Until I Find You

story about her becoming a prostitute to embarrass her ex-husband. (Femke was rich, as Jack recalled, yet she’d become a whore!) What wouldn’t you believe when you were four, and your mom was the manager of your so-called memories?

“Begin with the cop, Jack,” Ritva said. “There was a cop—he was your dad’s best friend.”

“He got you out of there—he was your best friend, too, Jack,” Hannele said.

“Yes, I remember him,” Jack said. He was a nice guy, Nico Oudejans. Nico’s eyes were a robin’s-egg blue, and high on one cheekbone he had a small scar shaped like the letter L. “Naturally, I thought he was my mother’s friend,” Jack told Hannele and Ritva. “And I thought Femke was a prostitute!”

They were sitting on the leather couch in the living room, with the darkness now fallen over the glowing dome of the Church in the Rock. The two women flanked Jack on the couch; they put their arms around him.

“Jack, your mother was a prostitute. Femke was just a lawyer,” Hannele said.

“My mom was a prostitute for just one night!” Jack blurted out. “She took only one customer—a young boy. She said he was a virgin.”

The two women went on hugging him. “Jack, no one’s a prostitute for just one night,” Ritva said.

“There’s no such thing as a prostitute who takes only one customer, Jack,” Hannele told Jack. “Not to mention one virgin!”

“We should all have dinner tonight!” Ritva cried suddenly.

“Unless Jack has a date,” Hannele said, teasing him. “I refuse to share Jack with a date.” Jack just sat on the leather couch, staring at the darkness out the window.

“From the look of him, he’s got a date,” Ritva said.

“Yes, he’s got a date. I can see it in his eyes,” Hannele said.

“I’m sorry,” Jack told them. He just didn’t know how sorry—not yet.

The aerobics instructor was thirty-one weeks pregnant and expecting her second child.

“Same anonymous sperm donor?” Jack asked as nonchalantly as the circumstances permitted. They were both naked and in bed, in his hotel room at the Torni, and Marja-Liisa was pressing Jack’s face against her big belly so that he could feel how a thirty-one-week-old fetus moved around in there.

“No, my husband died,” she explained. “We were planning to have a second child, but it took me almost three years to get up the nerve to have the second one alone.”

“Do you have a boy or a girl?”

“A four-year-old boy.”

In the context of Jack’s return trip to the North Sea, almost everything about a four-year-old boy was interesting to him; however, he sensed that this wasn’t the time and place to tell Marja-Liisa how sorry he was to miss meeting her son. (Jack was leaving for Amsterdam very early in the morning.)

She said a friend was with the four-year-old, giving the boy his supper and putting him to bed. Marja-Liisa warned Jack that she couldn’t stay late. It was unusual for her to stay out past her son’s bedtime, and she was always back home, in her own bed, when the boy woke up in the morning.

The athleticism of the thirty-one-week-old fetus was a marvel to Jack—less so, the lovemaking of the aerobics instructor. He’d never been in bed with a pregnant woman; Jack had no idea what to expect. He probably shouldn’t have been concerned by how active Marja-Liisa was—that is, for a woman in her condition. (After all, he’d watched her lead the leaping women in the aerobics class, and Jack knew that most of the uncomfortable-looking positions he’d seen in the Schwangere Girls magazine could not have been faked.)

Jack realized only later what he had wanted, which was not to have sex with her but just to hold her while he fell asleep. All he really desired was his hand on her big belly, his hand imagining that there were two people he loved—not just a woman but also the child she was about to have. It had been a great way to fall asleep.

The knock on the door was quiet at first, then more insistent. It was not a Sami Salo kind of knocking, but one Jack was able to incorporate into his dream—in the dream, Jack was a father.

“Marja-Liisa, are you there?” said a man’s voice in the hall. Then he must have asked the same question in Finnish.

The pregnant aerobics instructor had gone. Jack woke up alone in the bed; he went into the bathroom and wrapped a towel around his waist. There was a Hotel Torni envelope stuck to the mirror with a dab of his toothpaste. It was a clever way for her to have left him a note. He realized now that he must have been talking in his sleep.

My name is Marja-Liisa, not Michele. Who’s Michele?

Jack crumpled up the envelope and threw it in the bathroom wastebasket. Clutching the towel around his waist, he went to see who was at the door. Jack had a bad feeling that he already knew who it was. “Marja-Liisa—I know you’re there,” the man was saying, only a little more loudly.

Until Jack opened the door, he didn’t know that the man had brought the four-year-old with him. But what else could the poor guy have done? If you were a responsible father, you didn’t leave a four-year-old alone.

There was no question in Jack’s mind that the young man with the dark-blond hair was Marja-Liisa’s husband—not her dead husband, either. (Nor did the young man look like an anonymous sperm donor.) Any doubts Jack might have had were dispelled by the boy; the four-year-old had his dad’s dark-blond hair, but the child’s oval face and almond-shaped eyes were exactly like his mother’s.

“I knew it,” Marja-Liisa’s husband said. “You’re Jack Burns. Marja-Liisa said she saw you at the gym.”

“She’s not here,” Jack told him.

The unhappy husband looked past Jack into the disheveled room. The little boy wanted his dad to pick him up; the child was wearing slipper-socks with reindeer on them, and a ski parka over his pajamas. Jack stepped back into the room and the father carried his son inside. The pillows and bedcovers were all in a heap; the young husband stared at the bed as if he could discern the imprint of his pregnant wife’s body on the rumpled sheets.

Marja-Liisa had told her husband that she had a late-night aerobics class at the gym, but he found her gym bag in her closet after he’d put the four-year-old to bed; he had been tidying up the apartment and went to her closet to put some article of her clothing away, and there was the gym bag.

The young man showed Jack the piece of paper he’d found in the bag—Jimmy Stronach, Hotel Torni—but he’d guessed all along that Jimmy Stronach was Jack Burns.

“She kept telling me, ‘There’s a movie star in the gym, and I look like a whale!’ You’re not even her favorite movie star, but I suppose that doesn’t matter,” her husband said.

The four-year-old wanted to get down; his father looked distressed to see the boy climb onto the bed and burrow under the mound of pillows.

“She didn’t want a second child,” Marja-Liisa’s husband told Jack. “The pregnancy was an accident, but she blames me for it because I wanted to have more children.”

The four-year-old was sleepy-looking, but he had found a way to amuse himself with the feather quilt and all the pillows; the little boy moved in circles on all fours, like an animal trying to bury itself. Jack assumed that the child didn’t speak English, and therefore couldn’t understand them—not that the boy would have paid any closer attention to his dad and Jack if they’d been speaking in Finnish.

He’s only four, Jack kept thinking. Jack hoped that the child wouldn’t remember this adventure—being woken up and taken to a hotel in the middle of the night in his pajamas. Or perhaps the boy would remember no more than what he was told about this night, and why would his parents ever talk about it to him? (Maybe only if the night became a turning point in his family’s history, which Jack hoped it wouldn’t.)

“She’s probably gone home, or she was on her way home and you just passed each other,” Jack told Marja- Liisa’s husband, who was looking more and more distraught. The four-year-old was completely hidden from view, under all the pillows and bedcovers. In a muffled voice, the little boy asked his father something.

“He wants to use the bathroom,” the husband told Jack.

“Sure,” Jack said.

There was more Finnish—both the language and the barrier of the bedcovers making the exchange incomprehensible. Jack could see that Marja-Liisa’s husband didn’t want to touch the bed, so Jack helped the little