The Winter Place (19 page)

Had her expression been that obvious?

“Nothing,” Tess said, pushing herself back from the table and hurrying her plate to the washbasin. Her grandparents' even-toned, incognito argument had all but undone her. Tess was touched, but also so irritated that she felt about as fidgety as her brother. Awful things had happened to her and Axel—she got that. It wasn't fair, but they'd survive. What Tess wasn't sure she could get through, though, was being the awful thing that happened to someone else. Jaana and Otso looked like they'd had a nice thing going. A perfectly manageable little apartment in the city, wheelchair distance from anything they might need. Tess and Axel hadn't asked to be carted off to Finland, but likewise Jaana and Otso certainly hadn't asked to have kids dropped on them out of the dull gray sky. Strange kids on top of that—if Tess was being honest, the fact that they'd never met could just as well have been Sam's fault as theirs. Her grandparents didn't top her list of favorite humans, but she took no pleasure in turning their old, unfamiliar lives upside down.

“Don't go far,” Jaana said as Tess passed her,
speed-walking out the open door. “As soon as the light is good, we're going to work on the dock.”

It was their last full day at Talvijärvi. Tomorrow they'd catch the train back to Helsinki and begin the process of enrolling in school—a prospect Tess found so unfathomably strange that she saw no point in worrying about it in advance. It was also Halloween. Or at least it would have been, back in Baldwin, but Kari explained that it wasn't a Finnish holiday. He and Kalle knew all about it, though, from the movies. Kalle was even throwing a party for his friends that night. Everybody would dress up in costumes and eat candy and watch slasher films. Tess waited for Kari, all halting and sweat-palmed, to invite her to come. Clearly the boy wanted to, and she'd have said yes. But he never found the guts. Or maybe he wasn't invited, either.

Even with Kari's help, the work on the dock took up the entire day. The first order of business was to look the whole thing over, inspecting bolts for rust, the boards for rot. The slats that Jaana deemed unworthy were pried off their pilings, stripped of nails, and added to the firewood behind the sauna, to be replaced with new ones the color of tanned skin. They scoured baking powder into the wood and rubbed olive oil and
vinegar into the stains left by Kalle's idiot friends. But the work wasn't hard enough to keep Tess's mind off Jaana and Otso's fight that morning. Nor did it quiet a buzzing in the back of her mind, something like the bulked-up cousin of déjà vu. Tess was working over a stain at the end of the dock when it hit. She'd been here before. Not just Finland, but
here
.

Tess had long held dear a very particular, very clear memory of splashing in water behind the A-frame. That was impossible, of course. The nearest place to go deeper than your knees was in Mud Lake, where swimming was strictly forbidden. In the summer months, the only time it was warm enough to go for a dip, the shallows thickened into a viscous pudding of duckweed and goose crap. So she always considered it to be a sort of composite memory—splashing around in the Adirondacks and playing in Saara's vegetable garden behind the A-frame. And it would have been a nothing memory, totally insignificant, but for the fact that it was one of only a handful in which her mother made a cameo. Tess could remember a young woman perched on her knees atop a dock. This dock. It wasn't the A-frame; it was the Kivis' summer cottage. Not the Adirondacks, but Talvijärvi.

The thought very nearly made her dizzy.
There was her expired passport, of course, which by now was moldering in some Oswego landfill. But Tess didn't consider those Finnish entry and exit stamps to be proof that she'd ever met the Kivis. She realized, only now, that she'd been choosing to believe that the fight between their families started before she was even born. But she remembered being here, precisely. She remembered her mother on that dock, grinning the way she never did in photographs. If her parents had brought her here, it could only have been to see Jaana and Otso. Had it happened at Talvijärvi, then? Had Tess now arrived at the scene of a family destroying fight? She let her scouring pad drop and turned to face her grandmother.

“Why didn't you tell me that I've been here before?”

