“I’ve done things you found questionable,” I say. “Those things weren’t your fault. They were my choices. And you blame yourself for approving my actions. You believed you were granting the wishes of a man dying of brain cancer. It was unfair of me to place you in that position. You blame yourself for killing Adrien Moreau. He gave you no choice. He would have killed the rest of us, and you saved our lives. He brought his death on himself. Your action wasn’t criminal, it was heroic.”
“I hated the way you lived, the way you changed. Committing criminal acts. Stealing. Dissolving people in acid.”
Torsten gawks at me.
“I didn’t kill them,” I say. “I made two bodies disappear to avoid a mafia gang war.”
I light a cigarette to buy a few seconds and consider my words, then return my attention to Kate. “Brain surgery impacted me more than I knew. My recovery isn’t over yet, but I’m much improved. However, some of the things I’ve done upset important people, mostly because I no longer want to do questionable things on their behalf. If you come home, we’re going to stay in Arvid’s house for a while. You’ll like it. It’s pretty and spacious. On the river. A good place to rest. Jenna, Sweetness and Milo will come, too. Jenna was in the accident with Mirjami. She was pregnant and lost the baby. She needs a change of scenery. It’s sort of a vacation for all of us.”
“You still do questionable things,” Kate says. “You more or less had me abducted and forced me back here.”
Torsten helps me out. “I told Kari he had to get you back here in order for me to treat you. Your illness had become a life-threatening situation. I didn’t say it to Kari, but I was afraid you might harm yourself.” His smile is gentle. “You were abducted on doctor’s orders.”
She doesn’t find it humorous and scowls at me. “You think you’re the fucking Godfather. I’m married to Michael Corleone.”
A penetrating observation. Especially since Milo and Sweetness want the next step in our illustrious careers to be much like the end of The Godfather.
“If Kate goes with you,” Torsten asks, “will she be safe?”
A half-truth. “Of course she’ll be safe. She’ll be surrounded by law enforcement officers around the clock.” Followed by a truth, as without me, Milo and Sweetness to protect her, she’s in dire peril. “There’s no safer place she could be.”
“Tell us, Kate,” Torsten asks, “what do you feel would be best for you?”
“I want to sleep for ten thousand years with my baby in my arms.”
“Are you comfortable living with Kari?”
“I don’t know who he is or wants to be. I don’t know if we should be married anymore. I avoided him for weeks and kept his baby from him. That wasn’t fair. And it wasn’t right for me to leave him alone when he was so weak and sick and then to dump Anu on him out of the blue. I will try to be comfortable with Kari, one day at a time.”
“You aren’t well enough to live on your own. Do you see that now?”
She hesitates, doesn’t want to admit it. “Yes.”
“If you run away again or if your condition deteriorates, Kari is to call me, and you’ll have to take that rest we talked about. Do you both understand this?”
We nod.
“And Kari,” Torsten says, “you must understand that Kate isn’t well, and that living with her will sometimes be uncomfortable. You’re obviously in poor condition yourself. Are you prepared for that?”
“Of course.”
He writes a prescription for Kate. “This is for Valdoxan, an anti-depressant. It’s a relatively new drug, but results with it have been very good. The side effects are minimal, it will help you sleep, and stopping it when the time comes is much easier than with other anti-depressants.”
He hands it to her. “Kari, this is a safe place for Kate. If you have something you want to say or anything you would like to ask her, now would be a good time.”
I look at my wife and barely recognize her. The changes wrought by her suffering fill me with sadness. “Why did you leave?” I ask. “When you came out of your dissociative stupor, you left within hours. I don’t understand. You were in a safe place, loved and cared for.”
“Except for Anu, I wished we had all died on that island. I wish we had never come to Helsinki. I wish you could have been content to be a good and honest policeman, even if you didn’t make a difference. I just couldn’t stand the sight of you. It made me think of all that ugliness.”
“And now?”
“I still wish we were all dead, and I can look at you, but it’s hard.”
Question asked and answered. I should have known better. Never ask a question if the answer may destroy you. I say nothing else.
“Let’s call it a day,” Torsten says.
28
We go to a pharmacy, Yliopiston Apteekki, to get Kate’s prescription filled. It’s downtown in a large shopping district, a mall across from it. The main train station is on the other side of the street. Kate and I go there by taxi. It’s packed. Kate and I don’t speak. She takes a number to get in line and we browse in different aisles so she can avoid looking at me.
My cell phone rings. A nurse from the hospital tells me Mirjami is awake and would like to see me. I say I’ll be there as soon as I can. We go home. Milo is sitting on the couch with my laptop, jotting notes, going through the vast amount of information accrued from the numerous communications devices I confiscated. Jenna and Sweetness are sitting at the dining room table, dressed in raggedy house clothes and sipping their early-afternoon beers. The swelling in his nose has gone down, but the bruises around his eyes have deepened, and the spectrum of their colors is a rainbow of light blue to near black.
I ask Kate, “Does their drinking bother you?”
“I don’t care what any of you do. I just want to sleep.”
I ask her to please wait, ask Jenna to help me, and make up the bed with fresh linens. I don’t want her to sleep in a bed that smells like Mirjami. I’ve always found changing the blanket covers-which are like very wide and long pillowcases-near impossible to do by myself and wonder at how women are able to reach inside the little armholes in the corners of the covers, reach through the bottom, grasp the blanket and shake the cover in a whipping motion so that the blanket doesn’t hang out the end.
Kate tells me that Americans seldom use blanket covers and sleep under bare blankets. It seems a dirty habit and vile to me. During the short time I spent in the States, there were no blanket covers, but I thought it was because I lived in student housing and people made do with whatever was at hand. And when I watch foreign television or movies and people hang around on the bed with their shoes on, it makes me cringe.
Kate waits with impatience in the kitchen. I give her a dose of Valdoxan, and take my own array of painkillers, tranquilizers and muscle relaxants. The tranquilizers seem useless to me, as I have no problems with nervousness, but the neurologists tell me the relaxing effects will help my injured muscles from tightening. My knee hurts like mortal hell at the moment. I’ll eat whatever to make it stop. Kate asks for Anu and I put my girls in bed together.
“Mirjami is awake and wants to see me,” I say to Milo. “Could you drive me to the hospital?”
“Sure.” He shuts down my computer. “Let’s go.”
• • •
WE DRIVE to Meilahti Hospital, a huge facility surrounded by a warren of smaller buildings. We get directions to the burn ward from the front desk. We know we’re on the right track because patients in later stages of recovery wander the halls, going to the canteen, outside to smoke. Some miss eyes, ears, noses, fingers. In comparison, Mirjami got off easy, but these people could be her, and it makes me furious.
I ask Milo to wait in the hall. He’s her cousin and her friend. I promise to ask her to talk to him. A nurse escorts me in.
There’s not much to see of Mirjami. Burns of various degrees of severity cover almost sixty percent of her body. She’s wrapped in gauze and some kind of plastic wrap that I suppose keep the ointments on her from rubbing off. I don’t know, maybe it also reduces the risk of infection. I pull up a chair next to her bed and she offers me a gauze-covered hand. I take it gently.