The Empress Chronicles

by Suzy Vitello

  I thought a lot about Dr. Greta’s whiplash from seeing Empress Elisabeth as an object lesson for my improvement and healing to a source of regret. She went from wanting me to learn from this historic cautionary tale to stripping the story away from me. And I kept thinking, was it that suddenly the story about the thing was too close to the thing itself? Was the truth too painful for her?

  She always spoke of the merits of desensitization for OCD cases. Engage! And now, with my interest in Sisi’s story, I did just that. I wanted into the middle of the mess. I wanted to read her diary and find out what made her crazy and sad, beyond what was written in Death by Fame. Cory knew a little about her legend. He told me, “They called her the Reluctant Empress. She was this bohemian chick forced into this super strict monarchy role. She hated it.”

  The ripped-out diary pages I made Cory read over and over to me referred to a “magical faerie.” Some soothsayer named Lolo or Lola or Lila. It was hard to tell with the smudges. And Sisi had some nervous rash that broke out all over her hands. She tried to hide them.

  “Who does that sound like?” Cory said.

  And there was more. As he was wont to do, Cory dribbled out little trivia nuggets as they invaded his memory. “Her family invented Oktoberfest,” he informed me while we packaged the umpteenth half pound of fennel-crusted chèvre. And, “They were all inbred. Cousins marrying cousins. There were problems with their genes. Insanity and whatnot.”

  The obsession of my obsessive-compulsive disorder was all about that diary. I had to see it, the whole of it. I had to hold her in my hands, Sisi, read what she wrote. I had to know what happened to the man she loved and how she allowed herself to be married off to someone she didn’t. I had to know if, like Dad, she had a disconnect between what she loved and what she was good at. What was the story? What was the thing itself?

  And Cory understood. He knew without prying why I had to know. And together we hatched a plan.

  “I’m not only entrusting you with my car, dude, but with my daughter,” Dad says, handing Cory the keys to his Volvo. With the fair a week away, he and Willow are 24/7 with the cheese. Dad’s building the booth, and Cory, with years of Waldorf woodworking under his belt, crafted a beautiful burl counter, sanded and varnished and gleaming.

  “Don’t park anywhere near the route or you’ll get towed,” Dad cautions. “And no drinking. Of course.”

  So on parade night, I find myself sitting a bucket seat away from Cory. Sort of like a date. The boy smell of him mixed with Axe, the same smell the boys at Lincoln splatter on. His hair gelled into spikes. He cleaned up. Did he do that for me? I don’t want to know the answer. But I sort of do.

  I cleaned up too. Well, actually, girled up. I used some of Willow’s sparkle dust and had found an ancient tube of Maybelline mascara I had to add water to, to make it turn back to liquid. My hair, there wasn’t much I could do. I tried a barrette, but that looked like one of those baldy bands moms strap on their hairless infants’ heads so people know they’re female. I shoved on one of Willow’s knitted berets. I have a little bit of the French waif thing going on. Skinny as a heroin addict, so maybe, by some stretch of the imagination, I look hot. To someone.

  But really, tonight is not just about looking pretty. I’m wearing running shoes and leggings because tonight is really about dexterity and mobility and I’d better not have one of my clumsy spells. “You got the tools, right?” I ask Cory.

  “You just keep your end of the bargain, missy, and leave the B and E to me.”

  “B and E?”

  “For a genius, you’re kind of dumb,” he says, then leans toward me and whispers in my ear, “but still cute.”

  My head and stomach plow together and I feel like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on that holiday cartoon when the girl reindeer calls him cute and he flies for the first time, red glowing nose and all. My hands are sweaty. I’m smiling inside my chest, and I stay like that all the way to the edge of town, where we park the car on a side street in Northwest Portland close to the streetcar and make a dash for my old neighborhood.

  We slip onto the bright orange streetcar along with moms and dads and strollers and grandparents and teenagers from the burbs, sporting Beaverton and Gresham hoodies, carrying blankets and folding chairs and cartons of sidewalk chalk and Styrofoam coolers and umbrellas because the forecast called for a seventy percent chance of rain, like it always does on Darknights Parade night.

