Norma

  Marion handed Folake the box of hair and asked, as if in passing, whether anyone had stopped in and asked about her or the boys.

  Folake cocked her head. “Are you in trouble? You need help?”

  Marion shook her head and waved to the girl as she left.

  On the street Marion instinctively tried her left pants pocket again. She was used to calling Anita whenever she got nervous or whenever she learned something about the clan’s operation that Anita would want to know. Anita was always ready with a solution, and fast. Now Marion had to decide everything herself. She even had to arrange the ambush that freed Anita on her last morning alive.

  When her project phone had beeped after Anita was captured, Marion guessed that the message came not from Anita but from Lambert, who was trying to lure out Anita’s co-conspirators. Marion answered the message as if suspecting nothing and suggested a meeting in front of the salon. Lambert responded that some other place would be better. No, we shouldn’t change the routine, Marion replied. Then she called Folake to ask whether she knew the right boys for a little job. When the first baseball bat hit the windshield, the minion driving Anita jumped out of the car, and by the third blow, Anita was off and running, reaching the protection of the crowds around the metro station before the mongrels farther off could catch up with her.

  Anita’s project phone was probably still with Lambert. As far as Marion knew, it hadn’t been taken to Anita’s apartment with her regular phone. Marion could still keep up the game. She could still pretend to be Anita’s boss and maybe even blackmail the clan. She could suggest a trade and try to get more money. The thought was tempting. But the plan was more important. She wouldn’t take risks. Not anymore.

  —

  Later they grilled her about what she had seen through the window of the salon. Four black boys and a baseball bat. Or three. No, she didn’t think she recognized the boys. No, she hadn’t ever seen them before, or at least she didn’t think so. Everything had happened so fast. She’d noticed the car parked in front of the salon and Anita sitting inside, and the baseball bat hitting the windshield and the boys who continued pummeling the car. No, Anita didn’t usually meet friends at the salon. No, she didn’t have any idea whom Anita intended to meet that morning. She was just as surprised by the turn of events as everyone else. She certainly didn’t know how Anita’s boss had learned so quickly that Anita had been found out.

  —

  She had reserved a baseball bat and money for Anita in the closet in the back room and assumed that Anita would run into the salon after the boys attacked the car. She was prepared to defend Anita, to stall the mongrels and help Anita escape through the back door of the salon. Anita could have taken a taxi, maybe rushed to the harbor and left for Stockholm or Tallinn, wherever she could without a passport, and Marion could have followed. But no. Anita had run to the metro station for reasons Marion didn’t understand—unless her purpose was to protect Marion until the bitter end.

  Eight

  Ever since Eva told me about her fate, I’ve wondered what I would do if I received a call that you had been arrested. Flashing lights, police, paparazzi. The whole circus. Dear God. I couldn’t handle it. I wouldn’t be able to visit you in the same kind of institution where Helena is now. The idea that you could be locked up in a place like that for decades is unbearable.

  March 14, 2013

  I visited Laajasalo a couple of weeks before the tragedy. Easter was coming, and because Helena wasn’t up to holiday preparations, I decided to bake Alvar a cheesecake. I was just about to grate the lemon rind when Helena suddenly grabbed my arm and asked where the sugar was. She wanted to help. Her grip was strong, her voice higher than normal, and it had a strange tone to it. Her eyes were completely clear. She said she missed birch trees and the horizon when she was in New York. Eva spoke to me, through Helena.

  —

  At first I thought Helena was hallucinating. We had talked about Eva so much that it wouldn’t be any wonder if her world had become confused with the other voices in Helena’s head. But she was acting like someone completely different. Even her expressions weren’t the same, let alone her voice, and she pulled her hair the same way you do and claimed she’d visited us in the hospital after your birth. She had come to greet one of her kind. I had thought the scent of lemon and bergamot in the air was from a stranger, but really it was Eva! Eva left the smell of Shalimar in the room! She had started using it in America when she needed something that would give her faith in the future, just as lemon rind and the colonial goods store in Finland had smelled of hope and possibilities, like riches across the sea ripe for the taking. In New York the same smells had been different, and her new life had turned out to be something else. Money was in short supply, and America felt oppressive. Originally created as an antidote to the Great Depression, Shalimar had given Eva precisely the joy she needed. It still smelled of distant lands, unknown continents, and roads she could take if she met a dead end in America.

