Your Call

Kaisa came out of room 6 at five o’clock on Wednesday morning with her pack on one shoulder, and she stopped on the step.

She had known for an hour. For three days the pull under her breastbone had lain due east. Some time after midnight it had begun to move. Since four it had been so near that she had lain in the dark with her jaw tight and would not look out of the window.

A truck and trailer stood across four spaces under the one light in the lot. Two canoes rode on the trailer, keel up, a red one and a blue one, both furred with frost. Britta sat on the tailgate in Jari’s canvas coat. Anders stood by the front wheel with a folder in his hand. Beside him, with a blanket roll under his arm, was her father.

Tansy went across the gravel like a thrown stick and hit Reino at the knees.

“Isä.” Kaisa’s voice came out rough. “Who let you out?”

“He did. He lifted the hasp himself, yesterday at noon.” Reino’s hand had gone to the yellow head. “Then he rang the iron, and I walked up behind him to see their boots. They had nothing to look at down there this time. They looked at me.”

She crossed the lot and put her forehead against his shoulder. He stood for it, which was a great deal from him.

“We sat on the Moose Lake landing from one o’clock until four,” he said over her head. “Then I told them you’d paid for a bed and you’d sleep in it.”

“You said it was a small piece of country.”

“So you heard. I wasn’t sure, with Eino breathing on the wall.”

“I showed him your three lines,” Britta said from the tailgate. “That’s all I did. I didn’t tell him to come, and I didn’t tell you he was coming. You can both be angry with me.”

“Did he read the last three words?”

“Twice. I watched him.”

Anders had come away from the truck. He stopped six feet off. He had not slept, by the look of him, since she had last seen him getting smaller in a mirror. He held the folder out at arm’s length.

“The envelope came yesterday, by email, from Greenstone’s lawyers,” he said. “I told you we’d open it together, and I opened it alone. That’s one more of mine. These are yours.”

She took it under the light. There were eleven pages of option, and she turned to the last. The date was the thirtieth of September, 2019. On the line for the Vaara Lake Association there was one signature, in a neat sloping hand she had copied onto a board for two hours. Stefan Zalar, Treasurer.

Behind it was the check, front and back. It was for sixty thousand dollars, endorsed in the same hand for deposit to something called the Vaara Lake Land Account, at a savings bank in Duluth. There was a form with four lines for signers, and one name on it.

Her fingers had gone cold on the paper. She had kept two pages of her logbook apart for two weeks, and here was the sheet that joined them.

“Your father isn’t on it,” she said.

“No. He wasn’t a thief. He was only wrong.”

She put the folder inside her jacket, against the logbook.

“Your father’s free, and no seat is holding him,” Anders said. “I told him what was said in the sauna before I told anyone else. Then I told the pack. They know the law and the word. They know the board lied and why. They know about the paint, and they’ve read that signature. They know I sent you off on Sunday. I said the council pushed it and I chose it, with nobody’s hand on my throat.”

“What did Elsa say?”

“She said to bring her daughter home, and she’d decide about the pair of us afterward.”

“That’s fair.”

“There’s one thing more. Stefan’s gone. He swam the ice-house bay on four legs at two on Tuesday morning. He had one of the lodge rentals hidden on the west point. I followed him up Vaara and over the Paddle Portage, and I lost him on Hirvi. I sat off that shore at sunrise and couldn’t read a yard of it.” He did not look away. “You told me beside your truck how it would go. You only had the wrong lake.”

She found she took no pleasure in it at all.

“So he’s a day and a night ahead.”

“Yes.” He let his hands hang open. “It’s your search. It was yours on Sunday, and I took it off you without any right. Put me where you want me, or leave me on the dock.”

She looked at him for some time. He had not said he was sorry, and she was glad of it. She’d had a month of that. Instead he had opened a hasp, and he had stood at that fire a third time and told them the truth. He had done it without knowing whether she would ever hear of it.

None of that settled what was between them, and she did not have to settle it in a parking lot. What she had to settle was a boat. There were six miles of open lake at the end of this, and a front due tomorrow. On her first night in the council lodge she had asked for the best paddler on Vaara. It was still the same man.

