Death Spiral
Page 32
Then the burning went away again, but the pressure between my legs grew. Exhausted, I smiled at the midwife, who smiled back, and I asked for a glass of water. I managed to take one gulp before the pain started again and the pressure pulled me apart. This continued for about ten minutes, and I panted and screamed and pushed with all my might whenever another contraction came.
“Just a little more . . . you can see the head already,” the midwife said, lifting the mirror to a slightly better angle. There was the delicate head between my own coarse pubic hairs, my child’s head appearing from inside of me like a nut coming out of its shell. Gently I touched it, and when the pain came again, I growled as women have always done, growling like animals pushing their cubs out of themselves. That was the same way I gave birth to my child.
When I took her in my arms, I saw that she was a girl, a beautiful person covered in blood and vernix, who looked at us silently with wide eyes. I heard Antti weeping, but I didn’t cry, I just babbled gentle nonsense words to tell our daughter how welcome she was with us. The baby replied in her own language, making silly little sounds. Then I pressed her little fishy body against my own sweating chest so she could hear the beating of my heart and know that she was safe.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2011 Tomas Whitehouse
Leena Lehtolainen was born in Vesanto, Finland, to parents who taught language and literature. As a child, she made up stories in her head before she could even write. At the age of ten, she wrote her first book, a young adult novel, which was published two years later. Besides writing, Leena is fond of classical singing, her beloved cats, and—her greatest passion—figure skating. She attends many competitions as a skating journalist and writes for a Finnish figure-skating magazine, Taitoluistelu. Death Spiral is the fifth installment in the bestselling Maria Kallio series, which debuted in English in 2012 with My First Murder and continued with Her Enemy, Copper Heart, and Snow Woman. She is also the author of the romantic suspense Bodyguard trilogy. Leena lives in Finland with her husband and two sons.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © 2012 Pekka Piri
Owen F. Witesman is a professional literary translator with a master’s in Finnish and Estonian area studies from Indiana University. He has translated more than thirty Finnish books into English, including novels, children’s books, poetry, plays, graphic novels, and nonfiction. His recent translations include the novels My First Murder, Her Enemy, Copper Heart, and Snow Woman from the Maria Kallio series by Leena Lehtolainen, the novels in the Snow White Trilogy by Salla Simukka, the satire The Human Part by Kari Hotakainen, the thrillers Cold Courage and Black Noise by Pekka Hiltunen, Risto Isomäki’s ecothriller Lithium-6, and the 1884 classic The Railroad by Juhani Aho. He currently resides in Springville, Utah, with his wife and three daughters, two dogs, a cat, and twenty-nine fruit trees.