This Is Not Your City (22 page)

There is the sound of a car outside, and Daria wonders if the day has sped forward so quickly, that Paavo is home already. In June the light changes so little that it is hard to tell the time. Daria wakes sometimes at four a.m. and doesn't know if it's time to get up and make breakfast or to go back to sleep. She wakes sometimes with Paavo holding her, and when she tries to get up, he tells her again that he does not need a cooked breakfast, that bread and cheese and yogurt did him fine for years, they will do him fine now, that he does not need the things she thinks she owes him.

Daria puts Nika's notebook back under the stack of schoolbooks, arranges them so it will not look like she was spying. She is already worried to be here in Nika's room, to have picked up her laundry. Daria can taste the fight they will have about it when Nika comes home. When. There is a key unlocking the front door, and Daria stands with the hamper on her hip. She does not want Paavo to see Nika's room, to criticize the mess. But it is not Paavo who has unlocked the front door, who walks down the hall to the bedroom.

“You're in my room,” Nika says.

Daria drops the laundry and takes her daughter in her arms. She has not had the courage to hold her daughter this desperately since Nika turned eleven and started practicing surly looks in the bathroom mirror. Daria holds her now and rocks her back and forth on their feet. She is taller than her daughter, and holds her so hard that Nika is standing on her toes before her mother lets her down and looks at her. Nika's hair is pulled back tight, in a fierce but messy ponytail. She is wearing shorts and a tank top, and her shoulders are streaked with red and blue, the pull and press of fingers and nails. There are scratches on her arms, her legs, circles of red around her ankles.

“What happened to you? What did he do?”

“Nothing,” Nika says. Her eyes are as red as Daria's in the sauna, sore and tired from crying. “The car. I think I messed it up driving back. I'm not so good at shifting.”

“The car?” Daria says. “Where's Matti? Why didn't he drive?”

“I left the tent there. It belongs to his father. I just sat there all day yesterday and then I got in the car and left everything. He'll be mad.”

“No one's mad. You're safe,” Daria says, touching her daughter's shoulders, just resting her open palms on top of them so as not to squeeze the bruises. “And Matti? Is he safe? Or—not safe?”

“Not safe.”

“Does he need help?”

Nika shakes her head.

“Is he dead?” Daria asks her daughter, because she can think of no other way to say it, and Nika nods. Daria walks them to the kitchen before she asks her daughter how. She puts on the kettle, looks at the clock. Paavo won't be home for hours. The police won't bother with her while she's alone, unable to talk to them. Which is good because the story, when Nika tells it, takes a long time. Her breath won't come. Her throat tightens, mucus runs over her top lip and she lets it, swipes it with her tongue, until her mother takes a box of tissues from the bathroom and cleans her daughter's face. The story spills out slowly, and Daria can't help calculating the length and breadth of it, the number of
words, the way it contains as much as her daughter has told her in years. It is a story that starts with two teenagers in the forest, a midsummer bonfire, a package of sausages to roast on sticks and a case of beer. It was after midnight before the sun threatened to set, sunk rind-deep in the lake they had camped beside. They knew it would slip under and be up again in less than an hour, but there was still a sadness to the moment, that the sun would drown itself for even an instant. They were both full of sausage and beer when Matti suggested they swim toward it, the orange rim above the water. They stripped off their clothes and ran in. The water was frigid. They swam toward the sun, into the middle of the lake, and when Matti started to cramp, Nika was the only thing he had to hang on to. He panicked, thrashed in the water, tried to lever himself onto her shoulders and ended up pulling them both under. He grabbed at her legs, her ankles, and she kicked out instinctively, swallowing lake water and trying to scream to him to stop. He was too scared to listen, unable to make his body obey him. He had had them both under for over a minute, sinking, pulling Nika down with him, when Nika started kicking. She found his shoulder first, then his face, over and over until he let go and she shot up to the surface. Three breaths and she went down again, Nika told her mother, looking for him, to grab him and pull him up. He was twice her size, but if he didn't struggle she could have gotten him back to shore. She dove and dove and couldn't find him. The sun went down and the deeper Nika dove the more nothing she found. Her lungs were aching, her feet were numb and sore where she'd kicked him, and when a pressure began to poke at her side, she could think of nothing to do but swim to shore. She swam out two more times that night, until she didn't trust herself to make it there and back again, and found nothing. The next day she spent sitting on a fallen log by their burnt-out fire. She started drinking a beer, dumped it on the ashes. Opened another one, took a swallow. Matti's cell phone, still in the pocket of the jeans he'd left crumpled in the mud at the edge of the lake, rang eight times in an hour. On the ninth Nika pulled it out and threw it in the lake. The next night was cold enough Nika wrapped herself in Paavo's old sleeping bag and must have slept, because she
woke up propped against the log, and decided she had to leave. “I killed him,” Nika tells her mother. The kettle has burbled and then quieted, the hush before the boil. Daria has picked it up before it could scream, but hasn't poured the water. She only stands there, her arm shaking with the weight of the kettle, the burner still glowing.

