in Talvijärvi, but his recovery seemed incomplete. He shuffled along, slack and disinterested, as they toured the halls of what would be his new school. He'd outright laughed when Tess suggested they practice for their placement tests—after all, the only way to exacerbate the already severe social liabilities of the whole new-foreign-orphan thing was to add “dummy held back” to the mix. Grief would have been totally understandable, but this struck Tess as something different—something worse. It was almost as though Axel thought that this imminent new reality didn't apply to him. Like the life taking shape was somehow optional.
But it wasn't until Axel told her about the ghosts in the forest that Tess decided to say something. Honestly, it's not like he gave her much of a choice.

It was Sunday afternoon, and Kari was coming to spend the night. Far from an ideal arrangement, but Kalle needed to make one last trip to Talvijärvi to get the house set for winter, and Jaana had made it clear that taking Kari out of school was no longer an option. Axel made his move about an hour before Kari was set to arrive, yanking Tess into their bedroom, whispering that he had a pressing matter to discuss. She was briefly relieved by the apparent return of her brother's nerdy formality. But everything that came out of his mouth after that straight-up horrified her.

“This is going to sound weird. But the only way I can say it is . . . is just to
say
it. I spoke to Mom. This isn't a joke. I'm not playing. You're going to think it's pretend, but it isn't pretend. I spoke to Mom. To Mom's ghost. She lives at Talvijärvi. Or not, like,
lives
. You know.” Axel left it at that for a moment, staring at Tess over the gulf between their beds. “Mom's ghost. That's where she, um, dwells.”

As though Tess had somehow missed that crucial bit. “Weird” was a way-insufficient caveat. She was silent for a moment, trying to keep her stare from becoming a glare. “I don't know what I'm supposed to say to that, Axel.”

He huffed. “Well, not that. Not anything. Just listen to me, all right?” Axel glanced at the door. “I never expected you to believe me, but you deserve to know. You've seen her, too. She was the bear—the bear that came into our yard on the night Dad died. Remember how we were wondering why no one else saw her? Remember how there was nothing in the papers about it? That's because it wasn't a brown bear. It was
Mom
.”

“But another person did see her—her keeper, remember? And also, more importantly, it wasn't Mom. It was a bear. You took a picture of it.”

Axel winced, as though this were a wrinkle that he couldn't account for. “That picture,” he said. “That's the proof. When I look at that, I see Mom. Not”—he seemed to anticipate that Tess was going to pounce, which she was—“not
metaphorically
, or anything stupid like that.
Mom.
Herself.”

“That's not funny, Axel.”

“I'm not trying to be,” he said. “Also, there wasn't anybody else there. Just the Keeper, and he's not a person. He's something else.”

“Okay. Another ghost?” A dumb question, and she felt dumb for asking it.

“Not a ghost, exactly. He's different. What he called himself that night actually fits the best—he's the
Keeper
. But yeah, there are other ghosts. Like heaps of them. He keeps them. He's sort of . . .
I don't know.” Axel's stare broke for a moment and drifted, searching. “He's like a shepherd. He helps them when they need help. And do you remember that story Kari told, about the woodsman and his dead wife?”

Tess pursed her lips and gave a little nod. She never should have let them row out to the pine island. Her brother's fantasies didn't need any encouragement.

“The Keeper was in that story!” Axel said. “He was the one who promised to take Väinö into the forest, so he could look for Aino. He's also the one who brought Mom to our house, so she could look for—”

“Hold on a sec.” Tess put her hand up in the air. “Just trying to figure out how that works, exactly. Do ghosts fly coach? Or is there like a pet-cargo alternative?” Tess couldn't help the sarcasm, but it was water off a duck's back to Axel. There was no nudging him out of this mania.

“They didn't fly—they don't need to.” Axel scooted forward on his bed, just the tips of his sneakers touching the hardwood. “I spoke to them, Tess. I spoke to the Keeper and I spoke to Mom. That's who I was with on the night of the party.” Tess remembered Axel standing outside the Kivis' cottage, hair mussed and pants grimy, looking like a shell-shocked urchin. Come to think
of it, that was the night he'd fallen into this gloom-funk. “I was with them, but you'll never guess
where
we were.” Axel paused, maybe hoping that she'd actually try. But Tess wasn't going to throw so much as a twig on this bonfire.

“We were home,” he said. “We were in Baldwin.”

Oh. This was, finally, starting to make a little bit of sense. But the fact that it was transparent, fantastical wish fulfillment didn't make what Axel was saying any less distressing. He went on about how he'd stumbled upon the A-frame—as in their actual house, where they used to live, in New York—in the forest behind the Kivis' cottage. That's how their mother's ghost had traveled to America. There was a path running through the spruce trees that could, magically, take you there. A path that stitched the woods of the world together, from the Amazon to Central Park to Talvijärvi. The path was difficult to follow, but if you knew the way, it could take you almost anywhere. The Keeper did know the way, and he'd agreed to bring Saara to Baldwin. “But it wasn't to find us,” Axel said, suddenly pulled in and somber. “She was looking for Dad. Mom knew that Dad was going to die, and she wanted to find him—his ghost, I mean. Because this place isn't where he's supposed to wind up.” By “this place,” Axel was indicating more than just
their immediate surroundings. He meant Finland. “Talvijärvi was Mom's home. It's where her heart was. So when she died, she got sent here. But Dad's home is somewhere different, so on the day he died, Mom went out searching for him. But she didn't find him. She still hasn't. And if she can't, they're never going to be able to be together. Mom and Dad will be all alone, stuck in the places they came from. We've got to help them.”

That was, apparently, the end of it. Tess took her time. She had a vague sense that a great deal depended on the way she responded to this. Axel had laid his deluded nerd-heart out on the table, and she could either coddle it and hand it back, or she could do what was needed to knock her brother into the land of the fucking big kids. Tess crossed the span of hardwood and joined Axel on his bed. She took his hand in hers, but it didn't have the effortless sincerity of Kari's gesture. She felt like she was onstage for a play, way underprepared.

“I know it's really hard . . .” Sort of a false start.

Axel looked duly skeptical.

“Listen,” Tess tried again, “we need to start thinking about this as our life. Dad is gone. Grandpa Paul isn't coming to get us. We aren't going to go back home. This is our home now. The sooner you accept that, the sooner—”

“Were you even listening to me?” Axel pulled his small, sweaty fist out of her grip. “That's not what I'm talking about!”

“It's exactly what you're talking about.” Tess had been trying not to get angry with the kid, but maybe anger was in order right about now. This was the exact same crap that their father used to pull. Playing pretend was fine for an afternoon, or a weekend, but it made a lousy lifestyle choice. It was the root cause of the very predicament they found themselves in with the Kivis—Sam had flown them to Renaissance Faires in Oregon and Maryland, but he'd never flown them here. He'd taught Tess to identify a waxwing by its call but had never let her hear her grandparents' voices over the phone. “You didn't go to our house,” she continued, not bothering to blunt the edge of her voice. “And you didn't speak to Mom. Because Mom is dead. Because our house is in New York. And I'm telling you, Axel, next week you're going to be in a new class. You're going to have a chance to make some friends. So you had better quit with this ghost shit before then. I know it isn't fair, but you've gotta grow up a little bit. Actually, more than a little bit.”