by Tanith Lee
There is frost on the inside of the windowpanes when Pihla gets up for school. She sits with the blankets puddled around her knees, tracing the ridges; an alien topography through which the moon still glows, white and bloated, like something drowned beneath the ice.
She slips out of bed. She can hear her mother’s gentle snoring through the gap in Aino’s door; Äiti is a soft, rounded shape in the grey dark, bundled in blankets on the floor. Sometimes, when Aino’s episodes are especially bad, her mother takes days at a time off work. And sometimes, when Äiti can’t afford to take any more days off, she tells Pihla to skip school so she can watch Aino. Pihla likes these days. She reads Aino stories, and they play board games, and it’s okay if Aino has a seizure because Pihla knows exactly what to do now. It makes her feel like an adult, to be trusted with this responsibility.
Everybody in town knows about Äiti - poor Marjo, whose husband died and left her with a sick daughter. Nobody ever talks about it, though; nobody ever offers to help. They don’t consider it any of their business. They pretend they don’t notice how tired Äiti looks all of the time, how she drags herself from one place to another. They barely notice that Pihla exists at all.
Pihla dresses for school in the dark. She pours herself a bowl of cereal which she eats alone in the quiet kitchen, listening to the rhythmic grinding of her teeth as she chews, swallows, begins again. She washes her bowl and spoon so Äiti won’t have to do it later, running the water at the barest trickle. She almost drops the spoon in the sink; she fumbles to catch it, cringing inwardly at the dull clatter. She won’t be responsible for disturbing Aino’s rest; she’s made enough of a mess of things.
Her boots sit neatly on the shoe-stand in the hall. She slips them on and unlatches the door. She breathes white into the dark morning, watching sparse snowflakes dance in the orange glow of the streetlamps. The door clicks quietly behind her as she leaves, school-bag slung over her shoulder. Down the stairs, slowly this time, mindful of the ice at the bottom. Looking up, she sees Aino, hair chaotic, one side of her sleep-crumpled face pressed against her bedroom window, as though she’s listening to something only she can hear.
During maths, Ms. Lehtinen takes Pihla aside, out into the corridor. “Your mother called,” she says, pushing her thick-rimmed glasses up her nose with one finger. Ms. Lehtinen has a soft, doughy face and a small red nose, like pastry with a blob of jam. She smells of frost and cigarettes, making Pihla’s nose wrinkle. “She asked if you could come home early today.”
Pihla’s stomach suddenly hardens to rock in the centre of her. She forces herself to stand upright, to breathe deep and inhale the pungent nicotine stink emanating from Ms. Lehtinen’s jumper. She knows, without knowing, that Aino has gone missing again.
“Honestly, I would prefer you to stay in school,” Ms. Lehtinen says. When she frowns, her entire face crumples, like a balled-up tissue. “You’ve been absent a lot this year. I’m concerned that you’re falling very behind…”
Pihla tries to listen, but the inside of her mind has become a movie theatre for worst-case scenarios. She thinks of Aino by the lake, stepping out onto the ice. She thinks of the fissure spreading beneath her feet, the gunshot crack of ice splitting. She thinks of her sister disappearing into the black water as though she’s a shooting star fading out into a clear night sky.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbles, moving past Ms. Lehtinen with her head down. “I have to go home now.” She doesn’t stop to collect her schoolbag from her desk. Behind her, she hears Ms. Lehtinen sigh.
Pihla does not go home.
She does not run either, though her limbs twitch with the need. It’s a long walk from school to the lake and as her grim march takes her up through the town, past the church and the K-Market and the apartment blocks, the daylight begins to fail. A blueish, subaquatic gloom sets in. She knows that, behind her, the sun is setting, casting fingers of pink light out into the clouds as it sinks beneath the horizon. Snow will come again tonight – proper snow, so that Äiti will have to dig the car free if she wants to go anywhere. By then, she and Aino will be home, and there will be hot juice on the stove, and it can snow all it wants because they will be warm and safe.
