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I decide to keep my mouth shut and let the magic god do all the talking. My poor Finnish skills can only pick up a word here and there, but as we stand in the hallway of this old building, I get the impression that Tuoni is asking him about my father’s whereabouts.
They talk for a few minutes before my uncle nods and disappears inside his apartment, leaving the door open.
I nudge Tuoni with my foot. “What’s happening?”
He gives me a side-long glance and smirks just as my uncle returns and drops a pair of car keys in Tuoni’s hand.
“Kiitos,” Tuoni thanks him, and my uncle pats his hand and the keys a few times, nodding like Tuoni has done him some gracious favor before he goes back inside his apartment and closes his door.
“What the hell just happened?” I ask as I follow Tuoni back down the steps.
“I got ourselves a vehicle to your father’s place.”
“He knows where he is? Wait—we’re stealing my uncle’s car?”
“Clearly not. We’re borrowing it. I told him he can pick it up from there in a couple of days. He thinks he’s securing a place in Amaranthus by doing this.”
I smack his chest. “Please tell me you’re going to grant him that. You can’t play with people’s afterlife like that.”
“It’s as if you don’t know who I am,” he croons as we step out of the building and back into the cold, dark street. He nods at a red Saab across the street. “That’s the one.”
“So, wait,” I say to him as we hurry across the road, “he told you where my father was?”
“Yes. He’s up north. Not as far as he was before, but at a lake in the middle of a forest, living off some grid, in hiding.”
“Why? Why is he in hiding?” I ask, panic coursing through me at the thought.
“I didn’t ask,” he says, pulling me to a stop and placing the keys in my hand. “I figured your father will explain when we find him.”
“And he didn’t tell you anything else?” I ask.
“He told me all I needed to know. In a few days, he’ll remember where his car is, but he won’t have any memory of us being here. In fact, if you were to go up and see him again, he wouldn’t remember us. But we got the information we needed. So now, the question is, do we drive tonight to see your father, or save it for tomorrow?”
I ask for the address and then plunk it into my phone. It comes up as being in the middle of a national park, just below the Arctic Circle, and a ten-hour drive.
“We’ll park the car by the hotel and head off early tomorrow morning,” I tell him.
He gives me a broad smile, the kind that lights up his face and makes the silver in his eyes shine. “Does that mean we have time for more cake tonight?”
“Is cake another word for sex?”
He laughs. “Cake is cake, sex is sex. I will always make time for both.”
The next morning, we wake up before dawn, which isn’t saying much, since it doesn’t get light outside until eight a.m. We didn’t get as much sleep as we would have liked—yes, there was sex, and cake, but Tuoni was also up late because of all the coffee he was drinking. Who knew caffeine could affect a god so much?
We pack up our stuff and get in the car, with our little hotel coffees to go. I’m behind the wheel while Tuoni watches the sunrise and the city slowly come out of the darkness and back to life.
By the time we’re five hours into the drive, I’m wishing I was the one staring out the window. It’s tiring driving, even though there’s not a lot of traffic on the highway, and the scenery hasn’t changed much—trees, trees, more trees, the occasional moose on the side of the road, which has Tuoni marveling at how their bones aren’t showing.
Another five hours, and we’re driving through the dark, pulling off the main highway and down a snowy road that hasn’t seen a snowplow in years. I don’t know how I manage to drive the car without sliding into a ditch or a tree, but the Finnish tires seem to do a good job at keeping us safe and straight.
Finally, I spot some lights through the trees, so faint at first that I think they could be stars, except the skies are cloudy. We pull up to a cabin at the end of a lake, similar to the house I grew up in but much, much smaller.
I kill the engine and stare at the cabin, at its fading red-and-white paint and the dark roof with solar panels, its black-trimmed windows with a faint glow coming from inside, and I wonder how my dad could be here, this far off the beaten path. And why?
Perhaps this isn’t even his place at all.
But then the porch lights come on and the door swings open, and my father steps out into the cold, bundling a scarf around his neck as he stares at us in wonder.
