Norma

  “Calm down. Let’s continue,” Alvar said.

  “So what if I did visit the airport? I have to plan my future. I want a new life. A passport, an identity, the freedom to leave.”

  “Disappearing is expensive.”

  “Is it possible?”

  “Of course. What do I get out of it?”

  “Anita’s camera and videos.”

  “Videos?”

  “You’ll want to see these.”

  “And the Ukrainian supplier?”

  Norma shook her head.

  “Lambert won’t agree to that,” said Alvar.

  “I’m not making a deal with Lambert.”

  “I don’t decide things like this myself.”

  “This time you’ll want to, though.”

  “Fine. But only if this footage is valuable enough.”

  “It is.”

  “Then we have a deal.”

  Alvar clinked his glass against Norma’s. Norma took a deep breath. She’d made it this far. She was going to succeed: she would be around for next Midsummer. But in order to be sure of that, she had to have insurance. She moved behind Alvar and pressed her nose to his temple. He flinched.

  “Repeat what we agreed,” Norma said.

  Alvar bit his lower lip.

  “I have a good intuition,” Norma said.

  “Most people would consider this strange.”

  “I’m sure. Does it matter? I want to hear you say it.”

  Alvar’s dog came over to them, but he ordered her to stay. Norma smelled vetiver, she smelled nicotine, tannin, and sulfur, but no lie in any word when Alvar repeated what they had agreed. Norma dropped a key in his hand. Just in case, she had taken her mother’s vacation camera and the videos to attic storage locker number twelve.

  “I’ll send someone. You stay here. Are you hungry?”

  The dog jumped up and came closer when Norma tried to raise her head. Sleep instantly disappeared from her eyes. She never nodded off in strange places—her hair always woke her. The dog recognized her distress and cocked its head. She couldn’t sit up. Her hair had coiled around the rattan legs of the sofa like a drowsy vine.

  “Do you need help?”

  Alvar sat on the porch steps smoking.

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost midnight.”

  Norma felt her hair. She’d cut it in the bathroom a couple of hours ago, and the growth wasn’t noticeable yet. The color of the tips looked strange in the blue light of the mosquito lamp. She hadn’t been found out, just snagged her hair on some rattan, so there was no reason to panic. Only then did Norma remember that Alvar now knew everything. He’d disappeared to inspect her mother’s vacation camera and videos as soon as he got his hands on them, and that was several hours ago. During that time Norma had cut her hair, walked in the yard, and napped. But nothing about Alvar had changed. He looked the same as before, and his pulse was the same when he came over to Norma and asked if she needed scissors. The vetiver smelled precisely the same as it would normally. There was no change in the heat of his scalp. He didn’t smell like a man who had just learned of his sister’s betrayal.

  “Are there phones or anything else in your suitcase I should know about?” asked Alvar, as he handed the scissors to Norma.

  “What?”

  “Do you use any phones other than that one on the table.”

  “Does that question mean that our agreement is still in force?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  —

  Norma began extracting her hair from the rattan, cut out a bee stuck in it, and pushed it away. Alvar’s imperturbability was incomprehensible. He had just watched his mother’s peculiar monologues in the garden at her insane asylum. Surely that had to affect him in some way.

  “I’m sorry that Anita taped Helena,” Norma said.

  “Helena wouldn’t care.”

  “That’s exactly why she shouldn’t have done it.”

  Alvar sat in the facing chair and bent down to scratch the dog. “Make a list of the clothes you need. A new suitcase is waiting in the entryway. You’re disappearing today.”

  Alvar took Norma’s phone and gave her a burner instead.

  “I’ll call this when everything is ready. You’ll get a ride to Vuosaari. There’s a studio apartment there where you can be alone. If you need something, send a message to the number on this phone. Don’t go out, don’t open the door to anyone, don’t contact anyone. The rest depends on you. I’ll bring you a passport and credit and debit cards. There will be some money in the account.”

  “I don’t want money.”

