My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(16)

“It’s . . . darling . . . I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” whispers Mum.

But Elsa has already run past the reception desk and into the next room. She can hear the whale-woman yelling behind her, but then she hears her mother’s composed voice asking her to let Elsa go inside.

Granny is waiting for her in the middle of the room. There’s a fragrance of lilies, Mum’s favorite flower. Granny doesn’t have any favorite flowers because no plant lives for longer than twenty-four hours in Granny’s flat, and in a fairly rare instance of compliance, possibly also because of the enthusiastic encouragement of her favorite grandchild, Granny has decided it would be bloody unfair to nature for her to have any favorite flowers.

Elsa stands to one side with her hands pushed moodily into her jacket pockets. Defiantly she stamps snow from her shoes onto the floor.

“I don’t want to be a part of this treasure hunt, it’s idiotic.”

Granny doesn’t answer. She never answers when she knows that Elsa is right. Elsa stamps more snow off her shoes.

“YOU are idiotic,” she says cuttingly.

Granny doesn’t rise to that one either. Elsa sits on the chair next to her and holds out the letter.

“You can take care of this idiotic letter yourself,” she whispers.

Two days have gone by since Our Friend started howling. Two days since Elsa was last in the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the kingdom of Miamas. No one is being straight with her. All the grown-ups try to wrap it in cotton wool, so it doesn’t sound dangerous or frightening or unpleasant. As if Granny hasn’t been ill. As if the whole thing was an accident. But Elsa knows they’re lying, because Elsa’s granny hasn’t ever been laid low by an accident. Usually it’s the accident that gets laid low by Granny.

And Elsa knows what cancer is. It says all about it on Wikipedia.

She gives the edge of the coffin a shove, to get a reaction. Because deep down she’s still hoping this could be one of those occasions when Granny is just pulling her leg. Like that time Granny dressed the snowman so he looked like a real person who’d fallen from the balcony, and Britt-Marie got so furious when she realized it was a joke that she called the police. And the next morning when Britt-Marie looked out the window, she discovered that Granny had made another identical snowman, and then Britt-Marie “went loopy,” as Granny put it, and came charging out with a snow shovel. And then the snowman jumped up and roared, “WAAAAAAAAH!!!” Granny told her afterwards that she’d lain in the snow for hours waiting for Britt-Marie and at least two cats had weed on her in the meantime, “but it was well worth it!” Britt-Marie called the police again, of course, but they said it wasn’t a crime to scare someone.

This time, though, Granny doesn’t get up. Elsa bangs her fists against the coffin, but Granny doesn’t answer, and Elsa bangs harder and harder as if it’s possible to put right all the things that are wrong by banging. In the end she slips off the chair and sinks onto her knees on the floor and whispers:

“Do you know that they’re lying, they say you’ve ‘passed away,’ or, that we’ve ‘lost you?’ No one says ‘dead.’?”

Elsa digs her nails into her palms and her whole body trembles.

“I don’t know how to get to Miamas if you’re dead. . . .”

Granny doesn’t answer. Elsa puts her forehead against the lower edge of the coffin. She feels the cold wood against her skin and warm tears on her lips. Then she feels Mum’s soft fingers against her neck, and she turns around and throws her arms around her, and Mum carries her out of there. When she opens her eyes again she’s sitting in Kia, Mum’s car.

Mum is standing outside in the snow talking to George on the telephone. Elsa knows she doesn’t want her to hear them talking about the funeral. She’s not an idiot. She’s still got Granny’s letter in her hand. She knows you’re not supposed to read other people’s letters, but she must have read this one a hundred times these last two days. Granny must have known she’d do this, because she’s written the entire letter in symbols that Elsa can’t understand. Using the strange alphabet she saw on the road signs in Granny’s photographs.

Elsa glares at it. Granny always said she and Elsa shouldn’t have any secrets from each other, only secrets together. She’s furious with Granny for the lie, because now Elsa sits here with the greatest secret of them all and she can’t understand a crapping thing. And she knows that if she falls out with Granny at this point it will set a personal record that they can never beat.

The ink smudges over the paper when she blinks down at it. Although there are letters that Elsa doesn’t know, Granny has probably misspelled things. When Granny writes, it’s as if she is just scattering words over the page while she’s already mentally on her way somewhere else. It’s not that Granny can’t spell, it’s just that she thinks so fast that the letters and words can’t keep up. And unlike Elsa, Granny can’t see the point of spelling things correctly; anyway she was always better at science and numbers. “You bloody understand what I mean!” she hisses when she passes Elsa secret notes while they’re eating with Mum and George and Elsa adds the dashes and spaces in the right places with her red felt-tip pen.

It’s one of the few things they really row about, Granny and Elsa, because Elsa thinks letters are something more than just a way of sending messages. Something more important.