The Crane Operator's Harmonica

The drive took three hours and I spent most of it arguing with myself about whether I even deserved the night off. I'm Caren Park, thirty-four, and I sell pharmaceutical products to doctors who mostly look at their phones while I talk. My company had sent me up to Oulu for a meeting that got cancelled, and instead of driving straight back south I kept going, up past the last real town, following a road the rental car's GPS seemed embarrassed about. A spa at the edge of a frozen lake. One night. I had booked it on my phone in the parking garage two weeks earlier, at a moment when the sensible part of my life felt like a coat that no longer fit.

And then, of course, the moment I actually got there, I felt worse instead of better. That's the joke nobody warns you about. You drive three hours north for peace and quiet, and the peace and quiet just gives your brain room to do its worst work. The lake was white and flat out the window, the sky the color of a wet dish towel, and I sat in the parked car for ten minutes with the engine ticking down, thinking about a married doctor I'd made a fool of myself over seven years ago. Seven years. I was twenty-seven then and he was forty-three and I had told myself all kinds of stories about how it was different, and it wasn't, and I'd sworn off complications since. So here I was, thirty-four, single, sensible, successful in a way that impressed my mother and bored me to death, sitting alone in a frozen parking lot with nothing but time.

The hotel lobby was small and warm and smelled like coffee and floor wax. There was one desk, one woman behind it, maybe fifty, reading something on a tablet. A rack of brochures stood against the wall, the kind that advertise dog sled tours and northern lights evenings to people who never take them. I checked in, got a key card, and asked what time the sauna was free.

"Well," she said, and I could tell right away this was going to be one of those answers. "There's a small overlap tonight. You have eight to ten, but another guest has booked seven to nine."

"So for an hour we're both booked into the same sauna?"

"Yes, exactly so. It happens sometimes. Usually people just share it. It is not a big room but it is not small either. Most guests, you know, they talk a little or they don't, and it's fine."

I said okay, because what was I going to do, stand in my room for an hour sulking about an hour of sauna? I went up, dropped my bag, changed into my swimsuit, put a robe over it, and went back down with my hair wet from the shower. The sauna building was a separate little annex, wood-paneled, with a frosted glass door facing the lake. Steam was already hissing somewhere behind it. Through the frosted glass I could see a shape moving, a big shape, and next to the door, on the ground, somebody had left a coat and a pair of boots. A worn canvas coat, gray gone almost green, and heavy work boots with salt stains up the sides. I remember thinking the spa staff must have to walk around outside a lot in this weather, poor guy, shoveling paths or whatever.

I knocked, got no answer over the hiss of the stove, and went in.

The man on the upper bench was sitting with a towel around his waist and nothing else, and I want to be accurate about the fact that he did not look like a spa employee. He looked as though he lifts heavy things for a living and thinks about nothing while he does it, which is a compliment from me. Broad through the shoulders, forearms like rope, a beard he'd been letting do whatever it wanted for a while. Thirty-something. He looked up when the door opened and didn't move, which I appreciated, because the worst version of this moment is a man who jumps up and makes it weird.

"Hi," I said. "I guess we're sharing. They double-booked the slot."

"Then sit down," he said. "It's a big sauna. There's room."

There was room. I took the lower bench at the far end, hung my robe on the hook, and ladled water on the stones, which is the one thing I actually know how to do at a Finnish spa. The steam rolled up and the whole room went soft and white and I started to relax for the first time in about six weeks.

He had a low voice and didn't fill silence, which I liked more than I can explain. We did the small talk. Where are you from, how long are you staying. He was working at the wind turbine site forty kilometers east, he said, here for the winter. I told him about my cancelled meeting and he laughed at that, a short dry laugh, the laugh of a man who has sat through a lot of meetings himself, just different ones.

"You're staff here, right?" I asked, nodding toward the door, toward the coat and the boots. "I saw your work stuff outside. Shoveling in this cold must be miserable."

There was a pause. Just a beat too long. And then he said, "Something like that."

