My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(105)

When Dad has gone to sleep, Elsa sneaks down the stairs. Stands in front of the stroller, which is still locked up inside the front entrance. She looks at the crossword on the wall. Someone has filled it in with a pencil. In every word is a letter, which, in turn, meshes with four longer words. And in each of the four words is a letter written in a square that’s bolder than the others. E-L-S-A.

Elsa checks the padlock with which the stroller is fixed to the stair railing. It’s a combination lock, but the four rolls don’t have numbers. They have letters.

She spells her name and unlocks it. Pushes the stroller away. And that is where she finds Granny’s letter to Britt-Marie.





34





GRANNY


You never say good-bye in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. You just say “See you later.” It’s important to people in the Land-of-Almost-Awake that it should be this way, because they believe that nothing really ever completely dies. It just turns into a story, undergoes a little shift in grammar, changes tense from “now” to “then.”

A funeral can go on for weeks, because few events in life are a better opportunity to tell stories. Admittedly on the first day it’s mainly stories about sorrow and loss, but gradually as the days and nights pass, they transform into the sorts of stories that you can’t tell without bursting out laughing. Stories about how the deceased once read the instructions “Apply to the face but not around the eyes” on the packaging of some skin cream, and then called the manufacturer with extreme annoyance to point out that this is precisely where the face is positioned. Or how she employed a dragon to caramelize the tops of all the crème br?lées before a big party in the castle, but forgot to check whether the dragon had a cold. Or how she stood on her balcony with her dressing gown hanging open, shooting at people with a paintball gun.

And the Miamasians laugh so loudly that the stories rise up like lanterns around the grave. Until all stories are one and the tenses are one and the same. They laugh until no one can forget that this is what we leave behind when we go: the laughs.

“Halfie turned out to be a boy-half. He’s going to be called Harry!” Elsa explains proudly as she scrapes snow from the stone.

“Alf says it’s lucky he turned out to be a boy, because the women in our family are ‘so bonkers they’re a safety hazard,’?” she chuckles, making quotation marks in the air and grumpily dragging her feet through the snow, Alf-style. The cold is nipping at her cheeks. She nips it back. Dad digs away the snow and scrapes his spade along the top layer of earth. Elsa tightens her Gryffindor scarf around her neck. Scatters the wurse’s ashes over Granny’s grave and a thick layer of cinnamon bun crumbs over the ashes.

Then she hugs the gravestone tight, tight, tight, and whispers: “See you later!”

She’s going to tell all their stories. She’s already telling him the first few as she wanders back to Audi with Dad. And Dad listens. He turns down the volume of the stereo before Elsa has time to jump in. Elsa scrutinizes him.

“Were you upset yesterday when I hugged George at the hospital?” she asks.

“No.”

“I don’t want you to be upset.”

“I don’t get upset.”

“Not even a little?” says Elsa, offended.

“Am I allowed to be upset?” wonders Dad.

“You can be a little bit upset,” mutters Elsa.

“Okay . . . I am a bit upset,” Dad tries, and actually does look upset.

“That looks too upset.”

“Sorry,” says Dad, beginning to sound stressed.

“You shouldn’t be so upset that I feel guilty about it. Just upset enough so it doesn’t feel like you’re not bothered!” explains Elsa.

He tries again.

“Now you’re not looking at all upset!”

“Maybe I’m upset on the inside?”

Elsa scrutinizes him before conceding:

“Deal.” She says it in English.

Dad nods dubiously and manages to stop himself from pointing out that she should avoid using English words when there are perfectly good alternatives in her own language. Elsa opens and shuts the glove compartment as Audi glides up the highway.

“He’s quite okay. George, I mean.”

“Yes,” says Dad.

“I know you don’t mean that,” Elsa protests.

“George is okay.” Dad nods as if he means it.

“So why don’t we ever have Christmas together, then?” mutters Elsa with irritation.

“How do you mean?”

“I thought you and Lisette never came to us at Christmas because you don’t like George.”

“I have nothing at all against George.”

“But?”

“But?”

“But there’s a ‘but’ coming here, isn’t there? It feels like there’s a ‘but’ coming,” mumbles Elsa.

Dad sighs.

“But I suppose George and I are quite different in terms of our . . . personalities, perhaps. He’s very . . .”

“Fun?”

Dad looks stressed again.

“I was going to say he seems very outgoing.”

“And you’re very . . . ingoing?”