Page 19

1998

Kaya is deathly, deathly tired, but still she fills the bucket with lichen and walks towards the reindeer enclosure. Miika had to drive all over Lapland yesterday during a blizzard and she knows he, too, is exhausted. He’s been so good to her lately, she wants him to know that she can be good back. That between them, they can make this marriage work.

Last night, while he slept, she sketched him. Even after all these years, it’s the first time she’s drawn her husband. He was sleeping so peacefully. Just this big mound in the bed, his chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm. She’d never watched him in slumber before. Normally, after work, she’d get in the bed beside him, close her eyes and only wake when he was already gone.

Her lover always wanted her to draw him. He would shower her with words of praise and admiration, so eloquent in his flattery and, now she knows, lies. She did draw him, but not with the same love she drew Miika last night. It’s funny, how quickly you realise lust was only ever that.

There was something very intimate about drawing Miika while he was dead to the world. Something so trusting; him lying there, exposed, vulnerable, and her capturing every line of it.

It made her feel protective. Maternal even. This is her family. Miika and their child.

She hasn’t told him about the baby yet. There hasn’t been a chance. He’s either been tired or working. But today, he’s home.

She’ll do his chores and let him sleep. Then, later, she’ll make him his favourite meal, poronk?ristys, and pour him some of that nice sweet wine he likes from Germany. It’s always tickled her that her husband likes wine that tastes to her like dessert. Her lover was very different, preferring the tang of ale or the sting of whiskey. Miika loves whiskey, too, but thankfully he hasn’t had too much of it lately. She couldn’t bear it if, just as everything was coming together, he decided to start drinking properly again.

She has no lover to run to, this time.

Kaya shakes her head. She won’t think of that man any more. He had the smallest of chances to redeem himself. If he’d left his wife and come found her, grovelling on his knees, she’d have forgiven him. She might have left Miika for him. But now the die is cast and she hates him, hates having to see him when she’s in work. She wishes he was dead.

Kaya lets herself into the enclosure and begins to scatter the lichen around the ground. Most of the reindeer nuzzle against her legs then get to eating. Except for Pukka, who wants Kaya to feed him from her fingers, the way he likes it.

Kaya giggles as his tongue tickles her hand. She forgets the pregnancy nausea, the tiredness, all her little stresses and worries, as she feels the heat of the animals’ bodies around her, watches their breath snorting into the frozen air and thinks: this is my life, it’s what I want.

When she returns to the house, she scrubs down the kitchen and polishes all of Miika’s mother’s old ornaments in the sitting room. Then she goes to the bathroom, takes off her clothes and runs a bath.

Under the hot water, she runs her fingers over her stomach, which seems to have stretched even more. She lets her hands slide over her breasts, realising that they, too, have swollen further. Her hair, when she washes it, feels thicker than ever, and softer, too.

Kaya is standing naked in the bathroom when Miika comes in. She’s drip-drying on to the towel as she applies cream to her face in the mirror.

She turns. He’s staring at her, his eyes travelling over her body. He says nothing and Kaya starts to blush. She’s been feeling something towards him lately– lust. She hasn’t felt that way for him in a long time. Even when she started having sex with him so she could convince him the baby was his, it was just out of necessity.

Now, though, her eyes are drawn to Miika’s strong body and his large hands. She thinks: I want them on me. I want him on me. She can hardly think for how much she wants him.

‘Do you want me to stay like this?’ she says, coyly.

He looks up at her, then. There’s something strange on his face.

‘You’re pregnant,’ he says.

Kaya almost panics before she remembers it doesn’t have to be a secret any more. She was going to tell him, anyhow.

‘Yes,’ she says, beaming.

‘How long?’

‘A few weeks, I think. It must have been that first time after so long. . .’

He looks down at her body again.

‘Are you glad?’ she asks. Something in his demeanour has changed. The air is bristling with it.

The desire she was feeling is seeping from her body as fast as the heat from the bathwater.

Miika turns and walks out of the bathroom.

Kaya stays standing there, very still, her heart racing. She doesn’t understand what’s just happened. Is he angry at her? Does he not want her to be pregnant?

She reaches for her towel, wraps it around her body and sits on the edge of the bath.

Then, a horrible thought hits her and she starts to tremble.

Maybe Miika is not going to be the fool she needs him to be.