26

I’M BOARDING THE tram, riding it across town. I saw Grandma before the coffin was closed, saw her at peace, quiet on the white sheets. I cried a little.

Yesterday Mom didn’t look me in the eye—not when Dad came to get us in the car and not when we were drinking tea in the garden after it was all over.

The evening darkened slowly. Pink, lavender, peach.

My dad hugged my mom, I watched them and envied the simplicity of it, the comfort they had always been to each other. Maria hugged her, too, wrapped her arms around her. Mom stroked her back distractedly.

I didn’t even try to hug her. She didn’t look at me all evening. It felt like I’d ruined everything. I’d ruined it by knowing, by imagining, by bringing her the message.

I spent the night at home, made my old bed in crisply folded sheets that Mom had put through the wringer.

Later that night, when I’d already gone to sleep and woken again, I lay awake, then crept down the stairs and saw her in a corner of the sofa and asked if she was crying and she finally looked at me. I was still in the doorway. I was afraid to come any closer.

“Are you crying about Grandma?”

She slowly turned toward me, and I saw that I couldn’t reach her grief.

“I’m crying about my mother,” she said.

Then I went to her and hugged her. She didn’t try to stop me. I comforted her the way children are comforted. I had the words and the strength for it now, and my arms went around her.

She said she was going to talk to Grandpa. I won’t hear what they said, and I don’t want to. The things that happen between parents and their children, the accusations and the apologies made perhaps clumsily—no one else can understand them.

My job is to be here, to ride the tram across town. This time I won’t pluck anyone’s story to take with me, I have other stories to tell.

Eeva stepped into the water, intending to swim, and she did swim, as if she’d always been part of the family of the fish. Grandma was put in a coffin. Mom talked with Grandpa.

I ride across town and get off the tram.

MATIAS IS HOME. He’s on his way to play tennis, his racket leaning against the door, his bag packed. He’s been eating bread and reading the paper. I see the crumbs on the paper that’s lying open on the kitchen table.

“Well?” he says.

He comes and gives me a hug. I let him come. He opens me like this, little by little. Over and over he opens me, even though I thought I had closed myself forever.

IT’S A BEAUTIFUL day, my love—a beautiful day in life.

NOW I CAN tell him what I’ve been keeping to myself all this time.

It all begins at the moment the man walks out the door. It all begins at the moment the child asks, Will we see each other again? and I say I’ll see her tomorrow, even though I know it’s not true. It all begins when I lie on the floor for eleven days.

I start in a whisper. Once I’ve started, the words come easily. I haven’t told him this story. But I’m telling it now.