As Black as Ebony

by Salla Simukka

  Tears ran down the sides of Lumikki’s face toward her ears.

  More memories came every day. It was like she had a dresser inside her full of numberless drawers. One by one, the drawers were opening. All the drawers that had been locked for so many years.

  Once upon a time, there was a secret girl.

  Once upon a time, there was a girl who wasn’t.

  Now Rosa wasn’t secret anymore. And although she had died, she still existed in memories and photographs and stories people told. She was no longer erased from existence. Grasping that her sister’s entire existence had been concealed from Lumikki was still difficult. It was so appalling. She would never be able to accept her parents’ decision.

  They had made it in a state of shock, crazy with grief and trauma. Lumikki’s parents really had believed Lumikki killed Rosa. By accident, yes, in the course of a game. Jennika’s statement supported that and the child psychologists weren’t able to get anything out of Lumikki that contradicted that version of events. Apparently, Lumikki had just talked about how they were “playing death.”

  Lumikki’s father and mother had thought that carrying that kind of guilt would have been too great a burden for a child. That was why it was just better to shut that part of the past away. Lumikki thought that really it was more a question of her parents’ inability to face their pain. Their daughter had been taken away. For them, it was easier to think that she had never existed. They simply rejected the truth because they couldn’t endure it.

  So they created a new, single-child family. They had destroyed almost every trace of Rosa. Only the photographs still existed, stored in the girls’ former treasure chest. They had moved away from Turku. They had sworn the entire extended family never to breathe a word about Rosa. A vow of silence. A family of secrets. It was incomprehensible that it had worked. At first, Lumikki had asked about her sister, but when no one answered or they just kept saying she didn’t have a sister, she eventually stopped. Her dad and mom had thought that she would forget because children do so easily. And in a way, she had forgotten for many years.

  But the past can’t be erased so easily. Everything leaves a mark on a person.

  Everything surrounding the death had made her father unable to work for a while. First, he had traveled alone to Prague to think about what he wanted out of his life. They had considered divorce. Lumikki was only hearing about any of this now, a decade and a half after the fact. The family’s financial situation had collapsed, which was why they didn’t have the money to live in a big house like they had in Turku. They became a family where the most important things were never said out loud. They had become a façade of a family.

  CHRISTMAS EVE, FOUR DAYS EARLIER

  Lumikki sat on the couch and looked at the mantelpiece. Now, in addition to one daughter’s picture, there was also one of them both together. As it always should have been. Mom brought her more mulled wine. They had just finished their Christmas dinner a little while earlier.

  Her mother gently, tentatively touched Lumikki’s hair. There were more words in that touch than there could have been in any long monologue. This touch was an apology for all the years when her mother hadn’t known how to be a real mother.

  Silent night, holy night

  All is calm, all is bright

  Round yon virgin, mother and child

  Holy infant, tender and mild

  Sleep in heavenly peace,

  Sleep in heavenly peace.

  Dad hummed along with the song. Lumikki saw the tears running down her father’s cheeks. It was the first time she had ever seen him cry. Or at least, the first time she could remember. Maybe the time would come when, at moments like this, it would be natural for Lumikki to stand up, walk over to her father in his armchair, and hug him long and hard. But not yet.

  They were still a silent family. Years of not talking didn’t go away in a couple of weeks. Now there was a completely different, more peaceful, honest tone to the silence. It wasn’t oppressive or suffocating anymore. The silence didn’t stop up Lumikki’s mouth and strangle her throat. She could breathe. She could be at rest and trust that the words would come in time.

  When Lumikki fell from the window, a man walking his dog had just been passing by the school. He immediately called an ambulance and Lumikki was rushed to the hospital. She had come through with surprisingly few injuries, just bruises and sprains, nothing broken. She was forced to wear a neck brace for a week, but that was minor.

  When her father and mother came to the hospital, Lumikki told them everything. A wave of relief washed over the sterile hospital room when Lumikki’s parents learned that Rosa’s death really had been an accident. They contacted Jennika, who after all these years was also relieved that she could finally tell the whole truth. The lie had weighed on her.

