The Winter Place (30 page)

Jaana looked at Tess. As frenzied as her grandmother was, Tess had the impression that she would have waited as long as she had to for an answer. “It's all right,” Tess said. “I can meet you out there later.”

“You probably won't even have to,” Jaana said, forcing a strange, under-bitten look of calm. “It can't be long before we find him.” Optimism sounded about as natural in her mouth as
Japanese. She stepped to the door, pausing for a final moment on the threshold.

“It can't be long at all.”

It was a good thing that her brother had left such clear evidence of his escape to Talvijärvi, because had the search for Axel been based on Tess's story alone, then she had no doubt it would have been called off before dark. Nobody said so to her face, but they all plainly believed that she was lying. The people Tess spoke to for the rest of the morning differed only in how they interpreted her motives. A few of them clearly assumed that she was doing it intentionally, either because she had some kind of secret to hide, or because she was simply a profoundly shitty kid. But this was a minority—most seemed to think that she just couldn't help herself. That she was so addled by the trauma of a dead father and a vanished brother that she no longer knew what was true and what wasn't. And as such, these people treated her like some kind of delicate object that might shatter if you moved it too quickly. They listened intently to her story about meeting the Keeper in Baldwin, about Saara's ghost and the physics-defying woodland path, like cheap therapists looking for clues in her dreams. And as kind and gentle as these people were, Tess found that she actually
preferred the first group. After all, their nastiness was exactly what she deserved. Because Tess
was
a shitty kid—at least that's how she felt at the moment. Axel had asked for her help. He'd
begged
for it. And Tess had shrugged him off like he was nothing. She'd been shrugging him off for years.

Volunteers arrived as the word spread, sledding in from town and the various lakeside properties. Kalle, shaken with remorse for the role he'd played in Axel's escape, offered up his family home as a base of operations. There Aarne handed out bright neon vests and divided the new arrivals into pairs, assigning them to different search grids in the surrounding woods. The hunt stretched farther and farther afield as the day ripened and burst. By early afternoon a team of sniffer dogs arrived from Savonlinna, and shortly thereafter the forest reverberated with the hectic chop of a rescue helicopter.

Otso and Kari left Helsinki on the evening train and caught a ride to the lake with the police. Jaana and Tess were out in the driveway when the two of them arrived, skis fastened, warming themselves with mugs of tea before heading out to join the search again. Kalle was in the frozen drive as well, handing out thermoses of hot fish soup to returning volunteers. He'd been doing it all evening. As Otso wheeled himself up to the big,
bright house, he set his eyes on the young man.

“If I were younger, I would break your goddamn nose,” he said. “What's the matter with you?”

“I am so sorry, Mr. Kivi,” It was unclear whether Kalle meant this as an apology for his own behavior, or as condolences for what had happened. Maybe both.

“How could you not have noticed that he was in your stupid pickup? How could you not have seen him in the cottage?” There was spit flecking Otso's lip. He looked like he'd just finished up crying, or was about to start.

“I don't know,” Kalle said. It was all he said.

Otso's face twisted, his voice cracking awfully. He took a wheezing breath. “Well. I'm upset. Do forgive me.”

There was a moment of silence. Jaana broke it by pressing her weight sidelong into her back ski and gliding over the packed snow to her husband.
“Ukko,”
she said, putting her hands on his face, fingers lost in the dense bracken of his beard.

“Rakas.”
Otso looked up at her and blinked away some tears. He took her fingers from his cheeks and held them in his own shaking hands. Tess suddenly felt a strong compulsion to look away. There was something about this modest display that was unfathomably, almost terrifyingly intimate. All her grandparents had done was hold
hands and trade pet names, not more than four syllables in total. But these were as much real names as pet names, the secret identities that Jaana and Otso would never share with anybody else for the rest of their lives. And beyond.

“You're heading out again?” Otso said, his voice still quavering.