  —

  After Helena was locked up, I didn’t hear Eva’s voice for years. I stopped sending pipe hair to Helena and stopped using it myself.

  —

  When I realized Grandma wouldn’t be any help with Eva, I pilfered Eva’s picture from the Bible and took a copy of it to Helena in the hospital. She was overjoyed. She had missed Eva. The next visit I took a risk and let Helena smoke. I didn’t do so lightly. But no repeat of the tragedy was possible. Helena was under careful watch, and I would have stopped if her condition worsened. However, it worked immediately, and her mood improved. Helena had talked about Alma and Juhani before, and about a lot of other people, but she also said plenty of things that made no sense. Only regular smoking made her words comprehensible and gave shape to the confusion of sounds coming out of her mouth. Through Helena, Eva told me everything.

  —

  We started getting her out during the day and visiting as far away as Kuopio with Alvar, walking the square and visiting the bank. The purpose was to get Helena used to living outside the hospital. I was optimistic. I still believe she’ll get free someday, maybe as soon as we return from Bangkok. Eva is excited for that, too. Sometimes I get the feeling she likes Helena more than me.

  Eva didn’t talk to Norma, she talked to her mother. That could mean only one thing: during the spring, her mother’s mind had crumbled like a sand castle baked by the sun, and Norma hadn’t noticed anything. Not her mother’s betrayal, not her descent toward madness. Maybe they were one and the same. Norma prodded the photograph next to the computer. It fell on the table with Eva’s face down, and Norma pressed her hand to her pounding chest as if trying to stanch a hemorrhage. These videos weren’t going to help her with her debt problem, tell her where the loan money was, or explain Marion’s fear or Lambert’s strange behavior. All she would get was her own long journey into insanity.

  Some of the videos had been filmed in her mother’s apartment, and some in hotel rooms that could have been anywhere in the world. In one place, a blackout shade flashed between dark brown curtains that matched the décor; in another place, a ceiling fan rotated. Sometimes it was late and the staff had turned down the bed, set an evening chocolate on the pillow, a water bottle on the nightstand, and a cotton cloth on the floor next to the bed with slippers on it. Sometimes the bed had been slept in, and her mother was applying day cream while she talked to the camera. In some shots she smiled at someone even though she was definitely in the room alone and looked like a completely different person. But nothing in her behavior or environment was confused. Only her conversations with Eva revealed the break in her mind. Every word her mother uttered increased Norma’s distress, and every excited explanation amplified her despair until panic dried all the saliva in her mouth. As spring arrived, the change that had happened in her mother was obvious: her voice had become more determined, and it had lost the exhaustion that had been apparent since her visit to her own mother’s house. She was a woman on a mission, and that mission blazed in he
r eyes. She faced it like a soldier, her bearing full of energy. But she didn’t say anything about the money.

  March 15, 2013

  Last winter Eva told me to visit the asylum at the same time as Alvar, but it needed to look like a coincidence. At first I didn’t understand what was going on, and after Eva told me her plan, I didn’t think it would work, but she understood more about Lambert’s businesses than I did. She had smelled the clan’s source of livelihood on Alvar, and she knew how to take advantage of them. Alvar helped with this unwittingly, because when he visited his mother in the secure facility, he thought he saw Helena moving toward a clearer state of mind. Once Eva hugged Alvar as an experiment and shocked him out of his wits. Alvar asked the doctor if they had changed Helena’s medication. The smoking was what was doing it. And Eva.

