The Winter Place (12 page)

“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.

A
t 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.

“What?” Knocked out of his daydream, Axel looked back at the doctor. Jaana eyeballed him, as though Axel's momentary distraction were all the proof she needed of a profound medical calamity heading his way, fast.

“Sometimes you feel very tired. Sometimes you feel a bit weak. Is that true?”

“Yes,” Axel said.

The doctor smiled. “Me, as well. Naps. They are the ticket.”

Jaana was not amused.

Axel left Dr. Virtanen's office that morning thinking that his sister was right—really, they couldn't get out of this stupid place soon enough. But he amended this thought a little later, when he got his first bite of something called
lihapiirakka
, at the harbor market. It took about an hour to travel there from Vantaa, and by the time they arrived, Tess and Otso had just finished their shopping. A canvas tote brimming with vegetables sat on his grandfather's legs like an overhanging beer gut. Jaana pecked Otso on the lips, relieved him of the tote, and peered inside to inspect his purchases. Whatever was in there earned a curt grunt of approval.

Otso led them to a tented café near the center of the market, about which some picnic benches and tables had been set. A sign affixed to the tent proclaimed that they sold the best
lihapiirakka
in the market, though the word “market” had been crossed out and replaced with “Helsinki,” which had itself been dashed in favor of “Finland.” It was basically a soft, hot doughnut filled with spiced meat and exactly as delicious as that sounds. Axel ate two of them, followed by something called a
munkkipossu
—the same deal but with jam, dusted with sugar, and in a slightly more whimsical shape—while his new grandparents sipped coffee and looked gratified. The caterers
who ran the court-of-foods for the Renaissance Faire could have learned a thing or two from this market café. The food here was simple, vaguely rustic—it could totally have been served in a mead hall, atop a big pewter platter set beneath a boar's head centerpiece—and it was a hell of a lot more delicious than funnel cakes or corn dogs.

“Otso told me that we're going someplace,” Tess said. She'd been quiet as she ate, straining to repress all signs of pleasure. There was still a little bit of jam in the corner of her lip.

Their new grandparents looked at each other. “What?” Otso said in Finnish. “It's some kind of secret?”

“We're going to Talvijärvi, up north,” Jaana said. Translated literally, it meant: “winter lake.” “We have a house there. Not a house—a cabin. It's our summer place.” A summer place on winter lake. Axel hadn't yet been in this country for a full day, and already it struck him that there could be nothing more Finnish than this.

“Why are we going?”

Jaana and Otso looked at each other, like this question exposed a weakness either in their granddaughter's education or her character. “To
be
there,” Jaana said.

“It's beautiful,” Otso said, inching his chair closer to their table. “It's very beautiful.”

“But why? What's up there, other than the cabin?”

“Nothing,” Jaana said. “That's the point.” She waited for Tess to return the volley. When she didn't, Jaana went on: “It used to be your mother's favorite place.”

Did she mean for that to sound as provocative as it did?

“Can I have a little bit of money?” Tess said suddenly and with an oddly insincere brightness. It wasn't the response anybody expected of her, especially on the brink of what could become another light show of an argument.