The Winter Place Read online

  “But do you also know how she died?” Jaana’s face was totally relaxed as she said this, her voice flat. A stranger listening in could hardly have guessed that she was talking about someone so intimate to them both. Axel took a moment to respond, because the question had knocked him back a bit and because the answer itself was complicated. He’d never actually been told how Saara died—or, more precisely, he’d been told only lies. The going story was that his mother had passed when he was just under a year old. She’d had an emergency appendectomy and succumbed swiftly to a complication from the anesthesia. Axel never doubted his father’s intentions for inventing this story, but that Sam thought his flimsy lie had staying power hurt Axel’s pride a little. There wasn’t a single picture of him as a baby, cradled in the arms of a living, breathing Saara. And in a town as small as Baldwin, most people get obituaries, and those obituaries are easily findable when librarians think you’re darling. To say nothing of the research Axel had done into the disease itself. He and his mother shared a rare form of dystrophy, owing to a mutation in their genes. One of the sequences repeated, like God fell asleep on the job, his fingers heavy on the keyboard. Of course, there could be worse things for a nerd to be than that—a mutant. But genes are complicated things, and most changes to them are, in fact, for the worse. Their variant of the disease wasn’t nearly as debilitating as some others, but it did present big problems for pregnancy and labor. Axel’s mother had known this—had decided to have him and Tess in spite of it. She’d gotten lucky on her first try, less so on her second. Axel was the complication.

  “Yes,” he said again.

  Jaana raised her eyebrows, the first thing to happen on her face that could fairly be deemed an expression. “Your father told you?” She sounded incredulous, and given that she hadn’t liked Sam, that was reason enough for Axel to lie.

  “He did.”

  “Well. Good.” She didn’t say anything more for a time. “So you understand then, that . . . Forgive me. My English.” Jaana turned away, facing the dark screen once again. She rubbed her face with her hands. Axel was about to tell her that they could try talking in Finnish when she spoke again. “You understand that very little is known, yes? You understand that your mother was a special case, because she was pregnant. You could be my age before you have any real problems from this.”

  What Jaana was trying to tell him was that he wouldn’t necessarily die young. She didn’t have to. Axel had given death plenty of thought, especially in the last few days, and he had no intention of doing it, ever.

  Otso—their grandfather, apparently—met them at the roundabout outside of the small, glassy Helsinki airport. He was seated in the back of a stretched minivan-taxi, with some kind of mechanical lift bolted beneath the sliding door. Jaana climbed aboard while the driver loaded their luggage, sitting in the very back beside her husband. Axel and Tess took the next row up. Otso exchanged cheek pecks with Jaana and loosed a pitifully lame smile up at Tess and Axel. The old man had a full-speed-ahead beard, totally wild and food-speckled. The driver joined them, his reddish muttonchops curling up into a wickedly bushy mustache that curtained over his top lip. Ren-faire facial hair all around.

  “Moi,” the driver said, addressing his dashboard but speaking loud enough so that they could hear him in the back.

  “Moi,” Jaana said. In Finnish, it could just as well have meant good-bye as hello.

  “I’m very sorry,” Otso said, still gazing up at them. “I’m so sorry.” His pronunciation was deliberate and practiced. Axel wasn’t sure if the old man didn’t know what else to say, or if that was all he knew how to say.

  The words caught the driver’s attention. He glanced at them in the rearview. “English?” he said, without turning.

  “Amerikkalaisia,” Jaana answered for them.

  “Welcome to Finland.” The driver smiled gamely into the mirror.

  “We won’t be staying,” Tess said, earning a glare from Jaana.

  “This is good.” The driver coughed mirthfully. “Winter is approaching.” He waited a moment, shy eyes in the oblong frame of the mirror. When no one chuckled at his joke, he put the taxi in drive and pulled onto the road. The weather here was more or less identical to what they’d left behind, and a light drizzle streaked across the windows, partially obscuring Axel’s view of his new home. His mother’s country looked mostly familiar, like a middling replica of Upstate New York. The taxi turned onto a smallish highway lined with fir trees and some leafless deciduous, maybe ash or elm. Beyond the trees Axel saw a series of modest suburban developments, mostly single-level houses painted in barnish white and red, their yards and exteriors immaculate. The sidewalk was broad and lightly trafficked, pedestrians with eyes on their feet and umbrellas held against the wet breeze. They passed a gas station that looked exactly like the gas stations back home, except that the placards read in liters and euros. It had an attached café with some forlorn tables scattered out front, where, despite the weather—and the hour; it was only morning here—a man in an old suit sat drinking a froth-capped chalice of beer. Birds wheeled madly against a low ceiling of clouds. Axel didn’t recognize a single one of them.

