The Winter Place (18 page)

One of the birds leaped from its perch and flitted heavily down to the courtyard floor. It landed a few paces from Axel, its wrinkly black feet gripping an upturned corner of stone, and stared up
at him. “Go away,” it said very clearly in Finnish. It didn't sound the way a supernatural, possibly undead crow should sound—not shrill or deep or echoing. It was a perfectly normal voice, but for the fact that it had just come out of a crow.

“I'm looking for the Keeper,” Axel said. Tess and Kari turned to him, startled.

“He isn't here,” the crow said. “You shouldn't be, either. You need to leave.”

“I won't,” Axel said. Though,
I can't,
would have been just as accurate. Axel's exhaustion had been slowly mounting on him all morning, but the moment he crossed beneath the archway of Erikinlinna, it seemed to boil over. His legs turned to soft wax beneath him. And where had his knees gone? He used to have knees.

“You won't what?” Tess said, crossing to Axel and taking him by the arm.

“It's following you,” the crow said. “You're going to lead it here.”

“I'm not going anywhere until you tell me where the Keeper is,” Axel said, trying his best to sound hard. The numbness had come up past his waist now, making his tummy feel sick and loose. It was horrible and painless.

“Hey. What's going on with you?” Tess put a hand around Axel's chest as he began to slump forward toward the crow. The bird didn't flinch.

“You don't belong here,” the crow said. “This place isn't for you.”

“Kari,” Tess called out. “Help!” The older boy came around and grabbed Axel's other arm—it felt as though they were attached to his shoulders by nothing more than glue and staples. Slowly, they lowered Axel onto his back, making it look to him as though the trees were shooting up all around, a forest in fast-forward. There was a bird in every tree, two eyes in every bird.

“Now you've done it,” the crow said, flapping back up onto a low branch so that it could peer down at Axel. “You've drawn it out, you selfish little rat.”

“What's wrong with him?” Kari said.

“I don't know,” Tess said. Then she said some more stuff, questioney stuff, all directed at Axel. But he wasn't listening—not to her, anyway. He listened instead to the familiar ticking sound that had just filled the courtyard. The Keeper had warned him that this would happen. It had been bound to find him, sooner or later. The wheelchair rolled smoothly through the castle entrance, wheels bouncing over the cracked stone.

“Send it away!” the crow screeched, its feathers standing on end.

“I can't,” Axel said.

“What can't you do?” Tess shouted.

But Axel hardly heard her over the riot of squawking. The birds scattered, shattered, poured their wings and screams into the lake-blue sky. They fled the trees and the cracked battlements, the tower walls and balustrades. “Hiisi!” they shouted. “Hiisi! Hiisi!” The word rose up all around Axel—doubling, tripling, flocking.

I
t had been so long since Axel's last bad day that Tess had allowed herself to hope that they might finally be over and done with. No such luck. Her brother looked like he was about to fall asleep right there, in the middle of the crumbling courtyard. She and Kari were finally able to get him back onto his feet, but he couldn't take even a step unassisted. More worrying than that was the sleep-talk-caliber nonsense that Axel was uttering. The Hiisi was coming. The Hiisi had arrived.

Kari was clearly trying his best not to panic. He didn't have Jaana's or Otso's number programmed into his phone, and when he called Kalle it went straight to voice mail. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He looked as though he might throw up.

“It's all right,” Tess said. “It's happened before.”

“Okay,” Kari said, nodding as though to calm himself down. It seemed to be the only word he had access to, for the moment.

“Where does that path go?” Still steadying her brother with one hand, Tess pointed to a well-kept mulch track that led away from the covered picnic area and disappeared into the spruce wood, white blazes marking the trunks.

“Out to a parking lot, on the main road,” Kari said.

“Can we get back to the cottage that way?” Axel was in no shape for a walk, but they couldn't take him back out onto the water in this condition, life jacket or no. Kari's rowboat was out.

“That's not the right direction,” he said. Then, turning to the spruces, “We'd have to cut through the woods. It isn't too far, but . . .”

