The Winter Place

by Alexander Yates

  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.”

  “Of course he wasn’t.” Tess couldn’t help herself.

  “Of course.” Jaana gave a tired squint and began to dig through her pockets. She pulled out her cell phone and checked the time—coming up on eight in the morning, but it looked more like midnight. “You know, I’m sure, that he was seven years older than her? And you know, also, that they were seeing each other for less than a month before she went back to New York with him?” This first piece of information was not news to Tess, but the second one absolutely was. She knew that her parents had met when Sam was in Finland to conduct research for his dissertation, but Tess had always assumed that their courtship had been a question of months, if not years. She had no reason to think this, other than the fact that such a thing seemed reasonable. “One day,” Jaana continued, “your father is shaking our hands on the back stoop of the cottage, and the next Saara is telling us that she has a ticket to New York. And you know—we took it well. We took it better than anybody could have expected. We thought: Why not? Let her spend a summer traveling. Let her give this man a try. Besides, we knew that if we said one word against it, Saara would have traded her ticket in for one that left even sooner. Just to prove that she could!” Jaana threw her hand out, as though casting old frustrations across the ice. “But of course she could. We always knew that Saara could do what she wanted, maybe better than she did.”

  “It was more than three years before we saw her again.” Tess, at first, did not think that she’d heard this correctly. Jaana could tell. “Exactly,” she said. “Shortly after Saara left, she wrote to tell us that she was in love and that she had canceled her return flight and didn’t know when she’d be back. She told us all of this on a postcard. A postcard. It said ‘City of Salt,’ and it was just the most horrible photograph of a shopping mall, with parking lots going everywhere, forever. Otso and I didn’t panic, not yet. Saara was young, so of course she was in love. It’s part of the contract, at that age. We decided, for once in our lives, to let Saara do what Saara needed to do. It was, I think, the worst mistake we ever made. The months dissolved away, and we heard from our daughter almost not at all. It was different in those days. An international phone call that lasted anything longer than hello and good-bye could cost a fortune. And letters took their time. But even when Saara did call or write, she said almost nothing. As though Otso and I cared about the weather in Syracuse! As though I were dying to know what she was reading! It was nothing but empty small talk. We became sure that Saara was hiding something from us. And we were right.”

  Tess knew where this was going. She thought of that expired blue passport with her baby picture in it, the pages empty save a pair of stamps—entry into Finland and then, a full twenty-six days later, reentry to the United States. It struck Tess that there was a strange irony in this. Because for all these years Jaana and Otso had been a secret hiding behind the curtain of her life. But once, Tess had been the exact same thing to them. When Jaana spoke again, her voice was flat, all the hurt in it scarred over. “She never told us she was pregnant. She never even told us they’d gotten married. They did it just a few months after she left, so that Saara wouldn’t have to worry about her visa. There wasn’t a ceremony. They just signed some papers at the courthouse. They didn’t even take pictures.”

  “You would have asked her not to have the baby,” Tess said. Even though she was the baby in question in this particular case, she couldn’t bring herself to say: You would have asked her not to have me.

  Jaana straightened up on the tree stump. She took the now-cool porridge back from Tess, upended it into the thermos, and screwed the lid closed. They’d both begun to shiver, but having come this far, there was no stopping. “It’s very important here that you not misunderstand me,” Jaana said, looking Tess right in the face. “Because Otso and I are happy that you’ve come to live with us. Not about the circumstances . . . not about anything that’s led up to it. But you must know that we love you and Axel very much.” She paused, as though actually waiting for an answer. Tess could only nod. “But absolutely,” Jaana continued. “We would have asked Saara not to have you. And we wouldn’t just have asked. We would have demanded. I would have. Pregnancy was so very dangerous in Saara’s condition. I would have told my daughter that she was being stupid, and foolish, and risking her life with a man she hardly knew. And all of it would have been true. It’
s still true now. It’s what happened.”