  “Do you understand?” Alvar seized her by the jaw. His hand was warm, his skin dry. “You’re never going home again.”

  —

  The first time Alvar made this move, Norma had been sitting in the backyard of the salon. Her eyes had been wandering, looking anywhere but at him. The asphalt at her feet had seemed to boil, and she’d feared she could sense Helena’s madness in him. This time she heard her breathing and the beating of her heart and the tiny birds and the waves of the sea, and her gaze did not so much as stir. Alvar’s grip slackened, and at the same moment the thought flickered in Norma’s mind that she would always remember how that vetiver smelled on Alvar’s skin. She would probably fall for a man someday who reminded her of it.

  “Who will miss you?”

  “No one.”

  Alvar released her and opened another bottle of wine. The cork popped, and wine gurgled into the glass. Norma felt like smoking, to banish the echo of her last thought, but she didn’t dare take out the cigarettes she’d rolled. She wouldn’t rewrap the turban that had fallen to the floor either, even though being in Alvar’s presence with her hair down agitated her.

  “There’s always someone,” he said. “Say you’re going away on a surprise trip, everything that’s happened this year has taken its toll, and you don’t know when you’re coming back. Or I can write the message for you now.”

  “Is it so strange there isn’t anyone?”

  “Yes. What should we write? To whom? To everyone in your contact list?”

  “No one will wonder—”

  Alvar had come to sit next to Norma. The phone display shone like a moon in the dimness. The chemicals of the mosquito candle caused a slight dizziness, but that was all. Her senses worked normally, and Norma noticed that her hair was attracted to Alvar, coiling toward his hand as if to comfort him. She sensed his sadness. That had to be because of Marion. No rage, no anger, just sadness. Alvar had lost his sister.

  Alvar showed Norma the message he had written: “Happy Midsummer! Tomorrow this girl is headed to Asia for a break. See you in a couple of months!”

  “Does that sound enough like you?”

  Norma nodded, and the message whooshed away to everyone except Marion. She remembered her mother’s final message. Maybe her mother hadn’t sent it at all. Maybe someone else had written it. Someone who had thought a daughter might wonder if she didn’t hear anything from a mother after a trip.

  “Questions?”

  This was her last chance to ask how her mother had been found out, but Norma didn’t ask, not about her mother, not about the girls in the pictures on the camera, and not about what would happen to Marion. She didn’t want to know. She already knew too much.

  Alvar’s phone began to buzz. Marion’s name flashed in green in the middle of the table.

  “You could have gone to Marion and worked with her,” Alvar said. “She would have taken you on as her partner in her new business.”

  “Marion already failed once.”

  “Guess how many of our doctors have been arrested at some point? Every one of them is still working as a doctor. Marion’s plan was doomed from the start. Men like Lambert never get caught, even when others do. The Lamberts of the world carry on.”

  Norma’s phone began to ring. Margit. Alvar turned off the phone. It was time.

  Marion scanned the men walking ar
ound Lambert’s property and took a more comfortable position in her lawn chair—the mongrels didn’t seem to be paying her any notice. When Lambert and Alla took Ljuba to the doctor after she suddenly fainted, Marion had been left to look after the children playing on the lawn. If the clan suspected her, this could have been part of a plot to ensure Marion was kept under watchful eyes, but Ljuba wasn’t that good an actor. Marion watched the progress of Midsummer as if it were a long-awaited play. She was no longer disappointed that her brother hadn’t answered her calls and that everyone was lying to her. She would witness the last gasp of Alla and Lambert’s dream life—the final family dinner and the final hugs they exchanged, the final games in the yard with the rug rats—and if all went well, she would hear the final conversations about how Lambert would soon be the king of an embryo empire.

