The Very Little Princess: Zoey's Story (7 page)

And Princess Regina had reason to be cross. She hated, positively hated, this business of waking and discovering that she had been … gone. Who knew how much of the world slipped by while she was in such a state? Or what might happen to her while she couldn’t see or hear or feel?

And what did
lonely
have to do with anything, anyway? She was a princess. Princesses didn’t get lonely.

Regina scrubbed at her damp arm again and tried once more to wring out her hair.

And that was when it dawned on her.

The secret! Of course! It was water. It had to be water. Wasn’t she wet every single time she woke up?

Hadn’t Zoey been crying all over her the first time? Not a lot of tears, but at least one
big one. Then after she’d gone to sleep on her throne, hadn’t Zoey blubbered all over her again? And wasn’t that what happened every time? She’d open her eyes and there’d be an enormous face looming over her. A great salty tear would be splashing onto her face, running into her ears, soaking her hair.

And when she’d been away from whatever girl it was for too long, wasn’t that when she slipped into sleep again?

Every time?

Surely that had been the secret all along—water! She should have thought of it before.

What a perfect answer!

Perfect, because water was something she could take charge of. All she had to do to stop going off to sleep was to keep water close by. She could rub it on herself whenever a girl went off and left her alone. She never had to let anyone weep all over her again.

Not this girl. Not any other girl.

Her plan formed, Princess Regina stood. “Bring me water!” she ordered in a loud voice. (Or at least the order came out as loud as a three-and-one-quarter-inch doll can muster.) “Immediately.”

And, of course, since Zoey was used to providing for a princess, that’s exactly what she did.

Zoey sat on the bed, watching. Regina dipped water from the paper cup Zoey had brought from the bathroom. She held it in her hand, then scrubbed her face. She dipped again and spread the water up and down her arm. Then she wet the other arm.

She even peeled off her pink dress. “Rinse this for me,” she ordered, standing there in her bloomers and camisole. “I don’t want your salty tears in my dress.”

Zoey sighed, but she carried the tiny dress to the bathroom and held it under the faucet. She supposed it made sense, Regina’s not wanting the salt of her tears in the dress or on her skin, but it was hard not to be a bit offended. The doll acted as though her tears were poison!

She squeezed the tiny dress out and rolled it in a towel to blot it. Then she carried it back to the bedroom.

“Do you want me to hang it up to dry?” she asked Regina.

But when she looked to Regina for an answer, she gasped.

The tiny doll had fallen over. Apparently she had grabbed the paper cup when she went
down, and that had tipped, too. Princess Regina, the rug on the dollhouse floor, everything, was soaked.

Much worse than the mess, though, was the princess herself. She lay in the puddle, as stiff and still as a … well, as any ordinary doll.

“Oh!” Zoey exclaimed. “Oh!” And she snatched up Regina and tried to dry her off with the bottom of her T-shirt.

But though Zoey’s shirt made a pretty good towel, the doll remained rigid in her hand.

“Princess Regina!” Zoey cried.

The princess managed to get only one response past her stiffening lips. “Tears,” she said. “It must have been the tears!”

And yet again, she went still in Zoey’s hand.

“Be Good
.”

Just about now, you’re probably wondering what kind of story this is, anyway.

In most stories, if a doll can walk and talk, it stays that way. It doesn’t keep blinking on and off again like a neon light. In fact, in most stories about dolls, no one even asks how a doll came to walk and talk. It just shows up that way at the beginning of the story and never changes.

So this story is, I suppose, a bit odd.

It may be odd in another way, too. I’ll bet
in the stories you’ve read before, mothers were around for the usual reasons—to dispense cookies and sweaters and advice. But you didn’t have to pay much attention to them. They were just
there
, part of the ground the story stood on.

The way our mothers are part of the ground we all stand on.

But Princess Regina wasn’t like most dolls in stories, and Zoey’s mother wasn’t like most mothers, either in stories or out.

