22

IT ALL STARTED with a harmless phone call.

Eleonoora hung up her coat, closed her locker door, and slipped out of her loose pants and open-necked shirt. She thought she might just be for a moment, go for a walk on the beach, look at the seagulls floating in the air as if they were hung there. Then the phone rang.

Her first thought was: Mom.

It was an unknown number. She answered more testily than she meant to. It was Rautalampi from the art supply store calling about a painting Anna had brought in to be framed. Eleonoora let her worry drop away.

“The Ahlqvist that one of you brought in,” Rautalampi began.

For some reason he always referred to both Dad and Dad’s paintings this way—Ahlqvist. She wasn’t always sure if he was talking about the man or the art. Maybe that was intentional.

“It wasn’t me,” Eleonoora said. “It was my daughter Anna, remember? She wanted to have it framed for herself. I don’t have anything to do with it. Is it ready?”

“Well, actually . . .”

“Yes?”

“It’s the strangest thing, I’m telling you . . .”

“Did you call Anna? The picture’s for her, so I’m sure she’d like to decide about the frame and everything.”

“Right,” he said. “I hear you. I tried to call her, but I couldn’t get hold of her. I thought about calling your father.”

“This has nothing to do with him. I don’t think he’s particularly interested in the picture. He said we could dispose of all the paintings at Tammilehto.”

“This one’s a bit complicated.”

Now she was getting annoyed. When she was stressed she unconsciously took a certain attitude toward people in certain professions—bank tellers, grocery clerks, boys who worked at gas stations and couldn’t find blades to fit her windshield wipers. She always got control of her prickliness too late, after she’d already blown up at them. Every time it happened she would remember when she was little and she threw a tantrum because she wasn’t allowed to eat a chocolate bar that Rautalampi had given her before dinner. She wondered if Rautalampi saw this as the same childish temper, which annoyed her all the more.

“Well,” she demanded. “Can you tell me what this is about? I’m in a hurry.”

Not one to be moved by an angry or accusing tone, Rautalampi said firmly, “I think you’d better come see for yourself.”

SHE DROVE DOWN the ramp from the hospital and turned left onto the shore road.

Her annoyance was directed at her father, although it was only his painting that had interrupted her day. Sometimes in her younger years she’d been infuriated at him for the very same thing. Who do you think you are? Can’t you see that everything here revolves around you? You think you’re so big, so all-important, so revered. In reality you’re just a joke. You just use your art as an excuse to keep to yourself.

Her father had taken these outbursts surprisingly calmly—It’s good that you don’t idealize your parents, I guess.

When she opened the door of the art supply store, Rautalampi looked at her over his glasses.

“So.”

“So,” she replied tersely.

“I was taking the canvas off its stretcher bars,” he said.

“I hope you haven’t damaged it?”

He gave her a scathing look, a look that said, I do not damage paintings. What do you think I am, a clumsy child?

“Just come and look at it.”

The frame shop was in the back of the store. Familiar smells of glue and wooden lath filled the room as they always had, as if there were no time.

Rautalampi moved the easel. The painting Eleonoora saw wasn’t the one with the oranges.

Rautalampi, who had always eschewed drama of any kind, with his whole being, kept talking, like a grocer discussing an overshipment of coffee.

“There was a little buckle in the canvas. It happens sometimes. I took the top canvas off as well as I could. It’s there on the table. It can be restretched, of course. But you’ll need to decide what you want to do with this other one. It’s been under here for years, so it’s amazingly unscathed. That’s why I wanted you to come see it. It’s actually an unusual work for Ahlqvist. I don’t know if he had any reason for wanting to cover it up. Maybe it was some kind of experiment. He clearly had a model. You can see it in the peculiar stylistic fumbling. It’s almost like a caricature. It’s undoubtedly an adaptation, but I don’t know from what. He seems to be unable to choose a technique—he’s combined several here, not with any great success, if you don’t mind my saying so. Now you have to decide what to do with it. Shall I call your father or should we leave the painting here? You can’t really call it a completed work, it’s too unfinished. But it’s not my place to determine the worth of the pieces that come in.”

The woman in the painting was looking into Eleonoora’s eyes.

Rautalampi coughed at the same moment that the shop door squeaked. Someone entered, and Rautalampi said he would be right back.

Eleonoora stood in front of the painting for a moment. Then she turned, saw a chair in the corner, and sat down. She actually wished someone would come and cover the painting up. But no one came.

It was Eeva looking at her, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t stop looking back.

TO BE UNREACHABLE, to be indifferent to everything, these were the only ways Eleonoora knew to express anger. She walked without any particular destination. The sea was a level wall sparkling dazzlingly. The anger came in a wave of nausea, in flashes of memory.

Two hours later she stopped and looked at her phone. Nine calls. Some from her father, some from the phone in the apartment on Sammonkatu, some from an unknown number. The screen blinked. Anna. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence—Anna had tried to call her earlier.

The phone fell out of her hand. She didn’t intend to pick it up. Then she changed her mind—perhaps she guessed what Anna was going to tell her—and she picked it up off the ground.

She spoke without asking why Anna was calling, without explaining what she meant: “I saw Eeva. In a picture.”

Anna was silent. Anna knew! Anna wasn’t denying that she knew!

“Grandma told me about her,” Anna said. “And Grandpa. They told me about Eeva.”

Eleonoora had just one thing to say to her: “I don’t want to talk to you. I can’t bear to see you right now.”

Anna paid no attention to what she said. “Grandpa has tried to call you several times. He finally called me. Grandma’s dead.”