The Winter Place (14 page)

“The wheelchair . . . ,” Axel said. The words escaped him almost on their own, but he had little doubt that's what the Keeper was talking about.

The old man raised an eyebrow. “It looks like a wheelchair to you?”

“It's real.” Axel didn't mean this as a question, but that's how the Keeper took it.

“As real as I am,” he said. “As real as the elephants. It's the Hiisi.”

Axel recognized the word. It could mean slightly different things in different contexts, though most of them weren't particularly nice. A
hiisi
was a wood spirit. A
hiisi
was a troll, or demon. A
hiisi
was, apparently, following him. Axel knew he shouldn't be delighted by any of this.

“When it finds you,” the Keeper continued, “and it
will
, you need to keep your distance. None
of that silly shit you like to do—pushing it, kicking it. Don't even
touch
the thing.”

“Why not?” Axel said.

“You'll know soon enough,” the Keeper said, “next time you see it. The Hiisi likes to put on disguises. It dresses up as something it knows you fear. But underneath the disguise—that's so very much worse.” The Keeper went quiet for a moment, his gaze again drifting out across the water, to the tented market. “You should get back to them,” he said. “If you get Granny too worried, she might cancel your trip.” Then, without another word, he turned, taking high swamp-walker steps across the parking lot. He was heading in the direction of the little park, which for the moment looked utterly normal.

“Where are you going?” Axel called, not a little worried that it might seem crazy if he was yelling at an empty parking lot.

“Home,” the Keeper said, without turning back. “See you up there!”

A
xel behaved strangely for the rest of the day. He didn't say a word during the short trip back to Jaana and Otso's flat, and once they arrived he marched straight into the study. Tess followed, watching as he ransacked his suitcase. Clothes unfolded and books butterflied as he tossed them over his shoulders. When he found what he was looking for—their father's camera, the most expensive thing he'd ever bought, counting the truck he died in—Axel scooped it up and switched it on.

“I thought that was busted?” Tess said.

“The screen still works.” Axel planted himself on the edge of his bed and began to flick through the pictures. When he came to the one he was
looking for, his eyes widened. Axel stayed quiet for a long moment, and when he finally spoke again, his voice was thin and shaky. “I think you should sit down,” he said.

Quickly, Tess joined him on the bed. She took her brother's chin in her hands and turned his face toward her. He didn't have bad days often, but when he did, they started out like this. “Are you all right?” she said.

Axel made no answer, other than to pass her the camera. Tess looked down at the cracked display, threaded with blue, and saw the very last picture her brother had taken. It was the brown bear, sulking among the sugar maples edging Mud Lake Park. The bear looked smaller in the picture, though no less terrifying. How strange—she'd hardly given the animal or her keeper a second thought since Sam had died. But had the encounter happened on any other day, it probably would have been a highlight of her year.

“I think she's here,” Axel said, his voice sort of faraway and breathy. “She's waiting for us.”

Tess flicked the camera off and looked at him. “The bear?”

“No,” Axel huffed, impatient. He seemed about to say something more but caught himself at the last moment. “Wait. . . . You see a bear?” His tone
was so flat that she almost didn't realize that this was a question.

“Um, yes?” Tess handed the camera back to her bug-eyed brother. Again, she inspected his face. “What's going on with you?”

Axel didn't answer for a long while, and the “nothing” he finally uttered was totally unconvincing. Then he lay back on his bed, clutching the busted camera to his chest. He didn't say anything more, but behind that grim, jet-lagged stupor, there was a kind of lightness seeping in. It almost looked like her brother was happy.

The rest of the afternoon went by quickly, but that was largely because the sun set at half past four, dousing Helsinki in darkness. Jaana and Otso kept busy in the kitchen, cooking for the trip. The cabin at Talvijärvi had no stove or running water—Otso announced this cheerily, as though it were an excellent feature, something they'd be sure to put in the listing if they ever sold the place—so anything that couldn't be cooked over an open fire had to be prepared in advance. That meant that dinner was a smorgasbord of samples: sausages, thick hoops of raw onion, a bizarrely viscous gooseberry pudding, and a funky mushroom casserole that looked a good deal worse than it tasted. Tess was starving, but Axel hardly ate. He stayed silent throughout the meal, fiddling
with the camera, earning suspicious and worried glances from Jaana and Otso. When it was time for bed, he took the camera with him, the display casting a flickering glow over his face. It wasn't until Tess was about to fall asleep that her brother spoke again.

“What did Grandpa Paul say?” he asked.

Tess took her time. “He said to give it a week. He said we should see how the first week goes and then call him back.” She turned onto her side. “If we still want to go home after that, he'll see what he can do.” Paul had, of course, said no such thing. Tess hadn't had high hopes for their conversation, but it actually went even worse than she'd expected. Paul's voice came through clogged and woolen, eking its way from word to word, like just making the sounds required more effort than he was capable of. Tess's first assumption had been that he was drunk—where Paul was concerned, that was generally a safe bet to make. But as the conversation meandered and doubled back, she began to realize that he was sober. This was, in a weird way, even more troubling.

“I'm just so sorry,” Paul had said in a leaden voice. “You both deserve better.”

In a moment of anger, Tess has allowed herself to answer, “Yes, we do.”

Axel lay quietly for a moment on his bed, pulsing with the glow of the camera. “Good,” he eventually said. “I think we should
try
, you know? I think we should give them a chance.” Axel seemed to realize that this wasn't the answer Tess was expecting. He looked up from the camera to stare at her, forcing eye contact, almost like he was selling something.

“Don't you miss home?” she said, a little lamely.

“I miss everything.” Axel switched off the camera and set it on the floor beneath his bed. “I miss Dad.”

“Me too.”

