—
After Marion left, Norma sat in the sun for a moment to take a deep breath. She’d left off the scopolamine patches because they dulled her senses. If she felt overwhelmed, she could turn to her pills. The stockpile of human hair was especially troublesome even though the chemicals had destroyed almost everything her brain could deduce from it. July was approaching, and that frightened her. Summer was heating up, and the more humid the weather became, the more she would have to confront people’s vitamin deficiencies and hormone imbalances, not to mention the black avalanche. She had lost her first job during one such hot spell. She’d been an assistant at a clothing store in a mall in east Helsinki and realized that one customer who was trying on dresses would die within six months. There was nothing to do. Going to a doctor would be a waste. She hid her head behind the curtain of a fitting stall just before the vomit came. The woman had been a black cloud. Norma didn’t know how she would survive if customers like that came into the salon.
—
The ringing of the landline forced Norma to dive back inside. The woman murmuring on the other end wanted her problem solved before she left for her summer cabin. Getting away for emergencies like this would be difficult, and the tangles troubled her dreams and kept her awake.
“Anita said I should try some Ukrainian. What do you think? Should I switch?”
One of her mother’s clients. Marion hadn’t instructed her how to react to questions like this. Norma scrolled to Marion’s personal cell phone number on her own phone. It was for problem situations, and only for her. Not for clients, not under any circumstances. Women with hair emergencies called anytime they pleased and never gave up until you answered—this woman seemed to belong to that exact group. Norma had to solve this issue herself. She had to show Marion she could handle it.
“Hello? Did we get cut off?”
“I agree,” Norma said. “I think the Ukrainian would be a good fit for you. Virgin Remy, the highest quality.”
After the call ended, she remained standing where she was. The words had escaped her lips unremarked. The turban carelessly tied around her head didn’t feel tight, and the lock that had fallen loose by her ear didn’t react in any way. It had only its normal wave. Would she hold up as well with her mother’s next client? And what if someone started asking for news of Anita? The salon’s clientele was sure to include plenty of women who took pleasure in the misfortunes of others. Their kind dwelled endlessly on a tragedy until all the blood and marrow had been sucked out of it, gnawing at possible underlying factors with the same devotion as dieters who try to lose weight with gimmicks like slow chewing. But the salon was an oasis of dreams, not of anxiety. Norma decided to tell anyone who asked that her mother had quit and moved abroad.
The flower smelled like a tulip, but it wasn’t a tulip, and her clothing smelled like a damp cellar. Marion opened her eyes. The pillowcase was soaked with sweat and stank like a suitcase in Cartagena—used, like a towel left in the corner. She had fallen asleep and returned in her dreams to Albino’s side by the swimming pool. Albino removed a rubber tree twig from Marion’s hair and told her to relax and order a margarita. In the evening, they would celebrate. And just as Albino hadn’t known then that that would be the last day of her old life, Marion couldn’t know whether today would turn out the same for her. Her week had passed.
As she rose from her bed, Marion repeated to herself that they couldn’t do the same thing to her. Not even Lambert would go that far. Although as she watched the coffee drip, Marion knew that Lambert definitely would. She rubbed her ears, which rang with the sound of Cartagenan tree frogs. It wouldn’t go away. It always came back.
Marion was no more important than Albino. On the contrary. She was too old, and Albino had been young. Unlike Albino, she would be worthless. They wouldn’t ship her from Colombia to Maracaibo, where the hair thieves offered a variety of services, or to Cancún, where a troop of doctors interested in her would be waiting. Maybe they’d just throw her into the sea.
—
When she and Alla had returned to the hotel, the staff walked the halls dressed in white like angels, just as spotless as before. The cleaner’s cart already stood at Albino’s door. Marion had walked by as if all were well. She didn’t even slow down. Instead she hurried to her own room and its grave-chilled dampness. Albino’s studio apartment in Helsinki was emptied immediately, and a new tenant moved in within a month. Would the same thing happen to Marion’s home? Who would clean it, who would pack her things? Would they call her clients and cancel all their appointments, or would they look for someone to continue at the salon? Someone must have gone to Anita’s apartment to get her work clothes so that the person they were trying to lure out wouldn’t suspect anything when they saw her in front of the salon. When she was caught, Anita was carrying only dresses appropriate to the weather in Thailand. Maybe the same person, one of the mongrels, had also gone to Anita’s to drop off her suitcase and phone. It couldn’t have been Alvar. Even though Alvar had sent a message to Norma from Anita’s phone so she wouldn’t wonder about her mother’s disappearance immediately after her trip, it was difficult to imagine Alvar wanting to show his face anywhere near Anita’s home at that stage. Later Alvar had regretted the message, which didn’t sound like something a woman contemplating suicide would send. At the time, the clan had believed Anita would come to her senses and cooperate. The situation went south so quickly that arranging a suicide note was no longer an option. In Marion’s case, they wouldn’t make the same mistake. It would be easy. They would need only to hint at Helena, and no one would suspect anything.