“We're about to.” Jaana brought the bundle of their hands up to her lips, exhaling over them. Warming them. “They've given everybody flashlights. And with the snow and the stars, it's bright enough.”

“I wish I could come,” he said.

“I know you do,” Jaana said. Tess knew it too. Her grandfather would have gone right into the woods, plowing his chair through the snow, if only Jaana and the police would allow it.

“And what about you? Are you warm enough?” Otso let go his wife's hands and beckoned Tess over.

“I'm all right,” Tess said, approaching with a single push on her outturned ski, as her grandmother had.

“We'll be fine,” Jaana said. “She's an excellent skier. You should go inside. Kalle has a good fire going.”

“I love you,” Otso said. He was still winning the fight against the tears that so clearly wanted to jump out of his face, but just barely.

“We're going to find him,” Tess said.

“Of course you are,” Otso said. Before Tess could react, he'd taken hold of her wrist and pulled her close, planting a light, whisker-bristling kiss on her cheek. It was the first time he'd done this. He smelled like an old man, but different from Grandpa Paul, the only other old man she knew. Otso released her wrist and allowed himself to be wheeled to the front door. There Kalle and Kari helped him out of his chair and carried him up the steps and inside.

Jaana and Tess lingered for a moment, light from the Hannula house spilling out over the plowed drive. The stars were bright, and the woods flickered distantly with flashlights from the search parties. Then, without a word, Jaana pushed off with her poles, and together they sailed into the forest.

A
cold snap set in overnight, seeming to freeze everything into place, even the breeze. The previous afternoon had been just warm enough to raise a sweat upon the new snow, melt that had since hardened into a glittering skin of ice. Bluish with reflected starlight, the ice rolled over the forest floor, bunching up around tree trunks like gathered bedding, shattering beneath the gliding press of Tess's and Jaana's skis. Her grandmother took the lead, carving out slick troughs for Tess to follow. The two moved at a good pace, tucking their knees for speed downhill, hardly a stroke wasted between them. Often they would stop to shine their flashlights about the forest, calling out Axel's name. Sometimes the woods would
give them an answer: the shrill complaint of a red squirrel, the thumping wing beat of a tawny owl, even the alarmed braying of startled moose. But never Axel calling back. It had been two days since Tess's brother had slipped away from her in Helsinki. Nearly twenty-four hours since Axel had been swallowed up by the forest.

Tess and Jaana skied from the spruce wood to the reedy lakeshore. They slid beneath the star-cast shadow of Erikinlinna, where they encountered two more neon-vested members of the search party. Chief Aarne had set up a constant guard at the tumbledown castle, complete with chemical warmers and winter survival gear, just in case Axel did eventually try to make his way back there. Aarne had done the same thing at the Kivis' cottage and at all the vacant properties along the lake. The men were having an early breakfast when Tess and Jaana passed, taking shelter in the covered picnic area. Coffee steamed in their wooden mugs, and one of them was clutching a little loaf of rye in his bare hands, thawing it out. Right behind them was the display on Talvijärvi's famous ghost, including the laminated picture of Väinö and Aino and their ruined-looking son—the last family that the Keeper had helped to destroy.

“Anything?” Jaana called, hardly slowing on her skis. Given the grim demeanor of the men, she
needn't have asked. They shook their heads, and she and Tess pressed on.

From the castle they turned east, swinging up along the far shore. It was more than a ten-mile circuit around the lake, and Tess's legs were gummy with the effort. This was her twelfth hour on these skis, not counting a forty-minute nap back at the Hannula place. Perspiration drenched the insides of her jacket and saturated her scarf, crystalizing wherever it came into contact with the air. In the moments when they stopped to holler Axel's name and shine their lights overhand into the trees, the chill reached almost to her bones. Jaana had said that it was much too early in the season for it to be this cold. The lake shouldn't even have been frozen over yet, but already the ice was thick enough that volunteers had begun to take shortcuts over the shallows. If they stayed really quiet, they could even hear the
trees
freezing. The sap in their veins popped and groaned as it expanded—a conversation that reverberated through the forest.

