SIX

Saturday morning, Katriina takes Tommy and Petey over to Victor Street early to help Nicki get breakfast ready for the family. It’s not that Katriina particularly likes Nicki, but they are thrown together in that way that family often is, and she has learned to love her. And she doesn’t ever worry about Shawn’s relationship with Nicki. Nicki and Shawn are close, but they don’t have that same bond that he and Finn do – no inside jokes, no shared favourite books, no secret phone conversations while Katriina is in the shower. Or maybe it’s just that there’s nothing mysterious about Nicki. Either way, with Finn on her way to Thunder Bay, Nicki is clearly on edge – considering what happened the last time the twins saw each other, Katriina can’t blame her – so Katriina tries to remain cheery as she stirs scrambled eggs for Ross and flips pancakes for everyone else.

“This is your husband’s fault, you know,” Nicki says. “He was the one who told her in the first place.” Nicki has been ranting about Finn for the better part of an hour, and Katriina has been trying to pay attention, she has. The same way she tried to pay attention to her sister the night before when she had gone to pick up the kids, Hanna telling her about the art exhibit she had seen on the weekend, the new pub opening up on the waterfront; the same way she tried to pay attention to Shawn when he came home from the restaurant and told her about the young cook he was going to have to fire. But it’s like watching television on mute – their mouths are moving, but nothing is coming out. So she nods her head and makes the appropriate noises because this is what she has learned to do.

“Katriina?” says Nicki.

Katriina tries to bring herself into focus and takes hold of the pancake pan. Another thing she’s able to do by rote: pour, turn, flip. She did grow up in a Finnish pancake house after all; she should be able to do this in her sleep. But Nicki is still staring at her questioningly, so she looks down and sees the pancake is burning. It has been one pancake this whole time, burning itself right into the pan.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, scraping the charred remnants from the bottom of the pan into the garbage. For a minute she considers telling Nicki about the miscarriage, but decides against it. Nicki is too preoccupied – with the impending Finn situation, with her mother, with her kids, with everything. Besides, Nicki shouldn’t know before Shawn, it’s just not right.

“Mom!” she hears one of her boys scream from the living room. “Mom! Ross won’t let me play with his Legos.”

“Ross, stop being such a little brat!” Nicki yells.

“It’s probably one of my boys’ fault,” Katriina says. Her head starts to throb, a tiny flash of light pulsing behind her right eyeball. “They’re probably just being grabby.” She finishes scraping the pan and runs it under the tap. “You have lots of toys!” she calls, forcing cheerfulness. She feels the elastic band digging into her arm and fights the urge to snap it.

“Mom! He’s stuffing the Legos in his pants so we can’t play with them!”

“Ross, that’s gross!” Nicki says.

Suddenly there is a scream from the other room, and Ross comes running into the kitchen crying, his face indented with Lego markings, little round pockmarks in his delicate skin. Katriina runs into the other room, grabs the nearest boy, and smacks him across the bum. Then all the kids are crying, and Katriina is yelling Finnish curse words that she didn’t even know she remembered, and when it’s over she locks herself in Nicki’s bathroom and stares at herself in the mirror as she snaps the elastic over and over again – be a better mother, be a better mother, be a better mother – until her wrist has gone completely numb.

—

Katriina knows that the main reason Shawn wants to have another baby is because he thinks it will save their marriage. It’s not that she and Shawn don’t love each other, or even that they fight, or have resentments; there is no cheating or lying or drinking or abuse. It’s just that after all this time together they seem to have nothing left to say. When they were first married, all they did was talk: late into the night the way new couples do, over food and wine or while trying to watch a movie, lying in bed after sex, playing each other their favourite songs. They didn’t have much in common then – at least, not in the way she had had with the other guys she dated before, all good Finnish boys whose parents were friends with her parents, who worked as busboys at Kahvila on weekends after hockey practice and still spent Sunday afternoons with their mummus making pulla. What Katriina and Shawn loved then was the sound of their own voices, the radiant glow of their own beautiful goddamned hearts. Then they loved Tommy and Petey when they came along, one year after the other, right at a time when that glow was starting to dim – they loved being new parents, loved the attention it brought them from both their families, how it gave them something to concentrate on other than each other.