A moment passed. A long one. It seemed like the accident had happened a year ago. Or a minute ago. It seemed, for a moment, like it had never happened at all.

“He'd want us to stay here, I think.” Despite everything, chances were that Axel was right. Considering the alternatives. Still, Sam wouldn't have been happy about it. He'd put in zero prep work for their relationship with Jaana and Otso. Tess had never thought that her father was the kind of man to hold a grudge, but the fact that he'd kept this one going so long meant that something truly terrible must have happened between him and the Kivis.

“What do you think they did to him?” Tess said.

“I don't know,” Axel said. Then, after a moment: “Are you sure it was them?”

“What?”

“How do you know they started the fight?”

She stared at him, incredulous. All the available evidence pointed to Jaana as the maker and sustainer of the decade-long, arctic-silent grudge.

“Maybe it was Mom,” Axel said, already woozy and drifting. Tess could hear Otso's spokes echoing through the wooden flat. The street below hummed with the complaint of tramcars and a brief eruption of boisterous singing.

“What do
you
know about Mom?”

“Nothing,” Axel said. “Neither of us does.”

Their train was scheduled to leave at dawn the next morning. Tess kept an eye on her little brother, but he seemed more or less restored to his normal self. Axel grinned down at his paper ticket, at the looming sandstone giants, at the train waiting to convey them all to Talvijärvi. The thing was sleek and podlike, modern as a cell phone, but her brother couldn't have been more pleased if it were a steam engine, quaintly greased and smoky, worthy of platform nine and three-quarters.

The trip took only a few hours, but that accounted for most of their meager allotment of
daylight. Otso unfolded a map over his knees, tracing their route as they went—north out of Helsinki and east toward the Russian border. Tess watched as the flat, lake-pocked terrain blurred past her window. The farther they went, the greener things got. The autumn-brown ashes and elms fell away, replaced by spruce and stands of orange-barked pine. In some places there were no trees at all but a heathland of yarrow and hops and yellowish cloudberry bogs so wet that they reflected the sky. Tess imagined that her father had probably taken this same train journey years ago. She pictured Sam seated exactly where she was now, gazing out at the green and unfamiliar world beyond the windows.

Wow, Tess thought. He would have
loved
it. And just a moment after these words flitted across her brain, she had to turn away from Jaana and Otso, so that they wouldn't notice her wiping her eyes. God, it kept getting the jump on her. The depth of Tess's sadness was somehow a never-ending surprise. Her grief would jump out from behind some unexpected corner, yell “boo,” and freaking ruin her.

They transferred to a bus at the Talvijärvi train station, disembarking at the mouth of the Kivis' long driveway. And no sooner had the summer cottage come into view through the trees ahead
than Jaana began divvying out chores. Otso was to bring all the dry goods into the kitchen and deliver the perishables to the hillside cellar. Firewood was stacked beneath the eaves of a freestanding sauna adjacent to the cottage, and Jaana put herself in charge of making kindling and stocking the fireplace and the woodstove. Axel's job was to go inside the cabin, open up all the linen closets, and air out bedding—no heavy lifting there. It was Tess, unsurprisingly, who got the shit shift. Literally. No running water meant they used a composting outhouse, and her job was to uncork the toilet and add some wood chips. After that she should go down to the lakeshore and get the boat off its blocks and into the water. Oh—and could she bring all the heavy suitcases inside? Again Jaana seemed ready for Tess to fight her on this—she seemed, almost, to
want
it. Tess didn't know why her grandmother had decided to poke the dragon, and she didn't much care. She gave the old woman a blank smile and did as she was asked.

Tess started with the job least likely to involve poop or spiders, following her brother to the front door of the cottage and hauling each suitcase inside. If the Kivis' new condo in Helsinki was the exact opposite of her old A-frame back home, then their summer place was a sort of medium between the two. It had the same grotty odor of wood and
books—Otso must have left a great deal of his work here over the years—the same worn floorboards covered in a concealing patchwork of rugs. The cabin was just about the same size as the A-frame, but it felt a good deal bigger because there was simply so much less
in
it. With people this old, you'd expect a knickknack or two, but Jaana had been just as merciless with the clutter in here as she had been in their city flat. Where couches and chairs were needed, there were couches and chairs. The table was perfect for a couple and could accommodate up to four, but not a person more. There were exactly two beds. It wasn't lost on Tess that the smaller one had been her mother's.

Axel stalked the cottage for closets, opening each door with a kind of cinematic swish, as though he half expected to discover a fawn-trod snowscape on the other side. The fact that all he found were sheets and comforters, thick with the stink of mothballs, seemed to do nothing to dim his enthusiasm. Tess stashed a suitcase in each of the bedrooms—there had better be a cot somewhere, because no way was she sleeping with her brother—before helping Axel unfurl the musty linens. Then she left him in the cottage and made for the outhouse, which was set up against a low hill opposite the lakeshore, looking out from a copse of winter-tortured birch.

There was a covered plastic tub of peat and wood chips sitting just outside the outhouse door, with a big scooper perched atop the lid. The toilet seat looked like a regular one, but when Tess lifted it, there was nothing beneath but a gaping black hole—the kind you definitely don't want to hang your naked butt over. She dropped in a few scoops of woody mulch and got the seat closed as quickly as she could. Then it was down to the water. On her way, Tess passed the freestanding sauna, which looked rather like a jumbo replica of a Lincoln Logs play set, made of raw timber, jointed at the corners, with a capped tin chimney jutting from the roof. Jaana was already out behind the sauna, using a hand ax to split birch logs into kindling. She worked the ax into the wood with a few gentle taps. Then, once the blade was lodged, a quick thump splintered the log neatly down the middle. Jaana called out as Tess passed.