by Jane Toombs
Lucien was in the dining room when she came down at eleven thirty, not seated but she felt she had kept him waiting. He drew out her chair and again they faced each other across the formal expanse of the dining-room table.
An egocentric man, she thought, eying him rather resentfully. He is almost clinical about his wife—about Toivi—and he says “I” and “my” much oftener than “we” or “our.” For the first time she began to feel a faint pity for Toivi, unknown quantity that she was. Maybe she, Janella, could bring some warmth and interest to her aunt.
“Janella…”
She looked at Lucien, fascinated against her will by the amber eyes. He didn’t often trap her with them—was it deliberate?—but when he did she felt almost powerless, mesmerized. She took a ragged breath, unnerved.
“Don’t prejudge.”
She shook her head mindlessly. How could he know, he didn’t know what she’d been thinking. His eyes were gold, the world was all golden….
“Here’s your soup, miss.” The words jarred Janella back to the dining room, and she watched blankly as Ruth Barnes put a soup plate in front of her.
“Thank you,” she managed to say, and stared down at her hands, afraid to move.
If she looked up she might meet his eyes again, be caught in a web of amber. But she didn’t want to leave the table. She couldn’t allow him to know what had happened to her. Or did he know anyway? Was this some weird kind of hypnosis? She’d always heard you could be hypnotized only if you wanted to be, were willing. Was this untrue? It was difficult to believe Lucien had no idea of how she was affected. But why? Why would he do this to her?
“…eating…”
He’d said something. Janella raised her head but kept her eyes averted. “I’m sorry, I guess I was daydreaming.”
“I asked why you weren’t eating. Aren’t you hungry? Or perhaps you don’t care for vegetable soup.”
“Oh, no—I mean, yes, I do like the soup. I—I hadn’t started yet.” Dumb, she sounded so dumb.
“You look younger with your hair down.”
She smiled faintly and nodded. The soup was good, at least it tasted all right in her mouth, but she was having trouble swallowing past the obstruction in her throat. Nerves, just nerves. Relax. He hasn’t harmed you. Maybe you only imagine the feeling of being trapped, maybe it’s something like the whirling off, the spells you have sometimes, maybe it’s all in your head like Helen insisted. Janella remembered the spinning, the falling, the dark place she went to—yesterday, she had a spell yesterday. After almost a year. So perhaps Lucien was merely looking at her and she felt as she did without his intending it. Maybe something was going wrong with her mind.
No. Stop thinking that way. Whatever is wrong, don’t gaze into his eyes again, don’t stare at him. Avoid being caught, whether your fault or his. And you’re not crazy. How could you think logically, reason so clearly, if you were mad?
“I hope you’ll be good for Toivi.” He was frowning now.
“Well…” she picked up a cracker, crumbling it in her fingers while she fumbled with words, “…I hope so, too,” she finally managed.
I say such stupid things, she thought. Then, defensively, she wondered why he had rushed her up here if he wasn’t sure she belonged. She felt color come into her face.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” she demanded, voice taut with annoyance.
“I had trouble deciding if I should contact you at all. Presumably you had made your own life without us, without Toivi.” His soupspoon rested in the half-filled bowl—he wasn’t eating either.
“I thought I would meet you and try to be sure I wasn’t interfering, that you didn’t need me—us. But…” His voice trailed off and she knew he was watching her.
She ducked her head and played with her spoon. “And you found me without a paying job and in need of money. No, you didn’t interfere.” But she wondered again if she would be able to stay in this strange household with a man she half feared.
She saw through her lashes he was getting up and coming around the table toward her, and she folded her arms protectively, turning her face away from him. After a moment she felt his warm fingers along the sides of her jaw, gently forcing her face back toward him. She closed her eyes. There was a breathless second when she thought she felt something brush her lips. She expelled her held breath in a rush and at the same time heard someone take a step behind her. Ruth, she thought, and her eyes flew open. Lucien’s hand dropped from her face and she turned in her chair.
