Norma

  —

  Men took advantage of Elizabeth and the Sutherlands for their hair, and that’s why I’m so shocked by everything Marion has told me about the hair trade. Evolution hasn’t improved women at all. The Sutherland sisters lived during a time when women’s authority was limited to the home. They needed the men who ran the circuses and the entertainment industry in order to succeed. Now women have the same rights and opportunities, but we still don’t take home the profits even though we provide all the material and all the labor for the beauty industry. Century after century we’ve given our faces, our hair, our wombs, our breasts, and still the money ends up in men’s pockets. They’re the leaders. Every business Lambert and Reijo have ever run has been based on women’s sweat and tears. In Sweden they brought starlets to the stage and later continued the same thing in the Canaries. In Thailand they started selling bachelor vacations and cheap impotence pills. After Reijo’s boat accident, Lambert must have gotten bored in Thailand and moved to the growing markets of Russia. That’s where he found Alla and a new industry based on dreams. It’s ironic that I was the one to have a daughter like you and that Lambert would become my gateway into the hair trade.

  March 6, 2013

  Helena considered leaving Lambert many times, and I supported her as best I could, but whenever she made up her mind, Lambert would come to Finland, play the role of model father and husband for a while, swear he would return permanently soon, and then disappear again. As Alvar approached school age, Lambert decided there might be opportunities in the Canary Islands. Finnish tourists had started pouring south, so bars were popping up to cater to them, and demand for entertainment was growing. This was Lambert’s area of expertise, and he decided to set up a restaurant with the very best stage on the island. It would be reserved for Helena alone. The children just had to get a little bigger. Then Helena could follow him and spend every night singing.

  —

  Helena swallowed Lambert’s lines until she received a call from an old acquaintance from Sweden, who had been vacationing in the Canaries and stopped at Lambert’s bar. Lambert had a new starlet, and her stage name was Ann-Helen. According to this acquaintance, Ann-Helen and Lambert seemed quite intimate. Helena broke down completely.

  March 9, 2013

  I usually disposed of your hair by burning it and thought that was harmless until one morning you seemed ill and your grandmother suspected carbon monoxide poisoning. Grandma was feeling poorly too, and my own head hurt. I’d thrown some of your hair in the oven just the night before, and it occurred to me that the two things might be connected. Your hair was growing stronger and had started expressing its own will. If you happened to be angry, cutting it required strength, and at night you woke up with strange nightmares. You told stories of adventures in a place you called Amuli and described landscapes you recognized from Charlie Chaplin films. Once you tried to explain that you had been playing in your dreams with a woman we saw in a television documentary about Chicago and the Great Depression.

  —

  I stopped burning your hair, and your bad dreams went away immediately. Later Grandma caught you trying to light it on fire yourself. You got a beating, but that was also when I started experimenting with smoking it in a pipe.

  —

  Life in my mother’s house was difficult, and she was extremely strict when it came to alcohol. The salesperson at the state liquor store was a friend of hers, and I knew word would get back to her if I bought so much as a bottle of wine. Smoking was an easier solution. It calmed my nerves. Things felt like they would work out. I felt more confident, and that was what Helena needed too after that fateful phone call. I heard about Lambert’s betrayal from Marion, who called me in a panic and asked me to come visit. Helena cried incessantly, and the neighbors were complaining about the howling at night.

  —

  The situation in Helena’s home was even worse than I expected. So I gave her my pipe. She fell asleep instantly.

  —

  I called on Helena as often as possible, even though arranging visits was complicated. I couldn’t leave you with your grandmother. If she learned our secret, you probably would have drowned in the well. That was how our village handled abnormalities. We didn’t have the money for hotels, and I didn’t dare take you to Helena’s because I was afraid she would recognize that your hair was what she’d been smoking. During my visits, I would send you to a park or the zoo with a babysitter.

  —

  I mailed Helena regular doses of your hair between visits, and it clearly helped. The children didn’t ask any questions about Helena’s new habit. For them, all that mattered was she could sleep and the constant weeping stopped. I should have remembered that one glass of wine was enough to put Helena under the table, but I didn’t know any other way to help, and no one talked about therapy back then.

  —

  Marion kept me up-to-date on Helena’s health. She was a teenager and old enough to take care of Alvar and the house on her own for the most part. They didn’t hear much from Lambert anymore. Sometimes he would send a telegram, sometimes a card, sometimes money. After Helena smashed the telephone, Marion would call me from a phone booth. That was around the same time Helena started to wander. Once the police brought her home after she snatched someone’s baby out of a carriage and hummed lullabies to it. Finally Marion had enough. She didn’t want to waste her youth watching over her family, and after meeting her future fiancé, Bergman, she moved in with him. I visited Marion’s new home once and assumed that tiny feet would soon be toddling on the rug they had just bought.

  —

  Six months later Lambert’s new flame wanted to get married, so Lambert needed to divorce Helena. She didn’t take it well. Marion called and told me that Helena was talking to herself, knocking her pipe on the table, and constantly looking for something. She would angrily shake the envelopes I had sent her. I realized immediately what was happening. She was in withdrawal. I arranged a trip to see her. Beforehand I sent a batch, though, and it was a big one.