  —

  Alvar started talking to Helena more the better she seemed to feel, and gradually they moved from general topics of conversation to matters of the heart. His girl had been fired from Marion’s salon after getting caught stealing, and Alvar was angry and sad in a self-medicated haze of alcohol and amphetamines. He needed a listener, and this gave Eva more faith that our plan was worth all the risks. We had to seize the moment. Both Marion and Alvar would be happy to take on someone at the salon whom they could trust—an old friend, someone discreet. I doubted my abilities as a stylist, and I was afraid of meeting Alvar. I didn’t know what he had turned into. But Eva assured me that Alvar would be sympathetic to me, as would Marion. Through the clan’s network, I would be able to find what you needed, and we could avoid the mistakes Eva had made in her life. She had dealt with men like this before. Nothing about it was new to her, but it was to me. She dispelled my doubts by telling how she got her own children.

  —

  Eva was born in Amuri, a working-class neighborhood of Tampere, the daughter of a factory worker. Her mother abandoned her after the birth and ordered the sauna cupper, Kaisu, a folk healer who had helped during the postpartum period, to take the baby to the poorhouse. Unlike the child’s mother, Kaisu was not troubled by Eva’s strange qualities and believed that she possessed magical powers. She wanted to keep the baby herself, and it was Eva’s good fortune that Kaisu turned out to be a good foster mother who knew how to appreciate Eva’s gifts, but after Kaisu died, Eva was utterly alone. She couldn’t take over Kaisu’s profession because she had a poor tolerance for the sauna and sweaty backs, and factory work would have meant living with the other workers and long days of toil. She needed fresh air and a more flexible schedule.

  —

  In the moment of her despair, one Sunday at church Eva happened to meet the master of the Naakka holdings at the time and could smell the scents of a rich household—mace and lemon rind, crystal sugar and imported goods—and decided to use all her wiles to win Juhani Naakka’s devotion. And she succeeded—Juhani led Eva to the altar despite his family’s opposition. The match was seen with disapproval because the foster child of a cupper born in a nest of Red agitators was not considered appropriate material for the lady of a White home. But Juhani ignored all such talk. He cared only about Eva and was eagerly anticipating little towheads running around the yard. That was a problem for Eva. Reproducing was not for freaks of nature, and she kept her cycle under strict control using methods learned from her foster mother. The clock in her loins ticked away.

  —

  The solution to her problem came from an unexpected direction. After the Civil War, Eva received a letter from her sister, Alma, who wrote in despair—starvation had come to the working neighborhoods of Tampere, and word that Eva had married into a rich household had reached them there. Eva wept until Juhani Naakka relented and gave her permission to go to Tampere to tend to her bedridden relatives. What Eva left unsaid was that the letter also explained that her sister had been widowed in the war and was expecting a child.

  —

  Alma and her mother didn’t recognize Eva when she entered their room. The communal kitchen behind her stank of dandelion root, and the diseases seemed to have soaked into the walls of the building. Looking at the women in their beds, it was clear their time was short. They exuded only blackness. Eva would have to do everything in her power to keep Alma alive until the child was born. The situation was bad enough she wasn’t sure she would succeed. She needed a backup plan.

  —

  Eva sought out a horse cabbie who knew the way to a sugar bootlegger, and after a visit there, she asked the cabbie to take her to an angel-maker. She arranged the price with the old woman and placed sugar, lard, and flour on the table—the gifts she had brought for her sick relations. On the way to Amuri, in addition to the corpses, Eva had noticed the smell of child-bearing. Despite the poor nutrition, the war had caused the city to breed, and there were plenty of extra children around. She could get a boy even if Alma’s child died or was a girl or a freak.

  —

  For the following months, she fed Alma with a rag soaked in milk, heated porridge in a hay box, and numbed her nose with camphor cream, breathed in lemon rind, and fetched more morphine and creolin soap from the pharmacy. Her efforts were rewarded, and Alma gave birth to a girl, healthy and normal. That girl was your grandmother. A week-old baby acquired from the angel-maker became her brother, and Eva could begin to arrange burials for her mother and Alma. She wrote to Juhani that he should send a farmhand to fetch her after the funerals and that their house would be welcoming twins, the future master of the house and a beautiful girl. The children had been born prematurely, which could be blamed on the stress of living in a den of Communists.

