A Little Hope(26)

Suzette remembers waiting to step off that plane in Finland. Her hand shaking as she held her small carry-on and the local woman next to her still sleeping, her head almost on Suzette’s shoulder. Suzette looked at the woman, her open mouth so peaceful, and thought, What will we all do here? Which was really an absurd thought, because this woman spoke no English, so she probably belonged there already. Maybe she slept peacefully and felt, “Ah, home.”

Now Suzette looks at Damon’s text, then puts the phone down on her lap while she drives through Wharton. Damon is a good man. She cannot have another Finland. Her parents have spent almost forty thousand dollars on this wedding. She overheard her mother say to her grandmother on the phone in a low voice, “I haven’t ever seen her like this. This guy has brought Suze so much serenity.” As if Damon were a Buddhist garden.

His text says, I’m worried. You okay?

She imagines the feeling of his hand holding hers, and starts to bite her fingernails.

Today Connecticut looks like Finland: cold ground, green trees. And she feels like she did in Finland: uncertain, slightly sweaty.

She puts both hands on the steering wheel and finds a spot at Crowley Cleaners where she has her last fitting with Freddie Tyler, the seamstress. She knew Freddie through her parents’ good friends Alex and Kay Lionel. Freddie’s husband worked for Alex. Suzette had seen Freddie at several events before she learned she was a seamstress.

The sign says Open, but just one car is in the lot today: a shiny Buick that’s at least five years old. On the glass door of the cleaners is a plastic elf holding a sign that says Season’s Greetings, and in the window box are fake poinsettias and white lights. Her wedding is eight days away. Eight days, and she refuses to let it be another failure that will be held against her for years.

She walks up to the door and sees Mrs. Crowley at the counter replacing register tape.

Did Finland really happen? How odd that a person can have such things belong to them. She had been right out of college. She remembers her roommate in Finland—Helmi—a kind girl her age with large trusting eyes and a birthmark on her left cheek. Helmi had very fine hair, dishwater blond, and could patch together some decent English.

Already we go dinner for you?

The school where Suzette would be teaching matched her up with Helmi. Helmi made Suzette a strong cup of coffee that day she arrived, which is still the best cup of coffee she has ever had. They sat at a small wooden table in the kitchen of the apartment, and Helmi shrugged as she sipped and asked about Suzette’s flight. Then she stood in Suzette’s small bedroom with the plain bed that looked like a cot and brass lamp and tiny window and helped her unpack each item of clothing. This I put here? She remembers how suffocated she felt as Helmi laid her sweaters on the closet shelf and used one of the three hangers to hang Suzette’s black Stella McCartney dress. Very beautiful, Helmi said.

Suzette remembers how she talked faster than usual because she was nervous, and Helmi smiled politely, not knowing how to respond to her rapid sentences.

Then, a day later, the director of the English immersion school in Espoo showed Suzette to her tiny classroom, just a couple of days before the nine-and ten-year-olds would arrive. She remembers the cracks in the walls as she walked the hallway of the school, not seeing locks anywhere. She remembers the odd smell—like pinecones—and how paralyzed she felt. How this teaching and this life were right there, right in front of her, but she felt buried, bubble-wrapped.

How had she thought it would go? Did she not know moving to another country was not like in the movies: the satisfied stare out the plane window, the plucky heroine rolling her suitcase behind her?

She should have known better, but once there she felt like vomiting. What would she teach those kids on their first day? She had applied to the program and never thought she’d get in. She majored in social work in college. She never took an education class. “Paper clip your picture to the packet,” her father had said. “Guaranteed they’ll hire you.” She did. And they did.

A week later, when she was back home, when her parents and younger sister, Carrie, whispered about her downstairs, she sat in the picture window of her bedroom and held a throw pillow against her chest, chewing absently on the corner. “It wasn’t a good fit,” she had said calmly, but she didn’t tell anyone about how she left the school administrator a note (a note!) on her desk (in clearly printed words because she wasn’t sure if her cursive was legible to someone whose first language was Finnish). She didn’t say how she told Helmi she could keep the black dress, how she gave her a stack of euros (probably way too much) to cover the rent, how before she went to the airport she bought a pack of cigarettes in a bar and drank mulled wine and smoked and hiccuped and cried.

She cried because she couldn’t give this beautiful city a chance. She cried because she broke Helmi’s polite heart and because they’d never stayed up late to talk about boyfriends or watch a movie together the way Suzette had envisioned. She cried because she felt so alone, and no one in the bar even noticed her crying. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and she didn’t even know if her I’m sorry, but I can’t do this note was received yet. She cried because she never even sat in her teacher’s desk chair and because maybe they were relieved that she’d quit. Because the students wouldn’t have been able to learn from her anyway.

She cried because her older sister, Lisa, had gotten leukemia two years before that, and nothing, nothing had been right since she died. She felt so far away from Lisa in Finland, and she cried because returning home wouldn’t fix anything.