As she dressed and applied mascara, Marion kept an eye on her phone, glancing outside every now and then as she had that night in Cartagena when she’d hoped Alvar would call. She would have liked to hear a familiar voice after returning to the hotel without Albino, a voice that would say everything would work out. But Alvar hadn’t answered her calls. The entire night was punctuated by power outages, and Marion spent it alone listening to the tree frogs and water dripping from her hotel room air conditioner. The palm trees rustled like dead leaves. When they returned to Finland, Alvar hadn’t asked anything other than whether they had managed to visit Cancún as well.
When she stepped out into the stairwell, Marion listened carefully for strange noises. As she walked down the stairs, she felt certain that one of Lambert’s mongrels would lunge at her as soon as she stepped outside. They had surprised Anita at the door to the baggage claim, and they could take Marion the same way, in broad daylight when she least expected it, as she had just sent off another happy bride overjoyed at the results of her test styling before the big day. Or not. The Lamberts were precise. When the clock struck indicating that a week had passed, she would go on vacation. They had monitored Albino for a month before the decision. Exactly one month. Marion had been given one week.
—
No one was at the downstairs door. She didn’t see any guard dogs on the street, or suspicious cars in the parking lot. On her way to the salon, the asphalt lurched under Marion’s feet like the deck of a ship, and she felt rigor mortis in her limbs, but nothing happened. An hour later Alvar came to fetch her as agreed for a client meeting and chose a route that went where he said it would.
“Is something wrong?” he asked in front of the Palace Hotel.
“No, nothing,” Marion replied with a smile.
In the elevator, she was her old self. No one was going to come take her for a “vacation” in the middle of a client meeting. Perhaps Lambert’s way of punishing her was to make her imagine the worst.
Her hair had started hissing in the elevator, and when Norma pulled her turban off, she saw that it had become a mass of curling tentacles. She snapped that yes, she’d noticed the stray hair on the mat in the entryway. It belonged to the same man she had seen in the stairwell before, and there was nothing strange about it. It was part of the window remodeling. She needed help for her real problems, not for imaginary one
s, and threw the scarf into the laundry basket with such force that it fell over with a bang. Hearing her own cry, she pressed her hand to her mouth. She didn’t act this way. She didn’t talk to her hair. Her nerves were giving out.
Her curls relaxed as she drank a glass of box wine. Norma poured another glass as she waited for them to calm down enough that she could start with the scissors. Her head felt leaden. Over the day she had accumulated an unusual amount of gray, and it was the salon’s fault.
Her mother had gone unhinged after finding Norma’s first gray hair, and Norma had thought her mother’s reaction had to do with Norma’s age. Steel gray stood out so glaringly on a woman as young as she was, and dyeing wouldn’t help because her roots would show almost immediately. She wouldn’t be able to conceal her abnormality anymore. She comforted her mother by saying that the situation would go back to normal once the labor negotiations and the anxiety surrounding them passed, but personally she saw her graying as a sign of premature aging. That was a problem for many freaks of nature and was why her home was always ready to greet the police and paramedics. She kept her mother’s videos and the boxes of hair in chicken wire locker number twelve just in case.
As she stared at the ball of hair she would soon discard, a coincidence occurred to her: the gray had made its first appearance after her mother began work at Shear Magic. What if the reason wasn’t the labor negotiations or unhealthy living but rather her mother’s betrayal? What if her hair had been trying to communicate that to her? What if it didn’t want to adorn the heads of strangers?
Norma rushed to the computer. Thanks to her mother, she already knew all there was to know about dyeing aging hair. Even so, she looked it up again. All the familiar instructions about preventing gray with green tea and garlic, the ginger Indians rubbed onto their scalps, and the nutritional importance of manganese, calcium, folic acid, and copper.
Norma read the instructions as if they were a mantra she could chant to calm her mind and place her problems in proper perspective. Or maybe she hoped she would find a trick she had missed, some magic spell that had slipped between the lines. But she didn’t find any magic spell. And the mantra didn’t calm her mind. Her time at the salon would be limited.
Her mother had probably thought the same. She had seen the gray hairs as dwindling cash flow, and that was what had caused her distress.
The couple from Espoo held their coffee cups with both hands as if warming them. This private room at the Palace was a deliberate ploy for meetings with clients who were easily impressed by the patriotic atmosphere, the view of the sea, and the Finnish modernist design. But instead of admiring the view, the couple stared at the white wall. Their hands remained up, elbows to stomachs, cups huddled in hands. They were significantly early, as people like them always were.
