Page 38 of The Impossible Princess
I give a glancing smile and return to my two paragraphs, determined to nail them.
18
Open Access
CLARA
I send him a picture of the sign to the public bathrooms at the palace. Instead of stick figures of a man and woman, we have a prince and a princess, complete with robes and tiara. The wallpaper is a stylized version of the family tree with modernist portraits in pen and ink.
Another time he messages me, “I found a missing storage room.”
I’m on my way to a distant province to visit an animal shelter and my brow furrows at the text. “I am trying to figure out how that is possible.”
“Simple. Each department has a number of rooms assigned to it, and each must undergo inspection. Follow?”
“Follow.”
“They’re scattered all over the ship, not localized in one area. So, you don’t go down a hall, opening every door, but ping pong all over the vessel. Follow?”
“Follow. But how could you lose a room? This isn’t Harry Potter.”
“Someone dropped it from a department list years ago, and I found it by cross-checking the engineering plans.”
“Great! You have one more place to put puzzles and extra rolls of toilet paper.”
“Not great. The sailors have been using it as a rec room, renting it out for sexy times, flicking cigarettes into the ventilation shaft…”
“Shut. Up.”
“Guess what’s in the room next door?”
The car I’m travelling in moves like a cloud, even at 130 km/h, but my nerves feel like I’m in a rattletrap. “What?”
“A ton of refrigerator oil. A stray cigarette butt could have ignited the entire store.”
I grip the leather seats. The idea of it—a blazing inferno on a ship in the dark of night, Max being the one responsible for all those lives, putting himself in danger—makes me ill. “Captain must be glad.”
His three dots bounce for a long time.
“Not glad.”
When the day arrives for me to deliver my speech on solar power, I have memorized every word. To keep my restless mind occupied, I make my way to my godmother’s cottage to give Maren a respite. I bring along a deck of cards, and Lady Greta’s face, surrounded by a halo of well-kept white hair, brightens with a warm smile.
“I haven’t had a good card game in ages,” she chirps, though I know good and well that Maren gives her a game as often as she likes.
Playing with my godmother takes every speck of my attention as the game shifts from a kind of whist toHjerterfrito poker. She pops a caramel, one of our wagering chips, into her mouth and corrects me. She leans around my fan of cards to select my discards and keep me in line, slapping them down on the card table between us like a hardened gambler.
“And how are things with you?” she asks for the fifth or sixth time. It’s a friendly, noncommittal question, the kind which must have served her well as a lady-in-waiting when she used to meet hundreds of people a day. She returns to it like a touchstone, finding her bearings as she navigates interactions that must feel bewildering.
“I’m seeing someone,” I say, making a discard that has her frowning. “No. Not seeing exactly.” I’m telling her about Max because I am desperate to be honest with someone and I know she’ll forget.
“He’s nice,” I say. “He lets me come over and fish.”
“I fish,” Lady Greta informs me, pleased to find a common connection; forgetting that her sure hands taught me how to cast a rod and forgetting, too, the hours and hours we spent together on the banks of a river.
“Max cooks for me, and he likes records.”
“I like records,” she replies, picking up the discards pile and sorting through it until she hits upon a card she likes. “You know I was the inspiration for a Herb Gurtling and the Handsel Brass album?”