“You didn't kill him.”

“I kicked him and he drowned.”

“You didn't have a choice.”

“His parents will hate me.”

“No one will hate you. It's not a crime. Not being able to save someone.”

“They'll hate me,” Nika says, and Daria turns back to the stove, sets the kettle down, turns the heat off. She is not sure why this is the thing that troubles Nika so desperately until Nika describes a whole life Daria has known nothing about, helping pick currants off the bushes in Matti's family's backyard and bottling their juice. She has helped Matti's sister braid hair and try on makeup. Matti's father has invited her mushroom-picking in the autumn. She has helped Matti's mother tidy the kitchen after meals. His family has a piano, and Nika has played a little, only what she remembers from school, since she has never had an instrument to play at home. “His parents,” Nika says. “They've been so good to me. They'll hate me now.”

“They won't,” Daria says, taking mugs from the cupboard, teabags from the tin.

“How could they not?”

“If you don't tell them,” Daria says. “If you never tell anyone.” She steeps the tea, brings the cups to the table with a little ceramic dish in the shape of a teapot, printed with roses and stained brown from the seep of old teabags. Nika puts her hands around the mug and shakes her head at sweeteners. Daria sits across from her, lets her tea turn almost black and then lifts out the bag. Nika doesn't move, and Dairy lifts hers out as well, lets them slump soggily in the little dish.

“You will say you were eating, drinking, watching the sun go down,” Daria says, as soothingly but matter-of-fact as she can. “Matti went swimming. Only him. He went far out and then
you couldn't see him anymore. You shouted and you swam and you dove until you couldn't breathe. It's true. All this is true.”

Nika gestures at her scratched shoulders, scraped feet.

“You went as far down as you could, seaweed wrapped around your ankles. You almost didn't make it up. You spent the night leaning against a log. How would your shoulders not be scraped? Besides, you'll change clothes. A long-sleeved shirt, jeans. They might never see.”

Nika only looks at her, holds her body straighter. She is sore and in pain, and her mother can see her trying to figure out how not to show it, how to walk unhunched toward Matti's parents and be hugged without flinching.

“What will it hurt?” Daria asks. “Nothing. No one.”

Nika nods, and Daria does not know what it means, whether Nika agrees, whether she trusts herself to speak.

“It's a good story. It's almost true. And it will hurt everyone so much less. Two families. You can spare two families.”

Nika looks for a moment as if she is trying to figure out who the other family is, who besides Matti's parents pick berries in their backyard and laugh together at the same television shows. She realizes that her mother means the two of them and Paavo, or perhaps not Paavo, perhaps only the two of them. Daria tells the story again, spins a tale that is as long as anything she has said to her daughter in a year. She takes more time over it than her announcement to Nika that she'd signed with the agency, staked her hopes on finding an elderly Finnish man who had been too long alone. She fills in the details, the feel of the light, the smell of the water, the horror of seeing Matti disappear beneath the surface of the lake. Nika was the one who was there, the one who knows these things, yet she is leaning forward, hanging on the words of the story she will be expected to tell.