A woman dressed all in white stood behind her. Her dress was long and flowing and she had a white covering like a nun’s coif over her hair, so its color was hidden. She glared at Lucien from haunted dark eyes in a haggard face. She spoke and her voice was a harsh whisper.
“Why have you brought another girl to torment me?”
Chapter Five
Janella was frozen in position—body twisted in the chair, head turned, staring at the woman in white.
“Toivi,” Lucien was saying as though he hadn’t heard the accusing words, “Toivi, this is your niece, Janella. This is Arnold’s girl, your brother’s child.”
The dark eyes turned toward Janella, and as she looked into them all she could think of was Arnie—she was gazing at Arnie’s eyes and seeing the blankness, the nothingness. Her hand came up to her mouth and she fumbled her way to her feet.
“Aunt Toivi?” she said, her voice unsure. “Aunt Toivi?” There was no recognition in her mind, nothing except Arnie’s eyes set into the face of this strange woman in white.
“Huh!” Toivi expelled a rush of pent-up air, and deep within her dark eyes a glow began. No longer dead, they spewed anger, and Janella took a step backward. But Toivi turned again to Lucien.
“Another fraud. She doesn’t know me. When will you stop trying to pawn off these stupid children on me? Do you think I have degenerated so far I will not know my own kin?”
Lucien’s voice was still calm, his face impassive. “I’ve never told you any one of your other companions was Janella Maki, you know that, Toivi.”
She raised a hand as though to strike at him, and the flowing sleeve of the white robe dropped back to reveal a bone-thin arm. “Liar! Perverter of truth! I don’t care what you said—you knew what I thought and you allowed me to believe each of those other girls was my niece. Every time a new girl came you let me think…”
As Janella watched, fascinated, Lucien moved behind Toivi and grasped the emaciated arm, brought it across Toivi’s chest and put his other arm about her shoulders in a gesture not so much affectionate as restraining.
“I tell you this is your blood relative. Don’t be foolish.”
Toivi slumped against Lucien but her head turned and she fixed her eyes on Janella. “Well?” she demanded. “Vai niin?”
Janella shrugged slightly and tried to smile. “If that’s Finnish, I’m afraid I don’t understand any.”
“I asked you if it was so—are you my brother’s child?”
“My father was Arnold Maki,” Janella said stiffly, looking away.
“Was?”
“He—he’s dead. He died when I was eight years old.”
“How?”
Janella stared at the woman, who was still caught in Lucien’s arms. Was this a testing or did Toivi truly not know?
“His plane crashed into the ocean. He was a Navy flier…”
“Yes, yes,” Toivi said irritably, dismissing the last. “I know he was a pilot, Lucien found out. And I know he’s dead. I felt it when he died. We were close…”
Toivi moved against Lucien’s restraint, and he let her go, stepping back to pull out a chair for her to sit at the table. “Will you have some coffee with us?” he asked.
Toivi moved uncertainly, groping toward the chair, nearly colliding with Janella, who shrank away. At such close range the enormous dilation of Toivi’s pupils was clearly evident, and Janella saw the narrow rim of iris was not truly black but a deep brown.
When they
were all seated, Lucien spoke again. “Tell your aunt what you remember about your childhood, Janella. There must be something…”
Janella sat primly, hands folded in her lap so no one could see how they were clenched together. “I don’t have any memory of my first years,” she said, feeling she was stripping herself in front of these strange people, strangers who seemed such unlikely relatives. But at the same time she knew the woman was really Aunt Toivi, her father’s sister, looking at her out of Arnie’s eyes. Surely her aunt was entitled to the truth.
“My remembering starts in my eighth year. There is nothing before that.”
“Your mother…” Aunt Toivi murmured.
Janella shook her head. “Nothing.” The vision of her mother’s coffin in the dark place—how could she know if it was fact?
Toivi smiled, and for an instant her face became younger, almost girlish. “She was what the Old Country people call hella, kaunis—a gentle, pretty woman. Her name was Lisa, you know, but he called her Liisi because we say it that way. Or Tahtinen, sometimes, his little star.”
Janella felt tears prick her eyes.