But right now Aino is neither warm nor safe, and that’s Pihla’s fault. There are too many dots to connect, and Pihla connects only those she can see: she draws a mental line between her moment of irresponsibility and Aino disappearing out into the freezing night in her pyjamas, alone. And another line, bigger and blacker, between this and Aino’s present illness, this new disappearance. She has to make amends. More than that: she has to know Aino is safe.
By the time Pihla reaches the lake she is sweating despite the deepening cold, and the sky is a rich navy blue, bleeding black at the margins. There isn’t much light; the moon is obscured, and the summer cottages at the far end of the lake are empty now, gathering dust until the sun returns in late spring.
“Aino!” Pihla’s voice echoes briefly before being swallowed by the darkness. There are no footprints in the frost-stiff grass. No shadows in the corner of her eye. Her breath plumes white between slightly parted lips. Everything is still. For a long moment she stands there, wondering if her instincts were wrong, somehow; maybe they found Aino already, or maybe she never left home in the first place.
And then she hears someone singing.
The voice is beautiful. Low and melancholy, it sweeps towards the shore, echoing in the trees; Pihla imagines this is the sound the Northern Lights would make if they ever sang. As she listens, awestruck – Aino was right, my god - something small and pale rises in the water, billowing up beneath the ice a few metres from shore. Pihla is close enough to see the shape of a hand, a pentacle of slender white fingers pressing against the underside of the ice, the flash of a lavender coat.
Snippets of childhood ice safety cartoons spool out in her head as she dives out onto the lake. She doesn’t have her jäänaskalit spikes – if the ice opens up beneath her, she’ll have no way of getting back out – but she’s barely aware of the risk, certain as she is that Aino is floating beneath the black glass, freezing or drowning or both. Slowly, her sister drifts, drawn on some unseen current, hair spilling out like a spun gold jellyfish. Pihla falls to her knees, pressing exposed palms against the ice; the song is so loud now she can feel it thrumming in her bones, resonating in the auditorium of her skull. And as the crescendo builds she realises Aino is sinking.
Her cry of frustration is lost in the music. Her bunched fists rain blows on the ice. She kicks out with her heels, throwing her entire meagre weight at it. She howls, furious; her voice joins the chorus, and for one brief, breathless moment, she and the song are one. The ice beneath her is obsidian, smooth and dark and impenetrable. Her veins are alive with fire, her ears bursting with sound. Her fists descend over and over; skin splits across sharp knuckles, bright blood spattering garnet-bright against the ice.
Abruptly, the singing stops.
Pihla raises her trembling hands to her face. She is suddenly aware of the cold, of how badly her torn skin stings. Save for the vermillion smear of her blood the ice is unmarred. In the total absence of sound she feels terribly empty, as though she has been tipped up and poured out and nothing is left but the shell of her. She realises, a little uneasily, that she desperately wants to hear the song again.
“Pihla!”
Her stomach shrinks. This is no song she wants to hear; this is blame and disappointment, the sound of home. Pihla pulls herself to her knees, pressing her injured hands against her coat as she turns to peer towards shore. Äiti’s voice is louder than she’s ever heard it, and there’s a peculiar shrillness which Pihla distantly recognises is hysteria. And why not? Her eldest daughter is crouched on a frozen lake, and the front of her coat is stained bright red. Pihla slowly rises to her feet. She isn’t afraid.
“Be careful,” Äiti pleads. Her dark hair is a wild tangle beneath her hat, her boots barely fastened. Even from this distance, Pihla can see the tears gli
stening on her cheeks. Does she already know about Aino? Did she see her youngest daughter sink into the lightless depths of the lake?
Pihla reaches shore at last. The sensation of rocks underfoot is alien. She longs for the perfect smoothness of the ice. “I’m sorry,” she says, unable to look at her mother. Sadness burns in the space behind her eyes. Her knuckles ache miserably. “I tried, Äiti, honestly I did…”
“Ssh,” Äiti says, running cold-stiff fingers through Pihla’s hair. It almost feels comforting. “It doesn’t matter now. Let’s go home, Pihla. Why on Earth are you here? It’s only going to get colder, and I’ve left Aino at home on her own. She’ll wake up soon, and she’s been waiting for you to come home.”