  Cory wears a big overcoat with pockets, where he’s stuffed screwdrivers and a pry bar and other things he uses to pick locks. In one of the pockets, I placed my ingestion log, my iPod, my phone. He looks a little like Oliver Twist’s Artful Dodger, but not that different than the hipsters from AHA! who prowl thrift shops for yesterday’s castoffs. I like the idea that the people around us most likely think Cory and I are a couple. That I’m just another teenage girl going to the parade with my boyfriend.

  “I lived there—” I point to a building as we squeal by “—and there—” I point to another.

  Cory wags his face at all the lofts I point out. He says, “It’s a little like Berlin.”

  When we get off the streetcar, I realize that this tiny rehabbed section of Portland must seem stupid and provincial to someone who’s lived in Europe. “Did you like it?” I ask. “Living in Germany?”

  “Some aspects.”

  And then, because I’m an idiot, I blurt, “Did you have a girlfriend there?”

  He looks at me and his dimple broadens. He chuckles but doesn’t answer, because the light to cross Burnside has just turned green and we need to work our way through the throngs of people before the light turns again. Dusk has settled; the parade will start up soon. We have work to do.

  Jitters are jumping my stomach around. It’s a mixture of Cory being there right beside me, the big, solid boy of him, and what we are about to do, which is illegal. I don’t like breaking laws and rules; I’m not very good at it. And here I am, doing two things I’m not very good at—having a crush and breaking the law all at the same time.

  The last crush I had was at Providence. One of the dual-diagnosis boys. Boys like him can sniff out girls who’ll do things they want, and that’s how this boy was. He caught me spitting food into a napkin, and he cornered me during rec time, when the nurse was called out to deal with a seizure someone was having. He asked me if I’d ever felt a boner, and I said, yeah, at school, during the S.T.A.R.S. program. He laughed and told me if I didn’t touch his, he’d tell the nurse about me hurling my mashed potatoes. Luckily, just as I reached over toward his lap, my eyes squeezed shut, the male attendant burst through the door to write down the portions still left on our plates. Saved by the clipboard.

  When we get to the place on 10th where the lion statues sit on either side of the staircase, it’s swarmed with people there on the steps. No chance will that building be unlocked. The Portland police are stationed every few families, looking for potential looters or pickpockets. Cory looking how he looks, and me in my French heroin-addict outfit, we stick out big time.

  “There’s a fire escape on the side of the building,” I tell Cory. “But we’ll probably have to wait to go over there until the parade’s in full force.”

  “You brought your cell, right?”

  I point to the pocket of his coat where it’s nestled next to my iPod. That’s our agreement. I’m going to hook him up. Even though I don’t break rules, I know kids who do. Finding weed in Portland, Oregon, if you’re a teenager—even a nerdy one like me—isn’t much tougher than finding a coffee shop.

  “Why don’t you make some calls while we wait?” Cory says.

  This distractedness annoys me. I want him to be as into finding this diary as I am. After all, he’s the one who’s been piquing my interest with all his anecdotes about Bavaria and the Habsburg dynasty.

  Plus, I love that Cory and I are going to be sleuths together. When we hatched our plan, he taught me a German swear phrase he said we could
use if we were caught: Gefickt werden, he said, meant we’re in deep doo-doo. It would be our code if trouble was coming.

  But now he seems less interested in finding out more about Sisi and more enthusiastic about getting a supply of smoke.

  “Fine,” I say as I wiggle my cell from his pocket.

  I leave a bunch of voicemails while faint marching-band sounds grow closer and louder. Hucksters selling glowing plastic tubes that kids fasten around their necks are barking their wares. Some guy strides by selling sponge dogs on wire leashes. A drunk is pretending to be in the parade; bare chested, he walks down the center of the street, thrusting a small branch into the air. He trips and the branch hits him in the face, and his lip leaks blood. The police gather him up and haul him away.

  “A couple more of those incidents and we’ll be cop-free,” says Cory hopefully.

