Finna

by Nino Cipri

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  For my grandmothers. I miss you.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The bus abandoned Ava on the outskirts of LitenVärld’s vast parking lot, nearly three-quarters of a mile from the doors. The box store stuck out like a giant square pimple on the landscape, which had been scraped into gently undulating drifts of snow by February’s wind. Ava marched grimly toward the exterior, painted a cheery sky-blue and sunflower-yellow. The parking lot was mostly empty; it was a Tuesday and the weather was shit. Who would want to go shopping today?

  “Fucking Derek,” she muttered into the wind, cursing the coworker who’d called in sick. If the world were even the slightest bit fair, she’d be home in bed, alternating Netflix binges with long intermissions to listen to Florence and the Machine and actively feel like shit. That’s what she wanted from her days off: equal time to nourish her heartbreak and distract from it. That’s all she’d been doing since she broke up with Jules, three days before.

  LitenVärld was the bastard offspring of more popular big box stores, hanging in the margins between home goods giants and minimalist furniture mavens. It compromised between clean Scandinavian design and bougie Americana by selling furnishings that displayed neither virtue. Instead of sections, the store ushered shoppers through an upsetting and uncoordinated procession of themed showrooms, which bounced from baroque to postmodern design. The showrooms sat next to each other uneasily, like habitats in a hyper-condensed zoo. Here was the habitat for the Pan-Asian Appropriating White Yoga Instructor, complete with tatami mats and a statue of Shiva; next to it huddled the Edgelord Rockabilly Dorm Room, with black leather futon and Quentin Tarantino posters.

  Ava made her way to Her Majesty’s Romper Room, a princess-themed play area, which had a doorway to the break room and time clock. It gave Ava a headache if she paid too much attention as she walked through the store, even using the shortcuts only staff knew about. The best she could do was to shut off her peripheral vision and focus only on her goal.

  Maybe Jules won’t show up today, Ava thought as she squeezed past the gaudy miniature throne. Ava had told Jules that she needed space, and had changed her schedule so that she wouldn’t have to see them at work. Jules had listened grimly, then shrugged and said, “I’m not going to fight over territory I don’t want to be in anyway. I hate that place.”

  Ava wasn’t quite willing to hope that they’d gotten fired, but a generalized wish that Jules wouldn’t be at the store? That felt okay. They were already on their last excused absence for the quarter; maybe they’d just quit.

  Ava clung to that thought—that Jules might not be at LitenVärld today—hating that it brought her so much comfort. She clocked in, dumped her stuff in her locker, and got ready to go out onto the floor. She would have had to come back here anyway on Tuesday. She could do this.

  As she turned the corner out of the break room, Ava collided with her ex.

  “Crap, sorry,” Jules said, sounding distracted. Then Jules caught sight of who they were talking to, and froze. “Ava? What are you doing here?”

  Jules had brought the cold in with them, ice clinging to their jacket and the thin ends of their twists, melted snow coursing down their brown skin. They smelled like wet wool and Old Spice, which had always been improbably attractive. Ava backed out of the danger zone, back into the smell of stale coffee and ancient crusts of food splatter from the microwave that emanated from all break rooms.

  “I got called in,” Ava said. “Fucking Derek is sick.”

  Jules looked panicked. Ava felt bad for them; she’d been prepared for this to happen, and they hadn’t.

  “It’s just for today,” she added.

  “Okay,” Jules said. They were visibly pulling themself back together. “I’m just gonna—”

  The two of them did that annoying dance forced on any two people who wanted to get past each other in a narrow space. Finally, Ava backed all the way against the wall, waving Jules past her.

  “Look, just go,” she snapped.

  Jules opened their mouth to snap back, then shut it and moved past her. As they did, Ava caught sight of the scarf around Jules’s neck; light green dotted with blue, brown, and gray, crocheted with thick yarn. She’d made it for Jules for Christmas. In retrospect, the project had sprung from a desperate hope that the two of them might come together again, stitch fragile connections over the yawning holes opening up between them.

  “Is that … ?” she asked, gesturing.

  Jules looked puzzled, then glanced down with a tense grimace. Jules’s emotions were always written clear on their face, and they looked like they’d found a snake wrapped around their neck.

  “Never mind,” Ava said, and fled down the hallway, onto the shop floor.

  * * *

  Ava volunteered for shifts at the customer service desk with Tricia, their manager, to keep far away from Jules in stocking and assembly. Heartache felt like a persistent hangover: lethargy, a headache, an unshakeable belief in the cruelty of the world, drifting outside of time. It was hard to keep up the bullshit facade of industriousness when she felt entirely dead inside. The minutes dragged by as Ava attempted to look busy while Tricia hovered behind her.

  A young woman with olive skin and thick, black-brown hair approached the desk, and Ava turned toward her desperately. “Good morning,” she said, trying to inject some cheerfulness into her voice—mostly for Tricia’s benefit. Ava thought she sounded strangled.

  “Hi,” the woman said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I think I lost my grandmother.”

  “Lost her?” asked Ava.

