Chapter 8 - Welcome to my Life

Chapter 8

Nicky’s POV

She kept standing at the counter, her whole body trembling. Was she crying? Concerned I got up but Jon put his hand on my shoulder.

“I’ll take this from here.” He said, the gaze of his blue eyes not allowing me to do anything but nod. I wanted to shake his hand off at first but he didn’t take no for an answer, simply shoving me aside.

For a second I only stood there rotten to the spot with Jannis in my arms, my gaze following the tall man that took Linnea outside on the corridor behind the counter. I had not planned it, but all of a sudden I knew that I had to follow them. She would never tell me the whole story and by now I was fed up with her vague hints and evasions. I needed to know it and maybe this was my only chance.  

Putting the baby into the arms of a surprised Cate, I got up on a chair. 

“There will be no orders taken for the next 20 Minutes, but the next round of anything you wanna order is on me! And I will personally take your orders at precisely  3.30.”

A short murmur went through the crowd then some started to laugh and even cheer. Well then, buy the crowd a beer and everything is fine! I got down from my stool, signalizing Cate not to whistle-blow and her eyes became round.

“You wanna lurk around?” she whispered, grabbing my arm.

“Cate…” I gave her one of my intense looks straight into her eyes. “I love her but… She will never tell me!”

All of a sudden Cate stepped back, rocking Jannis a little. “You’re right.” She admitted, returning my gaze. “You are one of the nice ones, Nicky. Come on, go.”

Thankfully I nodded, sneaking along the corridor only seconds later. The door of the backroom she normally used to change Jannis in was left ajar and I could hear Jon’s deep voice.

“Lin, you gotta stop doing this!” he sounded firm. “Fucking sit down and tell me the whole story! You’re not gonna leave this room until I know everything!” a chair was moved. “Sit down! SIT DOWN!” I heard him draw a breath. “And now spill it! And start at the beginning not at ‘he left me and the baby, can you help us?’, am I making myself clear?”

“Jeez, Jon, can’t you see how hard this is for me?” Linnea suddenly flared-up, but Jon simply cut her short.

“You owe this to me!” he insisted. “And truth to be told, you owe it to Nicky as well, he is a nice guy and he really cares about you!”

‘Thank you!’ I thought outside in the halflight, stepping closer.

“Jon!” Linnea moaned. “I know he is and I know you deserve to know this but…”

“No more but!” Jon stuck to his guns. “Go ahead, I’m listening.”

There fell a short silence, then Linnea sighed. “We met in March 2008. Riku, he… he had only started working with Sunrise Avenue and I met him at a bar after a concert. We… God, he… he was such a nice guy! I took him home later that night and… well. The next morning I woke up on my own, thinking that he had left after having some fun with me. I was a little saddish to be honest, I had not expected him to sneak out after what actually had been the night of my life.” Linnea took a breath. “Well, I enter the kitchen in my worst nighty, all grumpy and cranky and there he sits, my one-night-stand, grinning at me with my house slippers on his feet, pointing at a fully set breakfast table. ‘I didn’t want to wake you up, but I was so hungry!’ he says, pulling me down on his lap. ‘Where on earth did you get this coconut-spread? It is the best thing I ever tasted!’” again Linnea sighed. “That’s how it started. A one-night-stand that turned into… well, I don’t know. It felt like he was meant for me. He was the one!”

“And then?” Jon asked calmly and I heard him pulling out another chair. 

At this point I had already thought about leaving. She had clearly set her heart on this guy and I wasn’t sure if I was actually strong enough to listen to her talking about another man in such a way. But somehow my feet didn’t move…

“Then.” Linnea sounded flannelly. “I kept studying and he was on tour. And whenever he was in Helsinki, he brought his suitcase and came from the airport to stay with me for as long as they were back.”

“So let me get this straight, hun, you were in a relationship with him and you were happy?”

“I was!” she affirmed. “And we were also happy when I got pregnant! He was so excited, he couldn’t wait!”

“But he left.”

“He… no we… God!” I heard Linnea getting up. “We made the stupid mistake of visiting my stupid crazy father in this stupid village in the stupid black forest in July. We had planned to leave sooner, but we had to stay with him for a few more days and I had not calculated it right and… I went into labour before we had the chance to get back to Helsinki.”

“Aaand?” Jon sounded surprised. “What’s the problem, it is Germany not Sudan! They must have hospitals there.”

“Well, they have.” She snapped at him. “But the only good one was about 50 miles away and the streets had been blocked due to heavy rainfall and a few huge landslips. They put me in an ambulance because the helicopter was out already. But somewhere along the way… We… I don’t remember much of it, but I remember being in an accident. The ambulance was… it slipped down some steep hillside and … God, it was rolling over and over and over.” Linnea shook her head and buried her face in her hands. “When I woke up, I was barely able to move. The paramedic had been killed during the crash, the driver died short after.” Still her face was buried in her hands and I felt sick all of a sudden. God, what a horrible situation! She had told me that giving birth had been hard but I had not had the slightest idea that she had most probably been alone in the woods after an accident!

