The Winter Place Page 6

  Grandpa Paul led them to the core of the gathering, where Sam’s casket sat bedecked with wreaths of nettle and blackberry. As they arrived, a Lancelot-looking dude stepped out of the milling mourners. He dropped to one knee before Tess’s little brother, presenting Axel with what appeared to be Sam’s replica sword, leathered hilt first. After a moment Tess recognized him as the black knight—rather, she corrected herself, the acned grad student who played the black knight every year in exchange for a handful of meal vouchers and ax-throw tokens. Her brother accepted the blade with the same solemnity with which it was offered. Then the knight turned to Tess and fell to his knee once again. Her father’s jousting shield was strapped to his back, and he unslung it and made to hand it over. Tess gave him a look that could have pierced any shield, replica or not. The black knight got up and backed away. The music stopped, and somebody started speaking into a wireless microphone, which she guessed meant that the funeral had begun.

  “Be nice,” Grandpa Paul whispered to her. He was right—these people weren’t trying to be anything but comforting. And besides, Tess knew that this was probably how her father would have wanted it, if he’d been around to cast a vote. So she did her best to quarantine the cornered, angry part of herself. It wasn’t easy.

  Slowly the microphone moved through the crowd. Grandpa Paul said a few words when it was his turn, but he had to stop when his voice fell to pieces. Sam’s students took over, sharing their memories of a professor generous with his time, a professor as pleased with their successes as they were. The pretend king talked about an excellent rider. A member of the birding society used the word “grace.” Tess scanned faces as these strangers spoke, but found that she kept coming back to one in particular—an older woman with silvery, boy-cut hair. She’d elbowed her way right up to the casket, but now that she’d arrived, she seemed not the least bit interested in the service. Instead the woman stared intently down at the plot immediately adjacent to Sam’s—Tess’s mother’s grave. The marker was simple, but the Finnish name on it—Saara Kivi—made it conspicuous in this cemetery. The woman had an odd, cold look on her face. It seemed almost like she was angry. She must have noticed Tess watching, because her gaze snapped up like a sprung trap. She was the first person at this whole thing who wasn’t the least bit shy about looking Tess right in the face. They stared at each other until a commotion erupted among some of the birders, and Tess, distracted, glanced away.

  “Indigo bunting!” It was a spontaneous shout, and the plump gentleman who’d loosed it slapped a hand over his mouth, mortified. The gathered mourners gawked, first at him and then up at the peak of an old oak, where a little blue bird was chittering about. It was late in the season for a bunting to be seen, and the birder must have been so excited that he couldn’t help himself. There was a long moment of awkward silence. It was Axel who eventually broke it.

  “Mockingbird,” he said. He used the hilt of Sam’s sword to point up at the arched roof of a family mausoleum, where a little bird was showing off with a song. Now the silence deepened. Some people smiled, and some who’d been crying cried harder. Tess had never imagined that in the midst of all that fakery and costume, she’d feel her dad so strongly. She should have guessed it would be Axel who’d bring him to her.

  “House finch!” somebody at the edge of the crowd called.

  “Woodpecker!” yelled Grandpa Paul, nodding up at a catbird. Nobody bothered to correct him, because it didn’t matter.

  Even their landlady got in on it, going for an easy one with: “Robin!”

  It went on like that for a while, as the crowd searched the trees above for birds. There was a siskin and a junco and a white-breasted nuthatch. Finally, after they’d named everything they could see, they went silent again and listened.

  As surprised as Tess had been by the turnout at the service, she was even more shocked when, after it was done, the old woman with short, silvery hair came to stand beside Grandpa Paul. She seemed not in the least bit his type—too quiet, too orderly, too altogether icy. Tess’s grandfather suggested that they go someplace where they could talk, and not a half hour later, the four of them—Mrs. Ridgeland had made herself scarce the moment she handed the kids over—were seated around a table in a nearly vacant Chinese restaurant. Grandpa Paul took off his tie, ordered a second beer before finishing his first, and slowly melted into his rumpled old self. He cleared his throat a few times. It took him all of two minutes to explain why Tess and Axel couldn’t live with him. His reasoning was sound—he was a disaster. He even used that word. “I’m a disaster. You both deserve and need more than I can give you. You’re going to live with your grandma. You’re going to live with your mom’s mother.”

