by Tua Harno
Sometimes it felt like some old foreigner was sitting at their table and they were teaching her about Finland: this is breast-feeding on cue; this is a quiche; this is our digital photo gallery, all the photos of Robby are there.
“I don’t have a computer,” Mom said once.
“You can access it with your phone. Erika’s pregnant, look,” Ville said.
Mom pulled out her phone.
“Oh yeah,” Ville said, “you can’t get online with that kind of phone.”
He would call when he left the office, Ville decided, then realized he was kidding himself. It would be better to call while he was thinking about it, before he forgot his sister again.
The phone rang for ages.
“This is Sirkka.” Mom’s voice was formal but melted into a warm muddle when she realized who was calling.
They kept interrupting one another, trying to talk about how Robby and Erika were doing and Mom’s surprise that the phone rang and it was someone other than a telemarketer on the line.
“You can block them, you know.”
“Yes, but who’s going to call me then? And one time there was one who talked in a country accent, it was so nice, we chatted about this and that for ages.”
“They’re tricking you. They hire smooth-talking motormouths like that on purpose so you think they’re your friend, they call you by your first name, too, it’s all calculated.”
“You sound just like Sanna,” Mom replied, which is how they finally got around to the topic of his sister.
“I got a postcard from her and a few text messages,” Mom said.
“Recently?”
How was it that when Sanna broke up with Janne, it took her even farther from them? You’d think the breakup would have brought them closer.
“Wait a minute, let me think. No, I haven’t gotten any for a while now. Not for two weeks at least,” Mom said. “Does it show when they were sent?”
“Yes.” Ville’s head started to ache. Was two weeks a lot? Probably, these days.
Mom hung up to check her messages. Ville hadn’t even set his phone down before she called back.
“Listen, Ville, the last message arrived on the first, it’s already been—”
“A month. And you haven’t heard anything since?”
“The message says I might not hear from her for a couple of weeks, but that she’d send a message as soon as she got back to Perth.”
“Got back? From where? The mine?”
“I don’t know. I thought she had some student thing.”
“Yeah, she was working on her thesis at the mining company.”
They were both quiet for a minute. Should he be worried? Did he have a choice? Mom didn’t, she’d be worried regardless.
Ville remembered how oppressive Mom’s worrying was. Her concern was like a weather pattern inside the house, gradually spreading to anyone else who happened to be at home. Mom would rub her hands and gaze out the kitchen window. It could be ignored for a while, but then she would sigh and share her imaginings out loud. What if she got hit by a bus? What if she tripped on the basement stairs, they’re so steep? What if someone abducted her? Mom gathered apprehension like a storm built up strength at sea, only to deflate with exaggerated relief when the door opened and the missing individual walked in, alive and unharmed.
“When did the postcard arrive?”
“Just a few days ago, but it was dated last month.”
Another silence.
“She usually sends me messages, she knows I worry.”
“I know.”
Mom didn’t ask Ville to find out what was going on, but her hope that he would lived in the ensuing silence. Ville could see in his mind’s eye how Mom would be incapable of sitting down, would just stare out at the parking lot, as if Sanna might suddenly step out of one of the cars.
“Sanna told me not to call, she said it would be cost too much. I can call her, though, can’t I?”
“Of course you can.”
But Ville already knew that it would be impossible to reach her by phone. Sanna was somewhere outside network coverage, otherwise she wouldn’t be keeping Mom in the dark. And even if Sanna had lost her phone, she would have found some way to send a message to Finland. She would have e-mailed him from an internet café, borrowed a phone. Something was wrong.
Ville closed his eyes, gathered nonchalance into his voice. “Listen, I’ll give the company a call. Maybe Sanna’s phone broke or was stolen. I’m sure she’s fine.”
“Right.”
Ville could hear Mom scratching the tablecloth with her fingernail. She used to wind the curly cord around her fingers, doodle on the notepad next to the phone. He and Sanna had admired her drawings. Sanna had picked up the habit and drawing in general. Did she still paint? Ville couldn’t remember when the stains and bits of masking tape that used to turn up all over his sister’s clothes and the soles of her socks had vanished from her. The tiniest paint splatters had showed in her blonde hair.
“Are you trying to cover up your disability?” Ville had teased, riling her up. His sister always heard about her splotchy skin from the kids at school.
“You’ll call me back, won’t you?” Mom said.
Ville’s throat tightened up, Mom sounded so small and sad. “Yeah, yeah, of course. But don’t get worked up, OK, there’s nothing to worry about.” He wondered whether Mom would have become aware of Sanna’s absence if he hadn’t called. Now Ville had raised a concern that wasn’t so easily dispelled.
Ville tried calling Sanna, but all he got was a recording in English. Then he called Antero. He felt like an idiot as he introduced himself.
“Of course I remember you, Veijo’s kid, sure. You and your wife have a boy, right?”
“Yes, that’s right, thanks,” Ville said, even though Antero hadn’t congratulated him.
“Sanna’s stint here in Kalgoorlie is over, as far as I know she’s back in Perth.”