But now that Tommy and Petey are older and starting to have their own lives, their own interests, Katriina is beginning to realize how rarely she and Shawn see each other most days. One of them always comes home late, either Shawn from the restaurant or Katriina from an open house, and then he is up at the crack of dawn to oversee breakfast service, or she is rushing out to meet with a potential client, leaving them to text each other during the day about where the kids are, who is going to pick them up, what they are going to have for dinner, whether they need anything at Shoppers Drug Mart, who they will call to fix the driveway. On the odd occasions when they do run into each other – in the bathroom in the morning while brushing their teeth, or collapsed on the couch for a quick glass of wine before going up to bed – they speak awkwardly, politely, as though they are strangers. Katriina can’t even remember the last time Shawn kissed her on the mouth instead of on the forehead as he is running out the door. When they have sex, it’s like a chore being completed, and only then because they’ve decided it is time to try for a third child, so they will have something to talk about again, so they will have something novel to interrupt the monotony of their everyday lives.

Ironically, what has happened to Kate could be a good thing for them. That morning, Shawn had pressed snooze on the alarm and wrapped his arms around her, pressing his face into the back of her neck and pretending to bite her; later, he sat on the edge of the bathtub while she put on her makeup and told her about going back to the hospital to see Kate the night before, about how aggressive the reporters were getting.

“There was this one reporter, Cassandra something, from Thunder Bay News. She told the nurses she was Kate’s niece and just walked right into her room. If I hadn’t been there, no one would have even known,” he said, rubbing his hands over his face. “Apparently there are clips of Kate all over the internet. People are posting them on fucking Facebook.”

“Oh dear,” said Katriina, flicking her powder brush over the tip of her nose. She knew the clips were out there, of course – unless you lived under a rock, you knew about the Conqueror of Kakabeka – but she couldn’t bring herself to watch them. One of her co-workers had even emailed it to her – Take a look at this lady – crazy!!!! – not realizing the crazy lady was Katriina’s mother-in-law. She had deleted it without watching.

“I just don’t understand it,” Shawn said, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Why would she do this? What could have possibly been going through her head?”

Katriina swept her mascara brush over her eyelashes, trying to keep her hand steady. “But how many of us could say we went over a waterfall in a barrel?” she heard Kate say in her head. Earlier, she had considered telling Shawn about this conversation but had convinced herself it wouldn’t make any difference, that it wouldn’t make him feel any better. Now, she realized deep down that she didn’t want to tell him because she knew it wouldn’t make her feel any better.

The silent seconds ticked by. Say something, she thought. Anything. “I’m sure she’ll be able to tell us soon, Shawn. I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation.” As soon as she said it, she knew it was the wrong thing, the wrong combination of letters and words. She concentrated on her own reflection in the mirror, avoiding Shawn’s eyes, afraid of the contempt she was sure she would find there. And just when she was about to say something else, to try to make it better, she felt the mascara brush stab against her eye and she dropped it into the sink, squeezing her eye shut as oily black tears spilled out over her cheeks.

Through her one open eye she saw Shawn reach out and put a roll of toilet paper on the counter and walk out of the bathroom. She blotted at her face with the tissue, trying to fix her mistake, but later, in her car, she checked in the mirror and saw the faint black streaks across her cheeks, lingering evidence of her failure.

—

As they are finishing breakfast, Shawn calls Katriina from the restaurant. “Where are you?” he asks. “I’m stuck at work for a bit.”

“Victor Street.” With her free hand she starts stacking dirty dishes on the table. The three girls are upstairs watching television and the three boys are in the backyard, and Nicki is sitting at the kitchen table, reading a magazine. All while Katriina cleans up. “Just having breakfast with Nicki and the kids,” she says brightly.

“Wait, Nicki’s there?” Shawn asks. “She was supposed to pick up Finn at the airport forty-five minutes ago!”

Katriina takes a breath. “Nicki,” she says, pulling the phone away from her ear. “Shawn says you were supposed to pick Finn up at the airport.”

Nicki stabs at a piece of pancake with her fork, then sticks it in her mouth. “No I wasn’t,” she says through her chewing. “Shawn was going to do it.”

“Nicki says you were supposed to do it.”

“How was I supposed to do it?” Shawn yells. “I’m at fucking work!”

Katriina pulls the phone away from her ear again. “Shawn says he’s at work.”

“I’m at work, too.”

“You’re eating pancakes.”

Nicki holds up a magazine, the front of which reads Hair Today. “It’s research,” she says, shrugging.

With the phone pinned between her neck and her shoulder, Katriina snatches up the stack of plates and deposits them in the sink a little too forcefully, wondering how she keeps getting caught up in the dramas of a family that isn’t even hers. She thinks about her own family, about Hanna and their parents and all their small, easily contained lives. If there are problems, they keep them to themselves. There is none of this leaving people at airports or screaming obscenities into cell phones. No riding barrels over waterfalls.

