My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(50)

“My granny was also someone’s mother! Did you ever think about that?”

The Monster doesn’t answer.

“You don’t have to guard me!” Elsa snaps and starts scratching more swearwords into the wooden armrest.

“Not guard,” The Monster finally growls. His black eyes emerge from under the hood. “Not guard. Friend.”

He disappears back in under the hood. Elsa burrows her gaze into the floor and scrapes her heels against the wall-to-wall carpet, stirring up more dust.

“Thanks,” she whispers grumpily. But she says it in the secret language now. The Monster doesn’t say anything, but when he rubs his hands together it’s no longer as hard and frenetic.

“You don’t like talking so much, do you?”

“No . . . but you do. All the time.”

And that’s the first time Elsa believes he’s smiling. Or almost, anyway.

“Touché.” Elsa grins.



Elsa doesn’t know how long they wait, but they keep waiting long after Elsa has really decided to give up. They wait until the lift door opens with a little “pling” and the woman in the black skirt walks into the corridor. She approaches the office with big strides but freezes midair as she sees the enormous, bearded man and the small girl who looks as if she’d fit into the palm of one of his hands. The girl stares at her. The woman in the black skirt is holding a small plastic box of salad. It’s trembling. She looks as if she’s considering turning and running away, or maybe, like a child, believes that if she closes her eyes she’ll no longer be visible. Instead, she stands frozen to the spot a few yards away from them, her hands grasping the edge of the box as if it were the edge of a cliff.

Elsa rises from her chair. Wolfheart backs away from them both. If Elsa had been looking at him, she would have noticed, as he moved away, an expression on his face that she had never seen in him before. A sort of fear that no one in the Land-of-Almost-Awake would have believed Wolfheart capable of. But Elsa doesn’t look at him as she rises from the chair; she is only looking at the woman in the black skirt.

“I think I have a letter for you,” Elsa eventually manages to say.

The woman stands still with her knuckles whitening around the plastic box. Elsa insistently reaches towards her with the envelope.

“It’s from my granny. I think she’s saying sorry about something.”

The woman takes it. Elsa puts her hands in her pockets, because she doesn’t quite know what to do with them. It’s unclear what the woman in the black skirt is doing here, but Elsa is certain that Granny had some reason for making her bring the letter. Because there’s no coincidence in Miamas, or in fairy tales. Everything that’s there is meant to be there.

“It’s not your name on the envelope, I know that, but it has to be for you.”

The woman smells of mint today, not wine. Carefully she opens the letter. Her lips tighten; the letter trembles in her hands.

“I . . . used to have this name, a long time ago. I changed back to my maiden name when I moved into your house, but this was my name when . . . when I met your grandmother.”

“After the wave,” ventures Elsa.

The woman’s lips pinch inwards until they disappear.

“I . . . I planned to change the name on the office door as well. But . . . well, I don’t know. It never . . . never happened.”

The letter starts trembling even more violently.

“What does it say?” asks Elsa, regretting that she didn’t have a quick peek before handing it over. The woman in the black skirt makes all the right movements to start crying, but seems to be out of tears.

“Your grandmother writes ‘sorry,’?” she says slowly.

“For what?” Elsa asks at once.

“Because she sent you here.”

Elsa is just about to correct her and point at Wolfheart and say, “Sent us here!” But when she looks up he’s already gone. She didn’t hear the elevator or the ground-floor door closing. He’s just disappeared. “Like a fart through an open window,” as Granny used to say when things weren’t where they were supposed to be.

The woman with the black skirt moves towards the door, emblazoned with the words Reg. Psychotherapist, followed by the name she once had. She puts the key in the lock and gestures quickly for Elsa to come in, although it’s quite obviously not what she wants at all.

When she notices that Elsa’s eyes are still searching for her large-hewn friend, the woman with the black skirt whispers morosely: “I had another office when your granny last came to see me with him. That’s why he didn’t know you were coming to me. He would never have come if he had known you were coming here. He is . . . is frightened of me.”





17





CINNAMON BUN


In one fairy tale from the Land-of-Almost-Awake, a girl from Miamas broke the curse and released the sea-angel. But Granny never explained how it happened.

Elsa sits by the desk of the woman with the black skirt in a chair that Elsa assumes must be for visitors. Judging by the cloud of dust that enveloped Elsa when she sat down, as if she’d accidentally stumbled into a smoke machine at a magic show, she decides the woman can’t have very many visitors. Ill at ease, the woman sits on the other side of the desk, reading and rereading the letter from Granny, though Elsa is quite sure by now that she’s only pretending to read it so she doesn’t have to start talking to Elsa. The woman looked as if she regretted it as soon as she invited Elsa in. A bit like when people in TV series invite vampires in and then, as soon as they’ve crossed the threshold, think “Oh shit!” to themselves just before they get bitten. At least this is what Elsa imagines one would be thinking in that type of situation. And that’s also how the woman looks. The walls of the office are covered in bookshelves. Elsa has never seen so many books outside a library. She wonders if the woman in the black skirt has ever heard of an iPad.