Was this all totally pointless? Sanna had been celebrating the breakup and dropped her phone in the sea or a pint of beer. Ville stared at the messages popping up in his inbox as Antero chattered.
“A friend of mine met Sanna, actually. I’ll send you his phone number, at least he knows who Sanna’s contact at the mine was.”
Ville thanked Antero and imagined how weird it was going to sound when he explained he was Sanna’s brother. It made everything sound so serious, a family looking for a family member this way. But he felt like he wouldn’t get peace of mind unless he got to the bottom of the matter, heard his sister’s voice. Then he could forget the whole thing.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained, Ville thought, looking at the phone number and remembering the mantra Mom always used to recite as she scratched her lottery cards. The saying had irritated him because she’d ventured plenty of her meager funds on them and never gained anything in return.
Ville hung Mom’s coat on a hanger; the fabric squeaked. She had used too much detergent and the coat had a soapy residue. Ville wiped his hands but couldn’t rid his fingers of the slick chemical feel.
Mom stopped at the glass doors to the living room, too uncomfortable to step through.
Robby eyed his grandma quizzically.
“Let’s eat first,” Ville said.
The smell of the detergent carried into Ville’s nostrils with every forkful, making his lasagna taste like soap. He couldn’t finish. Mom was shoveling her food into her mouth. Ville remembered how, wearing her rubber boots, she’d gobble four potatoes straight from the pot and slip a couple more into her pocket before heading off to work. Even now she inhaled her food, blowing on it when it was already on her tongue. Her breath made Ville turn away.
Ville remembered making Erika swear to tell him immediately if his breath ever started to stink. She wasn’t to be the least bit tactful or delicate. There was nothing more disgusting than people with hot, raunchy breath, Ville had said, and Erika had given him a crooked smile, saying she thought that maybe there were a
few things in this world a tiny bit more disgusting. Yeah, yeah, but still.
Mom took a plastic-wrapped toothpick out of her purse. Ville remembered that, too, how the side pockets of Mom’s handbags were stuffed with individually wrapped sugar cubes, packs of sweetener, tea bags, dashes of salt and pepper in white paper pillows.
“Where can she be?” Mom asked.
Ville considered how to phrase what he was about to say.
“I think something’s wrong,” Mom said. She had discovered a morsel between her teeth and was rolling it around in her mouth. “She wouldn’t do this otherwise.”
Robby started to cry. Ville lifted him out of the high chair. Erika came into the living room in her pajamas.
“Oh, you’re home,” Mom said, perplexed.
Erika nodded.
“Erika’s a little under the weather,” Ville said.
Erika rolled her eyes and took Robby with her. Mom watched them leave, still confused.
“I’m going to fly to Australia to find out what’s going on. The people at the mine told me she went on some sort of hike.”
The police had found the flight information from Perth to Broome. There had been nothing since. But now that a missing persons case had been opened, an unclaimed body might be identified.
“Sanna would be happy if she heard we’d traveled there together to meet her,” Mom said, pursing her lips.
“Flights cost over a thousand euros.”
Mom’s face blazed beet red, and she let out a small belch. “Oh yeah, of course. I was just thinking I’d be happy to go. You guys have the baby.”
He and Erika had argued about it. His wife felt that there was no point flying there until they heard something definite, but Ville was afraid that Sanna’s disappearance would be lost at the bottom of the authorities’ stack of cases.
“A lot of young people come out to Australia thinking they’ll take a break from life,” a police detective had said.
Ville hadn’t dared mention that Sanna was thirty and had just gotten out of a relationship; he just told them about Sanna’s studies, the research at the mine. He stressed the well-known name of the mining company; it indicated that Sanna was a normal, employed person—someone like that wasn’t going to suddenly throw on a caftan and disappear off the face of the earth. By the end, Ville sounded like he was blaming the mining company for losing track of Sanna and wondered if the police thought he was being paranoid.
“I have enough savings.” Mom looked at Ville defiantly, her bottom lip jutting out. “And if I don’t have enough, I can always take out a loan. She’s my only daughter.”
Ville was tempted to accept Mom’s offer. It would make things easier at home. But how would Mom ever manage alone in Perth?
She wouldn’t.
“I can’t sleep or concentrate, I can’t even eat, all I do is worry about Sanna,” Mom said.
Ville sighed. “OK, let’s go together, that way I can come back if it looks like it’s going to be a while.”
Mom nodded in approval. For a moment she looked like she was going to reach out across the table and touch Ville in gratitude, but she clutched her purse instead.
32
MARTTI
Tom Price is a wealthy city in the outback, run by mining giant Rio Tinto. The residents are young men from the mines with too much money. The wives have their pick of daytime activities, exercise classes and charity sales, while the children are sent off to boarding school.
Martti saw an orange hill from the back of the police car and asked what it was called.
“Mount Nameless,” came the answer from the front seat.
“Couldn’t they find some low-level manager to lend his name to the ridge?”
The police didn’t get why Martti thought it was so funny that the city had been named for the CEO of a US steel company: Thomas Moore Price of Kaiser Steel.