“She’s not going,” Katriina says into the phone. “Sorry.”

Shawn sighs. “Can you go, then?”

“Me?” Katriina says, raising her brows at Nicki. Nicki rolls her eyes. “I…I’ll have to see if my car’s still here…Hamish might have borrowed it…”

As she steps to the window, pretending to check for her car that she knows is there, she sees a cab pull up into the driveway and Finn get out. “Oh, she’s here,” Katriina says.

“Lucky you,” Shawn says.

Finn comes into the house with her eyes blazing, her head a halo of frizzy hair. She is perfectly dishevelled, as if she has just taken the red-eye from Paris after partying all night with rock stars or something. Even after all these years, Katriina is still startled by how identical Finn and Nicki really are, although now she notices that Finn appears years younger – her skin smooth and unwrinkled, her body lean in the places where Nicki’s has grown flabby. Do either of them notice? she wonders. Or do they just see themselves when they look at each other?

“Oh, hi,” says Nicki. “You made it.”

“Yup,” Finn says, slipping out of her flip-flops. The air vibrates with things unsaid. Katriina can feel it – it’s as if Nicki and Finn are having a conversation that only they can hear.

“Hello, Serafina,” Katriina says, trying to break the tension. “It’s so good to see you.” She reaches out to hug her, feeling awkward and gangly and all angles as she tries to manoeuvre her arms around Finn’s small frame.

“You, too,” says Finn, flinching.

Katriina could swear that Finn and Nicki’s eyes meet behind her back. Katriina pulls away quickly, her cheeks starting to burn. “Excuse me,” she mumbles. “I’ve got to get the kids to Hanna’s.” She slips out of the kitchen and through to the backyard before anyone can say anything else, two sets of identical eyes following her as she leaves.

Finn might think she is the outsider in her family, but she is still more of a Parker than Katriina ever will be.

—

On the best of days, Katriina’s life is a messy chaos of travelling between houses – her own, Hanna’s, her parents’, Victor Street, the Paulsson place, and any other house she is trying to sell. She finds herself, more often than she would like, making tea in someone else’s kitchen, forced to make do with someone else’s choice of milk. This afternoon it is almond milk at Hanna’s place, where she drops off the kids before her next showing, because Hanna has decided she is lactose-intolerant. As if any Scandinavian was ever unable to eat cheese.

“Did you see her?” Hanna asks as they sit at her sleek granite-topped island. Hanna owns a clothing store downtown and lives next door in the closest thing to a hipster loft that you could possibly find in Thunder Bay, an industrial space that has been converted into studios. She is all about the downtown north core, that two-block radius of stores and restaurants that can make you feel like you’re in a real city until you realize you have walked the entire length of the neighbourhood in less than a minute. Still, if you never left that two-block radius, if you lived and worked and partied there, you might be able to forget where you are. Katriina knows this is what Hanna is trying to do.

“Yeah,” says Katriina, embarrassed that for a minute she is unsure which “her” Hanna might be talking about. “Last night. She is still in a coma.”

Hanna shakes her head. “I still can’t believe it,” she says. “The clip’s been on all the news stations. They’re calling her the Conqueror of Kakabeka.”

Katriina takes a sip of her coffee. For her, what’s happened with Kate has been such a private thing, it is a jolt every time someone mentions it – she has a hard time believing that the world is having a reaction to something that she herself hasn’t really had the time to react to yet. “Yeah,” she says. “It’s a weird thing.”

“What’s wrong?” Hanna asks immediately. Secrets have never really been possible between the Saarinen sisters. From their parents, yes, boyfriends, even husbands, yes, but never from each other.

Katriina gazes down into her coffee, organically roasted and fairly traded, she assumes. “I lost the baby,” she says. “Again.”

Hanna shrugs. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Not a big deal?” Katriina swishes her coffee around in her cup, focusing on the whirling liquid. “How can you say that? It’s like my uterus is broken.”

“If that were true, you wouldn’t have them,” Hanna says, nodding to the frosted glass balcony doors, through which they can see the wavy outline of Tommy and Petey. The boys love going to Hanna’s place. They love her hardwood floors, the balcony overlooking the harbour, the nine hundred channels on her high-def TV. It’s strange, seeing her outdoor-loving boys – who will no doubt grow up as northern as they come, as northern as their dad and their granddad, who will fish and hunt and drink beer, who will drive quad runners in the summer and snow machines in the winter and trucks year-round – sitting on rattan deck chairs, sipping some kind of artisan root beer, and taking pictures of the Sleeping Giant with their iPhones. They turn into different creatures here, city boys, and sometimes Katriina can see little glimpses into alternate futures for them. It never lasts, though – five minutes at home and they will be devising new ways to maim each other with household objects, new things to drive their BMX bikes over.

