Coronets and Steel (59 page)

September 4.

“D’you think you can get me to the border, Ruli? Now, fast, without anyone knowing?
Fast,
Ruli?”

Tony had taught her to drive.

She got Alec’s Fiat, which had been left at Ysvorod House. There was little more of any purpose said between us; she was terrified driving on mountain roads, and I—well, forget it.

From the western border of Dobrenica I must have used one of every type of wheeled conveyance known to modern life, splurging at last on a commuter flight from Frankfurt to London.

In a restroom in Frankfurt I changed into my jeans and top, and after trying unsuccessfully to figure how to carry the grubby dress I left it in the stall. I tore up the letters I’d started so disinterestedly on the train to Vienna, and then, carrying only my wallet and passport, with a white rose and a slim green dictionary tucked into my sling, I got onto the commuter plane.

In London I picked up some cheapo duds in an Oxfam then holed up in a Chelsea bed-and-breakfast for a day or two, sleeping and trying not to think as the last days of August burned toward September.

Finally I couldn’t bear the four walls and I took a train north and visited all the Murray sites. Abandoning my sling, I tramped Culloden and Flodden fields, feeling as dead inside as those long-ago Jacobites who’d longed for a return to a lost world that had changed forever. The day was dark, pressed in with fog; ghostly figures seemed to drift in the slow vapors, but I was too dispirited to care.

A day or so before my flight I returned to London and wandered the streets of London aimlessly, looking, thinking. Remembering.

Finding myself in Charing Cross I was soon at Foyles’ Bookstore. There I went into action with feverish intensity, and spent almost everything I had left of my money on purchasing copies of Tolkien’s
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings,
and Harry Potter, and a host of other favorites about magic, and had them boxed up by the store to be sent by the quickest available method to Theresa and Miriam via the inn. They gave me a card to fill out as an enclosure, and my first impulse was to write “Rudolf Rassendyll.”

I laughed unsteadily, and said, “Just get it there before the first. Or it might travel around and around the mountains forever . . .” Laughter is so dangerous, so close to tears; I threw down the money and ran.

The second dawned, and passed, and I endured the hours sitting in the garden at Hampton Court.

I nerved myself to look at the news on the third—but of course there was nothing. There had never been anything about Dobrenica, so quiet and removed it may as well be Brigadoon.

On the fourth I left for Los Angeles.

There were two bad moments on the flight. After food was served I could not keep still so I wandered about the plane. Anguish seized my heart at the glitter of a blue stone in a square ring on a male hand holding up a French newspaper; the paper lowered, and an elderly Middle Eastern man calmly turned the page before raising the paper again.

The second time was when I saw my mother’s face.

My parents were at LAX, having known my arrival time when I bought my ticket months ago. I was the first through customs because I had no baggage—I left the Oxfam stuff in the airport restroom.

Mom’s face was round and smiling, her short hair frizzing like a cream-colored halo around her face, the rest of her comfortable in her favorite flowered kaftan and sandals. Next to her Dad shifted from foot to foot, tall and rangy, his beard more straggly than I’d remembered, his eyes crinkled with good humor. He clapped his hands around me in an enthusiastic hug, until I groaned and backed away, wincing and rubbing my left shoulder.

Mama said nothing, her smile wavering, and after looking at her Dad spoke. “Welcome home, Oh Footsore Traveler! Or arm-sore . . . what happened?”

I shrugged. “Little accident.” My voice came out too flat. Mom’s brow puckered with quick worry.

He tried again. “Well, Rapunzel, I suppose I should do the fatherly and claim your burdens?”

“Aren’t any,” I said, trying for offhand, for a smile, but not quite able to yet. I held out the carryall I’d purchased in Frankfurt. “This is it.”

“What? The airline lost your—”

“I lost it, Dad. Let’s go.”

“Kimli.” Mom’s voice was soft and tentative. “You look bummed. What’s wrong?”

That’s when I forced myself to meet her eyes. Her brow was serene, as I remembered, but instead of being smooth I finally saw the lines. But different lines from Aunt Sisi’s. Instead of well-bred tension these were laugh lines—and instead of the military precision of Aunt Sisi’s plucked brows Mom’s were arched as nature made them.

I turned away, my eyes burning with tears I refused to shed. Instead I stared through the shaded windows into the blaring sunlight beyond as we began to walk down the long corridors. “It’s okay, Mom,” I said, when I knew I had a grip. “I found your relatives. And . . . and I think they are safe.” My chest heaved; I closed my eyes, held my breath. Got control. Forced my eyes open, and my voice to sound normal. “But first, how is Gran?”

“The same,” Mom said, searching my face with an anxious gaze. “Why don’t we wait until we’re home?”

“Okay.” I looked away, groped for an easy topic and managed a normal LA question, “How’s the traffic?”

“The usual!” Dad said in an attempt at cheer. “Cell-phone gabblers to the right of us, tailgaters to the left of us, folly and blunder. Your mom was so sure you’d be suffering withdrawal symptoms by now, from not having had any Mexican food, she suggested we have tacos for dinner tonight.”