  “And my husband,” the short-haired woman said. It was the first time she’d spoken, and her accent was movie-bad-guy thick. Tess had listened to plenty of recordings, but she realized that she’d never before heard a real live Finn speaking English. “Your other grandfather. He’s waiting for us, in Helsinki.”

  Tess and Axel gaped at this strange woman. She gathered her sweater coat around her, as though cold. The waiter arrived with the food they’d ordered some minutes ago, in an entirely different lifetime. He set the plates down, sensed the nuke-level weirdness, and fled. “Don’t look at me that way,” the old woman finally said. “I’m not happy about it, either.”

  PART TWO

  The Summer Place

  But thy home thou now art leaving,

  To another home thou goest,

  To another mother’s orders,

  To the household of a stranger,

  Different there from here thou’lt find it

  In another house ’tis different:

  Other tunes the horns are blowing,

  Other doors thou hearest jarring,

  Other gates thou hearest creaking

  Other voices at the hinges.

  —KALEVALA, RUNE XXII

  6

  An American Mutant in Helsinki

  Axel took it better than Tess did. Like, by a mile. After a long stretch of silence, his sister tumbled into what could be fairly described as a shit fit. She made it clear to everyone at the table, and indeed everyone else in the restaurant, that she did not want to go to Finland. She had friends here. A life here. Florida would have been bad enough, but Finland? You don’t do that to a person. You don’t just tell them they’re moving to another country. You don’t take them out for Chinese food after their dad dies and announce: By the way—you’ll be living in the Arctic, like it or not.

  “Most of it isn’t in the Arctic,” Jaana said, her calm voice razor sharp in the wake of Tess’s yelling. Jaana Kivi—that was the name of their new grandmother. Or, not new, but new to them. Jaana, similar to their mother’s name, Saara. They had a’s in all the same places, which Axel found strangely appealing. Nobody had touched their food, but Jaana was fiddling with her break-apart chopsticks, trying to separate them evenly. “It’s just a little bit colder there than it is here,” she said, keeping her eyes on the sticks. They finally snapped, clean and splinterless.

  Tess was, for a moment, rendered speechless. “I don’t care if it’s tropical,” she said. Her voice had gone dangerously casual. “That’s not the point. The point is that Finland isn’t our home. And you aren’t our family.”

  “Whoa, there.” Grandpa Paul lifted his coffee-colored palms from the tabletop and held them flat in the air. “I know you’re upset, but that’s an ugly thing to say.”

  Tess slid her chair back and stood. She turned on her grandfather. “Don’t you think that if Dad wanted us to live with her, we might have met her before? Or at least known she existed?”

  “I’m sure your father wouldn’t have wanted you to live with me,” Jaana said. She set a chopstick down on either side of her plate, aligning them flush with the place mat. “It won’t surprise you to hear that the two of us didn’t get along. And I understand that this isn’t an ideal solution. It certainly isn’t ideal for me. Otso and I hard
ly have room for one of you.” Otso—that was their grandfather. Axel had two of those now. “So if you want to be angry with someone, be angry with him.” She nodded in Grandpa Paul’s direction. “He’s the disaster.”

  Tess looked the old woman over, and Jaana returned her stare impassively. Axel imagined his sister with a rapier, probing her opponent’s guard for holes, or blind spots, silently infuriated by how difficult it was proving to land a cut. Whenever warriors fought to a draw in one of his books, they always ended up becoming fast friends and questing buddies. Axel was often criticized for how his imagination bled over at the edges, but even he couldn’t picture that happening with Tess and Jaana. “Today was the first time you saw our mother’s grave, wasn’t it?” his sister finally said. “I guess you didn’t get along with her, either.”

