The Empress Chronicles (25 page)

And Count Sebastian was farther away than ever.

In that moment, however, before our mother could finalize and formalize the soon-to-be-known truth, a great crash occurred in the bedchamber, and we all rushed in to see what had happened. It was Nené’s mouth that registered the cruel circumstance first. Duchess Helene, my passed-over, charmless elder sister. She was the first to find her very own face, the oil-painting version, slashed by a rogue tree branch, which had cracked loose from a lightning bolt and pierced the window to lodge itself firmly into the center of her likeness.

Dad hums as we drive downtown Monday afternoon. It isn’t a song I recognize, but it doesn’t matter. Just the sound of him stringing a melody together makes my heart lift. Years ago, after he gave up making music himself, he was one of those guys with an enormous album collection, his records taking up all the shelves and floor space in his apartment. Mom said they burned out most of their friends whenever they moved because of all the crates of music. Dad knew more B-sides than anyone in Portland, it seemed, even though he didn’t own any vinyl anymore.

When we get close to 10th and Taylor, Dad stops humming and checks my face out of the corner of his eye like he does. “You okay with this? Saying good-bye to your therapist and everything?”

I nod. Breathe in that way that’s a cross between a deep, cleansing breath and a sigh. I grew to count on Dr. Greta’s Monday appointments the way a person might find herself looking forward to a weekly TV show she had no idea she was getting hooked on. “Maybe our paths will cross again one day,” I say for no apparent reason.

I dart out of the car when Dad pulls over to his usual curb, and we make plans to meet at the apostropheless concrete park. The hot weather of the day before has moved on, and Dr. Greta’s office building looms through a thick, low cloud. Again, a deep, cleansing breath/sigh. The grimy lions, the ancient elevator to the third floor, the HELLO on the door, now just an outline, like something chalked at a homicide site.

In the crazy person’s green room, the magazines of scantily clad middle-aged women are gone. There’s a fake plant on the coffee table in their place. No pictures on the walls. Only three chairs. Dr. Greta’s door is ajar.

I’m not prepared for Dr. Greta’s office, though. It looks like a bomb has gone off.

“Lizbeth.” She smiles, her lips so thin under her neatly trimmed hair. “I apologize for the state of things. My lease is up by week’s end, so I’m in a bit of a time crunch.”

The comfy wingback where I usually sit is gone. Instead, a rusty metal folding chair offers the only seat other than Dr. Greta’s shrink chair. No clocks on the walls. No desk. Bins, buckets and boxes are stacked four and five high all around the room. The curio cabinet lies on its side, empty as the Willow Creek goat who’d birthed the day before.

“You’re really leaving,” I say. Another breath/sigh.

“I am. It’s time for the next thing.”

“Will you still live in Portland?” I hope she’ll break that ironclad code shrinks have with patients concerning the divulging of personal details.

Dr. Greta does her own deep, cleansing breath/sigh then. “I need to visit family overseas,” she says after a pause.

Germany. Or, in her accent, maybe
Chermany
.

“But you, Lizbeth, look at the rose in your cheeks. The sparkle in your eye. How has this last week been?”

I gather my thoughts. Cory and I went over in detail what I’ll say, how I’ll get our questions answered without rousing suspicions that we have the diary and locket. Now is when I’m supposed to bring up Sisi and her engagement to Franz Joseph and ask about the distant relative Dr. Greta referred to in the previous session. I try to conjure up Cory’s exact words, and Dr. Greta must be sensing the strain.

“Are you all right, Lizbeth? Do you need a glass of water?”

I scratch my head. My hair is still tufted and uneven. For the first time in a long time, the pain and the burn and the relief right after floods me with memories. As I nod for the water, I’m struck with how sudden this memory hits.

Mom found me in the bathtub, my burned head under the full force of a gold-plated Brizo faucet. “Liz!” she shrieked, her freshly Botoxed face trying its best to contort with fear.

It hurt. It hurt so bad the only way I kept from fainting was to count the heartbeats in my ear. Then the paramedics arrived with their tanks and cuffs and whatnot. They immediately turned off the water, and just before I passed out, I heard, “She’s going into shock.”

