The sparse-limbed Christmas tree in the common room had already shed its needles on the floor when Siiri finally left her apartment. The tree was where the card table usually stood, and the Ambassador was very cross about it.
‘Where am I supposed to play solitaire?’ he shouted melodramatically, but no one reacted except for Margit Partanen, who hurriedly pushed her husband out of the room before he could say something lewd.
Eino Partanen had advanced Parkinson’s, and probably also Alzheimer’s and serious dementia, but since Margit knew how horrible the Group Home was, she had appointed herself his personal caregiver. Caring for one’s husband around the clock, week after week, while also living in a retirement home seemed like a strange solution but Margit was glad to get the 150 euros a month. She was actually being paid for not wasting the Sunset Grove staff’s time in caring for her Eino. Eino sat in his wheelchair mostly confused and if he spoke he usually said something inappropriate, which embarrassed his wife tremendously. But the disease hadn’t taken away all of Eino’s powers, because the residents of A wing could still hear the couple’s regular recreational activities.
Anna-Liisa was sitting at the coffee table. For once Siiri was happy that Anna-Liisa was there because she had to talk to somebody. Anna-Liisa listened without the smallest change in expression, her hands resting on her Zimmer frame.
‘Don’t waste your sorrow,’ she said. ‘Irma’s not dead. At least not yet. Everything happens in its time.’
‘But listen, I think that Irma has been taken to the closed unit,’ Siiri said finally. She had turned the idea over in her mind for such a long time without being able to think of how to proceed. Sometimes she thought she herself was going soft in the head, or paranoid or whatever, but she was more frightened that she might be right.
Anna-Liisa was silent for a moment. She didn’t say anything, which Siiri thought was a good sign. If Anna-Liisa had immediately started a lecture, she wouldn’t have been thinking about the matter, she would have just been talking for the sake of it.
‘Yes, I’m sure she has,’ Anna-Liisa said finally, folding her napkin into ever smaller triangles where it lay on the table. She started folding the plastic bags into smaller and smaller triangles, too – she had these peculiar habits, which she was rather proud of. ‘Reino was locked in the dementia ward when he made a fuss about Olavi Raudanheimo’s terrible treatment. And Olavi would have remained in the closed unit if his son hadn’t rescued him and taken him to Meilahti Hospital. And Irma has written numerous complaints, and very well-founded ones, which is even worse. Her last complaint was about head nurse Virpi Hiukkanen, when she left you lying on the floor unconscious. This measure is probably Irma’s punishment.’
Anna-Liisa weighed every word, wrestling for precision and articulating very distinctly. Everything she said was horrifying. But Siiri was relieved to have someone say so lucidly what she had feared. Maybe she wasn’t going crazy after all.
‘I just don’t know what to think,’ she explained. ‘Virpi Hiukkanen claimed that Irma was paranoid. It’s one of the symptoms of dementia, so you could use it to label anyone who suspects you.’
‘Dementia is the symptom, not paranoia,’ Anna-Liisa corrected her, and then thought again for a moment. ‘Irma did ask to see her medical files, didn’t she? And she didn’t get them. Virpi didn’t want to give them back to her.’
This was something Siiri had worried about too. Maybe someone had falsified Irma’s records so that transferring her to the closed unit would seem like a justifiable decision.
‘I’m afraid that soon they’ll shut me up in there, because I suspect all kinds of things. What can a person do?’
Anna-Liisa didn’t speak, but this time her thoughtful pause was so long that Siiri began to lose hope. Anna-Liisa must be as helpless, as much at a loss, as she was. They sank into a deep, gloomy silence and stared into empty space. A paper angel on a stick lay on the table, they could hear the grunt and slap of the Ambassador playing solitaire in the corner behind the tree, and somewhere further off the thump of Exercise Annie’s aerobics cassette. On the television some children were having a crabwalk race.
And then an amazing thing happened. Siiri Kettunen lifted her eyes from the paper angel and saw something that she had almost forgotten about, and at that moment she knew that it was the solution to everything.