Rasmus exhales loudly and gestures to the pot. “I was going to heat up some hapankaalikeitto, that’s sour cabbage soup. It’s not a close journey to anywhere. You need to get your strength up. Then we’ll set out. I promise.”
I sigh, and while Rasmus attends to the soup again, I go back into the living room. I gently place the aurora stone on a shelf and start going through everything I can get my hands on, from journals to field diaries and photobooks. Maybe there’s something in them that the police will want, some type of evidence. I don’t even know what exactly I’m going to say to them, but I’ll say whatever it takes so that I get them to pick up my passport and luggage from the hotel, and then tell them that my father’s body is missing and his funeral was faked. There’s a tiny little voice in my head that tells me that maybe Eero and Noora have gotten to the cops and they won’t be on my side, but that’s just paranoia brought on by all the delusional nonsense I’ve been subjected to for the last twenty-hour hours.
So far though, the notebooks aren’t providing me with much I can use. There are decades worth of my father’s work in here, jotted down in tiny handwriting. It’s all in Finnish, so I have no idea what it says, but occasionally there will either be some piece of dried foliage taped to the page, or a quick sketch of an animal. Except the animals aren’t quite right, like he’s sketching them in a decomposing form, half-skin, half-bones. I flip through page after page of a reindeer, a raven, a bear, a wolf, a fox, an eagle, an elk, and even what looks like a dinosaur, all of them drawn in various states of decay. What puts my teeth on edge is the fact that none of them are drawn in death. They’re all alert or moving, and if they happened to have an eyeball intact, the eye looks gleaming and alive.
Papa, that’s creepy, I think and quickly shut the book. What else are you hiding?
I pick up the one next to it, one of those ones meant for painting, with the thick textured pages, and tentatively open it, expecting to see more half-dead creatures.
And I do. On the first page there are three white reindeer. One is mostly bone, a standing skeleton with molting antlers, the others are intact but with milky eyes. They’re standing in front of a river, black as ink, and there are ripples on the surface that make me think there are large snakes slithering just below. There’s something so visceral about the image, like he’s captured a moment in real time, like there’s life in the painting, and if I stared at it long enough I could enter it.
I had no idea my father could paint so well, and all from his imagination.
With some effort, I flip the page to see another breathtaking image, this one of a forest quite similar to the one outside this cabin, with another river, only this one is light blue and iced over. At the end is a frozen waterfall, at least fifty feet high, and I swear the water is gleaming like a million crystals, like he’s used metallic paint.
Along the river is a sign with an arrow pointing at the waterfall.
Underneath the sign my dad has scribbled “Tyt?r, ?l? tule luokseni.”
Tyt?r sounds familiar to me, but I’m not sure what it means. I close the book, feeling a little unsteady on my feet.
“Soup is ready, if you want to join me,” Rasmus says, gesturing to the tiny circular table by the door.
I nod and go sit down. Rasmus brings me a bowl of steaming hot burgundy soup, some sour cream in the middle, and a cup of coffee. I eat two huge bowls, the sour cabbage strangely addictive, and drink three cups of coffee, while Rasmus stays mostly silent, his focus on his food and thankfully not me, slurping away. I used to eat like a bird, but part of my recovery was to embrace the messiness of food.
As soon as the meal is done, I wash the dishes, feeling bizarrely domestic, and Rasmus starts gathering things from all around the cottage, throwing them in a leather backpack that has seen better days, then brings out clothes from a closet and starts laying them on the couch.
“What’s all this?” I ask, wiping my hands on an embroidered dish towel.
“Can’t go anywhere if you’re just wearing that,” he says, pointing at me. He then shoves a long black coat in my hands. It’s leather but there’s shearling inside and along the wide collar and when I bury my nose into it, it smells like my dad.
I close my eyes for a moment as my heart aches for him.
“There’s no way this will fit,” I tell Rasmus, but I put it on and somehow it fits perfectly, cozy without being bulky.
“I think he’s had that since the 70’s,” Rasmus says with a smile. “He was a lot slimmer then.” Then he hands me a black scarf and a pair of black-and-white mittens and a matching knit cap with flaps over the ears, similar to the Sami traditional dress.