I woke up in the Oregon Burn Center, my head wrapped like a papier-mâché project, Mom and Dad on opposite sides of my airbed, soothing music piped in. I wasn’t really sure, so I asked, “Am I dead?”

They’d been crying, both of them, and Dad’s voice was all quivery and he said, “Oh, Princess, why? Why in the world?”

It was rhetorical, that question, and I figured I wasn’t dead, because nobody would be asking stupid rhetorical questions in the afterlife. But maybe that was the morphine talking.

“The doctors say you’re one lucky girl,” Mom chimed in. “Your scalp will heal. Your hair will grow back.”

I’d only meant to get rid of germs.

“One lucky girl,” I mimicked in a whisper. “Lucky girl.”

A week of medicinal-smelling ointments, yellowed gauze, morphine drip, and then the parade of mental health specialists. The argument over whether Dad could drive me to Providence or if I had to travel by ambulance. It was expensive to be hauled from hospital to hospital via meat cart, hence Dad’s lobbying for the DIY transportation.

I grew accustomed to the routine at the burn center. I loved the hygiene involved in caring for ruined epidermis. Everything so perfectly sterile. When patches of stubble showed under my bandages, the nurses were overcome with joy, ramping up their “royal we” way of talking, but I wasn’t so pleased. I wanted to wax the hair back off. I longed for a perpetual state of smooth. Hair was intrusive.

But now, in Dr. Greta’s office, my hair, its shaggy fuzz, is a comfort. Out of nowhere I blurt, “I watched a goat being born yesterday.”

Dr. Greta’s face brightens. “Yes? And how was that experience for you?”

“Well,” I tell her, looking at my hands, which are less raw and itchy than usual, “it was somewhat disgusting. But the mom goat, the doe? The way she took care of the kid once it came out, the way she licked its fur—that was fantastic.”

Dr. Greta chuckles.

“And it made me think about things. About parents and children and mess and love.”

“Yes?” Dr. Greta chirps hopefully.

“Well, that it’s just so …”

“Yes?”

“Messy, I guess.”

The space between Dr. Greta’s eyebrows wrinkles.

“In a good way, I mean.”

I tell her about Cory. Not the part about breaking into her office and his being arrested and the whole Jewellee fiasco, or me running off to the Conrad and then Cory eating my Luvox—though I do need a refill. What I tell her is the other part. The scene in the shed with all four of us helping the doe deliver her baby. I tell her that I admire people who can do jobs without overthinking them. How if I had a goal, that’s what my goal would be. To just
do
things. Like a Nike ad. And then, I launch into a question I didn’t even know I was going to ask:

“Do you think that if that empress you talked about, Empress Elisabeth, do you think that if she’d had the choice of who to marry, she wouldn’t have chosen Franz Joseph?”

“Ah. Well. We’ll never know that,” she says.

“But you said it was all a political decision and that she didn’t want to marry him.”

“Lizbeth,” Dr. Greta says in her authoritative voice, “I’ll tell you something I’ve concluded after spending years researching her writings, and understanding that my own
Omama
, who was her governess, was also somewhat delusional. In her diary, Elisabeth wrote a fantasy scenario in which she meets a mystic who offers to reunite her with her love. Her
inappropriate
love. Perhaps she was not quite ready for the responsibility of her rank? Perhaps the fantasy was her fairy tale?”

“But what if,” I suggest, “she didn’t marry for politics. What if she married for love?”

“Elisabeth was young. Too young to really know her heart. And she was more cunning than history portends. After all, she became beguiling enough to catch the eye of the most powerful man of his time, and he chose her over the elder sister. ”

“Beguiling?”

“Maybe that’s too strong an intent. However, my belief is that Elisabeth truly unconsciously bowed to the pressure for young girls of her station. Winning, you see, meant marrying the most powerful man of the day, and Elisabeth, well, she was nothing if not competitive.”

I take another cleansing breath and slow down the thoughts racing through my mind. What does my therapist know that she isn’t telling me? I look around Dr. Greta’s packed-up room. And then, I go out on a limb. “Was Sisi in love with someone else when she married?”

