My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(70)

“Are you scared?” asks Mum.

“Yes,” admits Elsa.

Mum doesn’t tell Elsa not to be afraid, and she doesn’t try to trick her into believing that she shouldn’t be. Elsa loves her for that.

They are in the garage and have pushed the backrest down in Renault. The wurse floats out over everything between them, and Mum unconcernedly scratches its pelt. She wasn’t even angry when Elsa confessed that she’d been keeping it hidden in the storage unit. And she wasn’t scared when Elsa introduced her. She just started stroking it behind its ear as if it were a kitten.

Elsa reaches out and feels Mum’s belly and Halfie contentedly kicking in there. Halfie is not afraid either. Because she/he is completely Mum and George, whereas Elsa is half her dad and Elsa’s dad is afraid of everything. So Elsa gets afraid of about half of everything.

Shadows more than anything.

“Do you know who he is? The man who was chasing me?” she asks.

The wurse buffets its head against hers. Mum gently caresses her cheek.

“Yes. We know who he is.”

“Who’s we?”

Mum takes a deep breath.

“Lennart and Maud. And Alf. And me.” It sounds as if she’s going to reel off more names, but she stops herself.

“Lennart and Maud?” Elsa bursts out.

Mum nods. “I’m afraid they know him best of all.”

“So why did you never tell me about him, then?” Elsa demands.

“I didn’t want to scare you.”

“That hardly worked, did it?”

Mum sighs. Scratches the wurse’s pelt. The wurse, in turn, licks Elsa’s face. It still smells of sponge cake mix. Unfortunately, it’s quite difficult to be angry when someone smelling of sponge cake mix is licking your face.

“It’s a shadow,” whispers Elsa.

“I know,” whispers Mum.

“Do you?”

“Your grandmother tried to tell me the stories, darling. About the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the shadows.”

“And Miamas?” asks Elsa.

Mum shakes her head.

“No. I know you had things there that she never showed me. And it was long ago. I was about as old as you are now. The Land-of-Almost-Awake was very small then. The kingdoms didn’t have names yet.”

Elsa interrupts impatiently:

“I know! They got their names when Granny met Wolfheart, she named them after things in his mother’s language. And she took his own language and made it into the secret language so he’d teach her and she could talk to him. But why didn’t she bring you with her, in that case? Why didn’t Granny show you the Land-of-Almost-Awake?”

Gently, Mum bites her lip.

“She wanted to bring me, darling. Many times. But I didn’t want to go.”

“Why not?”

“I was getting older. I was an angry teenager, and I didn’t want my mother telling me fairy tales on the phone anymore, I wanted to have her here. I wanted her in reality.”

Elsa hardly ever hears her say “my mother.” She almost always says, “your grandmother.”

“I wasn’t an easy child, darling. I argued a lot. I said no to everything. Your grandmother always called me ‘the girl who said no.’?”

Elsa’s eyes open wide. Mum sighs and smiles at the same time, as if one emotional expression is trying to swallow the other.

“Well, I was probably many things in your grandmother’s stories. Both the girl and the queen, I think. In the end I didn’t know where the fantasy ended and reality began. Sometimes I don’t even think your grandmother knew herself.”

Elsa lies in silence staring up at the ceiling, with the wurse breathing softly in her ear. She thinks about Wolfheart and the sea-angel, living next door for so many years without anyone knowing the first thing about them. If holes were drilled in the walls and floors of the house, all the neighbors could reach out and touch one another, that was how close their lives were, and yet in the end they knew almost nothing about the others. And so the years just went by.

“Have you found the keys?” asks Elsa, pointing at Renault’s dashboard.

Mum shakes her head.

“I think your grandmother hid them. Presumably just to tease Britt-Marie. That must be why it’s parked in Britt-Marie’s space. . . .”

“Does Britt-Marie even have her own car?” asks Elsa, because from where she’s lying she can clearly see BMW, Kent’s ridiculously oversize car.

“No. But she had a car many years ago. A white one. And it’s still her parking spot. I think it’s about the principle. It’s usually about the principle with Britt-Marie,” says Mum with a smirk.

Elsa doesn’t quite know what that means. She doesn’t know if it makes any difference either.

“How did Renault get here, then? If no one has the key for it?” she thinks aloud, although she knows Mum won’t be able to answer because she doesn’t know either. So she asks Mum to tell her about the shadow. Mum brushes her hand over her cheek again and levers herself up laboriously from the seat, with one hand over Halfie.

“I think Maud and Lennart will have to tell you about him, darling.”

Elsa wants to protest, but Mum has already climbed out of Renault, so Elsa doesn’t have much choice but to follow her. That is Mum’s superpower, after all. Mum brings Wolfheart’s coat. She says she’s going to wash it so he can have it when he comes home. Elsa likes thinking about that. How he’s coming home.