“It's all my job, is it? Why didn't you ask?” Jaana was jimmying nails out of a board that looked like it still had a few seasons in it. The wood groaned and popped. “I'm surprised you remember,” she said, briefly looking up from her work. “You weren't much more than a toddler.”

“You were here, too?”

“Of course I was. And Otso. Your mother, your father. It was here, in Talvijärvi, where the two of them met. Your father had come here to do research for his dissertation.” The board came
suddenly unstuck, and Jaana fell back on her butt. She'd been pulling too hard. Kari quickly took it from her and retreated to the woodpile behind the sauna. Poor guy—whenever he came over, he got more than he bargained for. “But why would you know any of that?” Jaana said, wiping splinters and grit from her calloused hands. “I don't suppose Sam ever said anything.”

“It was all his job, was it?”

“Cute,” Jaana said. She retrieved a good board from the stack at the foot of the dock, put some fresh nails into her mouth, and began to hammer it over the gap. Kari should have been back by now. Tess took up her scouring pad again. She could have left things there.

“It isn't my fault that I don't know any of this,” she said, working salad dressing into the stain. Soap would have been better, but it was bad for the lake and therefore forbidden. “I know a little, though. I know that you never even called.”

“Sam couldn't have been more clear about how he felt,” Jaana said. “He didn't want us to have anything to do with you. He stopped us.”

“And you let him,” Tess said.

She was totally unprepared for how deeply this would cut. The sight of a gouge in Jaana's plated armor was exhilarating, and she regretted it immediately. Still, there was no going back. She
kept her attention on the stain, her voice falsely casual. “Blaming my father for everything is just a way for you to let yourself and Otso off the hook.”

For a moment she thought that her grandmother might slap her. Jaana leaned forward, as though considering it, but then shifted her weight back onto her haunches and stood. “I don't let anyone off the hook,” she said. “Not myself. Not your father. Not even my daughter. Being gone doesn't make either of them guiltless. It just means they aren't around for you to be awful to.” Well. That felt enough like a slap. Jaana stooped down to collect her hammer and the spent, useless nails. Out on the pine island the swan let fly a long, quavering call. But it wasn't appropriately poignant or mournful. It sounded like somebody was murdering a clown with a shoehorn.

Jaana disappeared into the cottage without another word. Kari, who'd had the good sense to hide out behind the sauna, slunk back toward the dock. He joined Tess at the end, both of them facing the water.

“I knew your mom and dad weren't in Zanzibar,” he said.

Tess didn't know what she expected him to say, but that wasn't it.

“Axel told me a few days ago,” he said. “I'm really sorry.” He took her hand and held it. It
could have seemed creepily opportunistic, but it didn't. It occurred to Tess, suddenly and intensely, that Kari deserved better parents. And a better brother. By every measure, he had more than her—and less.

Tess cried a little then. Kari said nothing. He just held her hand and sat with her. And when she was done, he asked if she wanted to celebrate Halloween.

O
tso had been insistent, back on the day that Tess and Kari brought Axel home from the castle, that the boy join him for a steam. They'd stripped naked together in the little pine sauna, and Otso ladled water over a pile of heated, sizzling stones. It filled the room with steam, dropping a cloak of prickling heat down over their heads. The walls oozed, and the air smoldered in their lungs. “Just breathe,” Otso said. He held a whisk of dried birch, which he dipped into a bucket of lake water and then used to strike himself sharply about the shoulders. None of this was even in the running for weirdest thing to happen that day.

Otso's wheelchair sat outside the sauna door, his clothes piled neatly on the seat. Axel's
wheelchair was out there as well—though now he finally had a name for the thing. The Hiisi. It had followed them from the castle, beating birds from the bushes, and now it was circling the sauna like a weasel sniffing around a henhouse. It appeared that the Keeper's prediction had held true; the Hiisi was slowly shedding its disguise. The thing had grown bigger than it ever was back home, turning strangely bent and shaggy. The armrests went jointed, jagged—
stretched
. They pulled at the trunks, dragging the Hiisi over log and root as the thing went crawling and rolling, clicking and growling. Axel had been hoping for fantastical, and fantastical had arrived in spades.