The bandages swaddling her hands are clumsily wrapped, coming apart in places. Pihla picks compulsively at a frayed edge, pausing occasionally when the hushed conversation in Äiti’s room grows loud enough for her to hear. Beside her is Aino, serene in sleep, tucked beneath her blanket, unharmed and entire.
Her mother’s voice floats in and out of earshot, punctuated by the low, soothing tones of her täti Lilja, who has driven miles from Oulu to help. Pihla strokes Aino’s hair with awkward fingers, catching sentences as they drift in like old wood on the spring tide.
“…wasn’t even near the lake, Lilja, why would she think that?”
“Perhaps it’s only stress? People do strange things…”
“Did you see what she did to her hands? Jumalauta. I already have one sick daughter. How am I supposed to cope with another?”
“Oh Marjo, I’m sure she’s not…”
Pihla scrunches her toes up inside her socks, pressing her hands to her ears. She hates the sound of her mother crying: great, wrenching sobs, as if all the sadness inside her is being squeezed out. She put that sadness there, she and Aino together, and now it’s bedding in, setting roots deep in Äiti’s bones.
“I would have stopped at one,” Äiti says between sobs. There’s a terrible bitterness in her voice. Pihla imagines the redness of her eyes, the wry slant of her lips and the clenched teeth behind. “If I’d known all of this was going to happen, I would only have had one.”
Aino’s bed is small, but neither of them is big. Pihla crawls in beside her sister, surprised at the warmth emanating from Aino’s tiny body. She tugs the blanket up, scooting closer to the wall. She mustn’t disturb Aino, who needs her sleep so she can get better.
Pihla stares up at the window above the bed. The curtains are drawn, but a sliver of ink-blue sky is visible between them. The clouds are thick tonight, and the snow is descending in sheets, spiralling down so quickly that it is impossible to differentiate one flake from another. By morning even the lake will be lost under the white.
“He’s lonely,” Aino mumbles.
“What?” Pihla rolls onto her side. The pillow smells of Aino: clean skin, talcum powder. No trace of brackish water.
“Vetehinen.” Aino’s eyes are closed. Pihla isn’t sure if she’s sleeptalking. “He lives in the lake. He’s all alone down there. Didn’t you know? He doesn’t have anybody to talk to.”
“Who is Vetehinen?”
“Listen,” Aino says. “Can you hear him singing?”
Pihla listens. And under the gentle hiss of Aino’s breathing, beneath the murmur of passing traffic, weaving through the ambient sounds of midnight, comes his song. The sound is as faint as a faraway siren but she hears it so clearly, as though he’s here beside her, crooning into her ear, as if she is out on the lake again, the song buzzing in her skull like a rush of blood to the head. And if this Vetehinen is another of Aino’s delusions, how can Pihla possibly feel his loneliness as acutely as a wound?
“I saw you,” Pihla says. Her hand seeks Aino’s beneath the blanket, clasping her tiny fingers in the cup of one bandaged palm. “You were in the water. I tried to rescue you but I couldn’t get through the ice. I saw you drown, Aino.”
For a long instant the only sound is Vetehinen, singing his loneliness miles below the surface. Is Äiti right, Pihla wonders? Is this a madness shared between the both of them? Are they two halves of the same defective brain?
“I didn’t drown, silly,” Aino says, and curls up beside Pihla as if to prove it. She is warm and solid. The curve of her spine juts through the thin flannel of her nightshirt; each vertebra digs into Pihla’s arm, smooth and hard as pebbles. “He wants me to go to him. Go live with him on the bottom of the lake. He says it’s pretty there. He wants me to be his friend.”
“But then you’ll drown for sure.”
“He promised I wouldn’t.” She opens her eyes then, fixing her gaze on Pihla’s face with a gravity belying her nine years. She looks all at once impossibly old and very, very young. “He promised he’d make me well again,” she says, and she falters, just a little, as though acknowledging her illness stings her. “Äiti would be so happy, wouldn’t she? If Vetehinen could fix me? She could go to work, and you could stay in school, and…”
“You don’t need fixing,” Pihla says. Gently, she pulls Aino to her, pressing her face against her sister’s hair. She is little more than bones and a beating heart and a beautiful, muddled brain, but that is enough. ”You’re not broken, Aino, You’re already perfect.”
