Elsa doesn’t know how long they wait, but they keep waiting long after Elsa has really decided to give up. They wait until the lift door opens with a little “pling” and the woman in the black skirt walks into the corridor. She approaches the office with big strides but freezes midair as she sees the enormous, bearded man and the small girl who looks as if she’d fit into the palm of one of his hands. The girl stares at her. The woman in the black skirt is holding a small plastic box of salad. It’s trembling. She looks as if she’s considering turning and running away, or maybe, like a child, believes that if she closes her eyes she’ll no longer be visible. Instead, she stands frozen to the spot a few yards away from them, her hands grasping the edge of the box as if it were the edge of a cliff.
Elsa rises from her chair. Wolfheart backs away from them both. If Elsa had been looking at him, she would have noticed, as he moved away, an expression on his face that she had never seen in him before. A sort of fear that no one in the Land-of-Almost-Awake would have believed Wolfheart capable of. But Elsa doesn’t look at him as she rises from the chair; she is only looking at the woman in the black skirt.
“I think I have a letter for you,” Elsa eventually manages to say.
The woman stands still with her knuckles whitening around the plastic box. Elsa insistently reaches towards her with the envelope.
“It’s from my granny. I think she’s saying sorry about something.”
The woman takes it. Elsa puts her hands in her pockets, because she doesn’t quite know what to do with them. It’s unclear what the woman in the black skirt is doing here, but Elsa is certain that Granny had some reason for making her bring the letter. Because there’s no coincidence in Miamas, or in fairy tales. Everything that’s there is meant to be there.
“It’s not your name on the envelope, I know that, but it has to be for you.”
The woman smells of mint today, not wine. Carefully she opens the letter. Her lips tighten; the letter trembles in her hands.
“I . . . used to have this name, a long time ago. I changed back to my maiden name when I moved into your house, but this was my name when . . . when I met your grandmother.”
“After the wave,” ventures Elsa.
The woman’s lips pinch inwards until they disappear.
“I . . . I planned to change the name on the office door as well. But . . . well, I don’t know. It never . . . never happened.”
The letter starts trembling even more violently.
“What does it say?” asks Elsa, regretting that she didn’t have a quick peek before handing it over. The woman in the black skirt makes all the right movements to start crying, but seems to be out of tears.
“Your grandmother writes ‘sorry,’?” she says slowly.
“For what?” Elsa asks at once.
“Because she sent you here.”
Elsa is just about to correct her and point at Wolfheart and say, “Sent us here!” But when she looks up he’s already gone. She didn’t hear the elevator or the ground-floor door closing. He’s just disappeared. “Like a fart through an open window,” as Granny used to say when things weren’t where they were supposed to be.
The woman with the black skirt moves towards the door, emblazoned with the words Reg. Psychotherapist, followed by the name she once had. She puts the key in the lock and gestures quickly for Elsa to come in, although it’s quite obviously not what she wants at all.
When she notices that Elsa’s eyes are still searching for her large-hewn friend, the woman with the black skirt whispers morosely: “I had another office when your granny last came to see me with him. That’s why he didn’t know you were coming to me. He would never have come if he had known you were coming here. He is . . . is frightened of me.”
17
CINNAMON BUN