  Parades make me nervous—crowds, people, entropy. I feel on edge with the prospect of someone rubbing up against me. Dr. Greta’s office building is a prime view spot near the end of the parade, and in the twenty minutes we stand here more and more people flood in. I take an extra half a Xanax, but the crowd is still making me nervous, so I inch closer to Cory and slip my phone back into the pocket of his coat.

  It’s dark now. A marching band that includes an ensemble of lit-up umbrellas announces the true start of the parade. A little mist of rain rewards the umbrella act, and in the crowd some people begin to hoist their own rain shields. This, of course, causes a lot of shuffling. Some arguments break out about umbrellas blocking views. A large soccer-mom type in a maroon velvet tracksuit actually reaches out and snatches an umbrella that snapped up in front of her brood. A scuffle. Swearing. More scuffling, and soon some cops are engaged in breaking up the squabble.

  “What’d I tell ya?” Cory says, grabbing my hand and leading me to the back of the building.

  Like most buildings on the parade route, this one has its share of observers. If you have access to view from inside during the rainy Rose Festival parade season, you take it. When Cory and I look up at the bottom of the fire escape, we see windows full of onlookers. But of course, Dr. Greta’s window is dark.

  “Too public,” Cory says, ruling out the fire-escape plan. “We’ll just have to go in the front like we own the place.”

  We make our way back to the front steps, hopscotching over and around families, and creep our way up to the front door just behind an elderly gentleman and his much younger female companion. “He’s got something else on his mind,” Cory whispers. “He won’t notice us sneaking in behind him.”

  Cory holds the door ajar with the rubber edge of his big old skater shoe, and I practice acting casual, standing in front of him, watching a casino-themed float filled with Native Americans rumble past. The banner on the float reads The Spirit of the Great West Is Alive and Well.

  We wait a couple more floats before slipping inside and, lucky for us, the lobby is completely empty. “Third floor,” I tell Cory once we step in the elevator. Unlike the Pearl, where elevator buttons can’t be activated without a magnetic key, Dr. Greta’s ancient office building has open access to any floor.

  When we get to the end of the hall of the third floor, the big red HELLO, Cory says, “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if someone pried off the O?”

  Nothing is original, I guess. “Hilarious,” I say. “Now do your magic.”

  Cory looks around the hall. Nobody there. But his eyes linger on the ceiling.

  I ask, “What?”

  “Checking for cameras.”

  “There are none. This is the building time forgot. Like way back in the twentieth century. They still use fax machines in these offices.”

  “Point taken,” he says.

  He unsheathes a long, thin screwdriver-looking tool and wiggles it in the lock and in less time than it takes to put up an umbrella, we’re inside the crazy person’s green room, the vacant space where the fish tank used to be still looking sad, empty and wrong.

  “There’s lots of magazines with scantily clad middle-aged women in here,” Cory marvels, picking up a More.

  “Put that down! C’mon, Cory, get us in the office.”

  It turns out that Cory doesn’t need to take out his screwdriver again, because the door to Dr. Greta’s office is unlocked. We walk into the dark space, and I immediately trip over the small table where I usually set down my coffee, if I have one.

  “Nice job, Nancy Drew,” Cory whispers, sort of half-laughing.

  We stand still for a bit to let our eyes adjust, while trumpets blow fight songs and kettledrums pound enough to rattle the plaster. There is just enough light from outside, and slowly, dark, hulking shapes appear in the room. I point to the glass cabinet, and Cory rattles the front panel that serves as its entry.

  “Locked up tight,” he says. He brings out an ever increasingly smaller series of widgets and tools, but nothing budges the little lock.

  Cory folds his arms and cocks his head. If I were brave and not freaked out and prettier and not riddled with memories of Jeremy and how idiotic I was, now is when I would move up to in front of Cory’s face, close enough for our noses to almost touch. I would bat my Maybelline eyelashes under my knitted beret and wait for him to lean in and kiss me. But I’m not brave or pretty. I’m freaked out and anxious. And Sisi’s diary is so close. Just behind a thin pane of glass. I’m almost desperate enough to suggest we break the glass when Cory reaches over to me and takes off my beret and sets it down on Dr. Greta’s desk.