“And, as I see you better,” Toivi went on, “I think there is a look of Lisa about you—the structure of your face perhaps.”
Tears overflowed and ran down Janella’s cheeks. “No one ever told me,” she managed to say. “No one ever talked about my mother at all. Daddy didn’t and no one else knew her.” She dabbed at her face with her napkin. “Helen—my stepmother—has always claimed I look like my father.”
“Oh, yes, definitely,” Aunt Toivi said.
Janella gazed at her in surprise. “But then—then why…?”
“Why didn’t I acknowledge you at once?” Toivi sighed, sitting back in her chair, her head on her hand. She suddenly appeared very tired. “I no longer see well. And when I came in I thought—I was afraid you were just another of Lucien’s girls.” She shot a quick glance sideways at him, then looked slyly at her niece. “He has them, you know. You must watch out for Uncle Lucien.”
He rose from his chair but ignored his wife’s words. “I’ll ask Mrs. Barnes to bring you some coffee,” he said. Both the women watched him leave the room. Then there was a silence while they evaluated each other.
“What would you like me to do?” Janella asked at last.
“Do?”
“I mean my—my duties. Lucien said you needed a—a companion. What will you want me to do?”
“Oh, amuse yourself. Talk to me when we feel like talking, the two of us.” Toivi hunched forward in her chair and leaned across the table. “Don’t you remember any of the Finn I taught you, little Janny?”
Janella cleared her throat. “Aunt Toivi, you know I—I don’t even have any memory of you.”
“But I taught you to count all the way to one hundred, and you knew many words, like ‘hyvasti’ for ‘goodbye’ and…”
“No. I remember nothing.”
“Yksi, koksi, kolme…”
Janella, suddenly shaking, put her hands to her ears. The words echoed in her skull, terrible sounds, sounds she knew. She closed her eyes. “No,” she protested, her voice rising. “No, no!” She felt the familiar terror of the whirling inside her head. “Not here, not here,” she moaned, huddling miserably in her seat.
Then she was caught up and put on her feet while strong arms held her. “Open your eyes.” Lucien’s voice. “What’s the matter with the girl, Toivi?”
And her aunt’s voice, curiously complacent. “I can’t understand, all I did was say some Finnish words, start counting in Finn.”
Janella opened her eyes and saw first the rough knit of Lucien’s yellow sweater. He still had one arm about her and she was pressed to his side. She was comforted by the warmth of his body and realized she wasn’t going to have another blackout after all.
“I—I’m all right,” she faltered. Counting, Aunt Toivi had said. The nonsense words were counting. One, two, three, in Finnish. The same words, the magic words to go to sleep. Just Finnish words for numbers. Nothing to frighten her, how could counting be terrifying? “It was silly of me to get upset just because I recognized some of the Finnish words when I thought I didn’t know any.” She smiled weakly.
“A break in the wall,” Toivi said, and her voice seemed to repeat over and over in Janella’s ears. “Break, a break…”
She pulled away from Lucien and sat down again while Ruth Barnes brought in coffee for the three of them.
When Toivi finished her coffee she turned to Janella. “Help me upstairs, please,” she said.
Janella got up quickly, eager to do something, anything.
“I can get around all right, you know—it’s my eyes…” Toivi grasped her arm once again and they climbed the curved staircase to the second floor. The first door to the right was closed and Janella hesitated.
“Go ahead—open the door. I rarely lock it.”
So her aunt had an inside lock on her door. Janella glanced about the room and was vaguely disappointed. A bedroom quite like hers but done in white, the only oddity the lack of color. She didn’t know what she had expected. Aunt Toivi was unusual, of course, dressed in the white flowing gown and the headdress, but as for what Lucien had said—what were his words? Toivi believes she is a witch? Well, her room was ordinary enough.
Janella noticed several doors in the room, all shut. “The old woman…” she began.
“Oh, Akki. Yes, she stays in there.” Toivi gestured at one of the doors.
“She—this Akki—came in my room last night and scared me. I didn’t know she was living here. She was talking—I guess now it must have been in Finnish, sort of a chant—and I panicked.”