“Stern,” she said. “And you do what I say.”

“Yes.”

“All of it. If I say stop, you stop, even with Mikko in front of you.”

“Yes.”

Britta nodded at the grey Tacoma, where thirty-two pounds of rented Kevlar stuck out over the tailgate with a red rag on its end. “And that?”

“It stays on the truck. It’s paid for until Saturday, and I may want it yet.” She turned to her father. “I picked Moose Lake because it was the only water that didn’t touch Vaara. Is Vaara mine to cross?”

“Urho Niskanen is looking for a chair for you.”

“Then we go from the lodge. I know those three carries with my feet, and I want to see where he got off Hirvi. Britta, you paddle with my father. Where’s Jari?”

“Sitting in Stefan’s kitchen with the lamp out,” Britta said, “in case he comes home.”

“Good. I’ll follow you.”
***
They put in at the lodge landing at half past six, in the dark.

Every window on the shore was lit. People stood on the hall steps in their coats and did not call out. Hilja Maki was at the head of the dock with both hands on her cane. Kaisa nodded to her, and the old woman nodded back, and neither of them wasted the morning on it.

Elsa Hautala came down the planks as Kaisa was settling the dog. She held out a grey sweatshirt, folded small, with ELY SWIM across the chest.

“She’ll be cold when she comes back to herself,” Elsa said. “Put that on her. I’ll say the rest to you when she’s in it.”

“I’ll put it on her.”

It was seven miles to Ukonvesi, with three carries in it, of sixty rods, a hundred and forty, and twenty-five. Vaara was black and flat. Anders drove the red canoe up it with long quiet strokes, and the blue one kept on their left. From the bow of it her father’s paddle made no sound at all. He had told Britta she could not steer, and Britta had told him it was her boat, and she had the stern.

On the Paddle Portage Kaisa walked ahead of the red hull with the dog.

“Root on your left,” she said. “Wet rock. Step long.”

He stepped long. She did not turn round.

The sun was just over the east ridge when they set the canoes down on Hirvi. The lake lay open in front of them, two miles of it, as still as glass.

“Kneel in your stern,” she told Anders. “Where you were on Tuesday. How far behind him were you?”

“Ten minutes, by the stars.”

“And then you heard nothing.”

“I listened for a quarter of an hour. I didn’t hear a paddle or a drip.”

Her father had come to stand at her elbow. He looked at the west shore, and she looked at it with him.

“Aluminum rings,” Reino said. “He knows it does.”

“He’d no need to know he was followed. He’s been careful for seven years.” She narrowed her eyes. “He had no moon and a bright hull. He didn’t cross two miles of open water. He stopped paddling inside ten minutes, so he’s close. Which landing?”

“Not the gravel.”

“Not the ledge, either. There’s a white rock on it.”

“The reed bay,” her father said. “Behind the cedar sweepers. You’d wade forty feet in muck.”

“That’s mine too.” She kept looking. The bay was a third of a mile off, in the shadow of the trees, and the night had laid a skin of ice across it. The ice was white with frost. “What’s wrong with the ice?”

He was silent.

“There’s a stripe through it,” she said. “It’s as wide as a canoe, from the open water to the cedars, and it’s dark. That’s a night newer than the ice beside it. It hasn’t had time to go white. Something broke out through that bay after dark yesterday, and it froze behind him.”

They paddled over. Anders took the red canoe in along the edge of the dark lane without touching it. At the back of the bay there was a flat stone with a silver smear across it as long as her arm. Under the lowest cedar the sedge was pressed down in a bed the size of a grown wolf.

Anders looked at the bed, and then out through the sweepers at the shallows where he had waded on Tuesday morning. It was all in plain sight. He said nothing, and she left it alone.

“He lay here all day and watched the lake,” she said. “He went over the Long Carry last night. He’s on that island now, and that’s where I want him.”

Reino was still looking back at the stripe.

