Norma
“Who was my mother? One of the voices?”
“No, Anita was always Anita. Helena remembered her, even though she hasn’t recognized me in ages. Well, she recognizes me, but not as me. To her, I don’t exist. To her, I’m whatever she imagines I am, and I play along. Before, that was the only way to keep her calm and get food. When I reminded her of Alma when she was starving, she would buy milk, lemons, sugar, and bread and complain that the store didn’t have any lard. We stored our food on the windowsill instead of in the refrigerator. My first memories are from a bright summer night. Seagulls were screeching, the apartment was full of flies, and there were boxes of strawberries that had started to mold sitting in front of the window. The summer was hot, and I was sleeping under the open window. Luckily. Helena thought Dr. Jackson was sleeping in my bed. She stabbed my pillow and mattress. With a bread knife.”
Norma blinked. The new lashes felt like heavy windshield wipers, and she squeezed her eyes shut after realizing that Alvar had shoved his arm in front of her. She guessed what she would see before Alvar rolled up his sleeve. No more questions were necessary. Alvar had grown up surrounded by madness. He lacked any fear of the things other people feared, and Norma’s nose had interpreted that as danger.
“Anything else?” Alvar asked.
“Did my mother ever act the way Helena did?”
Alvar rolled down his sleeve. “Why do you ask?”
“For the last six months…”
“You think Helena stabbed Marion’s fiancé and threw their baby off a balcony because voices told her to? And you want to know whether Anita jumped onto the tracks for the same reason?”
Norma waited.
Alvar turned to shake ash onto the asphalt. “Helena was so quick, there was nothing anyone could do. Marion had given her the baby, and at first Helena rocked it as usual. Did I notice anything strange? No, Helena was always strange. Could I have prevented it? No. Or, well, maybe. I could have stopped Lambert from coming inside. He was visiting Finland and gave Marion’s family a ride to Laajasalo. Would that have changed anything? Should I have read the signs better? Maybe. If I had been more discerning, would Marion still have a family now? Probably. Should we all have watched Helena more closely? Yes. Yes, we’re all guilty, but so what? Maybe she would have killed someone else. Or herself. Or maybe it’s Anita who’s to blame. Why didn’t she intervene? She was an adult. Maybe she killed herself because she couldn’t bear the guilt anymore. What would you say to that? Maybe she didn’t like how Marion and I turned out. Maybe she saw us as monsters of her own creation. Would she be alive if Marion had a house and a husband and spent her days driving kids to ballet and hockey practices? If I—”
“Stop it.”
“You’re wasting your time thinking about all this. It won’t change anything. Do you want some coffee?”
Without waiting for a response, Alvar stood up and walked toward the McDonald’s. Norma pressed her hands to her nose. She had been on the verge of saying that she would give up the Ukrainians’ contact information, that she would give everything, anything, just so long as Alvar told her that killing herself was a logical thing for her mother to do. Or that it had happened during a moment of clarity when her mother had understood the severity of her condition and wanted to interrupt the cycle of madness before she ended up like Helena. Norma wanted to hear that her mother was just disturbed. The crisis hotline cards in her handbag were probably for moments of desperation like this. Following the accident, she regarded them with derision, but now she wasn’t laughing. Of all those business cards, she had chosen Alvar’s, even though she knew she shouldn’t let him know about her weaknesses and the strange manifestations of her mother’s broken mind. Alvar was the last person she wanted to see her cry.
Norma opened the glove compartment to look for a tissue. What she found was a brush. Two women had used it, both of them Vietnamese, both pregnant, both young. Alvar’s lovers? No, Norma would have smelled them on his clothes.
Alvar stepped out of the fast-food restaurant. Norma shoved the brush back into the glove compartment and felt around inside. Nothing. She pushed her fingers into the side pockets and between the seat cushions. A hairpin. She tucked it away just as Alvar opened the car door and handed her a coffee.
“Was my mother going crazy?”
“Would you feel better if you heard that Anita was so screwed up, she wanted to die? Do you think that will take away the pain?” Alvar asked.
“Does it?”
“No.”
Taking her chin, Alvar turned Norma’s head. He wasn’t lying. Norma was sure of that. Her senses had failed her before, but this time she was sure.
“Your mother was not crazy. Your mother was not Helena, and your mother was not going senile like your grandmother. Your mother was mixed up with unpleasant people. That’s why she jumped onto the tracks. Of her own free will. I’m sure she thought she was protecting you, even if she ended up leaving the whole mess on your shoulders.”
—
Norma remained standing in the parking lot after Alvar left for another meeting. She took out of her pocket the hairpin she’d found in the car. It too had belonged to a young woman whose hair blossomed with expectation. Maybe a Russian. Her stress level was abnormally high. Something was wrong, but what? Twins? Triplets? Quintuplets? Surely not.
A knock came at her mother’s door. Norma froze, her hand fumbling for a can of tuna fish on the top shelf in the kitchen, and the stool under her wobbled. The knocking came again. She set the can on the counter and went to the entryway. She couldn’t see anything through the peephole, and the stairwell was dark. When she put her ear to the door and listened to the breathing of the person on the other side, her hair started curling.
