The Winter Place (21 page)

“You know,” Kari said after a long pause. “I don't even think my brother's friends actually
like
him. They're just here for the house.” Despite what a jackass his brother had been, Kari seemed to take no pleasure in this thought. It almost sounded like he was sorry for Kalle. Like he thought Kalle deserved better, less-shallow friends.

“Well, it is a pretty nice house,” Tess said, half smiling.

Kari snorted. “I prefer yours. I mean the Kivis'.”

Neither of them said anything more for a while. The broad gravel drive stretched out at their feet, disappearing into the forest. A small fleet of cars was parked along the drive. Kalle's was at the front—a fat-bottomed pickup truck. It must have been conspicuous as a walrus on the lean Finnish highways.

“How much longer do you have to stay here?” Tess said.

“I don't know. He keeps giving the work crew the day off.” Kari glanced at the unfinished wing, beams bright as bone. The work site sprawled, spilling sawdust over the front steps, tarps puckering in the evening breeze. “Maybe a week?”

“Why not call your parents?”

Kari sighed and mumbled something about cell reception and roaming charges, clearly too tired to come up with a more compelling excuse. Or maybe just sick of sticking up for people who seemed not to have earned it.

“Would you like to come back to Helsinki with us?”

“That's nice of you,” Kari said. “No. I think I'll stay here. We should—”

There was a weird smacking noise behind them, and they turned to see a shape pressed up against the bright maw of the French doors. It was one of Kalle's friends, writhing and grunting, grinding his hips. “Go for it, Jum-
Bo
!” he stage-whispered. When all they did was stare, he gave up, leaving behind a fuzzy patch where he'd licked the glass. No, whatever Kari might think, Kalle deserved friends no better than this.

“We'll be done soon,” Kari went on like nothing had happened. “I can wait.” Then, as though these thoughts were somehow connected, he said: “How's Axel?”

“Better,” Tess said. “He should be back to normal by tomorrow.”

“So he has . . . It's the same as with your grandfather?”

Tess nodded. Though the truth was that she was starting to worry that it could be more than
just that. Otso and Axel might have had the same form of dystrophy, but Tess was willing to guess that Otso had never tried speaking to a bird. When she'd confronted Axel about it back at the cottage, he'd pretended not to remember. The kid had straight-up lied to her face. Tess couldn't remember that ever happening before.

Then Kari said something that took her totally by surprise. “You seem like you're a really good sister.”

She turned to stare at him. This was embarrassingly, laughably off base. “What are you talking about?”

It obviously wasn't the response that Kari was expecting. “I mean, it must be so hard . . .” He shifted on the step. “Everything you guys . . .” Nope, that wasn't going to work either. Kari knew from her expression that he'd entered a danger zone, and he was searching for a way out. He finally settled for: “I think he's lucky to have you.”

Now Tess actually did laugh. After all, she was the sister who'd watched Axel get knocked into the mud at the Renaissance Faire and still held hands with the douche-bag who did the knocking. She was the sister who was so reluctant to take care of him and so very resentful of her father's expectations on that point that she'd spent the last hour of Sam's life fighting with him. Never mind
that lucky
I love you
—it was a fluke, and more than she deserved. Tess was a crap sister, and if Kari weren't so busy trying to flatter his pathetic way to first base, he'd have had the stones to say as much.

“I know Kalle sets the bar pretty low,” she said. “But that doesn't mean I'm a good sister.”

Kari, bless him, didn't miss a beat. “Don't you talk about my brother,” he said. “You don't know anything about Kalle. So shut up about him.” They both went silent again, Kari looking a little shocked and terrified by what had just come out of his mouth. He must have thought he'd dashed his chances with her. They were still microscopic, but if anything he'd upped them.

“You're right. Sorry.” Tess wanted to apologize before he could, because that would have ruined it. “It's getting late.” She stood, brushing sawdust from her pants.

“All right,” Kari said. “Cool.” His eyes strayed to the hollowed-out new wing, and he kept them there, as though contemplating something pragmatic and work-manly.

Tess just stood there for a moment without moving. “I don't have a phone that works here yet,” she said. “Do you have the number for our place in Helsinki?”

“I think so,” Kari said.

“Give me a call, then, when you get back.”

“Okay,” Kari said, all his rejoicing tucked neatly into those two, breathy syllables. “Good night.”

Tess set off down the gravel drive without another word, passing Kalle's pickup before cutting around the house, back to the lakeshore. Up ahead the Kivis' cottage windows burned creamily under the lace curtains—no question that Jaana had stayed up to wait for her.

Sam used to wait up for her too. When Tess was younger, he'd been positively delighted by the barefoot, toad-collecting recluse his daughter was turning out to be. Sam had even egged her on, giving Tess the run of the neighborhood and adjacent park by the time she was nine. As long as she passed the winter-jacket test and she didn't have school the next morning, Tess had her father's permission to come and go as she pleased. When she was a kid, that meant hours upon hours in a private little corner of Mud Lake Park. She'd discovered an old stretch of forgotten boardwalk in the hemlock swamp, an oxbow meander that had been bypassed the last time they updated the trail, sitting atop the murk like an anchored raft, secret and hers. From there Tess could spy on turkeys scrambling through the brush, or oblivious joggers from Syracuse on the
cleared mulch paths. Buntings nested overhead during midsummer, and in spring she'd harvest illegal bounties of fiddleheads. The fact that Sam approved of Tess's reasons for staying out after dark—you're looking for a flying squirrel? Well, you'll need a better flashlight than that!—made him overly permissive, even in her estimation. How easy it had been to leverage that accustomed freedom in the service of her own social rehabilitation. She'd set off in her gum boots and overalls, the knapsack slung over her back supposedly filled with binoculars, a Nalgene bottle, and some honey-nut granola, but in actuality stuffed with a complete set of non-moron clothes. Tess dipped into the woods looking like Pippi Longstocking and emerged minutes later as a contemporary human teenager—an unavoidable, essential metamorphosis. One that Axel would go through as well, sooner or later. She hoped.

