Our relationship is based on trust, on mutual respect, on the natural balance of give and take. We have a shared direction, shared objectives. We are spouses, lovers, best friends. We know each other, comfort each other, we experience happiness and elation on each other’s behalf. In a word, we are wedded.
But…
Perhaps all this is being measured on this bright, chilled afternoon in a remote Finnish forest into which I have deceitfully driven my wife, who is carrying another man’s child. My wife, to whom something terrible has clearly happened. But what can I do? I cannot return to the spruce forest and reveal my plot. I ponder this for a moment until I think I’ve come up with a solution. I begin running again. Once I am far enough away, I take my own phone from my pocket. Eventually Krista answers.
‘Hi,’ she says.
‘Hello, my love,’ I begin. ‘I was just calling to ask if you want me to pick anything up at the shop on my way home. I can’t remember if we’re out of anything, but we definitely need more bread, yoghurt and eggs.’
Silence.
‘Fish,’ she says eventually. ‘Salmon, maybe.’
‘Right. Salmon soup might be nice. We’ll be needing some potatoes then, too. What else?’
‘Salad,’ she says, and from the tone of her voice I can tell her heart isn’t in putting together this evening’s shopping list. ‘A few tomatoes.’
I remain silent for the length of time it would take me to write these things down. It works.
‘Joel … I think I’ve sprained my ankle.’
I need to sound surprised. I try my best: ‘Where? I mean … how?’ Perhaps there’s more interrogation in my voice than pure surprise.
‘I don’t know whether I’ve broken it or just sprained it,’ Krista says, and I can hear that she’s truly in pain. ‘I can’t step on it, can’t really walk.’
‘Are you at home?’
A short pause.
‘No.’
‘Where are you?’
‘In the woods.’
‘The woods?’
‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘There’s a spruce forest behind the Teerilä Outdoor Museum. I’m on the hillside. The place with the stream running below it. You remember? The place we watched together back in the autumn because it was flowing so strongly.’
‘Like a little river,’ I say. ‘I remember.’
And how could I forget? It was a beautiful day. We were walking together, hand in hand. The trees were resplendent, their colours glowing for perhaps the last time that autumn – there was already a faint sense of frost in the air. I know the next question is unavoidable.
‘What are you doing out there?’
Krista is ready for the question. She too knew it was coming. ‘I was having a walk.’
‘A walk?’
‘I needed some fresh air.’
‘In thick snow in the middle of the forest?’
Am I doing this on purpose? Asking her questions, though I know the answers. And her answers are irrelevant; the questions themselves are enough – enough to show my superiority. The situation reminds me of the rare occasions when we’ve had an argument. Krista is silent. Eventually she speaks.
Krista is sitting in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. I am driving. We are lying to each other. It is shocking, but it’s surprisingly easy. It feels neither good nor right, but my mouth moves as though it were attached to someone else’s face. It’s a forty-minute drive to the doctor’s surgery.
And lying isn’t even the worst of it. Every time Krista lets out a yelp or a moan, it feels like someone clutches my stomach in an enormous fist and squeezes. This is all my fault. There’s no point trying to deny it or wriggle my way round it. I don’t know if we’ve looked each other in the eye once throughout the journey.
On top of that, I get the sense that Krista sees I’m not as shocked or worried as I probably should be. Of course, in one way I am very shocked and worried, very much so indeed. But my shock and worry have nothing to do with her accident.
I know the question I should be asking myself and everyone around me. Krista is pregnant, so what would have happened if she’d knocked herself unconscious; would she have frozen to death in the woods? I have to carry on asking myself these things. I try to find a suitable way of looking at this, an angle that might provide surprising answers. Eventually I come up with one.
‘I couldn’t help noticing…’ I begin, ‘…there was another set of footprints in the snow, along the embankment.’
I don’t quite glance to the side, but I focus on what I see out of the corner of my eye. Krista seems to turn her face towards the passenger window.
‘My leg was so sore I didn’t really look around.’
‘What about before that? Did you see anyone out there in the forest?’
‘Did I see anyone?’
‘It’s just … if there was someone there you could have called for help. Was there someone else around? The prints looked quite fresh.’
‘I didn’t see anybody,’ she says, and I can tell from her voice that she’s thought about this. ‘Not a soul on my walk. Well, I mean while I was in the woods. It was spur-of-the-moment, the whole thing. I thought I could take a shortcut through the forest down to the road, then from there I’d make my way back to the village. Something like that. But then my foot got caught in something and I fell.’
‘Right – down to the road.’
I see movement in the corner of my eye. Krista turns to look at me. ‘To the stream. Our stream.’
Our stream, I think to myself. The thought was sullied the moment it was born. The stream flows with black water. Krista is silent. Maybe she’s expecting me to say something.
‘Well, you’re here now; that’s the main thing,’ I say. ‘And thank goodness nothing worse happened.’
Krista lays a hand on mine. ‘When I’m with you, only good things happen.’
Krista’s ankle is badly sprained. The good news is she won’t need an operation. She is given a strong bandage and a plastic brace around her ankle, and a set of crutches, which help her get around.
We drive home again.
We lie to each other even more.
The afternoon darkens, shades of golden brown, violet and blood red slowly shift across the sky. Then the day finally loses its power altogether. It slumps behind the trees along the side of the road, leaving me behind just as it has done around thirteen thousand times before, to be replaced with a growing darkness that soon engulfs everything.
Suddenly I find myself living the worst time of my life. But I guess that’s what happens; surely nobody decides that on a Wednesday afternoon in a month’s time they’re going to screw everything up. It just happens, then you’re right in the middle of it, regardless of what you do or don’t believe.
I remember that happy spring afternoon when we packed up the van and left Helsinki for Hurmevaara. We told each other this would be the beginning of another shared adventure. We didn’t say, ‘Let’s take the sofa, the lamps, the books, the tables and drive straight to Hell.’
But that’s exactly what we’ve done.
The studded tyres grind against the road, and the very presence of the woman I love breaks my heart in two.