A few moments later she’s standing in a little room, looking at him through a pane of glass. He’s lying inside a little plastic box. Or a very big lunchbox. It’s hard to tell which. He’s got tubes everywhere and his lips are blue and his face looks as if he is running against an insanely strong wind, but all the nurses tell Elsa it’s not dangerous. She doesn’t like it. This is the most obvious way of figuring out that it actually is dangerous.
She cups her hands against the glass when she whispers, so he’ll be able to hear on the other side. “Don’t be afraid, Halfie. You’ve got a sister now. And it’s going to get better. Everything’s going to be fine.”
And then she switches to the secret language:
“I’ll try not to be jealous of you. I’ve been jealous of you for an insane length of time, but I have a pal whose name is Alf and he and his little brother have been at loggerheads for like a hundred years. I don’t want us to be at loggerheads for a hundred years. So I think we have to start working at liking each other right from the start, you get what I mean?”
Halfie looks like he gets it. Elsa puts her forehead against the glass.
“You have a granny as well. She’s a superhero. I’ll tell you all about her when we get home. Unfortunately I gave the moo-gun to the boy downstairs but I’ll make you another one. And I’ll bring you to the Land-of-Almost-Awake, and we’ll eat dreams and dance and laugh and cry and be brave and forgive people, and we’ll fly with the cloud animals and Granny will be sitting on a bench in Miamas, smoking and waiting for us. And one day my granddad will come wandering along as well. We’ll hear him from far away because he laughs with his whole body. He laughs so much that I think we’ll have to build an eighth kingdom for him. I’ll ask Wolfheart what ‘I laugh’ is in his mother’s language. And the wurse is also there in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. You’re going to like the wurse. There’s no better friend than a wurse!”
Halfie looks at her from the plastic box. Elsa wipes the glass with the Gryffindor scarf.
“You’ve got a good name. The best name. I’ll tell you all about the boy you got it from. You’ll like him.”
She stays by the glass until she realizes that the whole hummingbird thing was probably basically a bad idea, in spite of all. She’ll stick to eternities and the eternities of fairy tales for a bit longer. Just for the sake of simplicity. And maybe because it reminds her of Granny.
Before she goes she whispers through cupped hands to Halfie, in the secret language:
“It’s going to be the greatest adventure ever having you as a brother, Harry. The greatest, greatest adventure!”
Things are turning out as Granny said. Things are getting better. Everything is going to be fine.
The doctor that Elsa felt she recognized is standing next to Mum’s bed when she comes back into the room. He’s waiting, without moving, as if he knows that it will take her a moment to remember where she saw him. And when the penny finally drops, he smiles as if there was never any other alternative.
“You’re the accountant,” Elsa bursts out suspiciously, and then adds, “And the vicar from the church. I saw you at Granny’s funeral and you were dressed as a vicar!”
“I am many things,” the doctor answers in a blithe tone of voice, with the sort of expression on his face that no one ever had when Granny was around.
“Also a doctor?” asks Elsa.
“A doctor first and foremost,” says the doctor, and offers his hand as he introduces himself:
“Marcel. I was a good friend of your grandmother’s.”
“I’m Elsa.”
“So I understand,” Marcel says, smiling.
“You were Granny’s lawyer,” says Elsa, as one does when remembering details of telephone calls from the beginning of a fairy tale, say around the end of chapter two.
“I am many things,” Marcel repeats, and gives her a paper.
It’s a printout from a computer, and it’s correctly spelled, so she knows it’s Marcel and not Granny who wrote it. But some of Granny’s handwriting can be seen on the bottom of it. Marcel folds his hands together on his stomach, not unlike the way Britt-Marie does it.
“Your grandmother owned the house you live in. Maybe you already worked that out. She says she won it in a game of poker, but I don’t know for certain.”
Elsa reads the paper. Pouts her lips.