Toivi frowned. “I’ll tell her she mustn’t frighten you at night. Akki is a noita, and we don’t always understand what she does or says.”
“A noita?”
“I keep forgetting you can’t remember your Finn. Akki is a noita, a—well, maybe the closest translation is a wizard. Though actually Akki is a seeress. She foretells.”
“Oh,” Janella said, not really understanding.
“I’m afraid I can’t promise Akki won’t go into your room again, but she won’t harm you if she knows you are a Maki.”
“Harm me?” Janella said, surprised. She’d certainly ask Lucien to do something about her door.
“I’m sorry there’s no lock on your bedroom door but we can’t very well change things in a house we’re only renting. As it is, I have the only door on this level that does lock.”
“There’s a bolt on the outside of Akki’s,” Janella said.
Toivi frowned. “There when we came,” she said. “But Akki won’t hurt you, you needn’t be afraid of her.”
Janella smiled uncertainly. Aunt Toivi surely couldn’t believe in foretelling the future, actually think the old woman had supernatural powers.
“Oh, Janny, Janny—I used to tell you the old tales from the Kalevala. Can’t you remember at all?” Aunt Toivi’s dark eyes looked into hers. “Remember Kalami of Varpus who used his magic to help the Finns against the Russians? That was in 1808, the time of the Great Hatred. Once they hanged him, but hanging doesn’t bother a noita, no, not one like Kalami. He could be strung up and rattle there for a week, and still walk off before they came to cut him down.”
Toivi’s voice had fallen into a singsong rhythm, almost a chant. “And Tilli of Kuru, who knew how to cure by using the cemetery charm, calling the grave spirits from their homes. But most important, the noitas knew about death, death could wear no disguise to fool them.” She reached out suddenly and held Janella’s face between her palms. The thin fingers pressed against Janella’s temples. Her aunt’s hands were hot, felt fiery, and the girl’s head began to throb.
“Listen,” Toivi said, beginning to move her body from side to side. The movement made Janella sway, too, and she began to feel dizzy. She closed her eyes. Was there a strange instrument being played? Haunting music came faintly from somewhere. Minor-keyed, oriental, it wov
e into Toivi’s chanting words:
“Friends wear false faces
The face of a friend is masked
Life, too, carries masks
False faces
Smiling faces to deceive
Death is the only certainty
Surely death comes to all
Behind the masks
Magic is all the hero has
Spells and charms his only achievement
The noita carries death
In his charms, in his spells
The noita carries death
Without the false face of life.”
The music gradually faded away, after Toivi’s chant ceased. But a voice seemed to be in Janella’s head. “Yksi, one,” it said. “Koksi, two. Kolme, three. Nelja, four. Viisi, five. Count, Janny, say the words.”
“Yksi,” Janella repeated, “koksi, kolme, nelja, viisi…” She was suspended in darkness and yet she knew if she opened her eyes she would see the white of her aunt’s bedroom. But it wasn’t important to see, no need to open her eyes. She waited in the dark for the voice. The voice would tell her what was important.
“Remember, Janny,” it said. “You can remember.”
The darkness began to clear, though it gathered in the corners of the room and waited. What room? Not the white one. A room she knew and a child in a small bed, a girl, little Janny was in the bed. A familiar face above her, a dearly loved face, with warm gray eyes and the woman reaching, picking up Janny from the tiny bed and hugging her. “Mama,” Janny said, and Janella, watching the scene even as she relived it, saw the shadows coalesce and move to engulf the mother and child. “No,” she breathed, and felt pain shoot through her head. “Oh, please, no…”
She was in a bed and everything was white. The face above her looked down with black eyes, no, she must remember they were really brown, just the pupils showing black, crowding out the iris.
“Your eyes are open. Do you see me?”
Of course she saw Toivi. She nodded.
“You’re a good girl, Janny. And you’re going to do what I tell you. You want to do what I tell you, don’t you, Janny?”
Aunt Toivi’s voice belonged in the dream, soft, calm, a dream voice she wanted to obey. She would open her mouth and say so. She would agree.