The Winter Place (38 page)

“Well, here I am,” Tess said. “Talk.”

“Yes. Here you are.” The Keeper appeared to marvel at this for a moment. “How did you find me, anyway?”

“Your son helped us,” Tess said. Just the mention of Pyry seemed to do more to the Keeper than the strike with the walking stick had—for a second she thought he was about to cry. Tess was so furious with the old man that she couldn't help but twist the knife. “I bet you didn't even know that he was still alive.”

“Oh, I did,” the Keeper said. “If Pyry had come home to my woods, I'd have known. I used to look forward to the day—it would have given me a chance to explain myself to him. But waiting for my son to die wasn't a good enough reason for me to stick around. And I'll see him again eventually.” He wrapped his skinny arms around his body, and a shudder ran all the way through him. “You know, I'd forgotten what it felt like to be so cold.” He tried to shift his weight onto his bad leg and winced. “And pain,” he said. “I didn't remember it could hurt so much.” The Keeper took another long pull on his schnapps, and it seemed to lubricate his joints. He tried again to move his knee.

“I owe you an apology,” he said. “I know that. I do.”

“You owe me a lot more than an apology,” Tess said. “You need to take me to my brother.”

“I can't do that,” the Keeper said.

“Yes, you can,” she said. “If you brought him there, you can bring me.”

“Not anymore. I couldn't find the path again even if I wanted to. And besides . . .” The old man looked right at her, making eye contact for the first time since Kari left. Tess could see now that he really was crying. “I don't want to. An apology is all you're getting. But it's real. I mean it. If there had been any other way off the path, I would have taken it years ago. But no wood can be without a Keeper. The only way the Hiisi would let me leave was if I could find a new one. Your brother was the best chance I'd had in years.”

“So you made him take your place,” she said.

“I didn't
make
Axel do anything.” Even through his tears, the Keeper looked reproachful at this suggestion. “That's not even possible. The only way to stay on the path is to want it with everything you have. To believe that there's no place else in the world that you can possibly be. That's how I felt after Aino died.” He took his eyes off Tess and looked out through the trees, across the shore, at the sodden little island. When he spoke again his voice had gone brittle. “I would have given up everything to see her again—to tell her how sorry I was. I
did
give up everything. Your brother isn't any different. He feels the same way I used to.”

“Our dad just died!” Tess hollered at the old man. “Of course Axel feels the same!” She was almost surprised by how loud this all came out. And by the fact that she was crying now too. Because Sam was dead. She loved him so, so much, and he was gone. Now her brother was gone too. This wasn't the way she'd expected her meeting with the Keeper to go—the two of them weeping at each other. “I felt like there was nothing left for me, too. But I don't anymore. That's the point. Feelings can change. People can heal.”

“That they can.” The Keeper pinched a neon corner of his vest and rubbed it over his face. “Listen,” he said. “I'm not going to lie to you. It isn't a good life on the path, as a Keeper. It isn't even a
life
. But your brother will come out when he's good and ready. I promise you.”

“You mean he'll have to trick someone into taking his place,” Tess said.

All the Keeper could do was shrug. “Kagg did. I did. He will too. There's no shortage of mourners in this awful world. Plenty of them will choose to do much worse to themselves than live in their own grief for a few decades.” He took another long pull on his schnapps and stared down at the feather still clutched in his hand. “With any luck he'll figure it out sooner than I did. A lot sooner.”

“That's not good enough,” Tess said.

“I'm sorry,” the Keeper said, “but it is for me. And it's all you're getting.” With that the old man turned away from her and began limping toward the lake.

“Stop,” she said.

“Stop me,” he said, without looking back. The Keeper had called her bluff. He stepped gingerly over the rocky shore and then made his way out across the ice, heading in the direction of the pine island.

Tess caught up with him, the collected rain splashing away from her boots. It had gotten deep enough now that they both appeared to be walking on water. The Keeper still had the worn swan's feather clutched in his hand, and he studied it as he walked. It was very slow going, with that limp.

“You should know that Aino saw what I was doing,” he finally said. “She saw and tried to stop it. She was always better than I was.”

“It isn't very hard,” Tess said.

“That it isn't,” the old man said. He tightened his grip, bending the shaft of the feather in half. He dropped it in their wake, and it floated away. Then he took one more swig of his schnapps before pitching the bottle out over the lake as well. It splashed into the water, slid along the ice beneath it, and lay there gulping rain.

Tess began to hear something in the distance—the rising growl of a snowmobile. The Keeper heard it too. He stopped limping and cocked his ear into the rain. Tess scanned the southern shore and saw that it was her grandmother and Kari, come to get her. This was the second time in a week that Jaana had rushed to a grandchild's rescue. God, what they'd put her through. What they were
still
putting her through.

“That kid moves fast,” the Keeper said. Then he turned to face Tess again. “It's time for you to go,” he said.

“I'm not going anywhere.” Tess grabbed at one of the old man's soggy sleeves, but he pulled away. The fabric stretched down over his hand before slipping wetly out of her fingers.

“I'm not kidding,” he said, glancing from the shore to the pine island. It seemed like he was gauging the distance. “I'm going to do this whether you're here or not.”

For a brief and stupid moment, Tess wondered:
Do what?
But then she realized where they were—roughly the middle of the lake. It was early in the season, and the ice out here was still forming. Still thin. The Keeper shuffled forward a few paces, his eyes locked on the island. The last thing his wife had seen before she died.

“You should do what your brother couldn't
and give it up,” he said. “It's our job to love the dead. Not the other way around.”

