Chapters (46)
- Cover
- Other Titles
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Friday
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- Saturday
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- Sunday
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- Monday
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- EPILOGUE
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As she walks down the hallway and into the kitchen, Katriina tries to imagine what it must have been like for Margaret Paulsson. She tries to replicate the pain, thinks about finding one of her own sons, her husband, her sister, dead in front of her. But it is just a facsimile of pain – it is a drawing, or a television version of a person with a broken heart.
Her phone rings in her pocket. “Where are you?” Hanna asks when she picks up, before she even has a chance to say anything. “Your kids are driving me bananas.”
“I just had a couple of things to finish up at work,” Katriina says. She runs her hands along the kitchen counter, feeling the smooth surface, wondering how many sandwiches had been made there, how much milk had been spilled. “I’ll be there shortly.”
“Tommy claims you promised they could order pizza.”
“Tommy has a startling aversion to the truth.” But pizza, she realizes, is the only thing she has energy for. She sees it coming: she will become one of those mothers who is just too tired for anything more than takeout and television. She will marshmallow out into stretch pants and bras from a box. Shawn will leave her for one of the young Finnish waitresses at Kahvila who will bear him seven more children, and Katriina will grow old alone surrounded by several yapping terriers and the crushing weight of her own inadequacies.
After she gets off the phone with Hanna, she sits cross-legged on the floor in the empty kitchen. The whole house smells of cleaning liquid, of plastic and bleach. There are none of the human smells of a lived-in house, no rotting food or garbage or dirty laundry, no air fresheners or soup on the stove or sweaty gym bags or kitty litter. There is no outside noise from open windows, no dust floating through the air. Every time she walks through the house, Katriina has the impression that the air has not moved since the last time she was there, that she is the only one to disrupt the house’s stillness. Though she knows it’s irrational, she senses that the house prefers this, that it clenches up whenever she walks in, bracing for the impending chaos of her presence, resentful and sulking until she leaves.