The Winter Place Page 8

  “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.

  “The summer place. It is not nearby.”

  Tess missed a step. They’d been in Helsinki for all of five hours, and already the Kivis were planning another relocation? “What’s the summer place?” she said.

  “It is our place,” Otso said after a pause. His wince let Tess know that he was aware of what a crap answer this was. Apparently, it was the best he could do with the words he had. “Better wait for Jaana,” he said.

  Leaving the train station behind, they turned onto a larger street, with trams rumbling through dedicated center lanes. Otso’s chair didn’t have a motor, but despite those stork-skinny arms, he was able to move at quite a clip. His fingerless gloves hardly seemed to touch the wheels as he brushed his hands cleanly over the curved rubber, and Tess found that she had to rush to keep up. After a few blocks she caught herself staring at him—gauging Otso the way she sometimes gauged Axel. The kind of dystrophy her brother had was highly variable. One patient could get off easier than the next, so the fact that Otso had made it to this old age with so few problems was predictive of nothing. But still, it was kind of cool to see him zooming down that sidewalk. Otso was, in a way, the best possible outcome. He was also the root cause for all this trouble. His genes had killed Tess’s mother and made her brother sick. But then again, they’d also allowed those people—and her—to exist in the first place.

  The two of them turned down an esplanade lined with bare trees and cafés. Finns sat at French-style outdoor tables, not to be cowed by the October chill, downing espressos and beers—some seemed to be drinking both. In the distance ahead Tess could see the copper dome of an orthodox church sprouting out of the low Helsinki skyline. Some of the surrounding buildings looked like factories, with pale plumes of smoke discharging out of their upturned snouts. For a moment it appeared that the buildings were moving—swapping places ever so slowly. But then Tess realized that she was looking at the upper decks and smokestacks of cruise ships. They’d arrived at the harbor.

  Kauppatori was a densely packed market square, set right up against the water. From a distance Tess could see nothing but a quilt of identical orange tarps under a wheeling haze of gulls, but as they approached, the shop stalls began to distinguish themselves. Despite the late season, there was still produce for sale—carrots and peapods, gooseberries and blueberries and plastic troughs of gooey cloudberry. There was also plenty of fish: cooked and raw, whole and cleaned, smoked, pickled, and dried. Otso unfurled a canvas bag from one of his pockets and rolled into the grid of stalls, his chair bumping and hopping on the irregular paving stones. “We need provisions!” he said. A word taken right out of Axel’s mouth—the adventuring equivalent of groceries.

  “So, how long will we be gone?” Tess said, trying again.

  “One week. Or more, if not too cold.” Otso had reached one of the tented tables, where he greeted the vendor with a subdued nod. “There is time. For school, you wait for November. We must find a teacher for your Finnish.” He passed over the greens without a glance, going right for a bin of cleaned mushrooms, all twisty and golden. “These are kanttarelli,” he said, holding up one of the mushrooms for Tess to see. “At Talvijärvi—that’s where we have the summer place—the woods have many. Autumn is excellent for hunting.” Otso stuck his face into the bin itself to give it a deep, almost passionate sniff. He asked the vendor how long she’d had the mushrooms and where they came from. Her answers must have been exemplary, because he bought the entire lot.

  “Why are we going to the summer place?” Tess said.

  Otso turned to look at her, confused. “It is beautiful.” He made an attempt at a game smile. “Your grandmother, Jaana . . . We think it will be good. It is so quiet. It is somehow peaceful, and we think—”

  “Peaceful isn’t going to fix anything,” Tess said. “And Jaana never asked us if we wanted to go. Since my father died, she hasn’t asked me anything.”

  Otso squirmed in his chair and made a brief escape by turning to pay for the mushrooms. Tess felt a little ruthless, pressing her advantage on the old man by forcing him into lame, partial English answers. Especially when it would have been so easy to let him explain himself more fully in Finnish. But she couldn’t quit pretending now—the ammunition she’d been collecting was just too good.

  “You are right,” Otso said, placing the plastic bags of mushrooms into his larger canvas sack. “But please, don’t be cruel to Jaana.” If he had a bigger vocabulary, he probably wouldn’t have used that word, “cruel.” He probably would have been less honest.

  “She cares very much,” he continued, “and she is also very, very sad. We have been for a long time. But we are trying hard. We want only what is best.”

