The Winter Place (8 page)

The service was scheduled for midday, in the Oakwood Cemetery down in Syracuse. It was a
big, old cemetery that abutted the south end of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, where their father had taught undergraduates about lichens and hardwoods. The Oakwood was also where their mother was buried, and Sam's plot would be right beside hers. Grandpa Paul was supposed to land in the late morning, presumably with his new lady friend in tow, and would meet Tess and Axel at the cemetery. Tess hoped that her granddad would be able to hold it together and make it through the day. She hoped that she'd be able to, as well, because whenever she lost her immediate focus on the boxes, or her clothes, or spying on Axel to judge his energy levels, the world went flimsy. Tess felt a sadness so deep and desperate that it was like the sun—she was sure that if she looked right at it, she'd go blind.

“I know that was a shock,” Mrs. Ridgeland said as they left the A-frame and got back into her car. “I'm sorry about that. I don't mean to make you feel like you're being pushed out. But we have to be realistic.” She backed them down the dirt drive. A minute later they were on 690, heading southeast. It was the exact same route their dad had taken, not even a week ago, on the night of the brown bear.

“Everything's been worked out with a moving company,” Mrs. Ridgeland went on. “Your stuff
should arrive at your grandparents' place in no time at all.”

“What about Bigwig?” Axel said, tugging at his shiny sleeves—the only thing he had that approached funeral attire was a costume tux from the previous Halloween. “I think we'll need special papers,” he went on. “It's not the same for a hare.”

“What's that?” Mrs. Ridgeland eyed him in the rearview.

“As a rabbit,” Axel said. “I mean, I think it's easier for a rabbit.” They stared at each other via reflections.

“I'm not following.”

Axel sighed. He kept his voice reasonable. “Bigwig is a
hare
. She's technically a wild animal. We need a permit to take her out of the state.”

“I see. We'll have to look into that.” Mrs. Ridgeland nodded up in the driver's seat, and Tess knew that there wasn't a chance in hell that the hare would be coming with them. A tiny loss, in comparison, but Axel would take it hard. He loved that little animal.

They passed the exit for Camillus and came abreast of Onondaga Lake, on the final stretch to Syracuse. The lake was lined with a low, marshy forest. Red-winged blackbirds tilted among the reeds, trilling. Up ahead were the remains of the
concrete pedestrian bridge. It looked like a diving board now, terminating in a crisscross of caution tape, a full stop, a drop into the passing lane. They glided under it without a word.

“Grandfather,” Tess said.

“What's that?”

“You said grand
parents
. It's grandfather, singular. No matter what he told you.”

“None of my business,” Mrs. Ridgeland said, sounding relieved that it wasn't.

The funeral was a lot bigger than Tess had expected. A good portion of the faculty and student body of the College of Environmental Science and Forestry turned out, along with the Mud Lake Birding Society and the performance troupe from the Renaissance Faire. As they approached the site, Tess was horrified to see that Sam's fellow knights of the realm were attending in full-on period pretend—swords snug in scabbards, colored plumes sprouting out of their helmets like gouts of flame. Kilted bards played a running dirge on lute, bagpipe, and fiddle. The bizarre crowd parted as Tess and Axel approached, and people shushed one another, all of them apparently nervous about making eye contact with the newly minted orphans. Tess heard someone say her name, and only then did she recognize her grandfather among these strangers. He'd shaved,
and his hair was pulled back into a clean, puffy ponytail. He wore a pressed but ill-fitting suit, and when he hugged her he smelled of toothpaste and nothing else. And he was alone, thank God.

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.”

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

A
xel 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?”