Nika nods. She doesn't speak, but it is a good nod, sharp and decisive. Daria can see the muscles move along her neck. Daria smiles, takes her daughter's hand without speaking. The silence will swallow them, and it will save them whole. She thinks how exciting the story will be for the interpreter, how it will be a momentous task for the man with skin like the peels of new potatoes; how he will pause and lag and struggle to find a way
to tell a family that their teenage son is dead and if it is anyone's fault it's his own. The interpreter will struggle for the words, and Daria wonders how many she and Nika already know:
forest, lake, boyfriend, dark, I'm sorry
.
Metsä, järvi, poikaystävä, pimea, pahoillani
. Daria could ask now, about
olen pahoillani
, whether Nika knows this phrase for a regret so extraordinary that daily language cannot hold it. She could ask, but doesn't. Even if Nika knows the word, it is not now or ever a thing she wants to hear her daughter say.

In Tangier they were childless. At sea north of Algiers, the parents of a tuba prodigy. In Tunis, the parents of a daughter whose wedding featured a flock of ice sculptures: not only swans but cranes, herons, osprey. Geese mate for life, Lucinda and Wil told their fellow passengers on the
Wavecrest
, and the eagles cost as much as their double-occupancy stateroom on the cruise. As the ship sailed between Malta to the north and Tripoli to the south, the sea calm in between, the first formal dinner was scheduled with seatings at seven and eight. Wil and Lucinda unzipped their garment bags to find Wil's dinner jacket had the unmistakable smell of storage, lines pressed stiff along the seams and a mothy cedar smell from the wooden chips tucked in the closets at home. They hooked the hanger on the railing of their private balcony and let the suit flap over the Mediterranean. By dinner, lamb rubbed with mint and rosemary, Wil smelled like salt and wind and a peach sunset over the straits of Gibraltar, and they told their tablemates that their son was a cryptography genius recruited by the NSA at the age of twelve.

“Gunther asked us to send him a postcard from Egypt,” Wil said.

“And we said we could do better than that: a postcard for every day of the cruise,” Lucinda added. “It's such an interesting part of the world.”

Their tablemates, three elderly couples from Britain and Germany, stiff-backed and sparkling in evening wear, nodded. It was indeed an interesting part of the world, they said, and Gunther sounded like an interesting little boy.

“He is,” Lucinda nodded fervently. “He is.”

Wilbur and Lucinda Voorhuis were both fifty-one, and while Wil's round face carried the number better than his wife's, Lucinda often wore sleeveless dresses that showed off the long, firm muscles of her arms. They were both indeterminate enough to claim a hedgefund manager, a sweet-smelling infant, America's most promising young speed skater. At anchor in Port Said, at the northern edge of the Suez Canal, passengers on the inland river excursion were ferried on buses to Cairo, then on to Giza. The driver played a tape of educational commentary: the carving of the Sphinx in 2650 BC, the long solar boats that carried the Pharaohs into eternity. Wil asked Lucinda for a pen and notepad from her purse and drew a sideways Egyptian with the head of a jackal and a pleated skirt. “Anubis finds Lucinda worthy of paradise,” Will wrote in a speech bubble above the jackal's snout. “Her heart is lighter than an osprey's feather.” He was showing it to his wife when the elderly woman across the aisle asked if they'd had news yet from their eldest. Lucinda couldn't remember which child the woman was asking about, whether she needed an update on an Olympic bid in handball or the identification of breakages in chromosome 17p13. She wondered, for a wild, fluttering moment, if her real child had in fact typed a note, penned a letter, called the front desk of the Cairo Hilton and asked to be connected to Mr. and Mrs. Voorhuis' room.

“The article's still being vetted,” Wil stepped in. “But we're hopeful for the September issue. If not
JAMA,
it looks like
The Lancet
will take it.”

“It's quite an accomplishment,” the woman said. “I'd never even heard of the condition, and here's a young man who's got it all worked out.”

“It's not very common,” Wil said.

“Small mercy to those that have it.”

“True enough. We're very proud of him.”