  That Saara knew her parents would react this way went without saying—that’s why she’d stayed quiet about her pregnancy until after Tess was born. Jaana stared grimly down at her own gloved hands. “Do you know what she said to us when they got off the plane? She was walking right toward us like it hadn’t been years, holding you out in her arms like she’d been sending us photographs of you the whole time. Like we’d already watched you grow bigger, picture by picture. Saara said: ‘Aren’t you happy, Mom?’ I’ve never . . .” Jaana’s voice got thick and wet, but Tess couldn’t tell if it was with sadness or remembered rage. Both seemed appropriate. “We fought all the way home—Tess, you have no idea how we fought. ‘I didn’t need your permission,’ Saara said. As though we thought she did! Of course Saara didn’t need our permission. I don’t know what mistake Otso and I made, as parents, to make her feel like she had to prove the obvious. Gravity exists whether you drop things or not. But Saara, she always had to drop them. It wasn’t about permission. It was that she didn’t tell us. She could have died.”

  A bit of movement at the edge of the clearing briefly stole their attention. But it was just a rabbit—a big, rangy thing, new white fur still dappled with summer’s brown. It hopped a short ways into the open, searching out grass still peeking up among the tree roots. “But you forgave her,” Tess said. Again, those scant markings in her expired passport were all the proof she needed. If that fight had been the final one, then Tess’s trip to Finland never would have lasted so long. Had things gotten apocalyptic, as she knew they eventually did, then her reentry stamp to the United States would have been dated the very next day.

  “How could we not?” Jaana said, still gazing at the rabbit. It didn’t seem to have noticed them yet and was hopping ever closer, from stump to stump. Jaana’s lips turned up at the corners ever so slightly. “Saara always knew when she had us at a disadvantage. She was back, after all, and as mad as we were, we were also so happy to see her. And she’d brought you, and you were beautiful. Despite everything, it was a wonderful trip. We spent almost all of it right here. Our little cottage on the lake.”

  “I remember,” Tess said.

  “Of course you do,” Jaana said. Again she fell silent. It felt like the story almost could have ended there. But happy endings aren’t endings. They are middles.

  “Saara did tell us when she got pregnant with Axel,” Jaana said. “As though not keeping it a secret was enough. As though her decision to tell us this time meant that we didn’t get to have an opinion about it. She actually tried to keep us from coming. But Saara had as much power to do that as we did to stop her from making her own choices. We flew to New York and rented an apartment in Baldwin—you know that little building by the diner, overlooking the river? We lived there for almost half a year.”

  Tess had learned plenty that she hadn’t already known in the past few minutes, but this stood out as a shocker among shockers. Jaana and Otso living in New York, even for a short period of time, was somehow even more inconceivable than baby Tess traveling to Talvijärvi. “Paul was already there when we arrived.” Jaana said his name like it was a slur in another language. “But not to help. Nothing like that. He’d gotten into some kind of trouble down in Florida, and he was camped out in a tent in Sam’s backyard. That drunk was more welcome in their house than we were. Sam said it was because Paul didn’t try to meddle in their lives. But there’s a reason for that. Paul doesn’t love anybody, least of all himself. So why would he bother meddling?”

  “That’s not really . . .” Tess stopped herself for a moment. She didn’t want to approach even the distant cousin of an argument, not today. And besides, since her father’s death Paul had done absolutely nothing to earn her loyalty. But that’s the thing about family. They don’t have to earn it. “That’s not fair.”

  “I don’t need to treat Paul with fairness,” Jaana said. She went quiet again and seemed to have no inclination to continue. The animal—it was too big to be a rabbit, Tess saw now, and must have been some kind of Finnish hare or jackrabbit—hopped ever nearer. It didn’t even flinch when Jaana reached down to refasten her skis. She returned the thermos of porridge to her small knapsack and then propped herself up on her ski poles. Tess could actually hear her grandmother’s joints popping. They’d been still for too long and were both nearly freezing. But this was far from an appropriate stopping point.

  “And?” Tess said.

  “What and?” Jaana said. “You know how the story finishes. Saara died. And all our years of fighting exploded into something else. Sam . . . I have a lot to say about your father. A lot I won’t say about him. But whatever else, he loved my daughter. And when Saara died, his love became a furious, snarling thing. Ours did too. I have no desire to remember how ugly—how petty it got. And I could hardly describe it, even if I did. Your father had us removed from the hospital. We tried to have Saara’s body shipped home—our home. Her home. We spoke to lawyers. We made threats over the telephone. We all burned and burned and burned until there was nothing left.”