“Ah.” Dr. Greta smiles, leaning back in her chair. “So that’s what all the questions really are about. Romance. Tell me, Lizbeth, do you have a crush on this boy who has joined your household? This Coreopsis?”

“Coriander,” I say, feeling my face get hot, but happy to hear his name out loud. “Cory. And we’re just friends.”

Dr. Greta smiles in that self-satisfying way adults do when they think they’ve cracked the code on teenage inner life.

I let her have that smile. A parting gift. But I’m not about to back down. “You told me a while back that the regret is the real tragedy when it comes to choices. What if the empress was unhappy because she regretted being forced to marry someone she didn’t love? What if she had just refused, and ran off with that count?”

Dr. Greta’s face stones up. She pauses before she says, “He was a revolutionary. Her family was not pleased. On record, he joined the army and caught some ailment and died, but there is speculation that the family had him, um, taken care of.”

“Her family? Or yours?” comes out my mouth before I can stop it.

Her shocked face goes white. She swallows so loud I can hear it. “What do you mean?”

“You said that your
Omama
, the governess, that she was delusional. In what way?”

“Wilhelmine? Well, she was a silly and bitter woman, as I understand it. She had secrets, no doubt. And apparently, she was not very kind to Elisabeth. She was a strict disciplinarian,” Dr. Greta muses, studying the cracks in her ceiling as she speaks. “But I believe she had a soft spot for Elisabeth’s father, Duke Max. They may have been close at one time. But no, I don’t believe she had
anything
to do with the count’s disappearance.”

“What do you mean, bitter?” It feels strange swapping roles with my therapist, but I can’t stop now.

“Wilhelmine,” Dr. Greta says through clenched lips, “stole the diary. It is why I have it. And there is speculation that she also pocketed many of the Wittelsbach jewels. She had a bit of an entitlement problem.”

“Jewels?”

“From Ludovica, Helene, and Elisabeth,” Dr. Greta says. “Over the years. It is why, Lizbeth, I must now return to Munich. My parents’ house is being turned upside down. The authorities believe that a special necklace is secreted there.”

“Necklace?”

“A locket of some sort. But let us not get off track. This is our final session, and I want to hear from you. Tell me more about your days at the farm.”

A locket of some sort
. Apparently, Dr. Greta doesn’t know about the hidden locket. Or if she does know, she’s being coy. “So you’re going to return the diary?” I ask, not letting go.

“Return it? Frankly, I wish I did not possess it. It’s made matters ever complicated.” Dr. Greta sighs then. “
You
, dear girl. We are talking about
you
. Tell me, have you heard from your mother?”

As a matter of fact, I finally was able to check my voicemail messages on my way back to the farm yesterday, and Mom left several. They were contrite, full of sadness. She felt guilty, she said. She wanted to make sure I was okay. “No,” I say now, lying to my soon-to-be-ex-therapist.

“And how do you feel about your mother?”

How do I feel about my mother? Sad. Angry. But with the craziness of the past couple of days, Mom has been on the back burner. I shrug. “I’m sure she’ll call once she lands somewhere.”

“And your food intake? You certainly have a nice color to the face. Have you been nourishing yourself?”

She’s clearly given up on the ingestion log. I snicker at the irony that in one of the boxes stacked in the office, the blank pages of my food diary sit crammed in the decoy cover. If Dr. Greta’s planning on returning the diary to the Bavarian government or whomever, well, there’s no
there
there, and I actually feel relieved that my theft will inadvertently help her. “I’m growing fond of gluten-free muffins,” I say. “And last night I had tempeh.”

Dr. Greta nods blankly. Our time is coming to a close. She says, “I will send referral information to your father when I send the invoice later this week.”

The shrink chain. I’ll be handed to the next OCD specialist. More behavior mod. More Luvox. “So, we’re done then?”

Dr. Greta stands. Extends her hand. I take it. We shake like two colleagues. “Good luck, Lizbeth,” she says.

“To you too,” I say and turn to leave.

Before I’m out the door though, she calls me back. When I pivot around, in her extended hand is the knitted beret. “I almost forgot. I found this the other day. Did you leave it behind, perhaps?”