True (17 page)
Authors: Riikka Pulkkinen
Tags: #Cancer - Patients - Fiction., #Family secrets - Fiction.
A
T THE END
of October, on an ordinary day, the little girl hurts herself. We're playing tag while her father is busy with his work. It's her favorite game: again and again she evades my grasp, squeals when I'm just about to catch her, giggles.
After dozens of dashes to freedom, her sock gets caught on the threshold. She falls on the floor with a smack, her hands in front of her, and bangs her head on the edge of the door.
“Uh-oh,” I say.
She's quiet at first, for two seconds, three, then she gets up and looks embarrassed. I think for a moment that she's not going to cry.
“Did you hurt yourself?” I ask.
She shakes her head, then opens her mouth and begins.
Her crying is quiet and hoarse at first, then it grows into a loud bellow interrupted by gasping breaths. I remember all the times I cried as a child, when I couldn't catch my breath and snot ran into my mouth, those moments when I believed that nothing good would ever happen to me again.
She gets up, runs to the space between the cabinet and the radiator, rolls up in a little ball and bellows. I go to her, try to touch her, but she bats my hand away.
“Did you hurt yourself, sweetheart? Where does it hurt?”
I see a throbbing, shining bump on her forehead.
“Mommy,” she says. “I want my mommy.”
“Your mommy's not here right now.”
“Where is she?”
“Mommy's on a trip, but I'm here.”
Her crying grows stronger, the sound rising a note or two.
Something is sprained inside meâI don't know what to do. I'm insufficient. Her crying sets off every ghost and goblin of my childhood, all the times I woke up alone in the dark and couldn't feel my own boundaries.
I shove my own terrors aside and act. I find the words.
“Will you let me blow on it?”
I reach out my hand. She gets up, stumbles out of the corner toward me and stands beside me at first, not letting me pick her up yet.
“Come here.”
I sit on the floor. I take her in my arms. Her little body is hot, the pain has brought a sweat to her skin. The lump on her head is turning red, thin red threads under the skin like a spider's web.
I remember the rhyme my mother said to me. The words rise from my healed wounds and hover in the air. She listens.
I blow, recite the rhyme in the little girl's ear just like my mother did, and her mother before her.
She's not crying anymore. The paths of her tears are shining red on her cheeks.
She's very quiet, looking straight ahead at the corner and resting her head slightly against my chest. She's heavy here in my lap, letting her weight press against me little by little.
If this feeling had a color, it would be yellow, and a touch of blue.
I remember my mother's smile, those languid moments when I sat on her lap and she comforted me this way. I saw her from the outside then, I didn't guess that the feeling was like this, so complete.
Something stirs inside me. I'm much bigger and brighter on the inside than I've ever been before.
12
T
HEY'RE DRIVING THROUGH
the countryside. Now and then Matias puts his hand on Anna's thigh.
They had a strange argument at home before they left. The words they said still linger in the air. The beginnings of the fight had been simmering in Anna's mind for days, springing up at odd timesâirritation at something Matias said, some gesture, the way he takes off his socks, tugging on the ribbing with his toes against his Achilles tendon and tossing one sock, then the other, across the living room, or how he mutters
mmm
, and reaches his hand to the fluff at the base of her abdomen, as if discovering the boundaries of her body hair never ceases to amaze him.
“What's this?” he had asked as Anna was packing.
Anna looked up. He was waving a piece of paper in the air.
“I don't know,” she said.
“It was over there on the desk,” he said. “Did you write this?”
“No,” Anna said, before she had time to think. Then she said, “Yes. Who else would have written it?”
“I read it,” Matias said.
“Why? Give it to me.”
Matias held the paper over his head and looked at her. She thought she saw sarcasm or something like sarcasm in his eyes. But it wasn't sarcasm. He was serious. How could she never have seen him like this beforeâangry? She looked at the text. She recognized the writing, read the first few lines.
When I saw Linda for the first time, I wasn't prepared. There had been a mix-up of dates and he had to go to work unexpectedly. I told him I would watch her for a few hours. They were standing in the doorway, Linda wearing a backpack. I hadn't looked at a child up close like that in a long time. Pure was the first word that came to mind, but not in the sense of being free of dirt. It was something else, something fresh. Her eyelashes were surprisingly long, her eyelids were plump, her nose looked soft, rising from her face like a ripe berry. She already had distinctive expressions, but sorrow hadn't yet found its way onto her face. I could see that it hadn't. Seeing this was not like other seeingâit was seeing something that doesn't yet exist, but that you know is coming. Give her some bread and juice, he said. Don't let her eat candy from the table. You can play, maybe go to the park.
So we did. As we were crossing the street I wanted to run to the shelter of the arched building entrance, not put the child in any danger, not shatter that face into unrecognizability.
Linda interrupted my growing terror by taking hold of my hand. So simple: her trust made me believe. When it was all over I realized that she would survive this. I was the one in danger, the one who wouldn't survive as well. Maybe it had been that way from the very beginning. She was the one who drew the sorrow on my face. It was her disappearance from my life that left me limp, lying on the floor for days without moving, unable to get up.
“Something I made up,” Anna said. “A story.”
Matias looked at her, not turning his head, trying to get hold of something.
“What does it say about me that you wanted to leave this out?”
“What are you, the truth police? Can't I write what I want?”
