Read Online As White as Snow by Salla Simukka - Free Book Online Page B

hands. These thoughts were wrong. She had started wanting something she should not want. She had to ask forgiveness.
    She had to pray for strength.
    Lenka couldn’t help noticing that it was almost three thirty. If she wanted to meet Lumikki at five in the garden at the fort, she would have to leave soon. Lenka would do right by not going. Theoretically, she was under house arrest because she had broken the rules by bringing Lumikki home without asking permission first. They told Lenka that no one could be allowed to enter so easily. First, the family had to determine whether Lumikki was someone they could trust. Even if she really was Lenka’s sister, that alone wasn’t enough.
    Lenka had asked whether the family doubted her story. They said it wasn’t about that. It was because members of the family had to protect each other and the holy communion they enjoyed. No one could break that. Lenka’s right ring finger gently massaged her left ring finger where for years she’d worn the ring she received from her mother on her fifteenth birthday. Mother had died just a few weeks later. Lenka had always touched the ring when she needed strength or comfort.
    But last week, Lenka had removed the ring. Adam had told her more directly than ever before how her mother had lost her faith and abandoned the family, so keeping the ring had felt like an act of treachery. Lenka had thrown the ring in the river. There it could sink just like Mother had sunk.
    Now she had to find strength and comfort somewhere else, from her faith and from God.
    Lenka’s prayer broke off when an anguished, tearful cry came from downstairs.
    “Jaro is dead!”
    Lenka’s clasped hands fell. Guilt flooded her as she ran down the stairs. What if God had seen her sinful, worldly dreams and punished her by showing her how easily death could come?
    Lumikki sat in the garden of the fort, gazing at the fountain that gushed shining droplets like gems. The drops danced for a moment in the air, but then inexorably fell back to the surface of the water. Lumikki wondered how it would look if the drops suddenly rose to the sky like tiny, shimmering balloons. And then floated away. She played with the thought of them flying all the way to Finland and raining, warm and gentle, on Blaze’s face.
    Blaze. She was thinking about him again. Was it the distance? Was it easier to allow herself to long for him when she was in another country? Did that make yearning more permissible?
    By all rights, Lumikki’s thoughts shouldn’t have had room for anything but this strange Lenka girl, her even stranger family, and the ultimate question of whether they were actually related. Did Lumikki’s father have a secret child in Prague? Her longing for Blaze didn’t comply with traditional logic though. It had its own plans, and Lumikki couldn’t do a thing about it.
    Lumikki looked out over the city below her and suddenly felt a powerful sense of unfamiliarity and otherness. She didn’t belong here. She was just visiting. She was a tourist who would leave before the city could really start feeling familiar. She was never going to feel at home here.
    Where was Lumikki really at home?
    Not in Riihimäki with her mom and dad. Not in her apartment in Tampere either, at least not yet. She had nothing that bound her so firmly to any one place that it could actually feel like home.
    A hot wind caressed Lumikki’s hair, reminding her of how his hand had stroked it and how she’d wanted it never to stop. In Blaze’s arms, she had felt at home. In the warmth of his gaze, she had felt safe, alive, and whole. She could just be herself. She didn’t need to act or hide or edit parts out. She had been happy. She had felt loved.
    The wind brought a scent of flowers and trees and summer that was so intoxicating Lumikki had to sit down. The feeling of foreignness and homelessness started to wrap around her like twine. It started at her feet, binding them together and then continuing up to her