At the police station, Martti felt like he was talking himself into a hole. The clearer and more forthcoming he was, the more his answers sounded like something he might not want to say out loud.
“It didn’t bother you that he was in love with your girlfriend?”
“Eva isn’t my girlfriend.”
“She said she was.”
Martti sighed. “When it comes to Jake, it was more sad than anything. The poor kid never stood a chance.”
The police looked at him questioningly, as if offended on Jake’s behalf.
“That’s not how I meant it. He just. He was odd. Ask anyone.”
“We were told no one knew anything about him, that you were his only friend.”
“I’m sure I was.”
The police waited for further explanation, but Martti couldn’t find it within himself to offer it to them.
“According to the blood work and eyewitnesses, you were intoxicated the night you negotiated with the boy.”
Martti kept his mouth shut. This was true.
“As a safety inspector, I’m sure you’re aware of the risks you were taking entering the pit drunk.”
Martti nodded.
“You’re saying you were aware?”
“I was aware, but he’d asked for me. I thought it would wear off. There was a child who needed to be rescued.”
“But you didn’t know the child was there. Or did you?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“So you insisted on entering the pit. You could have said you weren’t in any condition to work. Then someone else would have talked to him.”
“He wouldn’t have talked to anyone else.”
Martti thought everything was actually plain as day, but somehow the way it came out of his mouth made it sound ominous.
“He wouldn’t have talked to anyone else, because I was his only friend and we had unfinished business regarding Eva.”
The officer finished recording his statement and stepped out of the room to have a word with her partner. She came back in to inform Martti that he was not to leave town; he needed to await trial in Tom Price. They wouldn’t hold him at the station, but he needed to answer a phone call at his motel every day; otherwise a warrant would be put out for his arrest.
On the way to the motel, he asked to stop somewhere he could buy a phone.
The police officers glanced at him, asked, “What happened to yours?”
“It broke earlier yesterday evening. Last night. I need to call my daughter.”
One of the police officers walked into the store with him; Martti tried to ignore the humiliation. The sales clerk was a teenage boy who looked like he didn’t want to sell Martti anything. It would be best if he just turned around and left the store. The salesperson checked his ID twice, but in the end let Martti buy the phone. Back in the patrol car, he clenched the box in his lap.
“How long am I going to have to stay here?”
The officers who were escorting him didn’t turn to look. They answered, with their eyes on the road, that it wasn’t up to them, but the prosecutor. The company would have demands, too, maybe others.
“They’re not in any hurry to have you back.”
Martti looked outside; sand was overtaking the road, starting from the shoulders. The town was besieged by desert. He wasn’t in any hurry, either, but he had a daughter who was waiting for him. How would he explain to Minttu that he wouldn’t be arriving on the flight he’d promised to take?
From behind the closed door of his ground-floor motel room, Martti heard the police car drive off. He’d finally gotten rid of them, but he didn’t feel any freer. The room had a low ceiling, a fake window, and an ineptly painted picture of a sunny beach. He opened the box, started charging his phone. Martti remembered Ned telling him that Aboriginal men killed themselves in prison. Suicide was taboo in the tribes, and it didn’t happen in their communities when they lived on their own lands.
“But being stuck in a locked room, that’ll exceed a man’s tolerance double quick. They set themselves free by dying, so they can go back to the environment where they belong
,” Ned had said.
What was the environment where Martti belonged? He would never work at a mine again, regardless of what happened with the police and the trial. He couldn’t imagine what this meant. What else did he know how to do?
When his phone was charged, he called Minttu. She didn’t answer, so he left a message.
An agonizingly slow day followed. Martti tried not to worry but couldn’t help himself. He had no idea what was going to happen to him.
He went to the motel reception desk and asked for the number of the police station. Someone he’d never spoken with answered, and she had no idea who had driven or interrogated him.
“I’d like to leave a message,” Martti said.
He made a second call. Eva whispered that she couldn’t talk, she was at work, but she was afraid she and Lily were going to be kicked out of the camp.
“Timothy thinks they can’t let a child stay here anymore. What am I going to do?”
Martti had nothing to offer her in terms of consolation; his opinion wouldn’t weigh one way or the other in Eva’s affairs. He wondered if Sanna’s brother had managed to get in touch with his sister. Why was it that the distances between family members were so often the greatest?
Minttu answered his message brusquely, and just wanted to know when Martti would be arriving.
“As soon as I can, but I’m not sure when that will be.”
“That doesn’t do me much good.”
He might as well be on the moon. Martti thought about Jake. The camp community would forget the baby-faced kid in no time. There wasn’t an empty place at the table in the mess. A new guy in the same gear would step into the job. Martti remembered how talented Jake was, how he’d rise up on his feet and lean in the direction opposite that of his machine, the dark figure in the cab looking like he was driving a dog sled. A collector of millions of rocks, like all boys at some point in their lives. The kid had been at the mines for over a decade. Maybe his parents and friends would forget that he had died, too, would just keep waiting for him to show up on leave. Martti reflected that the same thing was happening to him.