“You left this out because you wanted me to read it, that's what I think. Leaving something like this on the desk where I can see it can't be an accident.”
“What kind of nonsense is that? What right do you have to go snooping in my things?”
“It was right there on the desk. The desk that we share. Don't pretend that you didn't think I would see it.”
“But you still shouldn't read a person's diary.”
Matias gave her a significant look. “A diary. You just said that it was a story.”
“Same thing.”
“This is about things that happened to you. Your last relationship. The one you don't talk about.”
“Everything has to do with my former lovers in your mind. Try to get over it.”
He laughed. “You're the one who can't get over it.”
“You're the one who brought it up.”
“Because you won't talk about it. I think that's strange.”
“What should I say about it? What should a person tell their new lover about their old lover? Do you want to read the notes on last year's calendar, or the year before that, so you know who I went to coffee with two years ago January? What do you want to know?”
He shrugged. “You're the one who knows what I should know, if there is anything.”
He laid the paper back on the desk. It was between them. Anna looked away.
NOW MATIAS IS
putting his hand on her thigh and not taking it away. This is their making-up ritual.
“Should we stop at the Prisma?” he asks.
He looks at her affectionately.
“Let's.”
In the parking lot she thinks that she could easily stay here, by his side.
She sees their lives. Children skipping along ahead of them, yelling, begging for ice cream.
Ordinary moments, not sad, but not the kind of moments that you mistakenly thought represented happiness when you were a teenager dreaming about the future. Moments when you feel boredom, when a word like happiness doesn't apply. She knows that at some point in the future, happiness will seem like an overblown, childish word, once she's learned these other moments of . . . not happiness, but some other wordâmore ordinary, flat, skin-deep. Contentment.
They both secretly like the Prisma supermarket. They like the big shopping carts that you push down the aisles like steering a ship. They like the mountains of fruit and the foolish impulse buysâa hula hoop, a barbecue mitt shaped like a crayfish. They like the touching families, meekly buying ten liters of fat-free milk and two cases of yogurt, all of them wearing Crocs.
Anna picks out a whitefish from the seafood counter. They wander absentmindedly among the shelves, choose some vegetables for the grill, charcoal, lighter fluid, marshmallows, ice cream.
THE ICE CREAM
is melting in their bowls. They're sitting on the porch with their arms around each other.
They talk lazily about Godard's
Pierrot le Fou
, which they saw last week at the film archives. Matias thought it was fragmentary and overly arty. Saara thought it was chauvinistic. That's Godard's idea of what a woman is, she said, with exaggerated incredulity. Nothing but temperamental princesses! A line from the movie has tattooed itself into Anna and she doesn't want to shake it off:
We are made of dreams, and dreams are made of us.
She doesn't know if the line refers to the woman, whom the man can't understand, or to the time that the characters in the film are living in, or to dreams, which people can't live without, or to all of reality, everything that happens between people.
Anna's overcome with a surprising feeling of well-being, as if she were entirely herself and at the same time someone slightly different. The blackbird's call has a friendly, familiar sound, louder than before, but she can't find its dark shape among the foliage anymore.
“I'll tear up that floor tomorrow while you clean the shed,” Matias says, looking satisfied with himself, the way a man who performs mental labor every day sometimes looks when he has a chance to putter with his hands, build something, discover hidden abilities.
“Don't start dismantling anything by yourself. Wait till Dad gets here.”
Anna's mother, father, and her sister Maria are coming tomorrow. Her grandparents are coming, too, if Grandma's condition will allow it.
Anna hears her mother in the commanding tone of her voice, the same tone her mother uses with her father sometimes, which always makes him angry. Now these emphatic words give her a secret joy. She's exasperatingly like her mother, and it doesn't alarm her at all.
“I know how to do it,” Matias says. “I'll pull up the floor, then we can get started nailing down a new one right away.”
“Well, all right,” Anna allows, pretending to be the one giving in, but pleased.
Her father suggested reflooring the sauna porch when they saw him last weekâhe had a manly discussion with Matias about it at the front door when they arrived. Anna thought for a moment that maybe her father had always wanted a boy. With Matias he could talk about boards and nails and percussion drills and look out across the lake and say magnanimously, There's beer in the fridge if you want some.
THEY TAKE A
sauna in a mood of goodwill, the words of their argument dissolving in the steam. Matias rubs lotion on Anna's arms and back afterward, spreads apricot scent on her legs, and it all leads to where they guessed it might.
A mist floats over the lawn, Anna can see it from the window before she lies down on the linen blanket, a little damp from the sauna. Matias comes into her amazingly carefully and passionately. It suddenly feels like they are different people, who are doing this together for the first time. Anna herself is a little more passionate than at home, Matias strong and gentle.
What does the loon think, or the blackbird, when they hear this, Anna thinks just before she reaches her peak, rising and dropping at the same time.
Afterward they sit on the porch and Matias strums the guitar. Anna drinks Sol from the bottle, pulls her knees up against her chest. It's a little cold, but not too. She reads a copy of
Seura
that she found in the bottom drawer of the chest in the dressing room. A middle-aged writer and a pop singer telling about their new happiness.
Anna reads the writer's words aloud: “
I finally know what love is.
”
“What year is that from?”
“Ninety-seven.”
“Does he tell?”
“Tell what?”
“What love is?”