James Thompson - Helsinki Blood

“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.

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.

“Is it hard to talk?” I ask.

“Not if I don’t open my mouth too wide.”

“It’s a stupid question, but how are you?”

“Do you want the gory details?”

“Yes.”

“I’m burned to a crisp from the midsection down. I’ll need several surgeries, skin grafts, I can’t remember what all they said, but it’s bad, and it will be a couple years until it’s over.”

The only thing I can think of to say is I’m sorry , but those are paltry and tepid words, inadequate to her suffering, so I say nothing.

She can’t smile because of the burns, gauze and plastic, but she tries. “You should have made love to me when you had the chance. Those parts won’t be in working order again for a long time.”

I lie. “Yes, I should have. I wish I had.” I change the subject. “Where are your parents?”

“They flew in from Rovaniemi and have been here most of the time. I told them to go to a hotel and get some sleep.”

“If they need anything, have them call me.”

“Do you know anything about my condition?” she asks.

“The doctor told me what he could after he finished with you in the ER.”

She has a self-administered morphine pump. She doses herself. “I’m afraid they lie to me, to keep my spirits up. Please tell me what happened to my face. Tell me the truth.”

“Your face was farthest from the fire and so the least damage was done to it. You suffered third-degree burns to much of your lower body. From your lower torso and upward, you suffered first- and second-degree burns. If you looked at yourself in a mirror now, it would startle and frighten you, but it will pass, and most of those more minor burns will heal to a great degree within a few weeks. Your hair burned off. But hair grows.”