  Rosa’s death had been a tragic accident, and no one was to blame. What-ifs were never going to bring her back. Understanding and accepting that helped everyone touched by the tragedy. Piece by piece, step by step, they could take the repressed past back into their lives and make it a part of themselves.

  Lumikki tasted the spices in her warm mulled wine. Cinnamon, cloves, ginger. She looked at the slow, dreamy motion of the straw mobile hanging from the ceiling. Outside, white snow was falling. The Christmas album they were listening to would soon be over and it would be time to go to sleep.

  Lumikki knew she would sleep a long, long time, deeply, without any nightmares, in complete safety.

  Lumikki continued making her snow angel, improving the shape of the wings. She thought of Henrik.

  Her shadow. Her stalker. An obsessed man the depth of whose manic insanity had only been revealed after he was caught. When Lumikki fell from the window, Henrik fled to his home. Two hours later, the police broke the door down. They found Henrik unconscious on the bed. He had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, but hospital personnel succeeded in reviving him.

  At first, they hadn’t found anything incriminating in his apartment, but then it turned out he’d built himself a “Lumikki room” in his storage locker in the building’s attic space by covering the chicken wire walls with cardboard so no one could see inside.

  When authorities were finally able to interrogate him, they found that his obsession with Lumikki had begun immediately after she started at the high school. Henrik’s girlfriend had suddenly left him, and his mental health had collapsed. He had noticed Lumikki, who stood out from the other students, and fallen in love. Henrik had begun hoarding information about her.

  He was astonishingly patient, persistent, and devious. He interviewed people at her previous school. He got wind of the bullying from some of Lumikki’s old classmates. Next, he set about finding the names of her bullies and the extent of what they’d done. Henrik knew how to make an impression on people: He was calm, charismatic, and credible. Sometimes he posed as himself, sometimes as a reporter, and sometimes as Lumikki’s school counselor or therapist. People trusted him.

  Henrik found out who Lumikki’s relatives were. At the end of a night out drinking, Lumikki’s father’s cousin, Mats Andersson, finally revealed that Lumikki had had an older sister who died. Using every possible skill and connection he had, Henrik ultimately succeeded in getting his hands on the police report about Rosa’s death.

  There were always people who knew people. Finland was a small country. If you wanted to know something, you just had to be determined and cunning enough. Henrik’s psychopathy bent all of his intelligence and charm relentlessly toward his goal.

  When Lumikki started dating another student, it spurred Henrik to action. His obsession grew by leaps and bounds. His desire to have Lumikki for his own had no limits, and he would stop at nothing to get her. He wanted to know everything about Lumikki, to own her, to control her with what he knew. It was all part of Henrik’s power game.

  Henrik had spied on Lumikki. He had followed her. Stalked her. Henrik had tracked Lumikki’s every movement. His most brazen act had been going to talk
to Lumikki’s parents. Telling them that he also worked as the high school psychologist, he reported that Lumikki had visited him several times, talking about having dark thoughts. Henrik had made Lumikki’s parents swear not to tell Lumikki about his visit. On the same visit, he stole the key to the treasure chest, the location of which a drunken Mats Andersson had revealed.

  Lumikki didn’t even know everything Henrik had done. And she didn’t want to know. The most important thing was that he was in prison now and couldn’t stalk her anymore.

  Opening night of The Black Apple was postponed, but the show went on, one day before Christmas break. Lumikki had wanted them to still put on the play despite what had happened. She acted her role wearing the neck brace, pantomiming the glass coffin, and in the end, the show was better than anyone could have hoped.

  It was an important night for Lumikki. It did her good to see that the images of massacre Henrik had threatened would never come to pass. They only existed in his sick imagination, and would never become reality.

  The snow didn’t feel cold under her back. Not yet. Lumikki decided to stay in her snow angel for a while and look at the bright starry sky that arced over her—dark, distant, and full of points of light.

  She didn’t believe that people turned into angels after they died. She didn’t think that Rosa was somewhere out there looking down on her and watching over her life. Lumikki had a hard time thinking about the possibility that there could be life after death, at least in any form like this current one.