  “She was right behind me in the showrooms? I turned around to get her opinion, and she was gone. I’ve been looking for her for ten minutes and …” She trailed off, shrugging helplessly. Ava turned to find Tricia, then flinched back when she saw the manager already looming behind her. She hadn’t even heard Tricia approach.

  “I’m so sorry to hear that,” Tricia said gravely. She had donned one of her Managerial Faces that Jules had reportedly seen her practicing alone in her office: Calm And In Charge. She tilted her head, the blond highlights in her midwestern manager-class haircut catching the light. “Let me make an announcement over the PA system. What’s her name?”

  “Ursula,” the young woman replied. “Ursula Nouri.”

  Tricia nodded, her face serious as she picked up the phone and pressed a button. Her voice came squawking out of the overhead speakers. “Good morning, shoppers. Would Ursula Nouri please meet her party at the customer service desk? Ursula Nouri to the customer service desk, please.”

  Ava tried to smile reassuringly at the young woman. Tricia treated everything with the gravity usually reserved for state funerals and hostage negotiations.

  Tricia set the phone back down in the cradle. “Can you tell me what your grandmother was wearing?”

  The girl nodded. “She had on a red coat and some purple fleece gloves. Oh, and a leather purse. I’ve got a picture of her, if that helps?”

  Tricia and Ava dutifully looked at the picture the girl pulled up on her phone. Ursula looked like a fairly average grandmoth
er: white hair pulled into a low bun at the back of her neck, a billowy shirt hanging over a plump frame. The picture was obviously a selfie of Ursula and her granddaughter, the two of them smiling identically up at the camera.

  “She seems nice,” Ava ventured.

  “She is. I mean, she’ll tell you when your cleavage is hanging out or your boyfriend is trash, but …” The woman trailed off, staring harder at the small screen. After a moment, more words spilled out: “She doesn’t normally wander off like this? She knows I get really worried about her, because we’re like, the only family we have. It’s this whole, stupid, tragic story that I super don’t want to get into right now, so if you could just …”

  Ava shot a helpless look at Tricia, who thankfully took charge.

  “Ava, go through the showrooms and see if you can find her. I’ll send a couple of other people up there to look with you. Miss, why don’t you wait with me?”

  Ava nodded. As she walked past the young woman, she hesitated. “I’m sure she’s fine,” she said.

  The woman’s face cracked into an uncertain smile. “Thanks.”

  * * *

  The showrooms were eerily empty. The customer service desk was located at the central hub of the store, and even on slow days, it tended to bustle. The rest of the store felt abandoned, besides a few desultory shoppers and a pair of teenagers alternately making out and taking selfies in the Pastel Goth Hideaway. Then again, it was the downseason, a stark contrast to the roiling hell that had been six weeks prior to Christmas. And sure, it was hard to leave the house in February. Ava had suffered enough coming to LitenVärld today, and she was paid to be here. Still, it was odd to see all the fake apartments vacant; it reminded Ava of the haunting feeling of being the last one out of the store. Each showroom was like an empty home, waiting for its ghostly inhabitants to return.

  Or maybe the inhabitants had never left, but were just hiding out, watching the interlopers pass through their abodes.

  “Get it together,” Ava told herself. Could she blame her paranoia and morbid thoughts on the heartache? Or maybe she should blame it on February. The shortest month, and objectively the worst.

  LitenVärld was laid out like a twisting vine, with showrooms branching off a central walkway that wound through the store, curving back on itself before dumping people out into the food court and registers. Ava made her way quietly down the path, peering into the cubes for Ursula Nouri. Each room was alien and strange relative to the one before it. Strung together, they resembled an ugly necklace designed by a child, picking out the most garish beads to thread.

  That familiar sense of disorientation came over Ava, that slight queasiness at seeing all these clashing rooms squeezed together. It mixed with her dread and made her stomach churn. She turned a corner, saw a tall figure in the middle of the Nihilist Bachelor Cube, and let out a shriek before she realized it was Jules.

  “Fuck!” Jules shouted, colliding with modular shelves stacked with Camus and Palahniuk novels. “What the hell! Why are you screaming at me?”

  “Sorry!” Ava said. Her fright was quickly transmuting to irritation, as all her feelings seemed to do when Jules was concerned. “You startled me.”

  “I startled you?” they asked incredulously. “I’m not the one sneaking up behind people and screaming like a Nazgûl. God, I almost pissed myself.”

  They had a fist pressed to their chest, like enough pressure would slow down their pulse.

  “Sorry,” Ava said again, the word sour in her mouth. Seemed like too many of her conversations with Jules had required apologies. “Did Tricia send you to look for the missing grandmother?”

  “I volunteered. A soccer mom enlisted me to help harangue her husband into shelling out money for a new bathroom vanity. She managed to misgender me four times in two minutes,” Jules said. They bent down to pick up the books they’d knocked off the shelf. “Two different pronouns, completely ignored my nametag, eventually settled on calling me ‘the kid.’”

  “Have you seen the old woman?” Ava asked, cutting off Jules’s nervous rambling. “The granddaughter says she disappeared around here.”

  Jules shook their head. “I’ve been through all the rooms back there,” they said, waving their hand the opposite way Ava had come. “Didn’t see anything.”

