“Your parents will be, too,” he says.
“But not Aunt Hannah,” I say. “Not Lee.”
“They’ll understand,” he says. “They deserve to know the truth.”
I take another bite of ice cream, but the taste is gone. “It’s not just about her,” I say.
“What do you mean?” He slurps the ice cream off his spoon.
Don’t say it, Chelsea, I think. Don’t say it. But I have to tell someone. They’re in my heart and my head and now they’re in my throat, bursting out. They’re too strong and too big to keep inside me. “Dee had two kids,” I say. “They’re still there, with him. If I tell anyone anything, he’ll kill them. That’s what he said he’d do, and I believe it. If you knew him, you would, too.” My voice shakes as I say it, and then something snaps inside me. I take another bite of ice cream without tasting it. I am looking in on this scene from outside the car. I am watching calmly. A boy in the car almost chokes on a bite of ice cream. He spits it back into his cup. The girl takes another bite.
• • •
When Lola was first born, before she was old enough to be a person, Kyle mostly treated her like she was his precious doll. He didn’t get angry with her often, not when she cried all night and kept us all awake or stunk up our whole tiny cabin, or needed feeding and bathing and watching. Kyle would hold her and coo to her and change her diaper. It was like he was Lola’s father and, even though I was only eleven, I was her mother. When he wasn’t hitting me or throwing my food away, there were times when I could almost forget. Times when for a few minutes or an hour or even a day, I could believe we were a family. It was one of those times he told me about his.
He was sitting at the table, holding her in his arms. She squirmed and reached for his face, and he smiled that huge smile, and his eyes laughed.
“Aren’t you a doll?” he cooed. “Aren’t you?”
“She’s better than a doll,” I said. I was sweeping the wood floor of the cabin, and I clutched my broom. Why did I say that? But Kyle didn’t get angry.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, you are.” He wrapped his arms around her and turned in his chair. Stacie was sitting on the bed. She watched all of us but said nothing. “When I was a kid, they were my favorite things.” He looked at me, then at Lola. I’d never seen him smile like that, as if he was actually happy.
“You had dolls then?” I asked. I’d never thought about him as a kid. It didn’t seem possible. Based on his face, I guessed he was in his twenties now. But how could someone so large have ever been small?
“My sister had dolls,” he said. “Boys aren’t supposed to have dolls. Are they?” He poked Lola in the stomach. She giggled. “But then she died and Mommy didn’t want to throw them out. Daddy wanted to but Mommy didn’t, so she hid them in my room. Didn’t she?”
The broom twitched in my hands, but I couldn’t make myself sweep. If his sister died, that was sad. But he didn’t act sad.
“Daddy caught me with one once. She was a Barbie. Cowgirl Barbie, with the little vest. She had high-heeled boots for her little high-heeled feet.” He rubbed Lola’s bare foot. She giggled again. “He hit me with his brown belt. That’s how I got the scar on my back. You’ve seen it, Stacie.”
I’d seen it, too. He got dressed in front of both of us. But he looked at Stacie now. His eyes searched for her. His mouth closed up small so it didn’t look like a clown mouth anymore. It looked almost normal.
Stacie nodded and looked away.
I ran the broom across the floor. I had completely lost track of the pile of dirt.
“Barbie was my friend, and he took her away. But I had other friends, didn’t I?” His eyes moved to the row of dolls lined up on top of the bookshelf and spilling over onto the bed. There were three more Barbies in that row.
“What about your mom?” Stacie asked. “Did she hit you, too?” She didn’t quite look at him when she said it, but there was an edge to her voice, mean.
“Mommy wanted Felicity back, didn’t she?” He grinned at Lola. His clown face was back. “She wished it had been me and not her who got so sick. All your daddy had was his dolls, baby, isn’t that right? But now he has you, and you’re better than a doll, aren’t you?”
I kept sweeping. I was making a new pile of dirt, but every time I tried to sweep more dirt into it, I would sweep too hard, and the whole thing would break up. Kyle had bad parents. Maybe that explained why he was this way. But that didn’t make it right. We weren’t dolls; we were people.
“Sounds like your parents didn’t love you,” Stacie said. If I had said that, he would have hit me. But nothing she said ever made him angry like that.
“Some people are supposed to love you and play with you and treat you nice,” Kyle told Lola. “But if they don’t, they get what they deserve. Yes they do.”
I kept sweeping.
Stacie didn’t say anything. I didn’t look up to see what was on her face. I could hear her breathing, though. She had a little bit of a cold, and she wheezed, in and out, wheeze, in and out.
“They never knew, did they? One night they were having dinner like every day and by bedtime Daddy got to be alone with his dolls. And everything in the whole house belonged to him. Just like how things are now, isn’t that right?”