  This time Lambert wouldn’t have the chance to empty his safe or erase his computers, or Alla to pack the children’s things. Marion wouldn’t see Alla’s expression when the police came. She would be able to imagine it, though. After Anita was caught, Marion had rushed to the Lamberts to get clarity on what had happened, and Alla, the one she found at home, had been a sight worth seeing. Waves of mascara collected in the wrinkles around her eyes, rouge striped her cheeks, and her voice sounded like a trapped wild animal. One of the suitcases was already full of children’s clothing; Minigrip bags stuffed with dollars and passports lay on top of them. The snap of a fingernail as it hit the side of a suitcase was that of a lion, her hair streamed like a mane, and Marion thought that if Helena had been more like Alla, Marion and Alvar’s lives would have taken a different direction. Or if Marion had been like Alla herself, her maternal instincts would have told her that Helena’s relationship with small children wasn’t healthy. Alla would have remembered the time when Helena tried to take someone’s kid straight out of a stroller at the train station. Alla never would have given her baby to Helena, and if Helena took the child anyway, Alla would have been on her before she could get to the balcony. Marion, on the other hand, had stood like a statue. But all that was in the past now. She had learned to fight.

  Ljuba was the only one who gave her pause. Ljuba would have to return to St. Petersburg and give birth to a baby that would probably be sent to an orphanage for someone to buy. But Alla wouldn’t get any money from it, and no new embryos would be implanted in Ljuba from parents Alla had already chosen for her. That would be only a detour, though, as some other clinic was sure to take her in. Ljuba was young and healthy—she would get her happy ending and go to America.

  Marion took out her phone and started to browse flights leaving Frankfurt. Everything needed to go normally until Tuesday. Mail wasn’t delivered on the weekend, so she couldn’t send the envelopes until Monday. On Tuesday they would arrive, and then she would already be on her way.

  She awoke to chirping. A little bird, a delicate sound. Just outside the window, perhaps on the eaves. The chirping was the color of the rising sun, but afternoon light streamed in. Norma’s eyes fluttered open. She had fallen asleep again. The ceiling was unfamiliar, as were the sheets, and her skin against the sheets was bare. She felt a crackle all the way down to her lower back when she tried to lift her head, and understood that she was finished. The end of the world had come—it had Alvar’s eyes. Alvar’s elbow rested on the nightstand. He looked at Norma as if seeing her for the first time.

  “You should leave,” he said. “I tried to wake you earlier.”

  His voice sounded distant. Norma’s ears were clogged, as was her nose, and the hair rippling across the floor rose in garlands up the feet of the chest of drawers, sprouting from the foot of the bed, and undulating around her like sea oak. It hadn’t raised any alarms, not even yesterday, when she’d thought that she would never see Alvar again, that in a couple of weeks she would already be far away, in a new life as a new person, so why not, just this once? Alvar’s hands on her neck had felt like a caress, his kiss had slid deep into her heart, and her hair had squeezed and pushed and tangled around his arms, even though it should have known what would happen. And now it knew, now it knew what level these people operated on. It knew that rhinoceros horn cost one hundred thousand euros per kilo, elephant tusk only a thousand, and no dodo birds were left at all. Impotence pills, a cure for HIV. They knew a million ways to use mystical hair, countless ways to use the woman who bore it. She couldn’t understand what had happened.

  “You could have warned me,” Alvar said.

  “This is the first time.”

  “The first?”

  “No, I mean, it grows, but not like this. Not this way. Not ever.”

  Alvar took the scissors from the table.

  “They will never stop chasing you, my little Ukrainian.”

  —

  The drawing room downstairs was in a shambles. Norma leaned on the doorjamb and stared at the destruction. The glass of the desk clock was broken, and the iron umbrella stand was knocked over, as were the flower table, the snake plant, and the billbergia. Soil and pottery fragments were strewn across the floor. Bundles of hair lay coiled on the couch, but they had a strange tint, an amorous red. Next to them were a pair of scissors. Alvar had cut her hair, and it hadn’t resisted. It hadn’t attacked him or played difficult. It hadn’t woken Norma, and she didn’t know whether this was because of Alvar, the smoking, or both. Eva could have warned her, or at least hinted.