  “The boy doesn’t look so bad.” Otso spoke under his breath, in Finnish. “I thought it was more advanced than this.”

  “I’m not sure,” Jaana said, also in Finnish. “Paul was useless, of course. He didn’t know anything.” Like her husband, Jaana was half whispering. Did she not realize that Tess and Axel could hear her? Was Otso maybe going a little bit deaf? “I made an appointment for him with Dr. Virtanen,” she continued. “Heavens knows what kind of care he’s been getting. He doesn’t look right at all.”

  Even considering what Axel learned about Jaana over the last few days, he was still knocked windless by this sudden burbling of unedited honesty. She was totally nonchalant about it, gazing lazily out the window as she spoke. Tess must have been just as surprised, because she said nothing.

  “Does he have any symptoms?”

  “All I can tell is that he gets tired sometimes.”

  Otso caught Axel looking back at him, and he forced another weak smile. Then he turned to Tess. “She’s so beautiful,” he said.

  “And a brat.”

  “You’re surprised?”

  Jaana sort of snorted. “I shouldn’t be.”

  “She looks exactly like her.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Jaana said. “Her eyes aren’t quite right.”

  Axel felt like an idiot for not realizing until that moment that Jaana and Otso weren’t whispering on his account, but rather so that the taxi driver three rows up wouldn’t overhear. Because that man spoke Finnish, and it apparently went without saying that Tess and Axel didn’t. Their new grandparents hadn’t even bothered to ask! Of course their father, when he was alive, couldn’t be bothered. He hadn’t cared nearly enough to teach them. Jaana and Otso sure would feel lousy when Axel piped up to join the conversation. And rightly so.

  “Are we almost there?” Tess said loudly, and in English. She’d put a hand on Axel’s arm and clamped down hard. Making like she was scratching her nose, she pressed a finger hard against her lips in a very unambiguous shushing motion.

  “Getting closer,” Otso said. “We live nearby to the city center, now days.”

  “Now days?” Slowly Tess released Axel’s arm.

  “We just moved,” Jaana said. “We used to live out here.” She gestured vaguely at the houses beyond the trees. “But the garden was so much work. We wanted something smaller. Bad timing.”

  “Never mind,” Otso said. “We can manage.”

  They rolled on. The closer they got to downtown Helsinki, the more unfamiliar the scenery outside became. The buildings grew taller, pressing in against one another beneath copper-green roofs. The facades were simple, adorned only with a series of identical windows and a coat of cheerless pastel paint. The roads became narrow, and stone and brick overtook plaster. Trams passed them by, rumbling under a neat web of ca
bling. Jaana and Otso continued to talk in hushed Finnish for the rest of the ride. They covered the funeral and how awful it was. The A-frame and how awful it was. Grandpa Paul and how awful he was. By the time they stopped at the foot of the Kivis’ condominium, Axel was in as foul a mood as he’d been since that first night at Mrs. Ridgeland’s place.

  The driver got out and went around back to unload their luggage. Jaana fumbled through her wallet, sorting the euros from the dollars. Otso unbuckled his seat belt but stayed exactly where he was. Axel opened the sliding door and jumped out, fuming. And how perfect it was that the wheelchair should appear at that moment. He saw it, all saggy and creaking and forlorn, standing right at the back of the minivan. Like it had been waiting for him here all along. How stupid to have thought he could fool the thing and leave it behind. You can’t strand a hallucination. You just have to figure out how to unhallucinate it. Either that or learn to live with it.

  “Go away,” he hissed, giving himself a running start before kicking the wheelchair across the road, into the path of a slow-moving bus. He’d never been able to destroy the thing for good, but it was still gratifying to watch it shatter into fragments and smoke.

  But then something awful happened. The bus reacted as though the driver could actually see the wheelchair. Slow as the bus was, the brakes still screamed as it came to a sudden stop. Not sudden enough—the bus hit the wheelchair lightly, knocking it onto its side in the middle of the road, the upturned wheel spinning dizzily. Cars behind the bus slammed on their brakes and tapped noncommittally on their horns. The bus driver opened his door and stepped out into the street. Axel felt utterly stupid. God, he should have figured that one out. He only had this condition because Saara had passed it on. There were two people in the world who could have given it to her, and it obviously hadn’t been Jaana. That’s what the lift on the minivan was for. That’s why the old man hadn’t gotten out to greet them. How freaky it was that Otso’s real wheelchair looked exactly like Axel’s imaginary one.

