Burnt Land

by Tua Harno

  “I have to go back to Lapland as soon as I’m allowed to leave. Minttu’s having all kinds of problems—she’s not living with her mother anymore, she’s temporarily in foster care. I have to find out under what terms she could live with me. She’s the one who needs me most of all now.”

  Sanna could feel the tears streaming down, even though she felt a hollow laugh inside her over how their thoughts were overlapping. She could have gone to Lapland with Martti, but he wasn’t asking her.

  She had lost her grip on reality in the desert, hadn’t known if Ralda was trying to kill her or heal her. Saw shimmering water everywhere, but the only thing she felt in her mouth were the blisters that tasted of iron. Thought over and over she’d been rescued, until she woke up with a scarf on her face, heard the ravens, and remembered where she was. And after being rescued, refused to believe she was lying in hospital sheets, stroked them and felt the threads of the fabric seethe like sand. But through all of that, she had known she and Martti were real.

  “Pretty peculiar, this love of ours,” Sanna said softly. “Since it doesn’t mean anything.”

  She stood, leaned against the table, and grimaced; her stomach had stretched painfully. Martti handed back the lighter and was already pulling himself up to hug her. Sanna shook her head.

  “Don’t, it’ll hurt even more to hug as friends.”

  “But I still love you.”

  Sanna left Martti standing there at the table. Once she walked away she didn’t want to turn around. She nodded at the woman and the girl. The child smiled at her before bounding off. Sanna could hear the spry little footsteps on the carpet behind her.

  That evening, the baby tried to push its way through her belly button. Sanna watched it squirm. She wasn’t the least bit sleepy. Mom and Ville would welcome her with open arms, pat her on the shoulder and hug her, happy that she had gone and cleared up things.

  Blissfully unaware of her misfortune, Janne had sent her another e-mail detailing his frustration with Sanna’s decision. Her ex would accept legal responsibility, touchingly concerned that Sanna would have to ask the government for assistance. “I’ll pay my share,” he stated, “if you think it’s fair to put me in that position.”

  Probably not, Sanna thought.

  She could picture herself in Ville and Erika’s house, knew she’d be politely on edge at every meal. And it wouldn’t be their fault, or hers, that’s just the way it was. She was grateful for Ville’s help, but she couldn’t stay there long. She had to find her own place and gradually start meeting people she could relate to. Idealism died if it didn’t have company. She and Martti had talked about that. Her thoughts about the outside world were indistinguishable from who she was inside—Sanna knew that now.

  Her backpack was next to the door, already packed. Tomorrow she would fly out. How different from her departure from Kalgoorlie. They had driven into the morning, the stars still visible as the sky turned pale blue, the moon a splotch of milk on its surface. Both silence and speech were possible. They listened to music and the radio and talked, then would fall silent and gaze at the road and the old windmills in front of them. She had imagined it being a metaphor for them: they could travel like this forever, rest for a while, and then drive on.

  Then Sanna remembered the man from the lobby of the Shire. It was the same girl, his missing daughter, the one Sanna had seen on his phone.

  Her breath started racing.

  Sanna climbed out of bed. Her bare feet hurt and she looked for socks. Was she positive? Sanna hoped not. Hoped she would snap out of it any minute, doubt herself. But she remembered the face clearly—the girl had been looking right at her.

  There must be some police database of missing children, she thought. She could look into it before she said anything to Martti. It was always possible that Martti already knew, that the man with the thick lashes was a monster who had tortured his child, although Sanna didn’t think so—she remembered his sorrow.

  Sanna couldn’t sit still. She headed out into the hallway and down to the soda machine. She dropped in her coins, hands trembling. Wasn’t the scrawny woman the girl’s mother after all?

  The bubbles scraped at her tongue and throat; she needed to wait for the soda to go flat. She scratched at her peeling forehead and went to pull her key out of her pocket, but there was no pocket, because she was wearing her pajama bottoms. The key was inside the room.