“The door of the ambulance was missing, the whole car completely twisted.” Linnea continued with a lifeless voice. “I had a broken arm and the contractions became stronger but I couldn’t find Riku at first.” Sobbing she broke off. “When I finally managed to get out of the car, I found him a few steps away, unconscious and badly injured. I had no cell phone reception, we were in the middle of nowhere and suddenly my water broke and…” again she fell silent, her breath caught in her throat. “So all I could do was wait, I had no idea how a normal birth was supposed to take place, what I had to do except press it out somewhere along the way. God, it was horrible! When Riku woke up again he did his best to help me, but he was as scared as I was. He could barely move because of a dislocated shoulder and a broken leg. We… after a few hours, it was late afternoon already, Jannis suddenly stopped kicking. I couldn’t feel him anymore and… It obviously became more and more dangerous for me and the baby and… Well, I can’t really remember, there are only little pictures left but I know that almost everything went wrong and we didn’t have the equipment to … to do anything, do what were we supposed to do. I could feel that the baby was far down already. There was no way to think of something like a C-section. And above it all, who would have carried it out? It was horrible!” Linnea fell silent, shaking her head. “In the end we managed to get Jannis out of me alive by cutting me open in every direction possible because the kid was stuck. Riku, he… God, he was… I think he had a nervous breakdown. We had no idea about anaesthesia, couldn’t find anything in the damn ambulance-wreck. I lay there and he… he had to get a scalpel and cut… He had to…”

Again there was a silence between them and I felt that they had to hear the sounds of my guts churning. Damn, that was even more horrible than the stories she had already told me about!

“What happened then?” Jon asked lowly, taking the words out of my mouth.

“I think I lost consciousness somewhere along the way, but when I woke up, Riku had me bandaged and Jannis wrapped into some sheets and his jacket. I remember the look on his face, he was in shock, completely devastated and shattered. He told me to stay while he was out trying to find help. And so I did. But the blood loss… I… I can’t remember being found and rescued. I woke up in a hospital bed and when I was finally sutured and back on the surface of consciousness, I asked about Riku.”

“And?”

“He was gone. No one had seen him. Obviously some doctor at the emergency room had brought his shoulder back into place and taped his broken bones provisionally, but he was gone.”

“Gone as in he had left the hospital?”

“The hospital, the town, the country, I have no idea!” helplessly she shrugged. “He never told me. So as soon as I was able to walk again, I grabbed Jannis and took a flight back to Finland.”

“What about Riku? Where was he?”

Linnea shrugged again. “I have no idea.” She whispered. “His mobile was off, I couldn’t reach him.”

“But he came back, didn’t he?”

“He did.”

“Don’t let me drag every word out of you! Come on, Lin!” Jon sounded urgent. “He came back and…?”

“I don’t know, God damn it!” she hissed back. “It was about a week later. I had to go to the hospital again and only a few days after this whole mess I underwent surgery to reconstruct… well… “ she made a diffident gesture with her hands. “The suture was bad and the whole skin and tissue around was infected, it was horrible. And when I came back home he was there all of a sudden. He refused to talk about anything and we lived together in awkward silence for another week.” Linnea fell silent. “He had nightmares.” She started again in a very low voice. “He… well, Jannis was sleeping in my bed with me and Riku slept on the couch, but I could hear him scream every night. Sometimes when I went to the bathroom to change Jannis, I found him standing by the window in the middle of the night, staring outside. It almost killed me that he refused to talk about it and that he couldn’t hold Jannis without the memories of what he had seen and done during his own child’s birth. It was a hard time but I hoped that he would get over it somehow.” Linnea swallowed hard.

“But he didn’t.” Jon helped her out and she nodded, snivelling.

“The night he left us, we… I don’t even remember how it happened, but he was again awake because of a bad dream and when Jannis started to cry he became furious, yelling at me and at the baby. That was when he called him things like “that horrible thing that almost killed you” and “that awful monster you forced me to cut out of you”. It was dreadful! Like an explosion of emotions and words. And then he left without even packing, simply ran off in his trainers and he never came back.” Drawing a painful breath, Linnea shook her head. “Well, that was the point for me to leave as well. Jenna needed a place to stay, so I left my whole apartment as it was to her and came running to the safest place I know in the world.” Looking up at him she wiped her tears away. “That’s it.” She whispered, sobbing lowly when he pulled her closer and took her in his arms. “God, I miss him so much! I wish everything had happened differently!”

“We need to get you back on your feet, love.” He whispered soothingly, stroking her back. “You did a great job so far, you hear me? You are a great mother and hell, baby, you are strong! You can do this.”

That was the point for me to step back. 

Wow! 