“We've got time. This isn't an emergency.” Tess didn't actually believe this until she said it. But somehow hearing the words, even in her own voice, made them true. It wasn't an emergency. This had happened before, she said again, this time to herself. Axel was going to be all right. They each took one of his arms over their shoulders and left the castle ruins behind at a measured pace. Her little brother's sneakers barely grazed the grass underfoot, and his head dipped and lolled.

“Sorry,” Axel mumbled. “I'm sorry.” He was staring down at his legs, as though trying to will some life back into them. Their doctor back home had described this as “daytime sleepiness” and “fatigue.” Their doctor back home had a crap vocabulary.

“Don't be dumb,” Tess said.

“Yes. You have no . . .” Kari paused, maybe a little shy about intruding. But this was already so intimate, walking three abreast, arm over arm. He couldn't be in any deeper than this. “Nobody chooses when to get sick.”

“Not talking . . . ,” Axel said, his voice thick and groggy, “to you.”

Tess and Kari exchanged a look. They continued on without saying anything more, under the whorled branches of the spruce forest. Soon enough they caught a glimpse of the Hannula house through the trees ahead and the Kivis' summer cottage well beyond it. Kalle and his friends were all awake by now, framed by a double-paned window, playing one of those video games where you have to actually get up and dance. They were wearing bathing suits and neon wigs, because the world was inexplicable.

Jaana was out on the dock when they reached the cottage, using an old pair of binoculars to scan the pine island, probably wondering why she
couldn't see Kari's rowboat. But whatever scolding she'd been cooking up was shelved the moment she noticed the three of them emerging from the trees. Jaana helped them bring Axel inside and interrogated him only very gently about how he felt. Otso, resolute in his belief in the restorative effects of a good steam, rolled himself down the back ramp and went to go add logs to the still-warm woodstove in the sauna. Jaana had baked little blueberry tarts, which they ate silently as they waited for the fire to get going. Tess kept expecting her grandmother to flip, and Jaana kept not-flipping. Perhaps there was an upside to that fine-tuned Finnish pessimism. Expecting the worst all the time made a thing like this seem inconsequential—a reprieve from more awful possibilities.

Axel stayed inside for the rest of the day, tethered by his own exhaustion to the couches and chairs. Tess spent most of the afternoon with him, watching as her brother walked a slow circuit from window to window, wading through the air. But whatever Axel was looking for outside, he wasn't keen to tell her what it was. Moreover, he flat-out refused to talk to her about what had happened at the castle. Tess recognized the word he'd been mumbling—Hiisi—from the folklore that had been a mainstay of their old Finnish lessons.
A
hiisi
was a sort of forest-dwelling demon from pagan times—God, Axel could just as well have been repeating the word “unicorn” or “goblin.” But when confronted, her brother pretended not to remember having said it. It wasn't like him at all. Tess could usually count on Axel to be maddeningly chatty—far more likely to overshare than to withhold. Why he would start lying to her now, she had no idea. It made Tess a little angry, actually. They were all each other had left, and
now
Axel was going to start keeping things from her? Well, fine, she thought. If he wants his secrets, then he can keep them.

It took a few days for Axel to get his full strength back, but the time passed quickly for Tess. A lot needed to be done to get the summer place ready for its winter hibernation, and the work fell squarely on her and Jaana. The fireplace had to be scooped of ashes and scrubbed down with a wire brush, the woodstove in the sauna cleaned, the Nordic spruce benches sanded pale. Shoddy shingles on the cottage roof had to be replaced, and the chimney seam needed caulk, to say nothing of the filth-choked gutters. Not that Tess minded any of this. The tasks helped keep her mind off everything that had happened in the last few weeks. Off everything that was
still
happening, because that's what it felt like—a
slow, continuous dissolve. Tess's life was falling away piece by piece, the loss somehow bigger every minute she spent with it. Sometimes she'd look up from her work, see her father standing just beyond a scrim of unfamiliar trees, and have to hold fast to the cottage wall, lest she fly away on the breeze. How terrifying it is to know how much you love your parents.