  “Jaana doesn’t even want us here.” Tess’s face flushed with her own wickedness. But it was true, wasn’t it? She’d said as much back in Baldwin.

  Otso shook his head patiently, like an instructor offering gentle correction. “You are wrong,” he said. “You don’t understand anything.” Again the old man’s partial grasp of English made him unsettlingly direct. “Jaana loves you.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Tess said.

  “You don’t have to.” Otso made no more answer than this. He balanced the plump sack of mushrooms on his lap, pushed away from the stall, and rolled deeper into the market. They did the rest of their shopping in silence.

  8

  Real Elephants

  At the doctor’s office, Axel knew the drill. Height and weight and make-happy chitchat. Measuring tape wrapped around his upper thighs and arms, where his imaginary quads and biceps bristled with veins. An electrocardiogram to chart his dependably spiky heartbeat, followed by an echocardiogram, the ultrasound jelly cold on his chest and upper back. Dr. Virtanen asked about his energy and his breathing and made him move his neck in circles and read letters of various sizes from across the room. Basically, the same routine here in Finland as it was back home—a festival of prodding and discordant cheer. The only difference was that now, instead of Sam and the doctor retreating to another room to have their private conversation, it played out right in front of him. Jaana either thought that Axel had received nothing better than Renaissance-caliber medical attention back in the States—barbers bearing castor oil and leeches—or that he harbored secret intentions of dying, soonish. She gave Dr. Virtanen a grilling like Axel had never seen.

  “Did you look for the murmur? His father spoke in letters about a murmur.”

  “A slight murmur, yes,” Dr. Virtanen said, his eyes still on his notes. “But the boy’s heart is healthy. To be honest, if I hadn’t seen his paperwork, I’d be hard-pressed to say he was even positive.”

  “How can you be serious?” Jaana crossed her arms tightly over her chest and pressed herself into the wall. “Just look at him.”

  “He’s scrawny, absolutely. But scrawny isn’t a diagnosis. Nor is it necessarily a symptom. There aren’t any signs of dystrophy in his proximal muscles.” The doctor turned back to Axel, still up on the examining table in his skivvies. “For all you know, he could have a growth spurt coming.”

  “So that’s it, then. Not a thing in the world to worry about.” This prospect seemed to distress Axel’s grandmother even more than the alternative.

  “There never is. Until there is.”

  Jaana sucked her teeth viciously at this, but Dr. Virtanen seemed totally at ease. She must have been abusing him over Otso’s care for decades. “I know that it’s frustrating,” he said, “but this is the
best I can offer. The boy appears to be asymptomatic now, which is excellent news. But also not at all uncommon in a patient so young. Will he be asymptomatic next month? Next year? All I could offer would be a guess, no more valuable than anybody else’s.”

  Jaana uncrossed her arms and smoothed her trouser legs. She glanced briefly at Axel, and when she spoke again, her voice was hushed. “What about cognitive symptoms?” Axel didn’t recognize most of the words that followed, but the familiar medical terms came through. The Finnish word for “hypersomnia” was, apparently, “hypersomnia.” Jaana said: “persistent confusion.” She said: “hallucinations.” It was no surprise that she was up on her research—Axel was, after all, the third member of her family to be subject to the whims of this illness. But what did surprise him was the extent to which his loved ones had sold him out. His father had apparently called it “more than just an overactive imagination” in one of his letters. Shortly after the funeral, Paul had admitted to Jaana that Axel would spend hours in the woods looking for things that simply couldn’t be there. Mrs. Ridgeland had even claimed that he hallucinated bears and accused Tess of playing this mental deficiency for laughs. Axel wanted to correct them on this point—the wheelchair was one thing, but that bear was real and his sister would never do such a thing—but all that came out when he opened his mouth was a gout of dragonish flame. The shock wave blew Jaana and the old doctor off their feet, and lucky for them, because otherwise they’d have been char-becued with the rest of the office. The fire burned an ash-ringed hole in the wall, and Axel, still in his underwear, jumped through it and into the wet morning. It was cold out there, so he breathed more fire. Did Finnish cops even carry guns? He would destroy them, either way.

  “You get tired sometimes?” Dr. Virtanen asked, switching to flawless English.