Slowly I made my way back to Cate, completely lost in my thoughts. How was I supposed to deal with all those new revelations?  Two’s a company, but three’s a crowd. I was definitely dating a wonderful woman, but she was obviously still attached to her ex-boyfriend. And truth to be told, I had no idea how to help her getting over it and on with her life. I wasn’t even confident about the way she felt about me, about us… we had only been dating for a few months now, but I was almost certain that she was the one woman I would marry even though my divorce had been hard on me and I still felt weak when I thought about Kim and everything that had happened between us. But I only felt a little weak and sad, I wasn’t devastated because of her anymore. And evidently Linnea was still in a phase of deep desperation and far too involved with her old life to make another step towards me, us, our future together.

Should I take it slow? Or maybe try and talk to this Samu-guy again? Well, about what? Cursing lowly I stared down at my hands. Did she need time or did she need to be confronted with her past?

Well planned, Byrne, eavesdropping and making plans to use the stuff you secretly overheard. What a fucking shitty situation.

Still deep in my thoughts, I started taking the promised orders from the waiting guests at Jon’s. Cate helped me out and soon I was running and serving and trying to make conversation with the customers, even though I had a block of ice in my stomach.

“Hey!” All of a sudden Linnea put her hand on my back. She smiled despite her eyes that were still red from crying. “Thank you for your help!”

I didn’t reply and simply took her in my arms. “Are you alright?” I whispered, carefully stroking her back. “Is there something I can do for you?”

“You’re doing it right now.” She whispered back, resting her face close to my neck. “I’m sorry, this… this call really caught me off guard!”

“What happened?” still holding her close I felt my heartbeat speeding up.

“Samu, an old friend, maybe you’d say ‘the blond hulk’ just called and… well, I don’t wanna talk about it really. It’s fine, I’ll get over it.” She wanted to step back but I held her close.

“Why don’t you let me help you?” I asked lowly and even to my ears it sounded a little reproachful. She obviously heard the undertone as well and looked up.

“Well, if I had a clue about the kind of help I needed, you’d know first!” she shot back, struggling.

I released her and took the tray from the counter. 

‘No, I wouldn’t.’ I thought, turning over to the couple that had just started ordering their pies.

The fact that Linnea stayed silent only made this point even clearer to me: If she needed help, any kind of help, I would not be the one she’d ask for it. ‘The safest place I know in the world’, her words came to my mind. Well obviously that was not me.

It didn’t feel right and I wasn’t proud of myself when I sneaked outside on the corridor of her apartment that evening, pretending to head for the loo while she was cooking. I also didn’t take pride in searching her handbag for the keys to Jon’s diner and hiding them in my jacket. But I needed the phone, needed the phone number of this Samu-guy. And if I had to almost break in, well, tough times call for tough measures, right? Of course I knew that it wasn’t the right thing to do, but I was by now desperate to hear the other side of the story and maybe finally have the whole picture. To be honest, it frightened me. The thought of talking to Samu, finding out more about this damn soul mate bastard, maybe losing her if she ever found out about it. Truth to be told, I loved her. Up ‘til now we had definitely had a great time together but I kept asking myself if I had been blinded by love. There were signs, they had been there all along. She held me off her past, her life, even herself, kept me at bay. Even though we got along really well (at least I felt that way) she still refused to move in with me or furnish a room for Jannis at my apartment. She was distant. Withdrawn even. Today had been my wake-up-call. I was her boyfriend, but I wasn’t the one she came running to when she was sad, had problems or needed help.

Jon had unintentionally crossed a line that night but I wasn’t mad at him. After his talk with Linnea he had motioned me aside, telling me that he had overreacted and that I should have been the one to talk to her and comfort her. I had accepted his apology, acting like a very strong and confident man. But I wasn’t. I was in love. Madly in love. And my girlfriend refused to talk to me.

Sitting at my kitchen table in the middle of the night I stared down at the note in my hand, my fingers playing with the phone I had placed on the dark wood. I really hoped that no one would find out about me almost breaking into the diner to check the phone for Samu’s number, but even though I had simply opened the backdoor with a stolen key, I felt like a criminal.

It was four in the morning and I didn’t have a clue about the time in Helsinki but I desperately needed to finally dial the long 00358-number. I narrowed my eyes. Hopefully this was his home-number and not some random phone he had used. I started kneading my fingers, nervously humming along with a song that came to my mind. It was “how am I supposed to leave you” and I stopped immediately, groaning in frustration. Damn!

I awoke with a start, dozily staring outside into a grey winter sky. Quickly I checked my wrist watch. Seven! It was seven already! My hands were shaking when I started to dial the number from the little white note in front of me.

After ringing eight times the phone was picked up and a husky voice grunted a few words at me.

I cleared my throat. “Hi. This is Nicolas Byrne speaking. I am looking for Samu.”

The line fell silent and I heard some rummaging around at the other end.

“That would be me.” The other man then said, clearing his throat as well. “How can I help you?”