Tess was nearly at the cottage when she noticed someone standing in the yard, a short ways down from the freestanding sauna. She thought for a moment that it was Jaana, come to pluck her out of the party, but this person was much too small. It was her brother. Axel was fully dressed, his shoes and jeans caked with mud and leaf scraps. As Tess got closer, she saw twigs threading his hair and a big hole torn in his SU sweater.

“Dude. What the hell.” Tess turned Axel's shoulders and took his chin in her hand. There was a horizontal branch welt across his cheek, and one of his ears had a small but nasty gash in it. “You've got to be kidding me,” she said.

Axel made no response. Tess turned his face to better catch the light from the cottage windows and saw dirt-lined tear streaks running down the perpetual blush of his cheeks. Wherever he'd gone, he'd been crying there. Pretty understandable, all in all.

“Does Jaana know you're not in bed?” Tess asked.

Axel just sort of shrugged. His eyes were big and blank, aimed not at her but at the patch of woods behind her. Keeping her hands on his shoulders, Tess started to lead him back to the cottage door. Sounds from Kalle's party still boomed across the lake. The swan on her island honked back furiously.

“She doesn't give a crap about us,” Axel said, addressing not so much his sister as the night itself, the new and puny world. It was a very un-Axel-like thing to say.

“Come on,” Tess whispered as they reached the cottage door. “Jaana can be a jerk. But you know she cares about us.”

Axel huffed, suddenly put out and fidgety.
“I wasn't talking about Jaana,” he said, pulling himself out of his sister's grip. He stepped heavily ahead of her and opened the door, tracking mud into the bright living room. Tess lingered briefly outside before calling after him.

“Who, then?”

But the moment had passed.

Tess could tell that Jaana was livid that Axel had snuck out, but for some reason their grandmother kept it totally buttoned-up. She remained completely silent at breakfast the following morning, glancing at Axel between bites. Tess realized as they ate that her grandmother must have judged Axel to be too fragile to scream at, and for a strange moment she felt almost flattered. Because the old woman never hesitated to come right at Tess, guns blazing. Maybe that meant that Jaana knew she could take it.

They left immediately after breakfast, catching a ride to the station with Kalle. The older boy was clearly hungover, wincing in the sunlight as he helped unload Otso's chair and wheel their luggage up the platform. He was about to make his escape when Jaana collared him, pulling him aside for a little chat. Tess couldn't hear what Jaana was saying, but from the way Kalle was flinching, it looked like she was working some of that anger
out of her system. When he finally drove off, Jaana returned to the platform and announced, with no small pleasure, that Kalle was feeling ill. He'd be returning to Helsinki with Kari first thing tomorrow. Tess had already begun to feel a grudging admiration toward her grandmother, and now that feeling seized some major ground. But it didn't advance uncontested—Jaana was exactly the grumpy warrior that Kari needed right now, but she was also the grandma who had chosen to fight not one bit for Tess or Axel.

They arrived in Helsinki to find it gray and overcast, and by the time they piled into the lobby of the Kivis' building, a frigid drizzle was sputtering down. There they bumped into one of Jaana and Otso's neighbors—a man wearing a slicker, a heavy scarf, and a sourpuss face brought on by the bad weather. He greeted the Kivis by name and announced, almost defensively, that he'd been trying to call them all week. He explained that they'd received some packages while they were gone. He hoped they didn't mind, but he'd let the delivery people leave them in the flat. “I tried to call,” he said again, as though there were confusion on this point.

“Bad reception at the lake,” Jaana said, triumphant. “It's not a problem.”

But it turned out that “some” meant
eleven
, and “packages” meant
crates
. Their entire shipment from Baldwin had arrived, well ahead of schedule. The crates filled the living room and kitchen, stacked so densely that there wasn't even space enough to open the door all the way—Jaana and Tess had to slip through the crack and shift some boxes into the bathroom just to get Otso's wheelchair inside. With that done, they gathered in the living room, now a narrow corridor between crates labeled
BOOKS
and
BEDDING
and
SWORDS(?)
. Otso's beard fluttered as he huffed and puffed. He'd been right, of course, about the space issue. All four of them fitting into this little flat had been untenable before, but now it was plainly impossible. They could throw out three-quarters of this stuff and still it wouldn't work. But whether or not Jaana was prepared to accept this, Tess wasn't sure.

“Not a word,” her grandma said.

No choice but to get started. Axel, who'd been silent as a corpse on the train ride from Talvijärvi, glumly pushed the crate labeled
SWORDS(?)
into the converted study and began unpacking their dad's blunt armory. Otso set about trying to fold the Fortune book collection into the already sizable Kivi one, layering the titles two deep on the swollen shelves. Jaana and Tess set upon the larger boxes in the kitchen, where her grandmother
immediately started a donation pile for redundant mugs, flatware, and linens—sentiment a luxury for people with storage units. When Tess returned to the living room to search for her clothes, she noticed that Otso had gone totally still. He was staring down at Sam's old, leather-bound copy of
Seven Brothers
, in the original Finnish. He set it on the shelf. The next book he pulled out of the crate was a slim little paperback—one of Tove Jansson's illustrated Moomintroll stories, also in Finnish. Tess felt the down on her neck prickling. This had been bound to happen, sooner or later.