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“How was your date with Charles?” Clara asked after a long while. The soldier always trailing just a few steps behind us stepped off the escalator.
“It wasn’t a date,” I said, an edge to my voice. I remembered that term from School; the Teachers had referred to it as part of the courtship period. They told us men sometimes acted like gentleman before revealing their true intentions.
We strode past the low railing. Below us shoppers wandered through the atrium, occasionally glancing up to see where we were headed. Above the gallery’s entrance was a massive screen that changed every few seconds. First was an advertisement for the new global marketplace, OPENING THIS WEEK! Then it switched to a picture from yesterday’s paper, of me in the back of a car with the caption: PRINCESS GENEVIEVE’S BMW CONVERTIBLE RESTORED BY GERRARD’S MOTORS: PROVIDING CUSTOM RESTORATION AND DISPLAY OF AUTOMOBILES SINCE 2035.
“You know, you go around acting all annoyed, when you’re the Princess of The New America,” Clara muttered. “Anyone would kill to be in your position. ” The way she said it—the emphasis on kill—unnerved me.
“When was the last time you were outside these walls?” I asked. “Ten years ago?”
Clara’s straw-colored hair was in a braid, which snaked around her head and curled up at the nape of her neck. “What’s your point?” She narrowed her gray eyes at me.
“You can’t speak to it, to whether or not I have a right to be angry or annoyed. You don’t know what the world is like outside your bubble. ” With that I turned and started through the gallery’s main entrance.
Inside, the room was cool, and empty except for a few schoolchildren clustered in the corner, their gray uniforms similar to the ones I’d grown up wearing. For a brief moment, the soldier and Clara were behind me, and I had the grand feeling of being alone. The open space comforted me. The wood floors were solid beneath my feet, the walls covered with familiar friends. I walked over to the Van Gogh painting I’d seen in my art books so many times before, the blue flowers that stretched across the canvas, growing toward the sun. IRISES, VINCENT VAN GOGH, a plaque beside it read. RECOVERED FROM THE GETTY MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES.
More paintings hung in a row, Manet and Titian and Cézanne, one after another. I walked beside them, remembering all the time I’d spent on the School lawn, the lake in front of me, dragging brush across canvas to replicate its glassy surface. I was examining the gash in the bottom of a Renoir, its canvas taped together, when Clara came up beside me.
“There are things I do know,” she said, her voice tinged with anger. I could tell she had been preparing this speech for the last few minutes. Each word quivered with delight as she spoke. “I know how unsavory it is for a woman to be a man’s mistress. ” She stared at the two figures in the painting. A man was helping a woman up a grassy incline.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, unable to stop myself.
“You weren’t your father’s firstborn,” she said. “You were his last. I had three cousins before you, and an aunt, all of them lost in the plague. ” Then she turned, glaring at me. “I don’t know what kind of woman would do that—have sex with a married man. ”
I smiled, trying to ignore the lump that had crept up the back of my throat. “You’re mistaken,” I managed. Clara just shrugged before she strode past me, toward a still life on the far wall.
My feet were rooted to the ground. I stared at the man in the painting, the hat that cast darkness on his face, the pink bulb of his nose, the way his eyes were painted with two black lines. He seemed to be sneering at me now.
She was his mistress, I thought to myself, my vision blurred by sudden tears. My mother, who had sung to me in the bath, wiping the suds from my eyes. I was five again, kneeling on the floor. She was sick. I saw the broken light underneath the bedroom door, her shadow moving as she rapped her knuckles against the wood, tapping out her kisses, because she couldn’t risk pressing her lips to my skin. I had held my palm to the other side, keeping it there even after she went back to bed, her coughs breaking the night’s silence.
I turned toward the door, the tears threatening to overtake me. I kept walking, past the irises and Manet’s bullfight, the animal spearing the horse with its great and terrible horns.
“Your Royal Highness?” I heard the soldier ask, his footsteps behind me. “Would you like to be escorted upstairs now?”
I kept ahead of him, barely listening as he ushered Clara out after me, toward the elevator. No matter what Clara said, I knew it wasn’t my mother’s fault, it couldn’t have been, the woman who loved me so sweetly, who’d squeezed my toes one by one as she counted them, singing a silly song in my ear. Blowing on my soup to cool it before I even took one spoonful. He was the one who had had the other family.
I stepped inside the elevator. Clara came after me, making the car feel smaller and claustrophobic, the air stale and hot.
“Is everything all right, Princess?” the soldier asked as he pressed the button. I clasped my hands together, trying to steady them. I could only think of the King, that story he’d told me, the photo he’d held in his hands. He’d never said anything about his family. He’d taken so long to come for me, left me alone in that house. I spent so many days listening to her choked coughs, terrified when the room was silent for too long. She’d never felt further away than she did now, my only connection to her broken. “Princess?” The soldier repeated. He rested his hand on my shoulder, startling me. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said, pressing the button for the bottom floor again. “I just need to speak with the King. ”
twenty-one
THE KING WAS AT A CONSTRUCTION SITE, WORKING ON A building at the edge of the City center. When he couldn’t be reached, I demanded to be taken to him.
The car zipped down the empty street, past the massive City buildings. The fountains beside the Palace rocketed up into the air, spraying passersby with a fine mist. The view didn’t hold any wonder for me now. I thought only of the smug smile on Clara’s face as she told me about the affair. All those days at School, even the loneliest ones when I’d just arrived, I’d always had those memories of my mother. They’d stayed with me on the road, in the dugout, in the back of Fletcher’s truck, even after the chaos of the cellar. But now everything was corrupted by Clara’s words.
We turned right up a long driveway, toward a giant green building with a gold lion in front. The soldiers escorted me out of the car. Above the entrance was another giant billboard, like the one in the mall, flashing different announcements. A picture of two lions came up, the words THE GRAND ZOO: OPENING NEXT MONTH! beneath it. “This way,” one of the soldiers said, leading me inside.
Three soldiers stood at the entrance to the main lobby. The giant room was sweltering, the air smelling of sweat and smoke. Spotlights illuminated different sections of the dark corridor. A few yards ahead, a boy was kneeling over a bucket. He was a year or two younger than me, his bare back dripping with sweat as he worked, smoothing wet plaster over the wall. He looked up, his face thin and sad. “He should be over here,” the other soldier said, picking up his pace, his hand coming down around my arm as he ushered me quickly toward another hall.