  Really? I freeze, close my eyes, and in four seconds that seems like an hour, a whole infomercial plays in my head:

  Pucker up, close your eyes, not that way, this way! Now, for a limited time, you have the attention of a boy. Not just any boy, but the cutest boy ever. And he speaks German to boot!

  And just when I’m about to turn off the infomercial and raise my arms up to put them around Cory’s neck, a la Jeremy, he reaches into my tufted hair and yanks out a bobby pin.

  “Best tool in the whole damn world,” Cory says, right before adding “Ta-da!” when the curio cabinet glass squeaks the sound of success.

  I open my eyes. Instead of Cory’s face in front of mine, my gaze tracks immediately to the diary, lying there, just waiting for me to grab it. The touch of Cory’s hand in my hair lingers, and combined with the treasure in front of me, a tingle snakes through my entire body. But I can’t even bring myself to reach inside the cabinet, so I point at the worn little book, its bald velvet cover and yellow-brown pages so fragile. Cory, with his large, gentle paws, plucks it like a rose amid a thorny bush and places it in my waiting hands.

  I just stand there in one place, my breath and heartbeat all I can hear, even with the parade outside.

  “You’re welcome.” Cory smirks.

  “S-s-sorry,” I stammer. “I’m really sort of dizzy.”

  Cory reaches back into one of his large coat pockets and pulls out my ingestion log. I already scored the sides of the binding from the front and back covers in preparation for the switch. Cory hands me the food diary, along with his pocketknife. It’s up to me to perform the second surgery, the one where I cut Sisi’s pages from the worn cover. Silently, I call on help from the patron saints of the utterly spastic.

  I run the blade behind the ancient, stiff pages at the spine and slice down. Cory talks me through it like a surgeon might an intern. The pages severing from the binding make a tearing sound, like cardboard but more brittle. I can see the faint markings of black writing on brownish-yellow paper, my heart like the snare drums beneath us.

  “Push just a little more; you almost have it,” Cory whispers, his mouth so close to my ear.

  And then, one final slice, it’s loose! I take the empress chronicles, the bundle of thoughts and feelings and secrets, and insert them into the cover of my food diary, where they join the two pages I’d ripped from the diary earlier. Next, I take the empty pages from my food diary and cram them into the velvet binding of
the empress book, but there’s something lumpy where I cut the pages loose.

  Cory sees me struggling and pushes my hand away. “Wait,” he says, “There’s a hunk of metal or a blade inside.”

  I run my finger along the inside of the spine, and, sure enough, there’s a sharp point poking through.

  Cory puts his hand over mine. “Be careful there. It could be some rusty jagged thing, and I know you have trouble with sharp objects.”

  His hand touching my hand sends a fiery missile from his touch to my brain. He knows me.

  He takes the old binding from me and walks it over to the light in the window. He turns his pocketknife into tweezers with one quick flick of his boy ability and, as though extracting a splinter, pulls out a tarnished piece of metal on a long chain. “What the …”

  But we don’t have time for further examination because just then we hear the sound of the outer door to the waiting room opening. And at that very moment, my cell phone jangles in my pocket. Just like that, Cory drops the metal relic into his coat pocket, shoves the empty pages into the old binding and crams the decoy diary back into the cabinet. He hops over to the window, thrusts it open, then grabs my free hand, while my other hand holds tight to my treasure. Out to the fire escape we crawl, and then Cory closes the window behind us.

  “Oh, no,” I remember. “The hat. It’s still on her desk!” A sick feeling washes over me, replacing the electric jolt of Cory touching my hand.

  Cory whispers, “Gefickt werden!” Then, “Luckily, nobody would connect you with that lame hat.”

  We scramble down the escape, while beneath us the Portland General Electric float lights up the sky with its alternative-energy message. I hear my phone ring, but I’m not about to reach into Cory’s pocket and risk dropping the book, and once we hit solid ground again, I realize that it’s raining more seriously. “It’ll get ruined!” I cry.