Once upon a time, in a stark white hotel at the top of the world, a girl sat alone in a half-clean bathroom. She had just finished scrubbing the grout around the sink and toilet with a toothbrush. Now she had a rag and a bucket of disinfectant, and her cracked knuckles oozed blood into the tub she was meant to be scouring.
Out in the hall, the grandmother’s broom scritch-scritch-scritched in an even, deliberate rhythm. Everything her grandmother did was economical and precise. Even the quantities of bleach were exactly measured for each bathroom, so as not to waste a drop. The girl hated her grandmother with every electron in her body. She turned on the bathtub’s tap, stuck her hands underneath, and gasped as the cold water slid into the cracks in her skin.
The hallway sweeping stopped, and the bathroom door opened. The grandmother peered down at the kneeling, gasping girl. Her gray eyebrow twitched.
“Leave the tub for now,” she said. “You may dust my apartment instead.”
The girl refused to meet her grandmother’s eye, would not thank her for this act of pity. It had been seventeen days since her father had left her at this hotel, and though he had come to visit her every day, she hadn’t said a single word to him or her grandmother. The grandmother didn’t seem bothered; she was perfectly happy to issue commands and then work in silence. The girl was afraid if she didn’t obey, the grandmother would tell her mother what an ill-tempered, naughty girl she was and then her mother wouldn’t want her back.
Sometimes the girl would touch the frigid gold ring tied in her hair and think about wishing to go home. But she wasn’t sure that was what her mother wanted. After all, she had let her father take her away and she hadn’t come to visit, not once. The girl wondered if she should wish for her mother to love her, to want her back. But she wasn’t sure if wishes worked that way, and the old woman had said to be very careful about how she used them.
The girl took a dusting cloth and a spray bottle that smelled of vinegar, and she wiped all the woodwork in her grandmother’s sitting and dining rooms. She climbed up onto a chair and ran the cloth over the old cuckoo clock, hoping that when she wiped the round little door, the bird would come out and tell her what to do. It didn’t.
The girl drifted into her grandmother’s bedroom, which she had only glimpsed through its doorway. She rubbed vinegar spray all over the immaculate bedside table and wondered if her grandmother ever read. There wasn’t a single book or magazine in the hotel.
At the foot of the bed sat a wide cedar chest. As the girl wiped its glossy surface, the urge to open the lid sprouted in her heart and grew until it was unbearable. She listened carefully for her grandmother, then eased the trunk open. Inside were blankets knitted in the softest yarns the girl had ever touched. She looked at her grandmother’s bed, which was covered in a scratchy wool coverlet, and wondered why she’d kept these gorgeous blankets tucked away.
The girl pulled the blankets out, one by one, and buried her face in each. It was the closest thing to love she’d felt in seventeen days. The blanket at the bottom of the trunk was soft as the belly of a kitten, knitted in an ornate pattern of peacock blue and white. The girl spread it out so she could look at the design. Three beautiful young women stood in front of a snowy mountain range. They wore long gowns and crowns on their heads and graceful smiles on their faces, and their arms were linked together. Sisters, the girl thought, and she wished she had a sister to link arms with and she missed her mother all the more.
“What do you think you are doing?” Somehow, the grandmother was standing inches behind the girl. She snatched the blanket away, and the girl noticed that her hands shook as she folded it into a neat rectangle. The girl almost apologized, but remembered just in time that she wasn’t speaking.
The grandmother sent her to bed that night without supper. The girl lay on her narrow cot, shivering and dreaming of how warm those knitted blankets would be. The woodstove had long since gone out, but from deep inside its belly came a rattle and a groan. The girl sat up, trembling. The window on the stove door glowed green, then gold. It swung open and a folded scrap of paper fell out.
The girl waited until the rattling and groaning stopped. She eased out of bed and unfolded the paper. It was a page torn from a book; she recognized the story. A king and queen locked their three young daughters up in the castle because an old beggar woman had warned they must stay inside until they were all fifteen years old. On the day before the youngest princess’s fifteenth birthday, they snuck out and were kidnapped by trolls and taken to a world deep underneath a blue mountain. A soldier rescued them, but then he became trapped underground, so he blew on an old whistle and an eagle came and carried him to safety. The soldier returned to the castle and chose the youngest princess to be his bride (for it was always the youngest who was chosen), but the end of the story had been crossed out with heavy black lines. Below it, someone had written in rounded, childish printing:
The three princesses decided they were tired of everyone telling them what to do, so they ran away and were fierce and free and beholden to no one for the rest of their days.