  Such a numbskull, she thought as she walked back to the elevator. She could see herself in the elevator mirror. In her pajamas she looked like a runaway who’d stolen a soccer ball and stashed it under her shirt. The elevator clattered and squealed on the way down. Sanna drank her soda, even though it hurt. She needed something to do with her hands. The thought of the child agitated her.

  Martti was sitting in one of the lobby’s threadbare armchairs. Sanna stared at him for a long time. His T-shirt, jeans, and hair were dripping. He stood up.

  Sanna walked up to him. The soft elevator carpet turned to cold tile, as if she were walking across ice.

  “I came to see you and, well, there aren’t any phones in the rooms here and I don’t have your number. I figured I’d wait for it to stop raining.”

  “Which do you want: to see me or for it to stop raining?”

  “I don’t care if it ever stops raining.”

  Sanna’s stomach spasmed.

  “I found your letter last night.”

  “Last night? How slow of a reader are you?”

  “Really slow. If it’s something important about us.”

  Sanna didn’t know what to say or do. She curled her toes. She had written a little message to Martti and slipped it into the Hemingway, about halfway through.

  “Well, what did it say, the letter? What brought you here?” She eyed Martti from under her brows.

  “You wrote that you wanted to be with me, that it was all the same to you where we lived as long as we were together.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t think—” Martti pinched his forehead between his thumb and forefinger and closed his eyes. “Wait a minute, I want to say this right.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t know if you can understand this, but I always thought I didn’t need anyone else. That’s the way I’d felt since I was a kid, that we can get by on our own. Other people can ease our loneliness, but in the end it’s easiest to be alone. But I can’t keep going on that way.”

  Sanna nodded. She felt a flutter in her stomach, shifted the soda can from one hand to the other.

  “I don’t want to end up like the guys from the mines, with nothing on the outside. I want you to be there, you and Minttu and the child you’re about to give birth to.”

  Martti looked helpless and hopeful at the same time.

  “I meant what I wrote,” Sanna said. “I still do. But that means I want to know everything, don’t leave anything out. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me.”

  “You’re going to be mad.”

  Sanna’s heart dropped. She carried water from one puddle to another with her toe. Then she raised her eyes. “Yeah, I can imagine. Now I know how to be mad. Ralda taught me.”

  Hatred flashed across Martti’s face. “That woman.”

  “Just wait till I tell you.”

  “I can’t stay long,” Martti said. “I’m not supposed to leave the motel. Eva probably thinks I’m running from the police.”

  Then Sanna remembered. She looked around and asked Martti to sit down.

  Emily Roberts was abducted from a shopping cart in Adelaide a year and a half ago. Sanna looked at the photograph on the police-station computer. The police had dozens of pictures of Lily, among them the mobile-phone shot Sanna had seen, or at least one exactly like it.

  “So the girl is at a motel on the outskirts of Tom Price,” the police double-checked with Sanna.

  “Yes, she’s with a red-headed woman with lots of colorful tattoos. But the girl insists her mother’s dead.”

  The officer looked at Sanna, mystif
ied, then said, “No, that fits.” She eyed the screen. “Only one legal guardian has been noted for her: Jonathan Roberts, father.”

  “So it doesn’t sound like a custody battle then,” Sanna mused, and the police officer nodded. Strange case.

  Sanna wondered if the information would make things more difficult for Martti. Would he be viewed as having aided and abetted Eva in the kidnapping? If so, she and Martti would just have to wait and see.

  They had sat in the lobby of the hotel, the rain coming down in torrents. The streetlamps had stained the water splattering against the windows. The water-patterns had reflected across their bodies, and Sanna had warned Martti she’d be this way forever: splotchy and sensitive to light.

  “It’s dark half the year in Sodankylä,” Martti said.

  Sanna smiled.

  Martti had told her about his weeks in Pilbara, how everything was better when he’d been in touch with Sanna, but when the messages stopped he lost his grip. “That wasn’t normal for me. I’ve always been able to focus on my work, regardless of the circumstances, but it hadn’t felt as meaningful lately. I think that’s why I wanted to show you the gold, so I’d remember it myself.”