Quickly swinging the door open, Norma caught a glimpse of eyes shining in the dark and a flash of a strange woman, before she bounded down the stairs, and succeeded in catching hold of the woman’s shirt. The woman grabbed her hair and tumbled them both onto the landing. For a second, pain clouded her vision, but Norma didn’t release her grip. Thirty years old, a few children, pasta, rye bread and Edam, healthy living, the smell of a hospital.
“Where is Anita?” the woman panted.
“That depends who’s asking.”
“None of your business.”
“Now it is.”
Teeth sank into Norma’s arm, and the woman got away, only to trip on Norma’s loose ponytail, which wrapped around the woman’s ankles and held her in place until Norma could sit on her chest. Upstairs someone opened a door. The woman clearly didn’t want to attract attention, so she kept quiet and held her breath.
“I’m handling Anita’s business now,” Norma whispered.
“So give me more money.”
“Why should I help you?”
“Kristian is dead. They’re coming for me next. Where is Anita?”
“On her way home. How about we go inside and talk while we wait for her?”
—
Under different circumstances, the woman sitting on Norma’s mother’s couch could have been anyone: middle class, normal height, average income. But the blood in her veins seemed to have jelled. She shuddered, and her voice swelled with sorrow and fear. Still, she was a real person, not a phantom channeled by an addled mind like the ones on the videos, and therefore Norma had to find out what she knew. The woman looked at her with suspicion and refused to say anything other than that Norma’s mother had promised to help if any problems arose. She was a nurse, and she needed a job. She was just as good as her husband Kristian, if not better, and she was willing to travel anywhere.
“A nurse?”
“Specialized. I’ve been at Felicitas for more than ten years. Anita should know that.”
Norma pretended to know what the woman was talking about, although the name Felicitas meant nothing to her. As she waited for the water to boil for tea, she glanced at the Felicitas website on her phone. It was a fertility clinic.
“Kristian told
Anita everything she wanted to know, and now this is the price he paid. When will Anita get back? Don’t they know what happened to Kristian? Why are you handling things for Anita now?”
“So you want a job?” Norma asked.
“Felicitas has the best rate of positives, and I’ve done work for Lambert’s clinics before, too. I also have experience with multiples. I’m highly qualified, and I love my work. Anita knows how good I am.”
“She may still want something more.”
“I have these.”
The woman waved a stack of papers in her hand.
“Kristian was always lax with client lists, but I’m not. I already did some weeding. And this. You’ll want this.”
The woman brought up a picture and showed her phone screen.
“Kristian was supposed to bring Anita video, but we haven’t heard from her.”
The screen showed a room, a screen, rusty hospital beds, and an IV bottle. Paint peeled from the wall, and a bowl of something red sat on the nightstand, perhaps tomato salad or peppers. Three girls, all of them pregnant. One of the girls wailed and held her belly. The other two stared indifferently at the whimpering girl, spreading butter on white bread and sprinkling some sort of spice on it. In the corner of the picture was a worn plastic bag with Cyrillic lettering. Norma didn’t recognize the language. A blond woman dressed in a tight-fitting white suit looked on in boredom and lit a cigarette. A man with dark hair standing next to her ran to the girl who was in pain. Mouths moved, but no words were audible.
“One of the girls went into labor just as I showed up. Without me, she would have lost the babies. Twins. The situation was confused, and they forgot to check me. They’re so careful nowadays.”
“Anita didn’t say what your duties were.”
“Didn’t she?” the woman said. “I’m the surrogate coordinator for the agency. We were supposed to be there picking two new girls. We never use anyone we haven’t examined ourselves. All these hospitals will definitely start working with your boss once you get rid of Lambert. Girls are so cheap in Romania and Bulgaria. The only payment they want is a passport, a set of papers to get out of the country. Lambert’s clinics are decent. We take good care of the girls, and they’re happy to come to us.”
The woman’s voice was defensive, as if she were trying to make a case for the respectability of her actions. Because Norma didn’t come across as a professional. The woman was reacting instinctively to that, but soon the realization would dawn on her and the ruse would be up. As she set the tea out on the table, Norma looked around trying to provide a distraction. Her mother stocked her house with all kinds of food for her perpetually hungry daughter. The upper shelves in the kitchen were full of seeds and tuna fish, and on the bookshelf was a dusty bowl of nuts. Norma grabbed it, offered it, and took a few walnuts herself.
The woman didn’t take the bowl. Casting Norma a stern look, she stopped the video. “Wait, you’ve never seen something like this before. What line of work are you really in?” She slipped the phone into her pocket. Her movements were slow, and she lifted her teacup with exaggerated calmness. “Do you work for Lambert?” she asked. “Where is Anita?”
Norma barely managed to dodge the hot water. As she ran to the door, the woman overturned a table with a potted fern. Slipping on the broken pieces, Norma shouted after her, “How did it happen? How did Kristian die? Was it a suicide? Did it look like a suicide? Did Anita pay in cash?”
But the woman was gone.