The door slid open, and the heat enveloped me uncompromisingly. Dust, smog, hot dry air, so alien, propelled me back into the old life.
Home life? Not home. Not home.

As we drove up Sepulveda, I turned my aching eyes to the hazy horizon. A plane had taken off, engines screaming as they lifted the silver-winged shape into the air. I watched it soar into the glittering brown smog-haze as the fierce sun glared off its wings, and heat waves hazed the underside. It headed out over the ocean, and then began its wide turn up in the sky, vanishing into the glare.

I thought of the two continents that lay between myself and my heart, and of the hours, days, years that stretched ahead of me into this merciless sunlight, then somehow we were home, and getting out of the car, and there was my house, small and shabby and familiar yet strange. I knew I was seeing it through Alec’s eyes.

There was our tiny kitchen, last painted before I was born. Mom thanked the neighbor who’d sat with Gran while they drove to the airport, and then we were alone.

Food had been half prepared, but Mom did not go to the stove to finish up the taco shells. Instead, she sat down at the table next to Dad, and touched an envelope lying next to one of Dad’s clocks.

Mom said, “Kimli, maybe you’ve got a clue about what’s happening here.”

“Surprise came—express delivery for your grandmother, right before we left for the airport.” Dad grinned, scratching his beard again, which bristled out, more demented than Rasputin’s. “Go ahead. Take a gander.”

I pulled the heavy paper from the envelope. My burning eyes took in the discreet letterhead naming some British law firm. The legalese prose below it was couched in finest British-reserve, making a jumble of the names . . .
Mr. Lavzhenko Emilio, agent for . . . Ysvorod . . . Maria Sofia Dsaret.

Emilio’s first loyalty was to Milo, who had loved Gran, who had been given charge of Gran’s and her daughter’s welfare. Milo had kept that charge faithfully for over half a century.

My mother said as she raised a hand to shade her eyes from the sun, “We took it for a Nigerian scam, or someone was seriously tripping. Those long foreign-sounding names, the mention of a big inheritance. But there’s a heavy duty vibe in this paper with its engraved heading, and the overseas express delivery. You know what this is about?”

I stared at the paper in my hand.

There was Gran’s name next to Mom’s—both names, their fake ones and the real ones. Underneath was a copy of Mom’s baptismal paper.
It’s Mom’s story, too
. My eyes ranged from the paper to the envelope, as if I could reclaim connection to the sender at the other end.

The world stilled, and only my heart beat, for the first time with hope.

Over the stamp lay a Dobreni cancellation mark, clear and sharp. The date: September 3.

They’re still there.
My emotions swooped between joy and anguish.
They’re still there.

“Is this stuff real?” Mom asked.

“Oh yes,” I breathed. “Although I no longer quite know what ‘real’ is.”

“Far out. Let’s go to Gran’s room, and you can tell us all. Dinner can wait,” Mom suggested.

I held the letter as we went into Gran’s room, where she lay in bed, for she had become too weak to rise.

I sat in her rocker next to the bed, talking in my old-fashioned but “pure” Parisian French as I told them everything, from the day I gave up on my search in Paris and took the train for Vienna to the day I sat in the temple square with Ruli. Sometimes my dad would stir, and Mom would shake her head, but they never interrupted.

Gran lay unmoving.

I finished up, “So, Granmère, it sounds like we’ll have enough money to get whatever medical aid you need. So you’re not to worry about that. Or anything else.”

If she heard a word, there was no sign.

Dad said, “Maybe I should have told you this years ago, but it’s only a single memory from when I was a kid. I still don’t know what my dad meant. He was a tough old bird, I told you. Didn’t like questions. But one night, real late, when I was considering a run to Canada to avoid the draft. I was eighteen, and this was right before the lottery, during the Vietnam War. I knew he’d be mad because he was pretty conservative, but I felt like I had to tell him what I was planning. He told me he was a runaway. Not to avoid war. He’d served in the navy during World War II. He’d crossed the entire continent to get away from his family’s ghosts.”

“Whoa,” I breathed.

Dad felt in his pockets and pulled out a clock tool, which he turned over and over in his fingers, as he nodded toward the still figure on the bed. “Your grandmother was pretty definite about the subject of ghosts, so I kept that to myself.”

“Was that ghost reference metaphorical?”

“If my dad ever recognized, or made, a metaphor, I’ll eat that clock.”

“So what you’re telling me is that you think there might be a such thing as second sight, and that I might have inherited it.”

Dad scratched his chin through his beard with the clock tool. “Stranger things have happened.”

“Yeah. Well.”

Mom had been silent, turning from us to Gran and back again.

“Kimli,” she murmured.

Dad and I looked up.

“Will you speak a little of that language? I want to hear what it sounds like.”

So I said in Dobreni, “They still talk about Princess Lily in Dobrenica. Salfmatta Mina said she wants to see her once, before she dies.”

Gran’s eyelids fluttered. She whispered in the same language, “Then we must go back.”