Eero holds my gaze as I start to waver.
“Really?” I ask. “Rasmus?” I add, wanting to hear it from him. “Is he really in there?”
But there’s only silence. Why isn’t Rasmus saying anything? He was so hell-bent on getting me out of here and now he’s just gone mute.
“He’s at peace, so you need your own peace,” Noora says. “Come see, Hanna. Come see your dear father.”
I can barely swallow the lump in my throat. My entire body feels like shaking uncontrollably and I can’t stop it.
I turn around, breaking eye contact with Eero, a freeing sensation entering my body, and blink. Rasmus is gone. Like, he’s completely disappeared. But before I can even point that out, how that’s even possible, I see Noora peering over the casket.
And I see my father in that casket.
My mouth drops open, hit with both bewilderment at how fucked up my mind must be to have not seen him before, to utter gut-kicking sadness.
It’s him.
“Papa!” I cry out and run toward the casket, Noora stepping out of the way.
Tears automatically stream down my face as I stare down at my father’s lifeless body. It’s him, it’s really him. From his white beard, to his hooked nose which he always used to call his beak, to the stubborn crease between his white brows, like he’s frowning his way through death…
“Papa,” I say again, the word coming out raw and broken and I feel like the grief I thought I knew, the grief I thought I was making friends with, that was setting like cement, has changed once again. It’s deeper now, potent, and ripping my soul apart into tiny little pieces that will never come back together.
I want to touch him but I’m afraid he’ll be cold, that he won’t feel like him. I lean over his face, trying to memorize the details. It had been so long since I’d seen him and yet he looks the exact same. Like he hasn’t aged at all. Like he’s not even dead, just resting, just sleeping.
“I love you,” I whisper to him, and the tears fall from my face, splashing onto his skin. “I’m sorry I never said it enough. I should have said it more. I should have called more, I should have been more present, I should have been with you as soon as I was able to and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I kept putting it off. Putting you last. I thought we had more time. I really thought we had more time and we…we don’t. We didn’t. Now you’re gone. You’re gone.”
More tears fall from my eyes, landing on his face. With shaking hands, I reach to wipe it off his cheek but before I do, his skin seems to move beneath the droplet. I pause, staring wide-eyed. His skin seems to warp and shimmer, becoming translucent, and I swear I can see something underneath.
Something moving.
Something like…another face.
I shake my head, as if trying to right it, because I have to be hallucinating again, I have to be.
But then something shifts, and my father’s nose appears to disintegrate before my eyes, turning black, like it’s rotting off.
His eyes open.
He stares right at me.
A scream chokes inside my throat.
Because it’s not my father’s eyes.
These are Rasmus’ eyes.
“Run!” Rasmus’s voice comes out through my father’s open mouth, now turning black like rotting sludge, his teeth falling out.
I scream. Pure panic courses through me and I turn to run, because it feels like the only thing to do. This isn’t my father, I don’t know what this is, but I have to get far, far away from here.
But Noora is right there behind me, her body pressed against mine, and she’s grabbing me in a chokehold before I can even turn, her arm pressing in hard against my windpipe.
I can’t breathe. I start to struggle. For an older lady, she has the strength of a beast, and her smell is becoming even more pungent, and for a moment I feel this sensation to give up, almost like there’s another voice inside me, one that doesn’t belong to me, telling me it’s all over.
But then I manage to push through it and I remember who I am and what I can do, and all my training comes flooding back. It’s basic self-defense and I’m jabbing my elbow back, striking her where I can. It doesn’t loosen her grip as much as I hoped, but she does let out a groan, shifting, and I take the opportunity to quickly widen my stance and flip her over my head.
She goes summersaulting over on top of the casket, knocking it off the stand, and for a moment I’m horrified as my father’s body starts to slide out, but that horror stops when I realize it’s now Rasmus, scrambling to his feet.