Kari came by every afternoon, dressed in his own overshot approximation of working clothes, eager to do whatever Jaana told him to. Tess found it sort of cute and sad the way Kari followed her grandmother around like a puppy, and she wondered briefly if the Barcelona that his folks were visiting was as imaginary as the Zanzibar where her mom and dad were supposedly sipping umbrella drinks. But Jaana confirmed Kari's story and offered her own typically merciless assessment.

“They'll be in Spain until the day after Christmas,” she said. “Lousy people, worse parents.”

Like Tess, Jaana seemed happy to be busy. With each job finished—the hillside cellar door replaced, for example—she'd brew a cup of coffee and bask for a moment, sipping and surveying her handiwork. When the cup was drained, it was time to check on the progress Kari and Tess
were making and to begin her next task. Otso, on the other hand, was not so pleased. The normally cheerful, bashfully quiet man didn't like their Talvijärvi itinerary one bit. The wheels of his chair cut deep troughs into the lawn as he rolled to and fro, trying and failing to make himself useful. He met every new project that Jaana embarked upon—or set Tess and Kari against—with similar reservations. “This really has to happen now? These outhouse hinges—they're an emergency?”

One morning, during their predawn breakfast, Jaana and Otso had an out-and-out argument about it—the first that Tess had ever witnessed between them. Otso had called the bank in town, trying to arrange for an appraiser to come out and take a look at the property. He held his hand over the receiver to check the suggested times with Jaana, who kept saying: “Nope. Won't work. Inconvenient.” Finally, Otso surrendered and hung up the phone.

“Why break your back if you won't even let them look at it?” he said, frustrated.

Jaana stared down at her poached egg. She nicked the yolk, and it bled out slowly over the blue ceramic. “I'm not breaking my back,” she said.

Without drawing much attention to himself,
Axel slipped away from the breakfast table and hobbled woodenly back to his bedroom. Tess knew that he'd become uncomfortable with their eavesdropping. The truth was that she had, too. But her lie of omission had calcified over the course of the week. And the longer Tess put off admitting that they both understood Finnish, the more impossible it felt.

“That's childish.” Otso brought his coffee to his lips, mustache curtaining over the rim. When he spoke again, his voice was soft—too soft. “You know we can't keep it forever.”

“I never said forever. But now isn't the time. Not with the kids.”

“Now is exactly the time,” Otso said. “
Because
of the boy and the girl.” It would have been easy enough to use their names, but he clearly didn't want to drop any obvious clues to Tess that she was being discussed. “This is all right for now. I mean, it's wonderful. But in a few weeks the lake will be frozen and the cottage will be colder than an icebox. And we'll be four of us in Helsinki, in a flat with one bedroom. One bathroom. We need the money.”

Jaana stood and began to clear the table. She hadn't finished her egg. “You're so rosy,
ukko
. How much do you think we could get for this place? It's not in fashion.” Tess guessed from her dismissive
tone that this was a reference to the Hannulas' upmarket vacation palace. “Besides, winter isn't the selling season.”

“So we'll list it in the spring. We can do one last trip before midsummer, and—”

“I am not trading our summer place for an extra bedroom in Helsinki. We'll get on fine without the office.”

“But the office isn't enough for them. You know it isn't,
rakas
. What they need is space.”

“What the hell do you call this?”

It was amazing to Tess how utterly in command of her voice Jaana was—a virtuoso soprano of argument. But for the words themselves, they could have been discussing the quality of the marmalade. Jaana crossed from the kitchen to the front door and opened it wide, ostensibly to air out the breakfast smells. Outside there was nothing but trees in front of trees in front of trees. Dawn had come, later than yesterday, earlier than tomorrow.

“It's too much for you. You can't keep it up by yourself.” Otso poured his gaze into the well of his coffee cup. No need to actually say:
Because I can't help you
.

Jaana stayed by the open door, her hand on the rough wooden frame. The cottage seemed to expand, full and plump with the morning breeze.
“I'm not by myself,
ukko
. She might make a fuss about it, but the girl knows how to use a hammer.” She glanced at Tess and quickly switched to English. “What's the matter with you?”