  When Martti told her about the psychologist, Sanna had lost it.

  “Excuse me, I understand how you felt sorry for Eva, how she was so needy. But did you have to screw half the camp? Who are you?”

  Martti didn’t try to defend himself; he looked embarrassed. Sanna had waited for him to say something, although there was probably nothing he could say. She was going to have to accept it, but she was disgusted. She wanted to scratch her sores and scream.

  “Is there anything else?” she’d asked, unable to sit. She stood and paced, looking at Martti, but his face was still guilt ridden. “I think I’ll go to bed.”

  “Sanna, I’m sorry you’re hurting.”

  Sanna nodded. “I’m going to the police in the morning. I’ll let you know how things turn out.”

  As she waited for sleep to come, Sanna could hear the voices of young men during the pauses in the rain, as if someone were trying to remove the gutter, the clash of metal beating against metal. She shut her eyes tight. All her feelings were shapeless and glided through each other. Her throat felt like it would burst. But they were together. They wouldn’t be apart again. It was like land where she could lay down her roots.

  35

  SANNA AND MARTTI

  They took a seat in their booth at the bar-café. Sanna had noticed that they were avoiding each other’s rooms. Her desire was strong, and it was infuriating, because she was still mad at Martti. She wondered if she could make love. Would her skin tear at the touch? How would they survive the living memories?

  Lily’s, or rather Emily’s, father had come to pick her up the day before.

  Eva had shrieked when the police took the girl from one car and put her in another.

  “Martti, help! They’re taking Lily, help!”

  Sanna had been standing at Martti’s side. The scene was horrific. Sanna could feel Martti clenching his fists as Lily stared gravely at him out the car window.

  “Is she ever going to get over it?”

  Sanna didn’t know what to say. They might never learn what the girl had been through before Eva showed up at the iron mine. There was an entire year hidden from outside eyes, one the girl wouldn’t remember clearly herself, but that would still shape her, like a seedling planted long ago, or a snakebite that had gone undetected.

  Martti told Sanna about the things Eva had said in her sleep. It pricked her to hear about their intimacy, but together they came to the conclusion that Eva’s own child had died.

  “Shouldn’t you be getting back to Finland soon?” Martti asked Sanna.

  They had eaten, and the dirty dishes were heaped on the table. Sanna fingered an uneaten crust of toast.

  “Unless I want to give birth in Australia, yes, I should. I have a long-stay visa thanks to the mining company, but it’s going to expire, too.”

  Martti sighed and looked across the parking lot.

  “Every day I see that road and think about how far I’d get if I just started driving.”

  “They know being in limbo makes people restless and likely to agree to anything. When you’re doing time, you know when it’s going to end. This feels like it never will.”

  Sanna had noticed a lingering concern and grief in Martti, right there next to the joy he’d expressed at her return.

  “It’s ironic that of all the people I know, Jake was the one who’d adapted best to that environment. He had created his real life there, done exactly what I tell all the men to do. I’m responsible for that advice, at least,” Martti said and blew his nose.

  “Wouldn’t that psychologist know something?”

  Martti raised an eyebrow. Why hadn’t he thought of that? He’d been so eager to banish Sarah from his mind. It had been unpleasant enough forming the words, telling Sanna about her. Now he vaguely remembered Sarah’s persistent attempts to talk “about your friend,” as she had said.

  “I shouldn’t have tried to tell you what came up in session. It was all confidential, but I thought I had to warn you,” Sarah began. “But then, things went the way they went, as you recall, and I was in the middle of a family crisis and took some time off. I wasn’t there when it happened.”

  As he listened to her voice, Martti watched Sanna, who was cautiously running her top teeth across her bottom lip as she listened to the phone call.

  “Are you there now?”

  “Yes. Woke up at four a.m. today.”

