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week or two.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you call me?”
    Anna shrugged her shoulders again. “I wasn’t up to it. I couldn’t get up.” Then she looked at her mother and, as if marveling at her own train of thought, said, “I was lying on the floor.”
    She started to cry. It started with one tear and spread to the rest of her body. Eleonoora held her in her arms, not knowing what else to do. There they stood.
    Eleonoora said the nursery rhyme for hurts, their own shared rhyme of consolation, the one that her mother had said to her when she was a child. Whenever Eleonoora hurt herself her mother would take her in her arms and say the rhyme in a low voice. The last time Eleonoora had whispered it in her daughter’s ear was when she was less than ten years old. But still the words came, she still remembered them. Anna listened and finally relaxed a little.
    â€œThe bee rhyme. I had forgotten all about that.”
    AT FIRST ELEONOORA had been afraid that Anna’s grief wouldn’t pass. She had made a mental diagnosis of depression and gingerly encouraged Anna to seek help. In the end, she let the matter drop.
    Now and then a young person’s heart is made of lead. It accumulates weight from random experiences; anything can add to its density, slip it out of joint. But it can lighten again just as easily, forget its troubles.
    And that’s what happened. Anna had Matias now, with his worn-out T-shirts, his store of a hundred gentle expressions and only one angry one. She had moved in with him almost immediately, just a month after they met.
    When she visited Anna and Matias’s house, Eleonoora noticed a wistful tinge under the happiness. Where had the years gone? When had she become so old that her daughter had her own home with a lovely boyfriend, offered her a piece of apple pie on a plate that she herself had received as a wedding gift more than twenty years ago? She saw a hint of trying too hard in Anna’s happiness, as if she wanted to impress her with its authenticity.
    01 : 32
    Eero rolled onto his side. Eleonoora got up. She felt dizzy, her legs felt shaky.
    She took the scale out of the cabinet and weighed herself. Fifty-one kilos. She hadn’t weighed that little since she was breastfeeding. She ordered herself to eat a chocolate pudding on top of her regular breakfast. She looked at Eero, wished he would wake up, see how pitiable she was, and take her in his arms.
    She stood for a moment in the chilly darkness, her ribs sharp against the paleness of the night.
    Eero had pulled his knees up toward his chest and put his hand between his thighs as he always did. Something about his sleeping, his trusting presence, gave Eleonoora an unbearable feeling. It felt like vexation mixed with love. When her mother died Eleonoora would still have this family for whom she must necessarily survive.
    There would be evenings, nights like this one. Spring would come. Eero would be his old steadfast self. She would get through it. Gradually she would start to laugh again. That was what was unbearable. She didn’t want to. She wanted to cry, she wanted to build a cradle and put the rest of her life in it to cry, orphaned.
    Eleonoora put the scale back in the cabinet and wrapped her robe around herself again. Her head hurt, her back ached.
    She closed the bedroom door behind her, tiptoed across the hall, stopped at the door to Maria’s room, and listened for a moment. No sound. Suddenly she had to open the door, to see Maria, if only for a moment.
    The predawn moment, the dream of her mother swinging, the dread—all of it made Eleonoora feel that childhood uncertainty about what is true.
    Maria was, at least. She lay on her side with a pillow between her knees, her blanket kicked to the floor. Her thighs glowed in the dimness, her mouth was open, her hair bunched up around her face.
    She made a smacking sound with her mouth in her sleep.
    It seemed almost comical to