My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(96)

And Dad is standing on the stairs behind her. He’s out of breath.

Which is not at all like Dad.

Elsa’s eyes open wide when she sees him, and then she looks at Alf’s flat. At the radio. Because there’s no coincidence in fairy tales. And there’s a Russian playwright who once said that if there’s a pistol hanging on the wall in the first act, it has to be fired before the last act is over. Elsa knows that. And those who can’t understand by now how Elsa understands things like that just haven’t been paying attention. So Elsa understands that the whole thing with the radio and the accident on the highway must have something to do with the fairy tale they’re in.

“Is it . . . Mum?” she manages to say.

Dad nods and throws a nervous glance at Alf. Elsa’s face trembles.

“Is she at the hospital?”

“Yes, she was called in this morning to take part in a meeting. There was some kind of cri —” Dad starts, but Elsa interrupts him:

“She was in the car accident, wasn’t she? The one on the highway?”

Dad looks spectacularly puzzled.

“What accident?”

“The car accident!” Elsa repeats, quite beside herself.

“No . . . no!” And then he smiles. “You’re someone’s big sister now. Your mum was at the meeting when her water broke!”

It doesn’t quite go into Elsa’s head, it really doesn’t. It’s quite obvious. Although she’s very familiar with what happens when the water breaks.

“But the car accident? What’s it got to do with the car accident?” she mumbles.

Dad looks breathtakingly tentative.

“Nothing, I think. Or, I mean, what do you mean?”

Elsa looks at Alf. Looks at Dad. Thinks about it so hard that she feels the strain right inside her sinuses.

“Where’s George?” she asks.

“At the hospital,” answers Dad.

“How did he get there? They said on the radio all traffic on the highway is stuck!”

“He ran,” says Dad, with a small twinge of what dads experience when they have to say something positive about the new guy.

And that’s when Elsa smiles. “George is good in that way,” she whispers.

“Yes,” Dad admits.

And she decides that maybe the radio by now has in some way earned its place in this fairy tale, in spite of it all. Then she bursts out anxiously:

“But how are we going to get to the hospital if the highway is blocked?”

“You take the old bloody road,” Alf says impatiently. Dad and Elsa look at him as if he’d just spoken to them in a make-believe language. Alf sighs. “The old road, damn it. Past the old slaughterhouse. Where that factory used to be where they made heat exchangers before the bastards moved everything to Asia. You can take that road to the hospital. Young people today, I tell you—they think the whole bloody world is a highway.”

And there’s the moment right there when Elsa is thinking that she and the wurse will go in Taxi. But then she changes her mind and decides they’ll go in Audi instead, because she doesn’t want Dad to be upset. And if she hadn’t changed her mind it’s possible that the day wouldn’t have ended up as loathsome and terrible as it will soon become. Because when terrible things happen one always thinks, “If I only hadn’t . . .” And, afterwards, this will turn out to be one of those moments.

Maud and Lennart also decide to come along to the hospital. Maud has brought cookies and Lennart decides when he gets to the house’s entrance to bring the coffee percolator, because he’s worried they may not have one at the hospital. And even if they do, Lennart has the feeling it will probably be one of those modern coffeemakers with a lot of buttons. Lennart’s percolator only has one button. Lennart is very fond of that button.

The boy with a syndrome and his mother are also coming along. Also the woman in jeans. Because they’re sort of a team now, which Elsa is very pleased about. Mum told her yesterday that now, when so many people are living in Granny’s flat, the whole house feels like that house Elsa always goes on about where all the X-Men live. She rings at Britt-Marie’s door as well. But no one opens it.

In retrospect, Elsa will recall that she paused briefly by the locked stroller in the stairwell. The notice with the crossword was still on the wall above it. And someone had solved it. All the squares were filled. In pencil.

If Elsa had stopped and reflected a little on it, maybe things would have turned out differently. But she didn’t. So they didn’t. It’s possible that the wurse hesitated for a moment outside Britt-Marie’s door. Elsa would have understood if it had done that, just like she supposes that wurses hesitate sometimes when they’re unsure about who in this fairy tale they’ve really been sent to protect. Wurses actually guard princesses in normal fairy tales, and even in the Land-of-Almost-Awake Elsa was never more than a knight. Yet if the wurse had any hesitation, it didn’t show it. It went with Elsa. Because that’s the sort of friend it is.

If it hadn’t gone with Elsa, maybe things would have worked out differently.

Alf convinces the police to make a pass around the block “to make sure everything is safe.” Elsa never finds out exactly what he says to them, but Alf can be quite persuasive when he wants to be. Maybe he says that he’s seen footprints in the snow. Or heard someone in the house on the other side of the street tell him something. Elsa doesn’t know, but she sees the summer-intern policeman get into the car, and sees Green-eyes do the same after lengthy deliberation. Elsa meets her gaze for a second, and if she had only told Green-eyes the truth about the wurse, then maybe everything would have ended up differently. But she didn’t. Because she wanted to protect the wurse. Because that’s the sort of friend she is.