“Didn’t you say that Elsbeth and Eva both know we’re living together? Didn’t you” – here I paused because I found it difficult to control my voice – “didn’t you tell me that Eva was looking forward to meeting me?” I looked at the globe; I wanted to smash it against the wall. How happy I had been when I found it in a little store on Kirkkokatu. I had been looking for the perfect gift, and that was the one: not too personal, but thoughtful nonetheless.
Steve threw his hands up in the air. “True,” he said. “All true. But now’s not a good time. Eva is worried about the performance. She’s afraid she’ll forget her lines, afraid she’ll look ridiculous in front of her classmates. You know how it is with teenage girls.”
“But she doesn’t have to see me,” I said. “I’ll stay put in my seat, you don’t even have to tell her I’m there. I don’t know much about teenage girls, but from what I hear they’re pretty self-obsessed. She probably won’t even notice the woman sitting next to her father.”
“Probably not,” said Steve. “But Elsbeth will.”
“And is she nervous because her daughter’s acting in a school play?”
“She,” Steve said, frowning at me, “will be nervous because her own parents are coming and she hasn’t told them about our separation yet.”
“Oh. So you’ll all go like a happy little family, and you’ll see me tomorrow when you can?” My voice took on a sarcastic undertone, but Steve pretended not to notice.
“Not like a happy little family. Like a family. Why’s that a problem? You’re an adult, Hella. You should understand. A big girl like you.”
He shouldn’t have started on the big girl thing. I’d heard that one more than enough; no wonder I snapped. “I’ve been very understanding for the last four years. Maybe now it’s time I start thinking about myself a little.”
“Don’t you always?” Steve was getting as angry as I was, his jaw set and unyielding, his eyes narrow. “No one forced you to embark on an affair with a married man.”
The realization hit me like a slap in the face. “It’s you,” I said. “All this time I thought it was about Elsbeth, but it’s you. You’re still not ready to introduce your daughter to me. You’re still not sure that you and I are a couple.”
All those evenings I had spent waiting for him, all his claims that his marriage was over, that he was only staying for the sake of his child, that his sickly wife couldn’t manage on her own – it all came back and crushed me like a tidal wave. When I emerged, there was only one thing that mattered. I needed to know where I stood.
I took a deep breath. Then, in a voice as loud and clear as I could muster, I asked him to choose. Either it was me, in which case I was going to see the damned play, or it was them. And if it was them, I wanted him out of my life.
“Is that what you really want?” Steve said. He was standing in front of me, one hand on top of the filing cabinet, the other balled into a fist.
“Yes,” I said, forcing the tremor out of my voice. “It’s simple really.”
At this, Steve looked out of the window with a puzzled expression on his face. It was snowing again, another dreadful winter’s day, the sun hovering just above the line of the horizon, almost erased by blurry white streaks of snow. In an hour, the sun would set. So this is it, I thought. The last straw. Could it really be that simple? A child’s school play, for Christ’s sake, we’d been through worse. He loved me. I knew he did. He would do the right thing.
His glance left the window and stopped on me.
“Then,” he said, “we’re over.” He picked up his coat from the chair, started to pull it on as he turned for the door. “You can put my things in a suitcase and leave it on the landing. I doubt anyone would want to steal my stuff.”
With his hand on the doorknob, Steve paused as if he wanted to say something, then thought better of it. He shrugged and walked out, leaving me behind. Like a fish just out of water, my mouth gaping open, my mind blank.
3
Hella
The realization of what had just happened dawned on me after the sound of Steve’s footsteps died away on the stairs. I had put too many expectations on that first meeting with Eva. I couldn’t be light-hearted about it any longer; I couldn’t put things into perspective. And of course, with the weight of my pathetic hope crushing all rational thought, I had blown it.
Uninvited images flooded my mind: the cold nights to come, the empty apartment above the language school, dinners for one eaten straight out of a pan because what did it matter now?
My first instinct was to go home, open a bottle of vodka and drink myself into oblivion. Erase all coherent thought, erase the longing.
Wallow in self-pity.
Sob my heart out.
It seemed like a good idea; the only thing that stopped me was the woman waiting across the street. I saw her as I was leaving the building. She had been looking up at my windows, but when she spotted me on the doorstep she turned away quickly and pretended to busy herself with her watch. This made me pause. Even though the woman’s face was partly hidden by a sable hat, it was not Elsbeth, of that I was certain. Elsbeth was tall, blonde and pretty as a picture. Most people I knew looked surprised when they saw her, and I knew why: they wondered why Steve, Helsinki’s most popular – and only – American DJ and radio presenter, had left her for me. This woman was short, buxom and blonde. A peroxide blonde, not a natural one. There was something jarring about her, but I only realized what it was when I retraced my steps and dived back into the building. The woman’s face looked cheap, there was too much makeup – the lips were too red, the eyebrows non-existent. But her clothes were expensive: a sable coat, soft leather gloves and the sort of shoes you only saw on the feet of people who never had to walk anywhere.
The woman was here to see me, but she was hesitating. I considered my options. The vodka binge was still tempting, but could I afford it? What I had told the judge that very morning had been wishful thinking: I did advertise my murder-solving capabilities, but no murder investigations had come my way yet, and they probably never would. The only people who came to see me were, ironically enough, wives who suspected their husbands of cheating. And money was always tight. In all the cases I’d had, the husband had been the only breadwinner in the family. The wives paid me with whatever they could put aside from their grocery shopping budget, and that wasn’t much. So that woman on the street, with her fancy clothes… Even if it was the usual philandering spouse story, I had to take it. Unless I wanted to be penalized further for not paying the court.
I climbed the stairs back to my third-floor office and waited, forcing myself to recite the Kalevala to avoid thinking about Steve. I was on Beauteous Daughter of the Ether, her existence sad and hopeless / Thus alone to live for ages when I heard a tentative knock on the door.
“Miss Mauzer?”
Up close, the woman looked older than I’d first thought, closer to fifty than forty. Her name, Klara Nylund, told me nothing.
I pointed at the visitors’ chair. “How can I help you, Mrs Nylund?”