“Let’s go home,” Mum whispers softly in her ear.
Elsa stares, forcing her tiredness away and sliding out of her mother’s grip.
“First I want to talk to Granny!”
Mum looks devastated. Elsa knows that because “devastated” is a word for the word jar.
(We’ll get to the word jar later in this story.)
“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. . . .”