She was more fun, for one thing.

She was also a bit like the china doll. She blinked on and off again. The off times were harder for Zoey to think about than the on ones, though.

So mostly she didn’t let herself think.

And she didn’t let herself think now, either. Except about the doll.

The princess was doing this intentionally, all this going away. Zoey was certain she was. She just went off to sleep any time she pleased because she liked making people feel bad.

She was
that
kind of doll.

Zoey had heard what Regina said the last time she’d gone still. “It must have been the tears,” she’d said. As though that’s what she’d wanted … for Zoey to cry.

Well, it might be what the princess wanted, but that didn’t mean she was going to get it.

Not
her
tears! Not one single drop more!

Zoey stuffed the tiny doll into the pocket of her shorts and hurried downstairs.

She would see if her mother and her grandmother had finally stopped arguing. And if they hadn’t … well, if they were still talking at one another in those angry voices, she would say something to get their attention. Maybe she’d
tell them how much she hated listening to them, arguing and arguing the way they were.

But when Zoey burst into the kitchen, no argument was going on. In fact, nothing was going on at all.

The kitchen was bare and clean. Hazel stood alone at the sink, washing up the few dishes that had been used for their late lunch.

And Zoey’s mother was nowhere to be seen.

Zoey stood very still in the doorway. “Where is she?” she asked. “Where did my mother go?” Her voice came out high and tight on the word
go
, almost as though she were going to cry, but, of course, she wasn’t. She had no intention of crying.

Hazel looked over her plump shoulder at Zoey, but she didn’t say anything. Zoey didn’t wait for an answer, anyway. She turned and ran for the front door.

She stopped in the middle of the porch. What she saw was exactly what she had known she was going to see.

Her mother was there. She was out at the end of the stone walkway. She was opening the car door. She was getting in.

“Mom!” Zoey cried. And she was almost surprised when her mother turned back to look at her. She already had one foot inside the car, though, and she didn’t take it out again.

“Oh,” she said, “there you are!” As if she’d come to find Zoey, not the other way around. “I wanted to say good-bye.”

“Good-bye?” Zoey echoed. “What do you mean? Where are you going?”

“Home,” Zoey’s mother said. She said it simply. She said it as though they had agreed about all this earlier … that she would go home and leave Zoey behind.

“No!” Zoey cried. She flew down the steps and along the stone walkway and grabbed her mother’s arm. “You can’t go. Not without
me!”

But Zoey’s mother shook her head. She had already started shaking her head even before Zoey spoke.

“I need to be by myself, Zoey,” she said. Again she said it simply, flatly. As if it were something they both already knew.

And though Zoey had never heard the words before, it was true that her heart did know them. Her heart had known them since she was a tiny baby, lying in her mother’s arms. That her mother would go away someday. That she would say, “I need to be by myself, Zoey,” and she would go.

But already knowing the words in her heart didn’t make them easier to hear.

“You
need!” she cried.
“You
need! What about me? You’re my mother. Don’t you remember that you’re my mother?”

Her mother nodded this time. Yes, she remembered. But even as she nodded, she was slipping behind the steering wheel, putting her key in the ignition.

Zoey clung to her mother’s arm. This wasn’t happening! It couldn’t be happening!

“You must understand, Zoey,” her mother said. “I have to go.” She said it with a finality that passed through Zoey like a blade.

And though it was the last thing in the world Zoey wanted to do, her hand let go of her mother’s arm. It was as though her hand belonged to someone else, someone who agreed that her mother had to go.

Zoey’s feet seemed to belong to that same someone. They stepped back from the car.

The car door shut. The motor rumbled to life. The window rolled down.

“Be good,” her mother said, and Zoey wanted to block her ears against the mother-sounding words.
Be good
. As though she had ever been anything else!

Zoey’s mother smiled, a quick, bright smile that flashed on, then off again. She backed the car out, turned, pulled away.