  That thought didn’t feel bad or sad. This was just how it was. Human life had a certain duration, a beginning and an end, and between the two, there was an amazing amount of space. Every breath contained more than anyone could imagine.

  Lumikki knew that if she had chosen to, she could have been lying in the snow right now hand in hand with Sampsa.

  And if she had chosen to, she could have been lying in the snow right now hand in hand with Blaze.

  Lumikki’s hands were empty. She was alone.

  She had been forced to tell Sampsa that she couldn’t keep seeing him. She had really liked him and gotten along great with him and even loved him in a way. But Sampsa had never seen deep into her thoughts and the shadows of her forest. Sampsa couldn’t have seen, because for him those things didn’t exist. His world was different, full of light.

  Lumikki had also been forced to tell Blaze that she could never go back to him. She had loved him, and she loved him still, passionately, with all her heart. Blaze saw her completely. But Blaze was also able to hurt her so deeply that Lumikki could never expose herself to that kind of danger again.

  But the biggest reason that Lumikki had needed to say goodbye to both Sampsa and Blaze was that she didn’t trust either of them completely. She had thought either of them could have been her stalker. Even though it was only for a fleeting moment at the amusement park and even though her doubts had disappeared soon afterward. Still, those doubts told her that she didn’t trust either with all her heart. How could she be with someone she didn’t trust? How could she look either of them in the eye? A person she had imagined even for a second being capable of that kind of evil and cruelty? No one should have to be with anyone who had thought about them that way.

  The tears continued running down her face. Lumikki let them flow freely.

  She cried for many reasons at once.

  She cried for her dead sister, whom she hadn’t been able to mourn for all these years.

  She cried for her family, which would never have the kind of warm, intimate bonds of trust that families should have.

  She cried because she had been forced to give up happiness and love.

  She cried because she was alone.

  The stars in the sky suddenly felt closer. The light of those distant, twinkling suns was comforting. The universe was enormous. Lumikki’s tears stopped flowing. Suddenly, she felt better. She was so small compared to everything. In this universe, everyone was alone in the end, but no one was alone. Everything was made of the same elements. Lumikki was just as strong and weak as crystals and rocks, waves and reeds, grass and rotting leaves, the burning heart of the sun and the cold void of space.

  She had just as many layers and branched in just as many directions as a fairy tale a thousand years old. One that had started long before the words “once upon a time” and which would continue long after the words “and they lived happily ever after.” Because nothing really happened only once. All stories existed many times, morphing and changing. And no one lived happily ever after. Or unhappily. Everyone lived happily and unhappily, both at different times and sometimes both at once.

  This was Lumikki’s universe. In its darkness and light was room for passion and fear, despair and joy. The air that filled her lungs was heady. In the embrace of the sky, she became more whole. She became more herself. She was free. Lumikki pressed her palms against the snowy ground and wished that she could become one with the freshly fallen flakes, merging with their infinitude.

  A gentle night breeze blew through the park, moving the black branches of the trees and their shadows on the snowdrifts.

  The world sighed and throbbed around Lumikki with one single pulse. Her pulse.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2012 Karoliina Ek

  Winner of the 2013 Topelius Prize, Salla Simukka is an author of young adult fiction and a screenwriter. She has written several novels and one collection of short stories for young readers, and she has translated adult fiction, children’s books, and plays. She writes book reviews for several Finnish newspapers, and she also writes for TV. Simukka lives in Tampere, Finland.

  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 over thirty Finnish books into English, including novels, children’s books, poetry, plays, graphic novels, and nonfiction. His recent translations include the novels in the Maria Kallio series, My First Murder, Her Enemy and Copper Heart (AmazonCrossing), the satire The Human Part by Kari Hotakainen (MacLehose Press), the thriller Cold Courage by Pekka Hiltunen (Hesperus), and the 1884 classic The Railroad by Juhani Aho (Norvik Press). He currently resides in Springville, Utah, with his wife and three daughters, two dogs, a cat, and twenty-nine fruit trees.