  “Jesus,” Grandpa Paul said.

  Jaana didn’t blink, but something happened in her face. She was still in control, but it no longer seemed quite so effortless. “I don’t go where I’m not welcome,” she said.

  “Neither do I,” Tess said. She must have figured she wouldn’t get a better exit line than that, because she jolted suddenly toward the door, leaving nothing behind her but the jangling of a bell affixed to the frame. The table was silent, though everybody else in the restaurant was chatting noisily, making like they hadn’t been eavesdropping. After a moment Grandpa Paul got up and followed Tess out the door, looking lost and foggy. Axel and Jaana were left alone at opposite ends of the big, round table.

  “You’re angry, too, I suppose,” Jaana said.

  Axel didn’t say anything. The uncomfortable truth was that even with everything that had just happened to them, Axel found the idea of moving to Finland a little bit exciting. The country had always loomed large on his bookshelf, and in his brain, as a fairy-tale wilderness of fir trees and silent lakes. It was where the monstrous Groke sulked, leaving behind her a wake of hoarfrost. It was the land of the red swan, home of the first real wizard, a graveyard for wandering Vikings. They could just as well have told him he was moving to Mirkwood. But this feeling seemed way inappropriate, given the circumstances. And besides, Tess was his sister. Loyalty demanded a unified front.

  Jaana waited a long time for him to answer. Then, when it became clear he wouldn’t, she said: “Not that I blame you.” She reached across the table, and for a second Axel thought she was going to try to hold his hand. But instead his new Finnish grandmother wrapped her fingers around his wrist, just below the itchy fabric of his funeral clothes. She seemed to be appraising him, gauging his girth.

  “Eat,” she said. “It’s getting cold.”

  That nearly empty Chinese restaurant might just as well have been the business end of a catapult, for how quickly Axel and Tess were to be launched across the Atlantic. Sam’s funeral was on Wednesday, and before the end of the week, movers had come to cart away the boxes that Mrs. Ridgeland had packed. They were scheduled to fly out the following Monday. Tess confidently told Axel that applying for passports would slow them down, but as it turned out, they already had them. One each for Sam, Tess, and Axel, all issued on the exact same day the previous summer. Tess and Axel’s passports contained old yearbook photos on the info page, and their father had illegibly forged their signatures before locking up the documents in his desk, where Mrs. Ridgeland eventually discovered them. Why he’d hidden the passports, or even applied for them in the first place, was a minor mystery, overshadowed by a slightly larger one—a fourth passport. Jaana paged through it and gave it to Tess, who glanced at the thing only briefly before throwing it into the garbage so hard that it nearly bounced back out again. Axel waited for Jaana to empty the trash into the aluminum can out back before fishing the fourth passport out. It was for Tess, though the fat-cheeked toddler on the info page could just as well have been him. The passport was expired, and it contained just two stamps. Entry to Finland, reentry to the United States. Tess had, apparently, already been to this place she said she’d never go to. But when Axel checked the dates on the stamps and did the math, he found that she’d been tiny at the time. No way she remembered. His sister hadn’t kept anything from him—their father had kept it from them both.

  The day of their departure came quickly, and it was rough. In retrospect, Axel really should have seen the Bigwig thing coming. Bringing a hare to Finland was a nonstarter—forget about the airline regulations; they’d never get a wild invasive through customs. But Grandpa Paul promised them, moist-eyed, that he’d take care of her. He’d cancel his return flight to Florida, rent a car, and road-trip back down the East Coast with their grizzled, adorable pet. He had plenty of chicken wire at his trailer in the Boils and could set up an enclosure for her, no problem, wouldn’t take but an afternoon. “Besides,” Grandpa Paul said, “she’ll be thankful for a permanent vacation from cold weather.” Axel should have seen the scope of this promise as a warning sign, but he chose to believe his granddad. Grandpa Paul said he’d pick Bigwig up on Monday morning, when he came by the A-frame to say good-bye. But the coward never showed.