  —

  That was the greatest mistake of my life.

  —

  When the first reporter drove up to our house, your grandmother was weeding the carrot bed, and the photographer began snapping pictures before she had any idea what was going on. Through the crack in the kitchen window, I saw her mouth hang open and heard her denials. No, it isn’t possible, she kept repeating. The reporter knew he had reached us before anyone else and tried to hide his excitement as he launched into his questions. The neighbors in Helsinki had talked about Helena’s best friend with whom she’d lived in Gothenburg. The phone started ringing off the hook. Acquaintances from Sweden tried to call, wanting to reminisce about situations they claimed made them suspect something was off. Even Reijo tried to reach us, but Grandma pulled the phone out of the wall.

  —

  Still she ended up in the tabloids as “Elli Naakka, horrified villager.” That was just the beginning. The press attacked with such fury that nothing was ever the same. But no one caught Grandma off guard again—she and the dog drove away all comers. I avoided going into the village. I was afraid someone would realize Helena’s behavior was really a withdrawal symptom, the police would search her apartment, and I would get caught. Then I’d lose you, and you’d be found out. My nightmares were coming true in spite of my precautions. I never put a return address on the envelopes, and I tried to make my handwriting as different as I could when I wrote her address. I even wore gloves. I imagine I had sensed something would happen.

  —

  Religious as they were, Helena’s family blamed the devil, not drugs or mental illness. Preachers visited the village; even an exorcist showed up. Helena’s entire family tree was suspect: each unfortunate death, whether from hanging or drowning or alcohol, was seen as evidence of the demonic possession dwelling in the line. Helena’s old teacher was interviewed, and he said there had always been something odd about her. All her school friends had a sto
ry to tell about a strange encounter with Helena. Children no longer dared to go to school alone because Crazy Helena supposedly prowled the road. The rumor mill ground away, and then came the name calling. Bitch. Slut. Whore. Lambert became an object of pity and compassion, and someone began saying that Helena had been giving herself to men behind the co-op building since she was a child.

  —

  After Helena went to prison, Alvar was taken to his grandparents’ house, where he slept behind lock and key. They were constantly on the lookout for signs of Helena in him, and he would get into fights in the village. I went to see him a few times. I’ll never forget how he clung to my legs and kept repeating, “Call Daddy.” But I couldn’t, not that man. Later Alvar managed to escape and got to Sweden on his own. He didn’t return to Finland until Lambert’s business brought him here.

  —

  When I ran into Alvar in Kuopio, I felt all those years of worry wash away. He’d grown into a sensible young man, and I’m grateful for that. On our way back to Helsinki, we talked through everything that had happened. Alvar told me how Helena waited for the mail night and day, lying in front of the mail slot and licking the last wisps from the envelopes. In her most desperate moments, she’d cut her own hair and try to smoke it. Alvar knew she was high. He thanked me for giving him his first weed, grinning and asking what variety I’d been sending. It didn’t resemble anything he’d found since.

  —

  Apparently, since the tragedy, Marion had found time for several long relationships, a cat, and gallivanting in Stockholm. She came back to Finland when Lambert bought her a salon. I got the impression she had finally found balance, her own place in the world. I hesitated to ask about children, but I plucked up my courage. Alvar was silent for a long time. Then he said Marion thought Helena had been right about one thing: Marion wasn’t meant to be a mother. Once when she was drunk, Marion had even said she could stand anything except having one of her children turn out like Helena. She would never take that risk. And that was my fault, too. I had pushed Helena over the edge. Everything that happened as a result was my responsibility and mine alone.

  March 10, 2013

  You still hear about the Laajasalo Balcony Murder when the gutter press does scandal retrospectives. People haven’t forgotten. One of the customers at the salon brought up Helena while browsing posts on a true-crime website. I noticed how Marion blanched, and I whispered to her that I would finish the color job.

  —

  The woman was a typical murder fan, the kind who thinks she’s the only person who knows the truth, and she considered herself an expert on this particular case because she had lived in the same building as Helena. She’d heard Helena singing and knew people who had seen her walk out onto the balcony that last time. The balcony itself became a murder-tourism destination, which affected property values in the building. The woman whispered that she had managed to sell her apartment only to an immigrant family who hadn’t heard about the case. I wanted to slap her in the mouth. Instead I had to listen to her for more than an hour, enduring her musings about the children and how there had been talk of a divorce and womanizing, which would make any woman go crazy. She was sure the real target had been Lambert.

  —

  I thought it was more likely that Helena wanted to ensure the end of her family line. What she did was her way of arranging that. Eva has told me about similar tragedies, and her opinion is clear: no one should ever risk passing insanity on to their children. Even though the chance of inheriting schizophrenia is only 10 percent, I can see that Marion worries about it.