“Alvar will be here soon,” Marion said, keeping her voice low and reassuring. She noticed her fists were clenched tight, her knuckles white just like the couple’s, although for different reasons, so she hid them in her lap. Clients often overinterpreted things. Even the sight of a handkerchief could cause a stream of tears, and just after remembering that, Marion realized she’d left her handbag open with a large packet of tissues visible. She surreptitiously pushed the bag under the table. This meeting was set to be the easiest of the week, with no reason for tears. Everything had gone well. The first round of IVF had been successful, and upon hearing the news, the couple joked that they’d been prepared to pay for at least ten rounds after all the rumors they’d heard about fraud in the industry. The quick results came as a surprise, as did the reasonable cost. Thirty thousand dollars was a small price to pay to fulfill a lifelong dream—the man had laughed that his boat was more expensive.
Marion had now handled four agency clients since her deadline expired. The uncertainty hadn’t completely eased, but the tree frogs ringing in her ears had gone silent and some hope had rekindled. Norma was working at the salon, and Marion made a good start befriending the girl. As she looked at the couple, she couldn’t help thinking that the woman represented precisely the customer profile she and Anita had hoped to attract at their new salon. Her feathered bob cut had summer highlights obviously applied by a skilled hand, and she had her own hair, her own eyelashes, and her own nails. This was a customer who would never be late, would never beg for an installment plan, and whose credit card would never turn up missing, Marion thought as she wrote out the bill. The idea of hair extensions would be unfamiliar to her at first, so Marion would have to figure out whom the woman might admire. She would be shocked and refuse to believe that her idols were hooked on extensions. That was why Marion would suggest volumizing first. That sounded more natural, and no one would even notice a few keratin bonds in her hair. Visit by visit, she would gain the courage to take more radical steps. The younger generation was easier since Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Victoria Beckham’s daily changing lengths had already done the work. In Finland, Big Brother had the same effect: the audience watched every day as girls removed their hair to sleep and reapplied it in the morning. Soon nothing felt so natural as to do the same themselves. Before long, they began to tire of constantly fussing with low-quality clip-ins, and then they went to a stylist for a permanent solution.
—
Alvar walked through the door at precisely two o’clock. The couple’s heads turned, and their faces relaxed in bleary smiles as Alvar placed the ultrasound images in front of them. Marion looked at the clock. In two minutes, Alvar would turn on his computer and begin delivering news from the clinic. That would be followed by a video chat with the woman carrying the couple’s child, with the aid of an interpreter, after which they would review legal details and travel plans. Couples like this were the best because they began building the story of their future child’s origin early on. The woman had told her friends she was undergoing fertility treatments. The trips to Georgia were vacations, and the man’s work carried him abroad anyway. This time his wife was just accompanying him. In six months, they would return to Finland with their biological child, and the birth certificate would list their names as the parents. In addition to the easy legal environment, the choice of country had also been influenced by the fact that Finns knew next to nothing about it, so no one would connect the couple’s trips to Tbilisi with fertility tourism. Georgia didn’t have a reputation as a baby factory, and there hadn’t been scandals, at least not any that passed the bar for international news coverage. The Georgian War was already a memory, along with the other disturbances in the area—no one would think about how these things had resulted in widespread poverty and many single women with families to support.
The couple wanted to watch the video again. Alvar restarted it and handed them the latest test results for the woman carrying their child, an updated dietary report, and a brochure of housing options in Tbilisi if the future parents wished to rent a cozy family apartment rather than stay in a hotel as the due date approached. Alvar’s moves were cunning. When the woman heard the word family apartment, a beatific expression spread across her face.
“Of course, Marion or I will come along to make sure everything goes as planned. Just last week we had a happy family return to Sweden. They didn’t even bother getting a passport at the embassy. They simply headed home with the birth certificate.”
Alvar flashed a family portrait of a couple holding two children, one an infant in a christening dress, the other two or three years older.
“The boy looks just like his father.”
“Of course. He is his biological offspring,” Alvar said.
“Of course.” The woman’s relief was evident. Many believed that some signs of the woman who gave birth to the child would remain, something in the skin tone or hair color, or perhaps the shape of the eyes, even though there was no logical foundation for such worries. To those people, Alvar showed pictures of a surrogate holding a child who looked completely different from herself. That reassured them.
The man cleared his throat. “There was a third w
oman we considered, too,” he said. “This little gal could use some company. What do you think? Could we do it?”
“She could begin the medication immediately. The eggs and sperm are still on ice.”
“And since your first is going to be a girl, you could also consider whether you’d like the next one to be a boy,” Marion added.
The couple turned to look at her. “Is that possible?”
“These days anything is possible,” Marion continued. “For that we just need to move to Ukraine, which is a shorter flight anyway. We can easily move the genetic material there from Georgia. That isn’t a problem, and you won’t need to go through the donation process again.”
The man was first to show interest; the woman hesitated. They glanced at each other.
“Any child would be welcome in our home,” the woman said, but the man was clearly already imagining the hockey practices. The possibility of choosing the sex always upended clients’ thoughts. Sometimes it was clear they’d already argued about it at home. One had visions of pedal cars and video games while the other dreamed of flowing dresses and hair bows.