Tess and Jaana came to a patch of cleared land, stumps dotting the ground like low-set tables, and decided to stop for a breather. Jaana removed her skis and used one to clear the crusted powder from a large stump, giving them a place to sit. It was only after they stopped moving that Tess realized how hard her grandmother was panting—Jaana's
face was flushed, almost purple in the dark morning, her mouth a jagged vent of steam. Neither of them had slept more than a couple of hours since Axel had first disappeared, and it was starting to show. Tess sat beside Jaana and caught her breath as well. They were on the north side of the lake, opposite the distant, shimmering windows of the Hannula place. The house hung like a pendant in a chain of lights strung all along the far shores—flashlights from the search parties.

Jaana pulled a thermos of porridge from her knapsack. She poured some into the lid and handed it to Tess with a spoon. They traded bites, marking the slowing pace of their breathing. “I'd like to talk to you about what happened between us and your father,” Jaana said. This seemed at first to come from out of the blue. But of all the times in the world for her to bring this up, this struck Tess, somehow, as exactly the right time. “But before I start,” Jaana said, “I need to know how much you understand.”

“Nothing. Dad didn't talk about it at all.”

“I'm not surprised,” Jaana said, the spoon stopping on its way to her cold-chapped lips. She and Tess had been operating under a truce since the moment Axel disappeared, but it didn't extend to Sam, dead or not. “That isn't what I meant, though. I meant how much
Finnish
you understand. Because my English isn't good enough for this, and if we're going to talk about your mother and father, then I want to do it right. I need to know that you understand everything I'm saying. And if you don't, I need you to stop me, and I'll try to say it more clearly. All right?”

Jaana handed over the porridge and stared down at her. Tess had the distinct impression that if she didn't agree, her grandmother would have snapped her skis back on then and there, never to mention this again. Tess nodded.

“Your mother could really be a pain in the ass.”

Not exactly the way Tess had expected this story to start, but Jaana's expression told her that she didn't mean it to sound biting—her grandmother looked almost amused. “This was partly our fault,” she said. “My fault.
Partly.
When Saara was growing up, Otso and I could sometimes be . . . We were maybe a little overprotective. We always knew there was a chance, and not a small one, that someday Saara would get sick. We knew that much and nothing more. The testing back then wasn't what it is today. The doctors didn't know where to look, or even what to look for. But they knew that Otso had it, and that meant that it was fifty-fifty for Saara. Otso's was mild, but Saara's could be severe. You know all this, I'm sure. You must understand it as well as I do.”

Jaana stopped here. Tess wasn't eating, so Jaana took the still-steaming porridge back and spooned a little more of it into her mouth. In the distance they could faintly hear Axel's hollered name, fading into the dark. The pine island looked like a rocky hill atop a flat meadow of ice.

“So, yes,” Jaana said, “we were strict. And your mother did not react well to this. Saara always, always had to contradict us. She was a lot like you in that way—the moment Saara realized that we didn't want her to do a thing, it became the thing that she most wanted to do in the world.” Jaana hardly knew Tess well enough to make an assertion like this, and she would have opened her mouth to say as much, but for the conversational judo that her grandmother had just achieved—arguing would have proven the point. And besides, Jaana didn't seem eager to linger. “Saara was like me, too. She could be an intensely private, secretive girl. I loved my daughter very much, but you must understand, in many ways we were an awful mix. It got worse as she got older. Saara was twenty when the doctors were finally able to make their diagnosis, but Otso and I had known for almost a year by then. We wanted, more than ever, to take care of her. To make sure that she was eating right and getting enough rest. But what Saara wanted, more than ever, was to be rid of us. I would have felt the
same thing, in her shoes. And she, in mine.” Again Jaana trailed off. She handed the porridge back. “So what I'm saying is this: Yes, your father and I had our differences. But a lot of it started years before we even met him. Sam wasn't the only one to blame for what happened between us.”