  —

  The same thing could happen to you as Helena if your secret is discovered or you have children. Children like you. The risks you face in life aren’t just about getting caught and becoming a slave to the beauty industry. It isn’t just the businessmen, the investors, the researchers, and the doctors who would chase you. The real threat is the unpredictable behavior of your hair. If its effects become known, you wouldn’t be fit for hair dye advertisements or fashion magazine covers. You wouldn’t be the face of a new line of hair products as the Sutherland sisters were. You wouldn’t become a muse like Elizabeth, and you wouldn’t just become a fallen star like all those women. You would end up in a prison, an asylum, or some other institution designed for dangerous people. The photographers would show up on your doorstep and at your windows, and the vultures would descend on your grandmother’s house once again. Freak-show producers would flood in from every corner of the world to film their exposés against traditional Finnish scenery on a birch-lined road, in the yard of a country cottage. The whole gang of researchers would come to investigate the Naakka family genome. The only people in the villages now are the old folks, but they would tell stories of the strange Naakka clan and the overprotective mother who never let her daughter run around by herself, never let her go on class field trips or to summer camp or confirmation school. Everyone would have some story to tell again, and no one would object to their fifteen minutes of fame.

  Seven

  I put Helena’s family through all the things I dreaded. It’s Eva’s fault. If only I’d known how powerful your hair can be, Helena might not have gotten sick. At most, she would have had a nervous breakdown because of Lambert, recovered, and started a new life. Marion would have a family and be rushing between work and her children’s hobbies. And I wouldn’t be like a drunk driver after an accident who goes and spies on her victim’s family to see how they’re doing and hopes not to get caught.

  When Norma arrived at the salon in the morning, a man she didn’t recognize was leaning in the doorway to the back room, smiling as if he had been expecting her. She froze on the stairs. Marion hadn’t said anything about a visitor.

  “You must be Anita’s daughter,” the man said, and raised a steaming cup of coffee in greeting.

  Norma closed her eyes for a moment. The man was tall, slender, and dangerous. Instead of fading, that impression only grew, and the hair inside her turban began to tingle. That could also have been caused by the boxes of hair that had strangely reappeared on the desk. She’d brought the boxes to Marion the night before and watched as she unpacked them, took the hair to the back room, and threw away the packaging. Someone had dug the cardboard and cellophane out of the garbage and repacked the hair. Perhaps this man.

  “Beautiful name. Rare for a Finn.”

  “When my father proposed to my mother, an opera with the same name was playing on the radio,” Norma replied, and then she realized: This must be Alvar, Marion’s brother. Crazy Helena’s son. There was always something similar about siblings, or maybe the man’s hair had been on Norma’s mother’s or Marion’s clothing. That was why the scent was familiar. Instinctively she’d associated him with Helena. The tone when people talked about her never went away. The tone, the gossip, the knowing glances—the feeling of danger came from them, not from him. Her tongue stuck in her mouth with shame. If Helena were her mother, she would never want to see anyone who remembered Helena’s case, even less someone complicit in her fate. It was of little comfort that Alvar knew nothing about Norma’s role in the tragedy. She knew, and that was enough.

  “I’m sorry. We all liked Anita,” Alvar said, and led Norma to sit as if she were a lady suffering a fainting spell and needed the nearest park bench or exit. A glass of water appeared in front of her, along with a packet of tissues and some fresh coffee. Alvar’s pomade was TIGI Rockaholic Punk Out, and his aftershave was Burberry, which she could tell from the notes of sandalwood and cedar. He had been drinking the previous night, but not to excess. He had eaten something Asian—kaffir lime, ginger, cinnamon—plus apples and multivitamins. Traces of diazepam, from perhaps two weeks ago, but no other pharmaceuticals, no drugs, no testosterone products. A dog. He had a German shepherd.

  “Has Marion told you about her name?” Alvar said. “Helena listened to Marion Rung when she was homesick. In Sweden. Do you know that singer? She was on the Finnhits albums. You might have he
ard ‘Tipi-tii’ or ‘El Bimbo.’ I forgot to introduce myself. Alvar, Marion’s brother. I’ve heard a lot of good things about you. You left the funeral before I could express my condolences.”

  Norma’s sweaty palm disappeared in Alvar’s assertive grip, limply, guiltily. At the funeral, her nose had been stuffed up, and she had been high on benzos and scopolamine thinking the combination would help her endure the ordeal. She didn’t remember seeing him and took the cup of coffee to avoid responding.

  “We were hoping for a little help from you with these boxes. Marion said you found a package slip in Anita’s mail and decided it must belong to us when you picked it up.”

  Norma felt her turban loosen. Her hair cuticles opened, and ants began running across her skin. She hadn’t thought this through far enough. When Marion took the boxes, her roots had throbbed with excitement, and a smile had flashed on her face, but no uncomfortable questions followed. Marion accepted the vague explanation about the mysterious package as if it weren’t even necessary. Norma expected to deal with the issue later with Marion, whose tact was silky smooth when it came to anything related to Norma’s mother. Norma hadn’t anticipated that someone would jump on her about it the very next morning. Marion was Helena’s daughter, and she must have suffered the same rumors and curious glances as Alvar had—yet she lacked the same prickly aura.