Elsa crosses her arms and leans back in her seat and glares out of the window.
“People shouldn’t have children if they don’t want to take care of them.”
Mum reaches out, touches her shoulder with her fingertips.
“Your granny was old when she had me. Or, what I mean is, she was as old as I was when I had you. But that was old in Granny’s times. And she didn’t think she could have children. She’d had herself tested.”
Elsa presses her chin down over her wishbone.
“So you were a mistake?”
“An accident.”
“In that case, I’m an accident as well.”
Mum’s lips fold in on themselves.
“No one has ever wanted something as much as your father and I wanted you, darling. You’re about as far from an accident as anyone can get.”
Elsa looks up at Kia’s ceiling and blinks the haziness out of her eyes.
“Is that why order is your superpower? Because you don’t want to be like Granny?”
Mum shrugs. “I taught myself to fix things on my own, that’s all. Because I didn’t trust your grandmother. In the end, things were even worse when she was actually here. I was angry at her when she was away, and even angrier when she was home.”
“I’m angry too. . . . I’m angry because she lied about being sick and no one told me and now I know and I still miss her and THAT makes me angry!!!”
Mum shuts her eyelids tight and puts her forehead against Elsa’s forehead.
Elsa’s jaw is trembling.
“I’m angry with her for dying. I’m angry with her for dying and disappearing from me,” she whispers.
“Me too,” whispers Mum.
And that is when the summer-intern policeman comes charging out of the emergency doors. He has two nurses with a stretcher running behind him.
Elsa turns a couple of inches towards Mum. Mum turns a couple of inches towards Elsa.
“What do you think your granny would have done now?” asks Mum calmly.
“She would have cleared out,” says Elsa, still with her forehead against Mum’s forehead.
The summer-intern policeman and the nurses with the stretcher are only a few yards from the car when Mum slowly nods. Then she puts Kia into gear and, with the tires spinning in the snow, skids out into the road and drives off. It’s the most irresponsible thing Elsa has ever seen her mother do.
She’ll always love her for it.
15
WOOD SHAVINGS
Perhaps the most curious of all the curious creatures in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, even by Granny’s yardstick, are the regretters. They are wild animals living in herds, whose grazing areas are just outside Miamas, where they forage widely, and really nobody knows how they survive, considering the circumstances. At first sight, regretters look more or less like white horses, although they are far more ambivalent and suffer from the biological defect of never being able to make up their minds. This obviously causes certain practical problems, because regretters are flock animals, and one regretter therefore almost always crashes into another when heading off in one direction and then changing its mind. For this reason regretters always have enormous, oblong swellings on their foreheads, which, in various fairy tales from Miamas that have ended up in the real world, has made people consistently get them confused with unicorns. But in Miamas the storytellers learned the hard way not to cut costs by hiring a regretter to do the job of a unicorn, because, whenever they did, the fairy tales had a tendency never to get to the point. And also no one, really no one at all, feels good after standing behind a regretter in the line for the lunch buffet.
“So there’s no point changing your mind, all you get is a headache!” Granny used to say, smacking herself on her forehead. Elsa thinks about that now, sitting in Kia outside school and looking at Mum.