  “Shit,” Ava said. Where could an old woman escape to in a furniture store? She leaned against a showroom wall to think.

  “I still think this is the most depressing showroom,” Jules said conversationally. “It reeks of misogyny and sadness.”

  The Nihilist Bachelor’s room was one of the smallest show apartments. Tiny kitchenette, a fold-out desk beneath a loft bed, fake exposed brick along the walls. A single brown leather chair in front of a flatscreen TV. Ava thought briefly of Jules’s studio, which wasn’t much bigger, but was infinitely more comfortable. Jules had refused to buy anything except a set of plates from LitenVärld, and had furnished it from estate sales and Goodwill trips instead. Everything at work is part of a set with everything else, they’d explained. I don’t fit into any of those sets.

  Ava realized that they’d been standing and staring at each other. She turned on her heel and said, “Maybe she wandered into housewares.”

  “Am I that awful to be around?” Jules asked. There was something raw in their question; something flushed and bruised, radiating hurt. “You can’t even stand being in the same room as me. I thought you wanted to be friends.”

  Had she said that? Probably. That’s what you were supposed to say when you ended a relationship with someone you couldn’t hate, but didn’t know how to love, either.

  “Please don’t be so dramatic about this,” Ava said, trying to keep her voice cool.

  “Me?” Jules said. “You switched your entire schedule around so you’d never have to see me again. And you’re calling me dramatic?”

  “I think it’s reasonable to want some space!” If it was so reasonable, some distant, detached part of her wondered, why was she so defensive?

  “You’re acting like a stranger, or like I don’t exist, like we never—”

  “So what, you think I’m just overreacting?” Ava spat. It was one of the accusations that had stung her the most. She was emotionally volatile. She made mountains out of molehills. She couldn’t control her feelings. She’d never claimed otherwise, she’d just stopped being able to fake it around Jules.

  Jules opened their mouth to answer, then snapped it shut. “I’m not gonna do this with you in this stupid room,” they said, and turned to go.

  “This is why I changed my schedule,” Ava hissed at their back.

  Jules suddenly stopped, and Ava felt her hackles rise. Was this it? A rehash of the fight, their last fight, which was just the same as every fight?

  “Ava,” they said instead. And there was something in their voice that cut through the fight-or-flight haze: something low, confused, vulnerable. They said her name like they were reaching for a life jacket.

  “What?” she replied. Still on guard, but putting away her guns.

  “Weren’t we in the Bachelor Cube?”

  What kind of question was that? But Jules’s uncertainty infected her. She glanced to the right; Fight Club and The Stranger were still on the bookshelf. “Yeah?” she said. “So?”

  Jules slowly turned around. “Doesn’t it look kind of … big?”

  The Nihilist Bachelor Cube—like its cousins Coked-out Divorcée, Parental Basement Dweller, and Massage Therapist Who Lived in Their Studio—were all two hundred square feet or smaller, with an open floor plan to make each feel less claustrophobic. Jules had stomped into a separate room that shouldn’t have existed, a room Ava hadn’t seen from the walkway. Its design was radically different: bright, colorful, filled with floral prints and fake plants, posters of fantastic places on the wall. It resembled the Midlife Crisis Mom room, but that was on the other side of the store, and had been painted a warm peach color. This one was done in sand and cerulean.

  Past
the edges of the cube, Ava could see a whole other walkway, one that shouldn’t exist. Her gaze traveled up, and she gasped as she saw a seam connecting the two rooms. It was a dark purple, the color of a fresh bruise, and wriggled and squirmed as if it were alive.

  “This is weird, right?” Jules said from the other side of the seam. Their voice was normal. Ava had expected it to be warped by passing through the seam.

  “This is really fucking weird,” agreed Ava. She couldn’t seem to tear her eyes from that writhing border. It took a moment to hear Jules calling her name.

  “What?” she asked.

  They held up a pair of purple fleece gloves. “The old woman was wearing purple gloves, right?”

  “Shit,” Ava sighed. She pulled out the phone on her hip.

  “This is amazing,” Jules said. “It’s a creepy Scandinavian Narnia. I can’t believe we found something like this.”

  “Tricia,” Ava said into the phone, and Jules whipped their head around. “We’ve got a situation up in the showrooms.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Tricia replied, and hung up.

  “Seriously?” Jules said. They sighed with melodramatic disappointment. “We find a wrinkle in time and you tell the manager?”

  “What did you expect me to do?” Ava said. “Will you get out of the … whatever that is? You don’t know what’s in there.” That seam between the rooms twitched unpleasantly, and Ava took a step back.

  “It can’t be much worse than what’s back there,” Jules said, waving vaguely at Ava, LitenVärld, who knew what.

  Jules always wanted to run away. For a long time they’d talked about the two of them leaving together, moving or traveling. The destination changed, but the wanderlust remained the same. The last few weeks, they had more often talked about disappearing on their own. No destination in particular, just … away.

  “Jules,” Ava said urgently, but couldn’t think of anything to follow it with. What could she possibly say to bring them back?

  Jules sighed, looked down at the gloves in their hand, and then trudged over the threshold. “Ursula had the right idea,” they muttered as they passed Ava.