  This was, finally, the end of it. Jaana’s face was drawn, as though the telling had cost her something. But she also seemed—not comforted, exactly. But somehow lighter, as though the price had at least bought some small measure of relief. Jaana had probably recited this story to herself, over and over, as much to figure out how things had gone so horribly wrong as to practice for the day when she’d share it with her grandkids. And that task was finished. Or rather, half finished.

  “Come on,” Jaana said, “stay any longer and you’ll stick to that thing.”

  Tess fastened her skis. She braced her poles against the frozen ground and was just about to hoist herself up into a standing position when the most preposterous thing happened. The hare that had been steadily approaching for some minutes suddenly jumped up into her lap, like some woodland creature out of vintage Disney. “Oh!” Jaana said. Tess was too surprised to manage even that. The animal was heavy as a housecat on her thighs, and it looked up at her with big, glassy, not-so-intelligent eyes. Much of the hare’s fur was still brown, but the coloring on its face had already turned white, revealing little scars on its otherwise soft-looking lips. There were also old wounds along its left hindquarter—tight scar tissue, bald as a boiled chicken.

  “Is that . . . ?” Jaana trailed off, unable to finish her question. But she didn’t have to, because they both knew the answer. It was Bigwig, the family pet they’d left behind in Baldwin. The hare had somehow hopped her way across the world, not only to Finland, but to this exact little corner of Talvijärvi. Tess felt an intense and very sudden swell of mingled guilt and pride. The guilt was familiar—though it had evolved slightly over the last two days. Tess had stopped beating herself up for not believing her brother. After all, who would have, in her shoes? The guilt was simply because she hadn’t even really listened. But the pride was completely new. Because her little brother had been right, hadn’t he? He’d stepped right through the impossible and into the true.

  Bigwig shifted around on Tess’s lap, trying to get comfortable. She seemed happy and healthy—as well suited to the Finnish winter as any animal condemned to it by birth.

  “How could that . . . ?” Jaana was still having trouble making a full sentence.

  Tess took hold of Bigwig and stood. She looked down at the snow, where Bigwig’s tracks zigzagged across the cleared shoreline and disappeared back into the forest. There was something in there—a dark flicker of movement. Tess’s heart caught. She kicked her way over as fast as her skis would take her, sliding past one tree and then another. She was about to call out for her brother when she realized that it definitely wasn’t Axel in those trees. It was something else entirely.

  “Where are you going?” Jaana said. She sounded strangely far off and muffled. When Tess turned back to answer, she found that she couldn’t even see her grandmother anymore. The trees had circled in behind her—trunks and branches in every hue of
brown and gray. Some still had leaves, and some did not. Some were heavy with goblet-shaped flowers, while others wore ropy necklaces of hanging roots and vines. It was warm in here, and it stank of blossoms and rotten fruit. When Tess looked down at her skis, she saw that they were slowly sinking into a bubbling patch of coal-black mud. Or, no, it was sand. Fine, white sand.

  “I hate you here,” a voice said. It seemed to come from all around her. But it was just one voice—the voice of what could only be the monster in Axel’s story. The Hiisi. The demon that had chased poor Väinö. Again Tess was hit with that cocktail of guilt and pride. She had no idea that her brother had ever encountered anything so terrifying. But he’d done it. He was still doing it. She caught a glint of movement—a slithering up one of the trunks, leaping from branch to branch.

  “I hate you on the path.” The Hiisi seemed to be struggling to control itself.

  Seeing the Keeper in the woods and holding Bigwig were nothing compared to feeling the Hiisi’s voice ripple through her. But she was all in at this point. “Then why did you bring me here?” Tess shouted at the demon. She wasn’t really sure where to look, but it hardly mattered—if she fixed her eyes on anything for more than a few seconds, it changed. A cactus came and went, followed by a rosebush and then a palm. Tess was everywhere in the world right now, and everywhere was here. The Hiisi was silent for a moment, so she shouted again.