I took that at face value. Why wouldn't I? I was a woman on vacation being agreeable with a stranger, and the truth was I found him pleasant to look at, and the steam was doing its work on me, loosening things. I asked him what he did around the property and he gave answers that were vague in a way I should have caught, things about maintenance and being around in the evenings. I built a whole little story in my head. Caretaker, handyman, maybe the owner's nephew. I even thought, in a vague way, that it was kind of charming, a spa where the staff sit in the sauna with the guests like regular people.

Here's where I admit the other thing, the thing I'm not proud of but that's just true. I hadn't been touched by anybody in over a year. Not a handshake that lasted too long, nothing. And this man's shoulders were right there across the steam, and my brain, which had spent three hours in the car gnawing on my whole life, started sliding sideways into a different direction. I told myself it was just the heat. Heat does things to people. There's a reason they tell you not to drink in the sauna.

At some point he went out to the little changing alcove for more water and I heard him rummaging in his coat, and when he came back he had a beer in each hand from the minibar fridge by the entrance, and he offered me one, and I took it, and we clinked them like idiots. Two adults, thirty-four and thirty-six I'd learn later, drinking cheap beer in a sauna in the middle of nowhere, both of us clearly out of practice at being around another human being after dark.

We talked more. He asked what I sold and I told him and he said his crew took something for their backs and I said please don't tell me the name, I spend all day hearing the name. He laughed again. He had a way of looking at you when you talked, actually listening, not waiting for his turn. A crane operator, I'd find out, sits alone in a cab all day sixty meters up, so I suppose a person either goes quiet or goes crazy.

The second beer was a light one, and we both nursed it, with water in between. I was on the lower bench and he was up top, and at one point I stretched my legs out across the wood and my foot, deliberately or not, I honestly couldn't tell you, touched his knee. He didn't pull away. The steam hissed. Out the frosted glass the lake had gone from white to a deep blue-gray, evening coming down over everything.

"I should be honest," I said, and then stopped, because I didn't know what the rest of the sentence was.

"Take your time," he said.

"I drove three hours to be alone and I don't actually want to be alone tonight. That's probably too much information for a stranger."

"You're not really a stranger anymore. We shared a sauna and a beer. That's basically a marriage in some countries."

I laughed, a real one, and he smiled, and the smile did something that no amount of sensible self-talk was going to undo. And I still thought he worked there. Remember that. I still thought this was spa staff being friendly to a guest, and some reckless part of me had decided that didn't matter either.

* * *

He told me about his shift that day, said it had been a long one, and I read that as some spa maintenance thing, maybe he'd been out all afternoon scraping ice off the wooden walkways or hauling firewood for the sauna stove. I remember thinking, with a little thrill I didn't examine too closely, that he was exactly the kind of man I'd never let myself notice back home. Back home I met men in pressed shirts who talked about quarterly numbers. Here was a broad-shouldered guy in a sauna who fixed things with his hands and still had sawdust, or ice melt, or whatever it was, in the creases of his knuckles. I was thirty-four years old and I was daydreaming like someone who had never had a complicated feeling before. Seven years ago I'd made a fool of myself over a married doctor, and I'd sworn off complicated, and here I was constructing a whole romance out of a maintenance man's stubble. But the brain wants what it wants when it's cold and lonely and slightly beer-warmed.

"You'll want more water," he said at one point, nodding at my empty glass. "The heat sneaks up on you."

"I'm fine." I was not fine. I was aware of every square centimeter of my own skin.

He went out once more to feed the stove, and I watched him work the iron door with those hands, thick fingers, careful, and I thought about what those hands would feel like and then made myself think about the cancelled meeting in Oulu instead, which didn't help, because Oulu was the whole reason I was here, three hours north of everything sensible, a night I had booked two weeks ago on my phone in a moment of rebellion I couldn't even remember the shape of now.

When he came back in, the steam rolled in behind him and the light through the frosted glass had gone fully dark. The lake out there was just a black suggestion. The sauna felt smaller than it had an hour before, or maybe we had both gotten bigger in it, taking up more space somehow without moving.