He took a deep breath, as though to give Tess one last chance to back away. Then he bent his good leg and jumped. Even through the sound of the rain, the approaching snowmobile, and the splash of his landing feet on the inundated ice, Tess could hear a horrible, rippling crack. The Keeper jumped again. It was louder this time, and more of a groan, like a voice coming from deep underwater. Tess had very little time to make up her mind. The lakeshore and the island were just about the same distance away, in opposite directions. The only difference was that if she ran back to shore, she'd run alone. And any chance she had of finding her brother would be as good as drowned.

Tess took a lunging step past the Keeper, grabbing him by the wrist as she went by, yanking him toward the pine island. But the old man's arm might as well have been a zipper, because as she pulled, the lake opened up beneath them. She felt the sudden vertigo of loose footing, and then she fell cleanly into a pocket of splashing ice. It felt, at first, like a sharp punch to the head. Like lots of punches. Tess tried to kick to the surface, but her ski boots may as well have been made of cement. Her clothes drank in the lake and dragged
her under. The cold down there was so intense it wasn't even cold anymore. It wasn't anything. Tess could just as well have been adrift in space as where she actually was—under the ice, in a lake, in Finland.

B
ack in Talvijärvi, neither Axel nor his mother had mourned the Keeper's passing. There wasn't time, and there didn't even seem to be a point. The old man had given himself willingly, even happily, to the Hiisi's glittering jaws. They'd waited a few moments in the birches behind the cottage, to see if he might reappear. But the Keeper was gone. The Hiisi was gone too. The flashlights on the shore drew closer, and Axel began to hear the unmistakable sound of his grandfather calling out his name, followed by the shouts of Tess and Jaana. They couldn't wait any longer. Axel and his mother fled into the forest together, the voices of their family lost under the weight of the congregating trees.

But that was days and days ago—how many Axel couldn't quite count. The search for the Boils brought him and Saara ever deeper into the woods of the world. The forest around them was all at once damp with sunlight and choking on night, bound up tightly in fog and vines and snow. It was exactly as the Keeper had said it would be—an impossible, ever-changing woodland. Axel and his mother passed through the shifting groves, through jungles and swamps and ice-crusted pines. And it wasn't only the forest all around them that was changing. The farther Axel went, the more he could feel it in himself as well.

He first noticed that something was different just a few hours after they left Talvijärvi. Saara had caught a whiff of food, and they stepped off the path and into what appeared to be a little fishing camp. A few men were down at the edge of a mountain stream, casting their lines into the water. They'd left some trout to smoke on an untended grill, and Saara went to work, snapping the fish down whole. Axel took one of the trout in his hands and sniffed it. It had been nicely cleaned and deboned, and the smoked meat was the color of butterscotch. But even though he hadn't eaten in ages, the thought of putting the fish in his mouth made Axel a little nauseous. He wasn't the slightest bit hungry, and wouldn't be
again. He remembered that in all the time he'd spent with the Keeper, he'd never seen the old man eat. Apparently, Axel didn't have to anymore either.

But it was more than just his appetite. Axel was transforming in other, stranger ways. These changes revealed themselves slowly, becoming more pronounced with every step. It wasn't until Axel tripped over a log and tumbled into a camel-thorn shrub that he realized how little pain had come to bother him. Axel lifted himself up and picked the barbs from his clothes. He noticed that one of the thorns had passed right through his palm and was sticking out on the other side. He pulled on it, and the thorn slid out without even a drop of blood. He hadn't felt a thing.

Axel had to will himself not to freak out. “You're of the path now,” he said aloud. “You're just becoming who you were always meant to be.”

He almost believed it.

With time the blazes burned brighter, and Axel began to see traces of the Boils. A patch of wire grass here, a runty juniper there, a sudden stand of hickory trees. Then one morning they arrived at a familiar-looking patch of woods. “Why are you stopping?” Saara said. The air around them had suddenly grown damp and buggy. Her small
round ears began to dance to discourage the insects. It made her look a little psychotic.

Axel didn't answer. He looked down at the ground and saw that the shifting mosaic of snow and mud had been replaced by fine white sand. He looked up into the looming trees and then out at the surrounding bramble. After so many wrong turns and near misses, he was a little reluctant to call it. But sand pines don't lie. And neither did Grandpa Paul's trailer, faintly visible through the branches up ahead. Nothing but a ripple in the path, a few short steps, and here they were.

The Boils looked as much like the afterlife as anything Axel had ever seen. A fog rolled in from the scrubby hardpan, reshuffling the sunlight. Spanish moss hung all around like tree-bound kelp, throbbing gray and bright. But if this was the afterlife, it came with mosquitoes and decapitated snakes. It came with cigarette butts and crushed beer cans and crumbling ziggurats of bear scat. It came with rusty lawn furniture and a moldy birdbath shot to bits by years of target practice. It came with Paul.

“This is it,” Axel said. “We're here.”

Saara neither balked at this, nor showed any great sign of pleasure. She had her eyes on the prize, and the only prize was her husband. She wouldn't celebrate until she found him. “If this
is the spot, where is my Sam?” she said.

Axel looked again at Paul's trailer. The screen door hung wide, and a bald lightbulb affixed to the fiberglass lintel flickered and spat. The trailer was ringed with trash, the refuse spreading out into the woods in all directions. Sometimes when they came down for a visit, Sam would spend the first day just picking up garbage.

“He should be close,” Axel said. “Have some patience.”

“Patience.” Saara pressed her soft nose between his shoulder blades and pulled her lips back. “Say ‘patience' to me again.”