Lola began to cry. Kyle stood up, cradling her in his arms, and brought her over to Stacie. He set Lola down on the bed, and Stacie put one arm around her. The arm was shaking.
I swept faster, trying not to think about what Kyle had just said. Kyle had just told us that he murdered his parents, and he hadn’t even blinked an eye.
• • •
That night, I lay on my cot next to the double bed, and I tried to imagine what Kyle’s parents had been like. Had they looked like him, big people with little heads? Was his dad a bad man, too, or had Kyle made it all up? How did Kyle’s sister die? I wondered if I should have been sad about some of it, if Kyle’s past was supposed to be tragic. But Kyle didn’t seem upset. He acted like he got everything he ever wanted. I could hear Stacie breathing, and I knew she was awake. I wished we could talk about it because maybe if we could at least talk about it I would be less scared. But he was between us, and we couldn’t risk waking him up. No, it wasn’t we who couldn’t risk it; it was me.
Kyle would only kill Stacie if I ran away, if I told anyone. She was his doll, and as long as she was his and no one tried to take her, she’d stay alive. But Kyle never wanted me. He had no reason to keep me at all.
Lola was in her crib, which was at the foot the bed. I wished I could hold her, but I couldn’t risk waking her up either.
Kyle was going to kill me. Someday, he’d decide to do it. I have to make sure he needs me, I thought. He needs me to take care of Lola. I couldn’t clutch Stacie or Lola or anyone, so I clutched my blanket. I wrapped my arms around it like it could protect me. And I shook so hard the cot vibrated beneath me.
• • •
Now that somebody knows, I’m not sure what I should do. Vinnie said he wouldn’t tell anyone, but I don’t know if I can trust him. I think he’s a good guy, and he will probably want to do what’s right, but he might not understand what that is. He might think the right thing is to run over to Aunt Hannah and tell her. I reach into my Safeway bag and hold on to the Stacie doll. We’re still in Vinnie’s car, and now we’re sitting outside my house. I have a stack of books in my bag, too. They’ve squashed Stacie a little bit.
Why did I tell him? I am bad at keeping things inside. I used to think I was good at it, before. I was the one who didn’t talk as much. But I couldn’t hold back what I knew about Stacie being pregnant. She could have gone on for months pretending that it wasn’t true, but I had to ruin it for her by saying it out loud, and now I might have ruined everything. Why couldn’t I keep my mouth shut?
I wish that if you didn’t say something, then it wouldn’t be true. But it’s all true
whether I say it or not.
“I had fun today, hanging out,” Vinnie says. Apparently he’s decided to ignore the part where I dissolved into tears and burdened him with my secrets.
“Me too,” I say. “Thanks for teaching me how to drive.” I’m crushing the Stacie doll with one hand, and I pull my bag in close to my body. I’m staring out the car window at the mailbox with MacArthur on it. Something I didn’t notice before is that the lettering is fading. Pieces of the red paint are chipped off, too. If I weren’t looking, that red paint would still be chipped.
“I’d never say anything,” he says. “If it was, like, my mom or somebody I had to protect, I wouldn’t tell anyone either.”
“I don’t want them to grow up with him,” I say. “But the second he sees anyone coming, they’ll be dead.” I don’t look at him. I keep looking at the mailbox.
“If you tell, I’ll kill them.”
The door slams.
I stumble down the three steps.
I know Kyle’s kind of love. Once, I thought I was the one he’d kill, because he didn’t want me. But now I know it’s the other way. He let me go because he never wanted to own me. I was the buy one, get one free. But the things that are his: Stacie, Lola, Barbie. They’re his or they’re no one’s.
• • •
Lola, a baby, less than a year old, crawling.
Stacie, sitting in the kitchen chair, watching her cross from where she was sitting toward the door.
Me, at the stove, cooking chicken. Pieces I’d just cut up, the cutting board and knife in the sink, smeared with goo from chicken innards. The chicken beginning to sizzle, bits to pop.
Kyle, opening the door.
It opened in, and it whooshed in front of Lola. She began to cry, falling back on her butt. She yowled.
Kyle picked her up off the floor. “Oh, did I scare you, baby?” he cooed. He bounced her, but she kept yowling. Her cries grew louder. “Baby, baby, baby,” Kyle said, but it did no good. The door was still standing open, cold night air blowing in. I walked around the edge of the counter, past Stacie, ready to take her, but he carried her outside, walked down the three steps from the porch to the driveway.
We all heard it at the same time, the roar of a car engine, the grating of tires over gravel.
Kyle turned back toward me, gripped Lola tighter, and made a motion with his arm.
I slammed the door shut.
“What is it?” Stacie asked, standing. “It’s someone—someone’s found us.” Her eyes lit.