  “You probably don’t remember.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Norma tugged Alvar’s bathrobe tighter around her as her skin rose in goose bumps. She was dizzy and still waiting for her hair to begin to hiss, to understand that the nightmare had begun. But nothing happened. The hair purred next to Alvar, against his stray dog’s ribs, rocking her toward him, pulling her head into his arms, and she heard his heartbeat, felt his slightly higher body temperature, his elevated cortisol level, more adrenaline than normal, but nothing else. Norma was unable to feel fear. Maybe that was a result of Alvar’s skill in calming unbalanced women. Alvar’s approach to overcoming obstacles and surprises was something dazzling. No one had ever had this effect on Norma. She didn’t dare ask what had happened or how.

  She stood on her toes and pressed her nose against Alvar’s hairline. “It tells me things.”

  “Your nose?”

  “Your hair. My nose is sensitive to hair.”

  “Do I pass the test?”

  “Either that or you’re a good actor,” Norma said. “You should be afraid or shocked. That would be normal. Psychopaths, narcissists, and professional actors react in a different way from other people. But you aren’t any of those.”

  “At first I thought you’d died. Then I thought I was going crazy. Does that help?”

  “A little.”

  “Marion has the same thing. All children of insane parents do. We look for signs and constantly doubt our own minds. No one can live that way, which is why I decided to stop doing it.”

  “How?”

  “Through will and logic.”

  Alvar had thought he was hallucinating when Norma’s hair continued growing after she fainted on the rug. Then he forced himself to figure out what was going on. He had samples of old raw bundles, and they matched Norma’s hair. Now all the oddities of the Ukrainian hair Anita supplied made sense.

  “And besides, Anita talked about your hair.”

  “When?”

  “When she got caught. She was so confused, though, that no one believed her. Not even Lambert. They thought it was the rambling of an addled mind.”

  Norma sat on the stairs to wait for the panic to set in. Her hair should stop pushing and purring. It should react to Alvar’s words even if Norma couldn’t find the lie in them.

  “Lambert snatched Anita at the airport,” Alvar continued. “She’d just returned to Finland, and they gave her a truth serum. Which isn’t dangerous.”

  “Is that some sort of defense? My mother always protected you. She thought about you every day—she thought she was respo
nsible for what happened to you. And you let her die!”

  “She jumped onto the tracks herself. She ran away and jumped.”

  “And you couldn’t do anything to stop her?”

  “No. That wasn’t within my power.”

  “You could have let her go.”

  “Anita wanted to put me behind bars.”

  Now should finally be the time for rage. Norma grabbed the railing and waited.

  Nothing happened.

  The car would come in an hour, and Norma’s new suitcase waited on the threshold, a new dress and new shoes in the bathroom. She restrained her desire to grab the raw beef she had glimpsed in the refrigerator, but she took a risk and pulled a cigarette out of her tobacco case to clear her head. She would never see Alvar again. She’d known that yesterday. She’d known it as she undressed, she knew it now, and that knowledge became unbearable even though it was unavoidable. If Alvar wasn’t already thinking of ways to profit from her hair, it was an inexplicable moment of weakness, and he was sure to recover. Norma had to leave primarily because of Lambert, but now also because of Alvar.

  “If you need something to help you sleep, text me,” Alvar said. “Don’t go looking for anything yourself. Do you promise to stay in the apartment?”

  “Will you tell Lambert?”

  “I’ll keep to my part of the agreement. Always. But Anita took a big risk when she started selling your hair. Lambert has customers who would pay anything for a child with your genes. Has your DNA been studied? Did all that hair come from you, or are there others?”

  “There aren’t any others. But I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I have to know, my little Ukrainian. You have to help me make you disappear. Listen, Anita chose suicide because she knew Lambert would catch her again and she would talk. She would talk about you, and before long Lambert would have believed.”

  Alvar held Norma’s head. Norma’s nose had cleared, it worked, and now it trusted.