They had pizza that evening, the girls’ favorite. When they’d fallen asleep on their mattresses on the floor of the little apartment that cost six thousand five hundred a month, and which she at that particular moment had no idea how she was going to pay the next month’s rent on, the mom sat up on her own in the darkness. It wasn’t long to Christmas, then it would be New Year, she knew how much the girls were looking forward to the fireworks. It was tearing her apart that they still trusted her, unaware of how many things she’d failed at. When dawn came she packed their backpacks, and a notebook fell out of her eldest daughter’s. She was about to put it back, but it fell open at a page that began with the words: “The Princess with Two Kingdoms.” At first the mom felt annoyed, because she had spent their whole lives trying to persuade her daughters not to want to be princesses—she hoped they’d want to be warriors. And because the girls loved their mom, of course they did as she wanted, or at least pretended to, then did the exact opposite, because it’s the duty of children not to pay the slightest bit of attention to their parents. The eldest daughter had been told to write a fairy tale of her own for school, so she wrote “The Princess with Two Kingdoms.” It was about a princess who lived in a big, beautiful castle, and one night the princess found a hole in the floor under her bed, and down inside the hole was a secret, magical world full of strange, fantastical creatures, dragons and trolls and other things her daughter must have thought up herself. Things so fantastical that the imagination and flight from reality that lay behind them crushed the mother, because all she kept thinking was: How terrible must your real life feel to require this much… escape? All the creatures were happy, they lived in peace, and there was no pain in their little world. But the princess in the story soon uncovered a terrible truth: that the magical realm she had found, where all her new friends lived, was actually located between two castles in two different kingdoms. One of them was ruled by a king, the other by a queen, and they were fighting a horrible war against each other. They sent their armies to fight and fire terrible weapons, but the walls of both kingdoms were too tall and strong to give way, and in the end the girl realized that the war wasn’t going to destroy either of them. It would just ruin and kill everything that lay between them. And that was when she learned the truth: that the king and queen were her parents. She was their princess, and the entire war was about her, they were each trying to beat the other with the sole aim of winning her back. When the mom read the last words of the story, her daughters were just starting to wake up on their mattresses, and everything that was worth anything inside her shattered. The story ended with the princess saying good-bye to all her new friends and setting off, alone. She disappeared into the darkness one night and never came back again. Because she knew that if she disappeared, there would be nothing left to fight over. That way she would be able to save both kingdoms and the realm in between.

* * *

When her daughters had gotten up, the mom had breakfast with them, trying to act as if nothing were wrong. She dropped them off at school, then walked all the way back, out onto the bridge, and stood there in the middle of it, holding on to the padlock as tightly as she could.

She didn’t fight her ex-husband for her old home, she didn’t argue with her former boss about her job, she didn’t clash with their lawyer, didn’t fire any weapons, didn’t cause chaos. For the sake of the children. She did all she could to prevent any of the adults’ mistakes from affecting them. That doesn’t explain why she tried to rob a bank. It doesn’t excuse it. But maybe you’ve had the occasional really bad idea, too. Maybe you deserved a second chance. Maybe you’re not alone in that.

* * *

On the morning of the day before New Year’s Eve she left home with a pistol. That same evening, right now, she is walking back. A few hours after the hostage drama that the town will be talking about for many, many years to come, the mom picks up her daughters and asks: “Have you had a nice time at Dad’s?”

“Yes, Mom! How about you?” the youngest daughter asks.

The mom smiles, thinks for a moment, then shrugs: “Oh, you know… nothing much has happened. Everything’s been the same as usual.”

But as they cross the bridge the mom puts one hand gently on her eldest daughter’s shoulder and whispers quickly into her ear: “You’re my princess, and my warrior, you can be both at the same time—promise me that you’ll never forget that. I know I’m not always such a great mom, but the fact that your dad and I are getting divorced isn’t you… you must never think, even for a single second that this is… your…” The eldest daughter nods, blinking away tears. The younger calls to them to hurry up and they run after her, their mom wipes her face and asks if they’d like pizza for supper, and the younger one cries out: “Do bears poop in the woods, or what?!”

Just after they fall asleep that night, in their mom’s new home in the apartment of a kind and just-crazy-enough old lady called Estelle, the eldest daughter takes hold of her mom’s hand and whispers: “You’re a good mom, Mom. Don’t worry so much. It’s okay.”

* * *

And there they find it, at last: peace for the realm between the two kingdoms. All the magical, wonderful, made-up creatures can sleep safe and sound. Monkeys, frogs, elks, old ladies, everyone.

72

The new year arrives, which of course never means as much as you hope unless you happen to sell calendars. One day becomes another, now becomes then. Winter spreads out across the town like a relative with slightly too much self-confidence, the building on the other side of the road from the bank changes color in line with the temperature. It doesn’t look like much, of course, a gray building under its temporary white covering in a place where no one seems to choose to live but merely tolerates being stored. In a few years no doubt one of the locals will point to the door and tell some smug visitor from one of the big cities: “There was a hostage drama in there once.” The visitor will peer at the building and snort: “In there? Yeah, right!” Because things like that don’t happen in a town like this, everyone knows that.

* * *

It’s a few days after New Year, and a woman is coming out of the door. She’s laughing, her two daughters are with her, and they’ve just said something that’s made them all laugh so hard that their noses are dripping amid the swirling snowflakes. They walk to the trash bin and dispose of a pizza box, then the woman suddenly looks up and stops mid-stride. One of her daughters starts to climb up her while the other one bounces up and down.

It’s getting late, the sky is January black and the falling snow is obscuring visibility, but she sees the police car on the other side of the street. Inside it are an older and a younger police officer. She stares at them, her daughters haven’t noticed her terror yet. All she can think is: Not in front of the girls. This takes a matter of seconds, but she manages to live two lifetimes. Theirs.

* * *

Then the police car rolls slowly toward her.