Page 13

1998

Kaya mainly draws from memory, but sometimes she gets lucky. Today, there’s a skulk of foxes out. Only the kits. Their parents are busy hunting.

She watches them through the trees, their fur white and soft as they gambol through the snow.

It’s the smallest that has caught her eye, though, the one that’s still blue-grey. He’s a little apart from his siblings, not taking part in the nipping and play-fighting.

It’s this one Kaya has chosen to draw. The outsider.

She supposes she’s always felt that way herself. She has never quite fit with people the way she’s supposed to, her husband included. She doesn’t even know why they married. He was just there. They’d come up through school in together, though he didn’t hang around the town much. He was always working on his parents’ farm, or out herding when there were even more deer. This farm. He was quieter than her peers and Kaya probably thought that meant he was different, too. Unusual. Mysterious. She read in a magazine once that the red flags you see in the first days of a relationship are usually the same red flags that cause a break-up. And she’d realised early that her husband’s silence wasn’t mysterious. He was just dull.

When she turned sixteen, she let him take her virginity out on the island on Inari. It felt risqué. The Samis’ beloved island, rumoured to have been a place of ritual and sometimes sacrifice. But the excitement was all in her head. In reality, it was a stiflingly hot summer’s eve, her back was scratched by the twigs on the ground beneath her, he’d sweated all over her and the poking he did between her legs left her less breathless and more just sticky and in pain.

Four years later, they were married. He’d asked and Kaya had said yes. Why? Because she could. Because there weren’t a lot of guys her age in . Because he was big and strong. Because he wanted her. Yes, he was dull. But being alone was worse.

Her parents were devastated by her choice of partner. His mother, already three years dead, wasn’t there to see the wedding. His father barely caught the ceremony, before a heart attack took him, too. So the first year of their married life was spent with Kaya adjusting to the fact that at twenty, she was now a farmer’s wife. Getting married so young felt daring. Being stuck halfway up the mountain hadn’t been part of the plan.

But she adjusted and she was willing to give it a go. She might have been playing at housewife, but she found, oddly, that she was quite good at it.

A year later, she had come to the realisation that settling for boring wasn’t just a temporary arrangement. There was no excitement in her husband; moreover, he was now too fond of the drink to be of any use to her. A few months after that, she was fucking somebody else. She was only young, after all.

Now, at twenty-two years of age, Kaya is unhappily married, carrying somebody else’s child, and that man doesn’t want her either.

Her mother always said Kaya only had one foot in this world, the other in her fantasies. Drawing has always helped. On the page, she can create something real. Something beautiful. It comes naturally to her. Teachers had told her that. You should go to Helsinki, Kaya, they would say. Go to art school. But she didn’t take their advice. Now all she has to show for her dreams is her drawing book, the few sketches that hang in the bar and the odd painting her husband lets her frame.

Kaya looks up and realises the kit is staring straight at her.

They gaze at each other for a few seconds. Kaya’s heart rate and her breathing slow down.

She wonders if he can sense the baby growing inside her. If he knows that she’s already a mother. Animals are intuitive like that. She’s already noticed the reindeer and horses are more gentle around her. Not the huskies. They don’t seem to care; they’re just bundles of endless yapping energy.

Maybe it’s not too late. She could go to Helsinki, have the baby, try to manage alone. Nobody knows her there. They wouldn’t know what she’d done, the mistakes she’d made. They wouldn’t judge.

But that chance to start again would also mean she’d be on her own. No money. No family. No friends.

She hears a noise on the porch behind her. She’s been so focused on the young fox, she didn’t even hear her husband come out of the house.

He’s looking down at her drawing book. Kaya doesn’t move a muscle. She’s praying he doesn’t want to look at the other pages.

There are pictures in there she doesn’t want him to see.

He gave her this book, but she knows, in his heart, he considers her art a silly hobby. Sometimes, with drink on him, he goes further and tells her how little talent she has, because if she had any talent then she wouldn’t be there, would she? She wouldn’t be with him, on this useless reindeer farm in the middle of nowhere. Kaya might not understand everything but this she does: her husband places little value on himself and, therefore, little value on her for choosing him.

She braces herself. She can’t smell alcohol, but that doesn’t mean anything. She must always be prepared.

‘That’s beautiful.’

His words are so unexpected, they provoke more of a reaction from Kaya than if he’d hit her.

‘What?’ she yelps.

‘Your drawing. It’s very beautiful. You’ve captured his eyes perfectly.’

Kaya looks at her page, then back at the forest. The foxes are already gone, disturbed by the sound of humans talking.

‘I. . . thank you.’

‘You should put it in a frame,’ he says.

Kaya doesn’t know what to say. He hasn’t let her hang anything in months. Said the house was starting to look like a cheap-ass art gallery.

‘Thank you. I will.’

She feels his hand on her shoulder. His hands have always been rough, strong, even when they were only teens. They attracted her to him. She’d forgotten what his hands felt like. She’d become so used to yearning for her lover’s hands.

‘We’ve both been working hard lately,’ her husband says.

Kaya nods without speaking.

‘Let’s treat ourselves,’ he says. ‘Let’s go to town, have a nice dinner. Act our age.’

Kaya swallows. She manages to nod again. He squeezes her shoulder. She places her hand on his, squeezes back.

Then he completely shocks her as he leans down and kisses her head.

‘I’m sorry this is so hard,’ he says.

He leaves. Kaya is too stunned to react.

Was that– was he being nice to her?

She slams the book shut and sits perfectly still.

Maybe this can be fixed. He had so much thrust on him with the farm when his father died. Within a year, he’d had to sell half his herd and he still struggled to pay the hands he’d brought in to help take care of the rest. He must be terrified, a lot of the time, trying to make it all work. But they’ve made it this far. Things seem to be going well, the reindeer are selling. She hears him saying things like that, when she lends him half an ear.

She’s only five, six weeks gone, at most. If she slept with him tonight? If they had sex now– would he ever know?

For the first time in a long time, Kaya feels something blossoming inside.

Hope. She feels hope.