  Jaana waited with them in the front yard longer than she had to. Then she plucked Bigwig from her hutch, the hare made limp by her utter lack of hesitation. The children followed Jaana across the county road, to the edge of the park. This was almost exactly the spot where they’d last seen the brown bear, where the Keeper had smashed Sam’s camera. Axel realized that he hadn’t thought of either of them all week. They must be long gone by now, all their scent rubbed out by the wind and autumn rain. Jaana set Bigwig down atop a splay of browned ferns.

  “She’s going to get eaten for sure,” Tess said.

  “Don’t be morbid,” Jaana said. “The way you’ve fed her, nothing could choke her down.” She was right on that count—Bigwig would have been a middleweight among dogs. And most of it wasn’t even fat.

  “But what if she doesn’t know how to survive in the wild?” Axel said.

  “What’s to know?” his grandmother responded. “Eat. Sleep. Sometimes hide. Besides, this isn’t exactly wild.” She gestured into the woods, through which they could see one of the mulch walking paths and a series of little plaques announcing the Latin names of the trees they were affixed to. Axel supposed it was true. As long as Bigwig stayed in Mud Lake, she’d be playing with a net.

  “Go on,” Tess said. She was speaking to Bigwig, who stared up at them, confused. Jaana brought her hands together for a single, surprisingly loud clap. The sound carried through the trees, and Bigwig bolted. They watched her go, the last shred of their old life, a mottled puff of tail bounding deep into shadow, under and over the steadily falling leaves.

  They had a direct flight from New York City to Helsinki. Axel got the window seat, watching baggage handlers in jumpsuits loading suitcases onto a tilted conveyor. He half expected to see the wheelchair there, stowing away with the luggage, pretending to be benign and real. Or else rolling furtively around the tail fin, looking for a way to sneak aboard. He was glad to be leaving the thing here in the States. Though the longer he looked, the more afraid he was that it might jinx things. What if simply searching for the chair was enough to conjure it? Axel turned his gaze into the cabin and shut the shade on his porthole.

  As soon as the airplane took off, Tess buried her face in a book. Jaana, seated by the aisle, placed her hands neatly on her knees and stared straight ahead. It looked like she was watching the little TV embedded in the seat back in front of her, but the only thing on the screen was a mosaic of old fingerprints. Axel passed the time by watching his fellow passengers—his new neighbors, his countrymen. They were, by and large, ridiculously good-looking and stupidly dressed. Tights and goofy-large sunglasses, checkered coco-brown suits, harem pants, and mullets were in, apparently. Axel could detect only the slightest hum of chatter floating above these people, hardly audible over the sounds of flight. It took him some moments to recognize that it was indeed Finnish, a language he used to think he spoke fluently. An hour of eavesdropping in the Finnair economy
cabin cured him of that silly idea. Axel’s was little-kid Finnish. Picture-book Finnish—Moomintroll Finnish. His go-to vocab was cutesy, largely onomatopoeic, and maybe worst of all, inflected with a thick Yankee—or, Jenkki—accent. And now he’d been dunked into a soup of advanced varieties. Business Finnish. Backpacking-trip-before-university Finnish. Distressingly-beautiful-teenager-with-a-pixie-haircut Finnish. All of it more capable and authentic than his own.

  Somewhere between Iceland and Ireland, Tess jammed her book into the seat-back pocket, shut her eyes, and went to sleep. Jaana seemed to be waiting for this, and she suddenly became as chatty as she’d been the entire flight, which is to say: She used actual words. She leaned over Axel’s sleeping sister and whispered: “You know, I assume that your mother had this thing as well.”

  By “this thing” Axel could only guess that his grandmother meant his particular variety of muscular dystrophy—a condition that seemed to define himness to the outside world, his friends and loved ones included. And of course he knew it. “Yes,” he answered simply.