“I gave you the hour,” he said. “I never gave you ice. I’d have had the bay, and I’d have run my bow straight through that and never seen it.” He picked up his paddle. “You’re better than I was. I’ll not say it twice, so you’d best have heard.”

“I heard, Isä.”

On the Long Carry, in the black seep, there was one print of a rubber boot with a chain tread, worn down on the outer heel. It pointed north, and there was frost in it.
***
By one o’clock they stood at the bottom of the Step Portage, and Ukonvesi was white from shore to shore.

The wind had come up while they crossed Sumu. It blew out of the north now, straight down the lake, and the waves broke on the landing rock and threw spray as high as Kaisa’s knees. The far end was lost in haze.

She knelt and opened Mikko’s bag under the dog’s nose.

Tansy took three breaths of it. Then she walked to the very edge of the rock and stood facing dead into the wind with her head high. Her nostrils worked. Her tail began to sweep. She whined and looked back at Kaisa, and leaned toward the water until the lead came tight.

“That’s him,” Britta said. Her voice cracked. “She’s got him.”

“She’s got the wind, and he’s in it somewhere. It’s six miles, and I’ve never seen her reach a quarter of that. I won’t write it as a find.” Kaisa rubbed the dog’s ears. “She’s pointing where my pencil did. I’ll take that.”

She stood up and looked at the water. Then she looked at Anders.

“Could you cross it?”

He took his time. “With you in the bow, yes. It’s three hours into a head sea. I couldn’t promise you the dog, or the blue canoe.”

“When does it lie down?”

“Ahead of the front. It’ll drop in the small hours and be flat from about five. The front comes through at eight or nine, with snow. After that it blows northwest for two days.”

“So we’d have three hours. How fast can you do six miles?”

“Two hours. I’ll break the water for the other boat.”

She had known what she would say since the first wave hit the rock. She said it aloud anyway, for Britta, who was owed the reasons.

“If we go now, we get there at dusk with nothing left in our arms. He’d watch us coming for an hour, and Canada is half a mile behind him. If we swamp, nobody is coming for those children at all. We camp here. We’re on the water in the dark and at that cove by eight.”

Britta said nothing. She stood with her arms wrapped round herself and stared north.

Kaisa watched Anders. His nephew was up that lake, and he was the one person there who could have got to him today. She saw him look at the water and know it. On Saturday night he had stood on a step with his hand raised and settled a thing by himself.

“Your call,” he said.

He turned his back on the lake, rolled the red canoe over in the lee of the ledge, and asked where she wanted the tent.
***
They made no fire. A light carried a long way over water, and Stefan Zalar had fished this lake at night for forty years.

Supper was Britta’s pasties, cold, eaten sitting on the packs behind the ledge. One of them had a K pricked in the crust, and Britta handed it over without a word. Reino would not hear of a tent. He spread his blanket roll under the blue canoe as he had under every canoe he ever owned, and Britta crawled into the small tent from the guide stores and lay there with her boots on. It was dark by six. The wind boomed in the pines.

Kaisa sat in the door of her tent, unlacing her boots by feel. Tansy was already inside on the sleeping bag.

Anders came across the rock and crouched on his heels a yard away. She could see only the shape of him against the sky.

“I’ll wake you at four,” he said. “If it hasn’t dropped by then, I’ll tell you so.”

“All right.”

He did not get up.

“I’ve one thing to say, and I don’t want anything back for it.” His voice was low and quite steady. “I love you. I should have said it at twenty-six, and I was saving it for a fire. I’m saying it tonight because tomorrow is a day a person ought to go into having been told. I’m not asking you anything.”

The pull under her breastbone went wide and still. She held on to the bootlace. She had been waiting to hear that since she was twenty-two, and she was still angry with him.

“I heard you,” she said. “Ask me after.”

He was quiet for a moment. “After.”

“After they’re home. Go to sleep, Anders.”

He went back to the red canoe. She lay down in her clothes with the dog against her knees and listened to the tent wall crack and shudder. She counted the hours until four and did not expect to sleep. Some time after three she woke, and the wall was hanging still.
***