They Laughed When I Left, So I Came Home the Town's Doctor novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Eero's Boat

I did not take him upstairs.

I took him to the kitchen, and I made him sit at the table where I had put in his stitches.

Then I went to my bag and took out my wallet and slid a photograph from behind the license.

It was an old print, soft at the corners.

I put it on the oilcloth in front of him and sat down.

Two people stood on a dock in the sun.

A young man with a cowlick and a crooked grin had his arm around a woman with red-blond braids and gray eyes.

She was laughing at whoever held the camera.

I had held the camera.

Tuomas looked at it for a long time.

He did not touch it.

"That's Eero," he said.

"Yes," I said.

"And Leena."

"Yes."

He nodded, slowly.

"That's the summer before he." His voice failed.

"The summer before," I said.

I folded my hands to keep them still.

"They're his, Tuomas. Both of them. Onni and Helmi are Eero's children."

He did not move.

The clock above the stove ticked, and the refrigerator hummed, and across the room a moth batted against the window.

"Say it again," he said.

"They're your brother's. Leena's and Eero's."

"That's not." He put a hand over his mouth and took it away. "He's been dead for seven years."

"They were frozen."

"What?"

"The summer before Leena's chemo, they went to a clinic in Marquette and froze embryos. The doctors said it might save her chance of a child." I breathed. "He signed the forms himself. He was so happy about it. He bought her a bracelet that day."

"I remember the bracelet," he said.

"Then he drowned. And then she got worse, and then it was November, and she called me to the hospice."

He was staring at the photograph.

"She asked me to carry them," I said. "She was too sick, and she'd run out of time. She said, Sanna, there's nobody else in the world I'd trust with the only piece of him I've got left."

"And you said yes."

"I said yes before she finished the sentence."

I had never told this to anyone, not even my mother in so many words.

It came out in pieces.

"She made me swear two things," I said. "That I wouldn't tell your family until the twins were old enough that nobody could take them, and until I was somebody a judge would listen to. And that when I did tell, it would be at the boathouse, in daylight, in front of the whole town. So she couldn't do it in the dark."

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