  Martti reflected that he would never again have to deal with a life that depended on shift work and alienating times of day.

  “But I did file a report about him. It was clear he wasn’t fit to work.”

  “What report?”

  “For Jake’s boss. I don’t understand what he was still doing at the pit that night.”

  “Maybe his supervisor wanted to check with his supervisors,” Martti said, ashamed of his own thoughts regarding Sarah’s usefulness in the camp. If only they had listened to her.

  “Well, whatever. There hasn’t been any sort of session for the personnel here.”

  Martti nodded. He could just imagine the air of ambivalence hovering over the incident. Like with the canteen girl, responsibility diffused throughout the camp; stones of retrospective regret were lobbed at the individual pinpointed as accountable.

  “Can you say why he took the child with him?”

  Sarah fell silent. He could hear her gulp and her breathing tighten. Sanna touched Martti questioningly.

  “It was to punish us. You, me, Eva. He knew none of us would ever get over it. He would rob us all of the future.” Sarah hesitated before continuing. “I had strongly encouraged him to get to know Lily. You know, because Jake was like that himself, childlike. I thought it might serve as an experience of success if the child accepted him.”

  Thanks to Sarah’s testimony, the prosecutor acquitted Martti of criminal liability. There was no way he could have done anything about Jake’s private plans for vengeance. The justice system was not the place to weigh Martti’s deeds.

  But the company still upheld its claims for damages. He’d been drunk in the pit, there was no denying or dodging it. The sum would consume the whole of his retirement savings, as if someone had done the calculations and guessed his exact value, had added up the years on the job and the sacrifices made, the precious vacations and days off he had simply given away, hoping to fill them later with loved ones and peace.

  He looked at Sanna, searching her for an answer.

  “There go all my dreams—the farm, and being able to spend time with my family instead of spending all my time on the job, if I ever find another one.”

  Sanna had been leaning against the doorjamb, watching him pack, but now she walked up to Martti and gave him a hug.

  “I don’t suppose we’d be living a very glamorous life with a teenager and a baby, anyway.”
>
  It felt good to hear Sanna talking about Minttu as part of their life. Sanna gazed at him trustingly.

  “Let’s start from a hammock and some wicker chairs. We’ll build our lives back up together.”

  EPILOGUE

  I met Sanna for the first time at the Rovaniemi Airport. There was a crowd of hundreds—some sort of religious revival was in town. Everyone was clustered in a half circle around a lone luggage belt. The voices of the women had a high, tinkling note, meant for singing hymns; the men looked like teetotaling engineers.

  Sanna fit right in. Her face was benevolent, free of makeup and mascara. She wove her way through the crowd, held out a hand, and said hello. I shook it firmly and looked her in the eye, gave her my name. Then my gaze focused on her hands. I sought confirmation from her eyes. I could see the trademark thickness of burnt skin on her cheeks, the doughy lines on the surface.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not contagious. It’s not cancer”—Sanna lowered her voice and glanced around—“or Jesus.”

  She grabbed my bag and dragged it and me along with her to the car. I sat in the passenger seat, even though I felt like climbing in back and falling asleep. But I tried to be polite to this mystifying person, my landlady’s neighbor, who had voluntarily offered to pick me up.

  “It just feels like I can’t afford these years at this age. I should go back south, to the cities, somewhere my life could go on.”

  I meant go on to mean the way life goes on when you meet someone new. As if that person were a door you could pass through to another life, the life I wanted mine to be, the way I imagined it.

  By the time I told Sanna this, I had started working at the mine and we were hanging out by the river in Sodankylä. We had become friends. The sun gilded her the way it did the rocks at the lake back home. She was so happy. She was beautiful. She had fine eyebrows, white as birch bark, and she stroked them absentmindedly.

  The river was still and mirrored every tree; the trunks continued into the ground through the surface of the water. I saw our reflection in the stalled current. Either way could have been up or down. She’d been in the same situation herself once, which was why she’d wanted to help me when I showed up.