  His grandmother was already out of the van, approaching the bus driver, speaking calmly in Finnish. “I’m so sorry. Is everyone all right?”

  The bus driver answered her back, but Axel recognized none of the words. This, too, was a vocabulary lesson. Because what could they possibly be other than the most awesome and elaborate curses?

  7

  At the Harbor

  Talk about an awkward elevator ride. The four of them were silent in the brightly lit, mirrored box as it carried them up to the Kivis’ condominium. Otso rolled his creaking chair a quarter turn forward, a half turn back, trying to be sly about checking it for damage. Other than a slight asphalt burn on the left armrest, it seemed fine. Axel, on the other hand, not so much. He was dangling over the rim of a good shame-and-fury weep. Tess was embarrassed for him, too. His normal flavor of weird was strong enough, but they were entering uncharted territory here. What could he have been thinking?

  “Well,” Jaana said as the elevator stuttered open. “An excellent start.”

  She took Otso by the horned handles of his chair and rolled him down a paneled hallway, to the door of their flat. The sound of her key in the lock was crisp and lonely, and when she turned the knob, a soft muddle of outdoorsy light poured into the corridor. Jaana took a single step into the flat and removed her shoes, setting them beside the door, heels to the trim. Otso did the same, though Tess wasn’t sure what the point was—with his feet in their stirrups, his shoes wouldn’t have touched the floor anyhow. “I will give you a tour,” Otso said, turning himself around by anchoring one wheel with his hand and pushing lightly on the other, sort of like ruddering a canoe. “You should visit the toilet first, however.” His beard opened up to reveal a smile. “It will take a long time.”

  Hilarious. The tour took forty seconds—just about ten for each Ikea-neat room. The front door opened onto a sort of den/hallway, the spine of the flat. It was bright and sparsely decorated, rigid with cheer. A white leather sofa sat against the far wall, presiding over its own reflection on the shining hardwood, with some kind of woolly animal pelt—maybe a reindeer?—thrown over the back of it. Over by the window was a low wooden breakfast table dotted by a shifting constellation of shadows from the rain-specked window. There was only one chair pulled up to the table. Otso’s traveled with him, and guests were apparently infrequent.

  The rest of the flat was just as showroomy, looking almost like it’d been explicitly designed to be the opposite of their old A-frame. The kitchen was stocked with shiny copper pots hanging from hooks embedded in the faux-earthen tiling, two big wall calendars sporting pictures of the beckoningly melancholy Finnish countryside, and a chromed espresso machine. The bathroom had no tub, just a retractable showerhead affixed at about waist height, with an attached mini sauna no bigger than a phone booth. Jaana and Otso’s bedroom was small as well, but it had an expansive view of the city, a fogged-in hint of the Baltic beyond. Hothouse daisies drooped in a Moomintroll-print vase on the end table. The ruthless way that Jaana had taken a hatchet to even the slightest hint of clutter seemed right in keeping with Tess’s first impression of her, though what remained hardly matched her temperament. As though the old woman were trying to give the impression that she was cheery, warm; and really she was the precise opposite of that.

  The last room was a study, and that at least looked lived-in. Otso had been a poetry professor at the University of Helsinki, and a great deal of his work seemed to have followed him home over the years. Reproductions of famous Finnish paintings hung lopsided on the walls—Tess recognized several from the illustrated Kalevala that Sam had given them—alongside tacked-up photocopies of the relevant passages from the Finnish myth. It was all harpies and glowing forges, big-ass beards and undead swans, with Otso’s tiny annotations scrawled everywhere.

  “You two should get some rest,” Jaana said, indicating the two twin beds drifting at odd angles in the middle of the study—clearly an afterthought. “It’s still very early, and we have a busy day.”

  “There is cheese in the freezer,” Otso said.

  “Refrigerator,” Jaana corrected.

  Their grandfather winced a little. “Refrigerator.” Then, to Jaana, in Finnish: “Tell them they should help themselves whenever they want. Can they eat? Have they been eating? I should have asked what they like. Tell them they’re welcome.”

  “They’re not babies, ukko.” Ukko was a vaguely rude word for “old man,” certainly an accurate descriptor in this case, but Jaana seemed to be using it as a term of endearment. “They know they’re welcome.” Then, switching back to English: “Do try to rest. Don’t worry if you fall asleep. I’ll wake you when you’re needed.”

  “Sleep tightly,” Otso said as Jaana wheeled him backward out of their surrendered study. “And without insects.”

  “You should probably leave the talking to me,” Jaana said, closing the door softly behind them. The wood was pulp thin, and their voices came through almost as loudly with the door shut.

  “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.