The Very Little Princess: Zoey's Story (8 page)

Then the dust roiled up behind the car like smoke.

And she was gone.

Zoey stood there for a long time, watching her world burn away.

At last, when there was nothing else to do, she turned back toward the empty house.

Almost empty. Hazel stood on the edge of the porch watching her. She held her arms out for Zoey.

Zoey knew her grandmother wanted her to come to her. Instead, she reached into the pocket of her shorts and took out the tiny china doll.

She threw Princess Regina at her grandmother with all her might.

A Kiss

It was a good thing Hazel was so soft. And a good thing she was quick, too. She caught the tiny doll against her stomach.

“I’m sorry, Zoey,” she said. Once more she held out her arms. “I’m truly sorry.”

But Zoey didn’t move. “Will she come back?” she asked.

Hazel sighed. “I hope so,” she said. “I’ve always hoped so.” And then, when Zoey still didn’t come to her, she added, “Until she does, we have one another.” She held up the
tiny doll. “And we have Princess Regina.”

Without a word, Zoey walked past her grandmother and into the house.

Princess Regina woke with that familiar feeling. Wet. She wiped her face and sat up.

Where was she? Pale moonlight spread all around her, so she could see perfectly clearly, but still she didn’t understand….

Oh! She was on a pillow, and the giant girl—Zoey, that’s right, this one was called Zoey—was blubbering all over her again.

Would she never stop?

But to tell the truth, Zoey wasn’t really blubbering. She was sleeping. Perhaps she was dreaming. And a tear or two had simply slipped out, run down her cheek, and caught the tiny doll on their way to the pillow.

Zoey didn’t even know Princess Regina was
next to her on the pillow. She had gone to bed alone, and after she was asleep, her grandmother had tiptoed in and laid the tiny doll next to her cheek.

“Take care of her,” she had whispered, but I’m not sure whether she was asking the girl to take care of the doll or the doll to take care of the girl.

Both, maybe.

In any case, here Regina was, soggy with tears again … awake again.

All of which made her realize that she had been right in what she’d said as she was going off to sleep last time. Tears were the answer. It was tears that woke her up!

A messy solution, but an easy one. The only thing she had to do was to keep this enormous girl crying.

She reached up and wiped the dampness from Zoey’s cheek and rubbed it into her throat.

How would she do it, though? She could hardly order Zoey to cry for her. As far as she could tell, people didn’t cry on command like that. And she didn’t want to have to depend on Zoey, anyway … or on anyone else.

And then—just like that—she had the answer. Regina didn’t quite know how she
knew, but she did. She knew exactly how she could keep Zoey’s tears coming!

The princess stood on her tiptoes and whispered into the deep cave of the girl’s ear. “Mother,” she said. And instantly another tear came rolling toward her.

Regina gathered the moisture and rubbed it on the back of her neck, up and down her arms.

“Mother!” she whispered again.

She was rewarded with another tear.

“Mother!” she said, a bit more loudly.

Zoey’s eyes flew open!

So, here we are. Princess Regina is awake once more. She’s awake, but she has been caught milking Zoey for tears.

Zoey … well, Zoey is angry, and not only with the doll. After all, her mother has just driven right out of this story, leaving her
behind with a stranger. It helps very little that the stranger is her grandmother.

Zoey sat up in bed and glared at the doll.

“I’m sorry!” Princess Regina said. She scooted backward until she came to the cliff at the edge of the bed.

“You’re not sorry,” Zoey said. “Not even
that
much.” And she held her thumb and forefinger up with only a hair’s-breadth of space between them to show how little she believed in
sorry
.

Princess Regina
was
sorry, though … truly. And not just sorry she’d been caught. (Everybody feels sorry about that.) For the first time in her long, on-and-off existence, she was looking out through her brilliant blue eyes and actually seeing.

Zoey’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes snapped with anger, but behind the snap lay
loss so deep that the tiny doll thought she might drown in it.

“She’s left you before, hasn’t she?” Regina spoke softly, but her words rang like an iron gong. “She’s left you lots of times.”

“My mother?” Zoey cried. “Are you talking about my mother? Never! She’s never left me!”

“Never?” Regina said.

“Not ever!” Zoey insisted. But then, maybe because she absolutely, under no circumstances was going to please this doll by crying again, words began tumbling out instead. “Sometimes she stays in bed,” she told her. “That’s all. Sometimes she gets so tired she can’t get up, and then she stays in bed. But she doesn’t
leave
me.”

“And what do you do when your mother stays in bed?” Regina asked, still in that soft-iron voice. “Who takes care of you?”

Zoey shook her head from side to side as though she were trying to shake away flies buzzing at her. But she answered anyway. “There used to be a neighbor from across the hall,” she said. “Her name was Mrs. Lane. She’d come get me when she heard …”

She stopped.

“When she heard what?” the doll asked.

“When she heard me cry,” Zoey answered, her chin thrust out like a battering ram. “I was little, so I used to cry. But I don’t do that anymore. Besides, Mrs. Lane moved away, so now I take care of myself.”

“You really do? You take care of yourself?” Princess Regina couldn’t help but be impressed. For all of her long life, despite her independence, she knew there was little she could do without one or the other of these enormous girls. Why, she couldn’t even reach her throne room by herself!

“I get myself dressed for school,” Zoey told her. “I wash my face and brush my hair. And I eat Cheerios from the box. I like Cheerios best that way, anyway. When Mama’s there, she makes me eat them with milk.”

Regina had never eaten, not Cheerios or anything else, but somehow she understood the difference between cereal straight from the box and cereal with milk. Even if you liked it straight from the box, you wanted your mother to insist on milk.

Princess Regina was beginning to understand many things.

“Your mother’s name is Rose,” she said. It was a statement rather than a question.

Tears brimmed, then tumbled down Zoey’s cheeks.

You might expect that the little doll would have rushed to catch the life-giving
moisture. After all, now she knew how much she needed it.

But she didn’t. The understanding that was dawning was so huge, so heavy, that the weight of it made her sit down hard on the pillow.

This girl—this brave, lonely girl—was just like her. She, too, could be frightened … and angry … and lost. She could even go still inside!

Princess Regina reached up to touch her own eyes. For some strange reason they were stinging.

Her eyes had always
seen
perfectly well. At least they saw everything she wanted to see when she was awake. They had seen sunshine and pink and her own image in a mirror. They had shut against giant faces thrust too close to hers. But this was the first time they had ever stung like this.

And it was certainly the first time her own eyes had ever made tears.

“Oh!” Princess Regina said.

And Zoey said “Oh!” too.

Because, as the tears fell, the most amazing transformation was taking place. The perfect china doll was suddenly … well, less than perfect. A little freckle appeared here, a tiny mole there. Her golden hair dulled, just a bit. One fingernail actually seemed to be a bit jagged.

But beneath the tears, her vivid blue eyes sparked with life.

“I … I’m
soft,”
Regina said, holding up a tiny arm. “My skin is soft!”

“You’re alive,” Zoey said, lifting the doll in the palm of her hand and wiping away the minuscule tears with her thumb. “You’ve cried, and now you’re alive!”

And then, completely forgetting her proper role as servant, Zoey gave the princess a tender kiss.

To the princess’s own surprise, she kissed Zoey back.