It’s not that she doesn’t love Tommy and Petey. She does. It’s just that everything with them is so physical, so immediate, so loud. So Shawn. Part of the reason she agreed to try again was to give her own genetic material one more chance to fight its way to the top, to see if she could produce a child who people might recognize as her own.

“Maybe they broke me,” Katriina says.

Hanna lowers her coffee mug. “It seems to me that you’re more worried about your body not performing the way you think it should than you are about having or not having another baby.”

“Maybe,” says Katriina. The whirlpool in her coffee is still spinning, and she has a strange, irrational urge to be inside it, to surrender herself to the void. Maybe she is beginning to understand what drew her mother-in-law to that waterfall.

—

Later that afternoon, Katriina is showing a young couple from Winnipeg around the Paulsson house when she hears a sudden, sharp wail coming from above them, a keen so profound that she has to stop and hold on to the doorframe as she is discussing the possibility of fitting an eight-person table plus a buffet in the dining room.

“I’m so sorry,” she says to the couple. “I can’t even explain that.”

“You’re explaining it fine, I just don’t see it,” says the woman, who is called Irene or Aileen, Katriina isn’t sure.

“Excuse me?” says Katriina, holding a hand over her right ear to try to block out the noise. She hasn’t even said anything yet about how the sound might be from a passing train, or a neighbour’s cat that has been trapped in the rafters.

“There’s just not enough space over here,” Irene/Aileen says. “The hutch is at least a foot and a half deep. There wouldn’t be any room to push your chair out from the table.”

“I don’t know,” her husband says, whose name Katriina remembers because it is actually Shawn, even though he is small and wiry and bald, nothing like a Shawn should be. “I mean, once you had it in here, you’d see it’s not as big as you think it is.”

“I’ve heard that one before,” Irene/Aileen says. It is a joke without mirth. In the midst of this, Katriina realizes they can’t hear the wailing, which has pitched up an octave, into a range that feels like it is burning holes through both her eardrums.

“Let me show you the kitchen,” she says, a little too loudly. Irene/Aileen and Shawn both give her a strange look but follow her out of the possibly-too-small dining room, their hands linked together in solidarity. The wail is now a scream, and as Katriina explains that the cupboards are brand new, only two years old, she can barely hear her own voice. All she can think is, How can they not hear this?, immediately followed by Maybe I’m having a stroke. She blinks, testing her vision. Her tongue feels normal. She can clench and unclench her left fist. She has no idea if these things are actual stroke warnings or not, but for a moment it takes her mind off the noise. She smiles brightly, opens cupboard doors, talks about the school in the neighbourhood. It doesn’t matter; she knows they are not going to buy the house. They could sense the tragedy as soon as they walked in, the heavy, burdened feeling in the walls, the heartache in the floors.

“The longer a house stands empty, the lonelier it gets,” Katriina’s boss, Paula, is fond of saying. Paula, who once suggested stashing crystals around the Paulsson place in order to “heal its spirit.” Katriina took the crystals, worried that if she didn’t, Paula would suggest something even more drastic, like a séance or an exorcism. But she left them in her car – at the very least, she might not have to worry about that slow leak in her right front tire. Paula was right about one thing – the longer a house was up for sale, the harder it was to sell, regardless of the market or the location or the upgrades or anything. It was as though the house lost confidence the more it was rejected, which led to even more rejection. Or not the house, Katriina supposes. The person trying to sell the house.

After Irene/Aileen and Shawn leave, Katriina leans against the front door, breathing in deeply. The wailing has stopped. She goes upstairs, checking all the rooms for stray raccoons, for hidden smoke alarms, but can find nothing. Nothing but a silent house, waiting to be occupied.

“Claudia?” she whispers into the silence.

She is going crazy. She must be going crazy. She reaches for her elastic, but it’s not there. She has a flash to it sitting in a pool of water on the edge of the sink at Victor Street, where she took it off to rub Polysporin on the scratches. With increasing panic, she searches the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, the floor of the closet in Claudia’s room, the junk drawer in the kitchen, anywhere there might be a stray elastic band.

In the end, all she finds is some garbage bag twist-ties and a pad of yellow Post-it notes in a kitchen drawer. She digs a pen out of her purse and writes on the top Post-it. Be a better…

But there are too many things to cover, too many aspects of her life that she has let slide. She sticks the note to the inside of the cupboard door. Then she changes her mind and crosses out the “a”: Be better. Just be better.