Coronets and Steel

by Sherwood Smith

  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.”