  Norma turned off the computer and fetched her mother’s cardboard box. She stored the hair and her mother’s videos in attic storage locker number twelve, but she kept this box at home. Other than Eva’s picture, the contents didn’t seem important. Still, Norma decided to go through the pile once more with fresh eyes. It might be more evidence of her mother’s mental breakdown, like the videos with their stories of complicated family histories and Eva’s ghost made flesh. Norma had begun to suspect that her mother had started smoking again. It had earned Helena a sentence in an insane asylum, and long-term use had probably affected her mother as well.

  The papers in the box had one common thread: all of them had something to do with procuring children. Her mother said as much in the videos, even though she’d never seemed particularly fond of children. But would she have told Norma if she’d dreamed of a larger brood? What if Norma’s birth had meant the end of her mother’s baby dreams?

  The number of women undergoing fertility treatment had grown over the past decade, as had their age. At the salon, Norma had come across a woman who was taking injections of clomiphene and hCG and complained the medications were ruining her hair. She was doing her treatments in Estonia, where you didn’t have to explain why you wanted a child if you were single. She also praised the Estonians’ prices and customer service. Plenty of women considered even cheaper countries. Norma turned on her laptop and looked up the Finnish rules for infertility treatment. Her mother was too old. She would have had to go abroad.

  Or had her mother hoped for a child for Norma? At first the idea seemed insane. Norma had accepted long ago that family and relationships were not part of her future. But what if her mother wanted something else? Perhaps Eva had planted the idea in her head that Norma could become pregnant with someone else’s egg. On the videos, her mother was always saying that her plan would bring some kind of improvement to Norma’s life, not her own.

  Norma had always preferred going to bed with people who were already spoken for, because they made no demands. Their skin brought a moment of joy and forgetfulness. That was enough. She wasn’t built for family life and long-term relationships. She had tried dating once, and it didn’t end well. Eventually she grew tired of sleepless nights, and he got fed up that Norma wouldn’t try to cure what she claimed was insomnia but was really her hair waking her whenever it needed to be cut. Her mother had mourned the breakup more th
an she did, just like every job she lost. For vacations, her mother booked them trips to places that wouldn’t remind Norma of what she was missing.

  —

  Making the call was a mistake, and Norma knew it as soon as she picked up the business card. But she had to. There was no address under the name. While she waited for a reply, she looked up the number online. It was either blocked or a prepaid account.

  The silence in Alvar’s car stank of discomfort and loneliness, and Norma didn’t know where to start even though she had already thought through all her questions. She could hear noises from the SUV parked next to them, which came from a family of four enjoying their Happy Meals. A golden retriever claimed its portion of the children’s food. The meeting spot had been Norma’s suggestion. She had wanted to meet in a public place without extra people listening in, but she already regretted her choice. The children in the SUV were focused on the toys that had come with their meals. The girl’s figurine looked like a golden-haired princess, and the girl herself like a future Saint Lucy’s Day procession leader.

  “Was it ever like that for you?” Alvar asked, nodding at the family.

  “No.”

  “We didn’t have a car. Helena didn’t like buses, so we walked regardless of the weather. She threw the radio away. The television started to talk, so it had to go, too. Lambert was mad when he came to visit and saw both were missing. I told him they were stolen and got a beating. You wanted to hear about Helena, right? People don’t usually know how to talk about her. Or they find the topic uncomfortable. Didn’t Anita tell you?”

  “No, never.”

  “When I was a kid, I thought I’d be able to control Helena’s voices. I hoped so, anyway. It didn’t go that way, though, ever. I was always someone different to her. If I was Juhani, she liked me. If I was Jackson, it was best to disappear. But if I was Alma, she wanted to know what the news was from Tampere and whether people still hated the Reds. Sometimes I was Juhani, and Alma was there with us, and we discussed the Civil War, which was educational at least. Sometimes she had an amazing accent. She could have been a great actress, a better actress than a singer. Anita blamed Lambert when Helena stopped singing, but she was wrong. Helena’s symptoms had already started in Sweden. Once Helena thought the water at a venue was poisoned with henbane and that the microphone was reproducing someone else’s voice. Lambert had no way of knowing what would happen onstage.”