Once (14 page)

I kept my eyes on the scenery, trying to pretend I was alone. This morning, the King had suggested Clara take me on a tour of the art gallery. He said it would be nice for us to spend time together so I could get to know my cousin. I knew neither statement was true but I obliged, hoping it would make me seem happy with my place in the Palace. Like a girl with no secrets.

“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.”

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.

I turned back, noticing two boys my age who were stapling down carpet. An older worker, maybe twenty, walked slowly down the corridor, carrying a giant wooden crate. When he passed one of the spotlights I made out his face, gaunt and sickly, his eyes sunk back into his skull. His shoulder bore the same tattoo as Caleb's. Somewhere above us a terrible drilling sound split the air.

“Where is he?” I said, my voice flat. I walked faster, with purpose, thinking of all the boys in the dugout.

The soldiers strode in front of me, toward a glowing blue light. They glanced at one another, their faces uncertain, unsure if they should've brought me here or not. “Genevieve,” a voice called out. Two figures appeared at the end of the hallway, silhouetted by the light. “What are you doing here?”

“I needed to speak with you,” I said. The King was standing with Charles, who looked momentarily happy, his smile disappearing when he saw my face. I pushed past them, into the wide room. An eerie light filled the space. The walls were all glass, forming several enclosures with plants and giant, fake rocks.

“Would you give us a minute?” the King said finally. The men's footsteps receded down the hall. He stepped beside me, facing a tank filled with yellow grass. High above, a mountain lion lay out on a flat rock, its ribs jutting out of its side.

“She told me,” I said, not turning to meet his gaze. “Clara told me about your wife. She said my mother was your mistress.” My entire body felt hot. “Is that true?”

The King turned back to the corridor, where Charles and the soldiers had left. “This isn't the best time to talk about this,” he said. “You shouldn't have come here.”

“There will never be a good time to talk about it.” I stared at him. “You didn't want me to come here because you don't want me—or anyone—to see how all of your projects are built.”

His face flushed and his eyes went dark. He rubbed at his forehead, as if trying to calm himself. “I understand you're angry,” he said. “Clara shouldn't have said anything. It was not her place.”

He turned and walked the length of the room, his arms crossed over his chest. “I don't like that word—
mistress
. I know how it sounds and it wasn't the case. When I met your mother I was separated from my wife.” He paused in front of a glass case titled
GRAY WOLVES
. Two giant dogs were tearing at red meat. Another gnawed at a broken bone.

“So she was your mistress,” I said, unable to control my voice. “And you brought me here, telling me how you'd been looking for me for so long, how broken up you were without your daughter, and you just happened to leave out that you had a whole other family?”

The King cleared his throat. “I am sorry,” he said, laboring over each word, “that I didn't tell you about my other children. But it's not something I like to speak about. I'm more concerned with the future, just like everyone else in this City. We're all trying to move on.”

The softness in his voice startled me, pulling me out of my own head and into his. I wondered how they had died, if their noses had bled like my mother's, if they had been together, as a family, or been separated in the hospitals. I wondered if he had held them, despite the warnings not to, if he had been the one to mash up their food and press it against their dry tongues.

“What were their names?” I finally asked. I had to know, just wanted to picture them, if only for a moment. I had siblings—at one point, if not now. The thought filled me with a strange sadness. “How old were they?”

He turned back to me. He had pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and was twisting it around his fingers, turning them pink. “Samantha was the oldest. She was eleven when she died. Paul went first—he was eight. And then Jackson, my little guy.” A faint smile appeared and then was gone. “He wasn't even five years old.”

I remembered the plate I'd prepared in the kitchen. How I'd sat leaning against her bedroom door, devouring the last of those mushy pink beans, comforted by her intermittent coughs. Before she had retreated to her room she had shown me how to open the cans, her hand around mine as we squeezed the metal gadget. They had been in a row, one for each day, over twenty cans long.
Only open one can
, she'd said, as she moved around the house, locking all the doors.
No more than one each day
.

“I'm sorry,” I said softly. We stood side by side, and for that minute, in the stillness of that room, he was not the King. I was not the Princess, taken against her will to the City. We were two people trying to forget.

He rubbed his forehead with his hand. “I really loved your mother. And I was going to get a divorce. That was always the plan,” he said. “But things were complicated between us. We were living different lives, in different cities. I never even knew she was pregnant. And then later, when the plague happened, it changed everything. I couldn't have left Sacramento even if I had wanted to. There was no way for me to help her. Everyone was just surviving.”

“Did your wife know about her?” I asked, feeling sick even as the question left my mouth. “Did you ever tell her, or was my mother a secret?”

“I was planning on a divorce,” he repeated. “I was just waiting for the right time.”

I turned and walked past him, starting down a tunnel with a glass enclosure on one side. There, just thirty feet away, was a grizzly bear like the one I'd seen in the wild. It lay there, seeming half alive, its head resting on a plastic rock.