Jaana tried to send him straight to bed after the sauna, but Axel resisted. Instead he wandered from window to window, peering out. The Hiisi was still out there, ramming itself into the cottage walls, making framed photographs shake on their nails. But nobody seemed to notice. The thing lingered in the yard for the rest of the afternoon, haunting and hunting. Come nightfall it settled in outside Axel's bedroom, pressing its impossible self up against the glass. Axel watched it from the narrow slab of his mother's bed, never drifting off long enough to dream. But that hardly mattered. His life had all but become one.

It took several days for Axel's strength to
return, and in that time the Hiisi slowly faded into the surrounding woods. But optimist that he was, Axel decided that its sudden appearance could only be a good sign. After all, in Kari's story the Hiisi had been trying to keep poor Väinö away from his wife—away from what Kari had called “the underworld.” So if the Hiisi had shown itself at the castle, that must mean that Axel was getting close. And even if the legend of Väinö and Aino were nothing but a fiction, the Hiisi's presence offered a more general hope. Because Axel had come to Talvijärvi to search for his mother's ghost, and when you're looking for a ghost, a
demon
can hardly mean you're on the wrong track—like some kind of paranormal indicator species. Axel's father used to teach a whole unit on indicators, back at the college. Sam could go into maddening detail about the things you could infer from orchids, wild strawberry, or epiphytic lichens—the calling cards of real, ancient woodlands. “Don't worry about missing the forest for the trees,” Sam would say. “Because the forest
is
the trees. The forest is the tree. The forest is the branch, and the leaf, and the acorn.” When Axel applied this principal to his new magical circumstances, he could only conclude that in a world where the Hiisi existed, his mother could, too.

Axel had plenty of time to mull this over as
he convalesced, stranded in the Kivis' little cottage. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that Talvijärvi also made perfect sense, habitat-wise. This cottage had been in Jaana's family for three generations, and Saara had all but grown up here. What more appropriate place, then, for his mom's bear-shaped ghost to go a'haunting? Sure, Baldwin had been Saara's home too. But she'd lived there for only a few years, and a green card hardly gave her roots. If Saara existed anywhere other than as a pile of bones in the Oakwood Cemetery, she had to exist here, under these old blue spruce trees. Among the rocks and pines of her childhood.

Axel knew that he had no choice but to return to the castle—those ruins were still his best and only lead. He waited as long as he could for his energy to come back, but their impending return to Helsinki forced the issue. He decided to sneak out on their last night at Talvijärvi, the sort of now-or-never moment at the root of most good adventures. And tragedies.

It turned out to be an ideal night for subterfuge—a good chunk of moon swung into the sky, and it gave off such a glow that there was no need for Axel to risk giving himself away with a flashlight. Better yet, Tess had left early for a party at Kari's place and wouldn't be around to
catch him sneaking out. Axel waited until after his grandparents' usual bedtime. He dressed quietly, layering sweaters against the dull autumn chill. But as he slipped into the den, he saw that Jaana was still awake, sitting upright on the little sofa. She was crying. Or maybe it would be better described as tearing—her face looked exactly as it always did, only wetter. She hadn't noticed him, so Axel doubled back through the kitchen and slipped out the back door. If Jaana's week of upkeep hadn't included oiling all the hinges, his quest would have ended then and there.

Outside he could hear the breeze in the treetops and faint music coming from the distant party. No creaking wheels, though; no Hiisi. Axel made for the shadows of the birch thicket. His plan was to follow the shoreline past the Hannula house and then cut through the forest toward Erikinlinna. Getting to Kari's was easy enough, thanks to the blazing windows up ahead. Speakers thumped Finnish rap into the forest, and through the windows he could see what appeared to be a Christmas movie playing on the big screen. Or, no—it was definitely a Halloween movie. Santa had a knife, and he was using it.