Norma went back inside, pushed the pot shards and clumps of dirt and fern into a corner, and opened a can of tuna fish. Now she understood. These people owned baby factories, and her mother had wanted to buy a child either for herself or for Norma, maybe using a surrogate. Or maybe she had just wanted an egg. And she really couldn’t have found anyone else? Were these the only people who didn’t ask any questions? In Finland surrogacy was illegal, and doctors would want to know why a fertile woman wanted to use someone else’s eggs. Unless her mother wanted twins, triplets, or God only knows. Norma remembered the hairs she found in Alvar’s car. Her mother might have been afraid of all the tests, since her smoking would have shown up in her blood or urine. Or maybe she was thinking of Norma, not herself. Either way, she had hankered so blindly for a child that she was willing to risk getting involved with criminals. In a state of madness, this might have seemed like logical behavior. That was why her mother had told her on the video how Eva got her two healthy children. All it took was money and lies. She had wanted to remind Norma that those were the only options for people like them.
When Norma returned from picking up lunch, a German shepherd sat on the steps of the salon. It caught her scent from a distance, of course, and when her steps slowed, it watched her all the more closely. Alvar came to open the door before she could go around back, and she had to stop to let the dog sniff her ankle thoroughly before she went inside.
She felt the dog’s wet nose on her skin, and Alvar’s watchful gaze bothered her, even though she didn’t realize at first what was wrong. The dizziness grew worse. First she registered her hair. Her hair on a strange woman’s head, the woman whose locks Marion was currently blow-drying. Then Norma recognized the woman, and saliva filled her mouth. She dropped the takeout containers. Unable to remain in the salon, she pushed Alvar out of the way, running outside and across the street, ignoring the honking horns and screeching brakes. She stumbled down the stairs into the park and rushed to the trees. The woman was the same one as on Kristian’s wife’s phone, the same blond in the white suit, and that woman had Norma’s hair.
After her retching subsided, Norma sat down in the shade where the grass was still cool. Fumbling for the scopolamine patches in her pocket, she slapped them behind her ears under her turban. She heard dog paws on the gravel, and soon Alvar shoved a water bottle into her hand.
“Heat doesn’t always agree with me,” Norma said. “Who is that blonde?”
“Alla. Lambert’s wife. What about her?”
Norma’s field of vision began to return as the fog faded from the edges. She realized she had spoken too hastily. It was a mistake to ask anything about the woman. She could still smell the scent of her hair mixed with the woman’s own, with her scalp oils, last night’s champagne, and a low-carb diet. Her hair on the woman’s head was dead. It didn’t recognize her. It was fused with the woman’s life, and despite her higher-than-average stress level, the woman smelled as if she were in love. Lambert and the woman were happy. They walked the world hand in hand spreading joy to some couples and sorrow to others. Storks to the right, scythes to the left. Still, Norma didn’t understand what her mother had needed with a video of Alla examining possible surrogates. Why hadn’t her mother just bought a child? Why had she been prepared to pay Kristian for that footage?
Alvar snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Should I call for help?”
Norma opened her eyes. “Did she come to demand money?”
“She came to have her hair styled. Are you having problems with the people you’re getting the hair from? Did someone show you Alla’s picture?”
“No.”
“What about mine? Or Marion’s? Or Lambert’s?”
“Why would someone do that?”
“You recognized Alla, and now you’re denying it.”
“I must have run into her on the street.”
“Do you vomit every time that happens?”
Norma discovered she was scratching the dog, to keep her hands occupied. Though she was always suspicious of animals: they sensed she was different from other people and spent more time sniffing and investigating her.
“Who was Anita working with, and who was her boss?”
“Marion was her only boss.”
“I don’t know what kind of game you think you’re playing, but you’re about to run out of time. Right now Alla is calculating your value just as Anita’s boss is, and if you think you should be more afraid of whoever that is than the blonde sitting in that sa
lon, you’re wrong.”
Alvar stood up to leave and ordered the dog to follow. “Call me.”
Norma couldn’t return to Shear Magic, not now. She would go home and continue with the videos. There must be some logic to them. She had wanted to reconstruct her mother’s final moments in order to understand what happened to her, and now that also meant finding the common thread through her mother’s incoherence.
The meeting invitation came as a complete surprise. The message was terse, just the sort that might indicate a desire to make a deal: the girl wanted to talk, preferably immediately. When Marion arrived at the Playful Pike, Norma was already sitting and waiting. The envelope resting on the table increased Marion’s optimism.
“What did my mother talk about during her last few days?” Norma asked.
“About our future business. She was excited,” Marion replied. “It was our dream.”
“So why did she jump in front of a metro train?”
Marion couldn’t catch Norma’s eye, but still she was sure this would be the moment. To cover the sound of the tree frogs, she jingled the ice cubes in her glass of water, lifted one out, and squeezing it in her hand, decided to forge ahead.
“Lambert learned about our plan and wanted to get rid of Anita. He wouldn’t have approved of us leaving, let alone that our new salon would have exclusive rights to the Ukrainian hair, as Anita was planning.”