Äiti and Lilja are silent now. The whole apartment seems to be holding its breath; a great, collective tension. “You don’t need to be fixed,” Pihla whispers, pressing a playful finger to the tip of Aino’s nose. “Because you’re an oracle, aren’t you? Where would we be without you?”
In the stillness of 3am Pihla rises. She climbs out of bed, shifting a sleeping Aino very gently aside. The silence is brittle; she feels as though she might shatter it with the slightest misstep. She slips out into the hall, bare soles kissing the laminate. She slips her snowboots onto her bare feet, shrugging her coat on over her pyjamas. She won’t be outside for very long.
She closes the door as quietly as she can. A fierce wind whips at her hair, stealing the breath from her open mouth. Snow swirls wildly in the glow of the streetlights, sharp against her skin. She huddles into her jacket, shoving her bandaged hands in her pockets.
Pihla does not look back as she walks. If she looks back, she knows her resolve will crack. She pretends there is no home behind her. That her mother and sister are at the summer cabin by the lake, curled up before the fire. She wants to believe she’s going to join them, that they’ll all be together in that little log house while the snow falls all around them. It doesn’t matter, she tells herself. It’ll be better this way.
In the dim moonlight she is a grey, hunched shape moving swiftly through the white. The roads are empty, the snow undisturbed. This time is alien to her. Pihla does not recall ever seeing the world on the cusp of waking before, this still and sacred time when all but the most persistent insomniacs are dreaming. She finds the total silence appalling. It feels as if the entire world has died while she was sleeping. By the time morning comes her footprints will have been erased completely.
She expects to see the lake blanketed in snow but when she arrives, finally – shivering with an almost convulsive violence – it is so dark and so clear that Pihla wonders for a moment whether a great rift has opened in the earth.
“Vetehinen,” she calls, but quietly, so that the wind snatches the words from the air and carries them away. Lying beside Aino she had been full of conviction, certain that this was the right thing to do. But now she’s here, staring out at the abyssal darkness of the lake, she is no longer sure. She doesn’t know how deep the lake is, but she thinks it’s probably a long way to the bottom.
I am not doing this for me, she reminds herself, tightening her scabbed knuckles into twin fists, and somehow that feels better.
“Vetehinen!” Louder this time, braver, though her voice quavers on the last syllable. She straightens her spine, plants her feet in the thick powder on the shore. Pihla stands tall, asserting her bony, awkward girl’s body. “I’ve come to speak with you.”
Silence. She is
so cold now. It seems that the very bones of her are rimed with frost and she fears that the slightest movement might shatter her.
“Please,” she says.
It happens very quickly. A seam appears in the ice, bright as lightning, scoring a path towards shore. The ice shies back from the seam, a smoked glass door sliding open. The space beneath is devoid of light, but as Pihla approaches she realises there is no water inside. The exposed lakebed slopes gently downwards for a few metres before dropping quite suddenly. Beyond this point, the darkness is absolute.
Cautiously, Pihla steps beneath the ice shelf.
The air tastes brackish; the sour salt tang of it feels like blood in her mouth. The ground underfoot is soft and damp. Her boots slide in the mulch, and she moves tentatively, slowly, holding her blue-tipped fingers out before her as darkness closes over her like a cataract. Her hands brush against a smooth, cold wall. She follows it up, around, tracing a solid arch overhead with the pad of her middle finger. The tunnel is easily wide enough to accommodate her, but her chest constricts with a sudden claustrophobia. She thinks of the vast night sky high above, the sheer surface of the lake below it. She is alone on the bottom of the lake, and she does not know what is holding all of that black, freezing water at bay.
Her breath comes in shallow gasps, barely filling her lungs. She can hear the hiss of her own panicked respiration, the tinny oxygen-tank echo of a hospital ward. Her feet carry her blindly onwards and she’s certain that if she stops moving she will sink slowly into the mud. Oh Aino, she thinks. You told me it would be pretty down here, but there’s nothing at all.
