“Where do you want to go?”
“Back to the States, to Aspen.”
In my mind’s eye, I see Kate every moment of the day. Her cinnamon hair, dove-gray eyes so light they’re almost without color. Since we met, our relationship has been something self-contained, both a beginning and an end, like I picture death must be. I thought nothing could ever come between us. I get the same feeling I had when Seppo threatened her. My heart pounds, my ears ring, my vision goes blurry.
“In the States,” she says, “I never met anyone who committed suicide, never even knew anyone who had a suicide in their family. In this little country, it seems like someone does it every day. Finns are like lemmings rushing off a cliff.”
It’s true. Most years, Finland has the world’s highest suicide rate. Last year, it was twenty-seven out of a hundred thousand citizens. If I lost Kate and the twins, I would feel like joining the statistics.
Kate looks at me and reads the panic in my face. “Oh God. Kari, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I want you to come with me. I would never leave you.”
I start to calm down. She puts her arms around me and kisses me. “We could leave here,” she says. “You speak and write almost perfect English. You’re educated and a decorated officer. Any police department in the U.S. would be privileged to have you on its force.”
Her opinion of me is higher than my own. “Why do you want to leave?” I ask.
The sadness in her face tells me she’s going to speak from the heart. “When I first arrived here, my picture of Finland was different. Nature and the environment seemed wild and beautiful, life seemed orderly. I thought people were happy.”
“You were mostly right,” I say.
“No, I was wrong. This is an ugly place. The silence, the misery, the months of darkness. It’s too extreme, like living in a desert made of snow instead of sand.”
Sometimes I think this too.
“When I talk to people,” she says, “they hardly ever laugh or even smile unless they’re drunk. Finns are inscrutable. I have no idea what they’re thinking or feeling. Sometimes I feel like people hate me for being a foreigner, like the nurses at the hospital when I broke my leg. I’m uncomfortable. Worse, I’m terrified because I’m pregnant. I’m at the mercy of people I don’t and can’t understand.”
I didn’t know how deep her cultural alienation had become. I try to explain. “What you perceive as silence, we view as peaceful solitude. Most of us aren’t miserable, but our approach toward life is serious, maybe because of our extreme environment. People don’t hate you, they respect you because you’re successful. Finns are afraid of making mistakes. If we can’t do something perfectly, it’s hard for us to try to do it at all. The people that work for you speak fluent English and are proud of it, but a lot of people are too scared to try.”
“That’s no excuse for the way they treated me at the hospital.”
“You were in pain. Sometimes, people here ignore suffering so the sufferers can maintain their dignity. When you give birth, your medical care will be excellent, for the same reason the nurses wouldn’t speak to you. Health care professionals expect themselves to excel at their work. Our educational system is one of the best in the world. There’s no better place for our children to grow up.”
I’ve given a speech that sounds like an advertisement selling the Finnish way of life. Hearing the words come out of my mouth, even I don’t buy it.
She looks frustrated. “Are we living in the same country? We just watched a teenage boy, probably turned psychotic murderer, be carted off to the morgue after hanging himself. I run places that sell booze. Do you think I don’t see how rampant alcoholism is here? People are drunk because they’re depressed. They get so depressed that they become mentally ill and kill themselves. You say this place is safe? You want our kids to grow up in this environment?”
Almost everyone in Finland knows a suicide. The normal way of dealing with it is to allow ourselves to grieve, to speculate about why and talk about our love for the departed. Then we bury the dead and seldom mention them afterward. I don’t know if it’s because of our pain at their loss, or because of guilt, the feeling that we didn’t give them the help they needed to stay alive. Suicides get only a tiny obituary in the newspaper, a minimalization of our loss, a form of denial. The minuscule death notices speak of our shame.
“There’s a lot of truth in what you say. I can’t defend life in the north against its flaws, and there are many, but this is my home and I love it. If you stay here long enough and learn the language so you can understand the culture, you may come to love Finland for some of the reasons you hate it now-the silence, the solitude, even the melancholy-like I do.”
She’s getting angry. “The language! I don’t speak Finnish, but I know enough about it to see that it’s a reflection of the culture. In colloquial speech, you refer to other people as ‘it.’ That tells me a lot.”
“Kate, I’m a cop in early middle age with a bad leg. I don’t know if I could get a job in the U.S. or not, but I’m pretty sure that even if I did, I wouldn’t be any good at it. I speak English, but I don’t understand your culture. I can’t catch crooks if I don’t know how they think. Those few months I spent in the States working on my master’s thesis, I felt like a fish out of water, just like you do now.”
“My income is six figures. It doesn’t matter if you work or not.”
“It matters to me. Besides, after the twins are born, you’ll be on maternity leave. We could figure it out then.”
“What difference does my maternity leave make?”
“It’s a hundred and five workdays, that’s a long time.”
“What are you talking about? I’m not going on maternity leave for months.”
“Why not? Everyone does.”
“Does that mean I’m required to?”
As much as I love Kate, sometimes the cultural differences between us mystify me. “I guess not, I just never heard of anyone not wanting to before. What do American mothers do?”
“We take a few weeks, get child care and go back to our careers, and that’s what I’m going to do. Are you saying no to moving? Won’t you even think about it?”
My automatic reaction, when someone tries to make me do something, is to do the opposite. I try to stay reasonable. “This feels like an ultimatum.”
“Kari, it’s not an ultimatum. I would never leave you, I just want to know if you’ll consider it or not.”
I don’t want to say it, but Kate’s happiness is more important to me than my own. “I’ll consider it.”
We drop the subject and get ready for bed. Kate always goes to sleep with her head on my shoulder, our arms wrapped around one another. We do the same now, but I can still feel the tension between us, like magnets forcing each other apart instead of pulling each other together. I’ve never felt that way with Kate before, and it worries me.
23
MY PHONE RINGS at nine A.M. “Where are you and Valtteri?” Jussi asks.
I tell him about Heikki’s suicide, the note and my suspicions.
“Fuck,” he says.
“He and Maria are torn to pieces.”
“Do you really think the suicide note was a confession?” he asks.
“Maybe. Probably.”
“Why would he do it?”
“It doesn’t pay to speculate. Let’s wait and see if DNA places him at the crime scene. What have you and Antti turned up?”
“Antti processed Eklund’s car and found blood and semen. He sent them to Helsinki for testing. Eklund’s alibi checks out, but I’m not convinced. If he slipped out of Hullu Poro for a little while, killed Sufia and then came back, I’m not sure anybody would have noticed.”
The case is entering day five and I haven’t had a decent night’s rest since it started. “Listen, I’ve only slept for two hours. We’re all tired. Let’s take the morning off and get together this evening, after the DNA reports come
