Snow Angels

The receptionist pretends like I’m not there and keeps talking to her current client. I slap my hand on the desk. “Now.”

She starts to get angry, then puts on a bureaucratic face and checks her computer. “Katherine Vaara is in room 207. Officer.”

I find Kate in a hospital bed, her left leg in a cast that goes from the bottom of her foot to high up on her hip. Her already pale skin is waxen, her lips are pursed tight. She holds out her arms for me to hug her. When I do, her mouth presses against my ear and I hear her suppress a whimper. “I want to go home,” she says.

“Tell me what happened.”

“Later.”

I can’t ask the next question, but she reads my thoughts and lets go of me. “They did an ultrasound.” She pauses, manages a demure smile. “There’s not just one baby, there are two.”

“Two?”

“We’re having twins, and they’re both fine.”

I lay a hand on her belly, overwhelmed by joy and relief. “Kate, that’s wonderful.”

She doesn’t say anything. I can’t tell if she thinks it’s wonderful or not.

I ask a stupid question. “Are you okay?”

Kate’s trying hard to keep herself under control. “No.”

“Are you in a lot of pain?”

She shakes her head. “Not now.”

“Are they going to let you go home?”

“I don’t know.”

I find her doctor. “She’s lucky,” he says. “She fractured her femur, but it’s not that bad. If it were closer to the hip or a deeper fracture, she’d have to stay here in traction for the next couple months. She already has a pin in that hip. If she’d broken it again, she might have been permanently disabled. I’m putting her on sick leave.”

“Can I take her home?”

He shrugs. “Sure.”

They give Kate crutches and we get her checked out of the hospital. She has a hard time fitting into the back of the Saab with the cast. I try to talk to her on the way home, but she’s not ready.

When we pull up to the house, she won’t let me help her, says she has to learn to get around by herself. She pushes herself out of the car. I put an arm around her, but she shrugs it off and manages to hobble inside. Because of the cast, she can’t negotiate the couch and starts to tip over. I scoop her up and lay her down, take off her shoe.

She starts to cry. “I fell. I took a steep back trail down the mountain, full of rocks and trees, and I hit an ice patch and I fucking fell.”

This has to be traumatic for her. A reminder of how she shattered her hip as a teenager and had her dreams of becoming an alpine ski champion destroyed. I sit on the floor beside her so I can stroke her hair while I listen.

“I went ass over end and barreled into a big rock and broke my leg and I couldn’t move and I was afraid I killed the baby and I lay there for forty-five minutes before another skier came by and another thirty before they came with a snowmobile and got me.”

I try to hold her hand, but she shakes it free.

“And I got to the hospital and the nurses wouldn’t speak English to me and I didn’t know what was happening or if the baby was alive, and while they examined me they shoved me around like I’m an animal. And then I found out there are two babies.”

“Kate, they probably just don’t speak English.” In truth, they probably just deal with everybody that way. Sometimes Fi

“They shouldn’t have treated me that way.”

“You’re right, they shouldn’t have, but aren’t you happy about having twins?”

“Of course I am, but that’s not the point.”

She squeezes her eyes shut and tears of frustration slide down her cheeks.

“Damn it.” She slams the glass top of the coffee table with her fist. “Damn it.” She hits it again. The next time she screams. “Goddamn it!” Pound. “God fucking damn it!” Pound.

“Stop it Kate-that’s dangerous.”

Now she’s yelling for all she’s worth. “And now I can’t go skiing!” Pound. “And I can’t go to work!” Pound.

“Stop it Kate.”

“And I can’t speak Fi

I don’t want to manhandle her, but I don’t want her to hurt herself, so I’m considering it. “Kate, stop it, goddamn it.”

She stops and bursts into tears. “I’m sorry Kari. I’m just so frustrated. I’m helpless and trapped in this house.”

With both hands, she lifts her broken leg up to rest it on the coffee table. She drops it too hard, and the cast shatters the glass tabletop. Glass flies. The weight of the cast going through the table makes her pitch forward onto the floor. She breaks her fall by jamming her right hand into the broken glass on the rug. When she holds it up in front of her, blood streams out of it down her arm.

I rip my white shirt down the front. I whip it off and wrap it tight around her hand, then take her in my arms. She presses her face into my shoulder. Her chest heaves and tears explode out of her in big racking sobs. We stay that way for a few minutes until she calms down. Blood has soaked through my shirt and drips on the rug.

“I don’t want to go back to the hospital,” she says. She starts sobbing again.

I unwrap her hand. Some glass shards are stuck in it. She has about a dozen puncture wounds, but none of them need stitches. I get antiseptic, tweezers and bandages from the bathroom. She winces as I pick out the glass, but she doesn’t cry anymore.

I bind up her hand. “It’s going to be okay,” I say. “A couple weeks at home, then you can go back to work. In a few weeks, the cast comes off. A couple months after the babies are born, you’ll be back on the slopes.”

“But I can’t do anything. I can’t work, can’t take care of the house, can’t shop.”

“We’ll work it out. I’ll get somebody to help you.”

Before long, she passes out from exhaustion. I call a neighbor, wake her up, explain things and ask her to check on Kate in the morning. I clean up the glass and blood, rearrange the living room, then take our bed apart and bring it downstairs. Even the buzz of the electric screwdriver doesn’t wake her when I put the bed back together. We have a small bathroom next to the foyer, so at least she won’t have to worry about the stairs now.

The clock reads two A.M. I won’t get much rest again. I pick her up, put her in bed and crawl in beside her. Kate’s eyes open. “What happened with your murder investigation?” she asks.

“The case broke.”

“Who did it?”

It’s late, I don’t want to talk about it and I don’t want to upset her. “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow,” I say.

9

WE HEAD OUT IN two squad cars, Antti and Jussi in one, Valtteri and me in the other. It starts to snow. On the way, I tell Valtteri about the evidence against Seppo and my conversation with the chief. “So you’re going to arrest Seppo Niemi,” he says. “The Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways.”

He doesn’t take it farther than that. It’s a subject people don’t broach with me.

We roll up on Seppo’s winter cottage. It’s bigger than my house and set on a two-acre lot. It cost a lot of money. We park behind a gray BMW 330i. I get out and look at the tires with a flashlight: Dunlop Winter Sports. Valtteri calls for a wrecker to drag it to the police garage. The four of us go to the door together and I knock.

My ex-wife, Heli, opens the door. I haven’t seen her for thirteen years, since she left me for Seppo. I was in the hospital for a few days after getting shot. She never came to see me, wouldn’t answer the phone. When I got home, her things were gone. She refused to ever see me again, or even to speak to me. After a few weeks, I got the divorce papers in the mail.

She’s sweaty, in tight workout clothes, and techno music is playing. We caught her in the middle of exercising. She was a good-looking girl when we were together. Even then, she worked hard at it. It’s difficult to reconcile the image of the girl I was married to with the woman before me. A combination of dieting, exercise and bulimia have taken their toll. She’s tiny, looks old, tired and undernourished, a gym hag with bleached hair and a fake tan, like she was somebody’s idea of pretty once.