We grabbed hands. It was the first time in months we’d done that. We rushed to the window and looked out. A car was pulling up the hill.
Kyle stared straight at us through the window. He put a hand around Lola’s tiny neck and very slowly, shook his head.
• • •
“Maybe the cops know how to deal with people like that,” Vinnie says. “Maybe they can talk him out of it. They do it on TV all the time. There’s this guy who gets on the phone with the bad guy inside the building, and the bad guy sweats, and all the hostages cry, and then at the last minute everyone gets out okay.”
I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that on TV. I guess I’ve missed a lot of shows in the last six years.
“But you know him,” Vinnie says. “It’s up to you.”
I can’t go inside. Not with this rattling around in my mind. Not when I went and said it out loud, and now someone is talking to me about it, out loud. But there’s nowhere else for me to go. I wish Vinnie would start driving again and we could speed out of here, and I would never have to face my mom or my dad or Jay or Aunt Hannah or Lee. I would never have to see in their eyes how much they want to know the truth or face maybe being dragged in front of a judge. I would have to keep lying my whole life, but I wouldn’t have to lie to the people I care about. It’s hard to keep lying to them.
Especially when I made that choice, when I saw the look in Kyle’s eyes that night, when we saw that car nosing up toward us. When I grabbed Stacie and pulled her down, so no one would see us in the window.
“You wanted her,” she said to me.
“No,” I said. But I held her hands. I held them and stared into her eyes, and she stared back. She knew the choice I made that day.
• • •
I push the Stacie doll down to the bottom of my Safeway bag. “I can’t tell them,” I say. “You can’t tell them either.”
“I won’t,” Vinnie says. And I believe it. I have to.
SIX YEARS IS A LONG TIME. It’s a long time to be constantly terrified and angry and sad. Sometimes if you want to survive, you have to make the best out of whatever kind of life you have. I could have refused to take care of the babies. I could have refused to let Kyle call me Chelsea, and I could have kept calling Stacie Dee. I could have let him throw my food away and starved to death.
I could have jumped in between Stacie and him every time he did it to her and let him knock me to the ground. I could have made him kill me.
In the moments when he smiled, when he showed a little bit of affection, I could have turned away. I could have spit in his weird little clown face.
But I wanted to live. I wanted to have moments when the world wasn’t dark and angry and sad. I wanted to have something to love.
• • •
The bathroom door opened. That was how Kyle would do it. He didn’t care what you were doing in there. If he wanted to come in, he would just come. I could feel him standing above me. He blocked out half the light from the little bulb hanging from the ceiling. I was twelve now. Lola was a year and half old, and Stacie was pregnant again with Barbie. She wasn’t too far along yet, though. We were both trying to pretend it wasn’t true.
I couldn’t help myself. I retched again. I had been sick for an hour, ever since I ate the last of the bologna as a midnight snack. I didn’t look at him as he came in. I didn’t want to hear the lecture. Somehow it was my fault that I was sick. It could never be his fault, for buying old bologna from the half-price bin. We could never have sugar or white bread, but old processed meat, which happened to be really cheap, was no problem. He never saw any inconsistency in that, because whatever he did always made sense to him.
“Are you all right?” he asked. He sat down on the floor behind me. His legs were so long that one of his feet knocked against my rear as he adjusted himself.
“Bologna,” I whispered. “Was bad.” Here it comes, I thought. I leaned forward against the toilet, waiting to see if there was any more in me. Maybe if I kept throwing up he would at least not come any closer.
“Oh.” He shifted himself, and his foot knocked against me again.
I thought I was done throwing up, so I closed the toilet lid and stood up. When I turned around, I saw that there were tears in Kyle’s eyes.
“I was thinking about my sister,” he said.
I turned on the tap and filled a glass with water, hoping it wouldn’t come back up again.
“Felicity was a beautiful little girl,” he said. “Everybody said so. They gave her all the dolls. The pretty ones. Those were the ones she liked.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure if he even wanted me to say anything. So I sat down on the toilet lid and sipped the water.
“They looked at me like I did it, but I didn’t. I didn’t mean to. Nobody ever died from the flu before.” His shoe squeaked against the bathroom tile as he shifted himself again. “Like I wanted to get the flu and then give it to her so she would die, that’s how they looked at me.”
I took another sip of water. He was really crying now, tears rolling down his face. With Kyle, you could never be sure what tears meant. Sometimes he might be sad, but sometimes he was angry. When Kyle cried, you never knew what he might do.
“I never wanted it to happen. Just because I wanted her dolls, that doesn’t mean I wanted her to die, does it?�
� He looked up at me. “I loved . . . she was . . . it was just the flu. Nobody dies from it. Nobody.” He began sobbing, huffing and snorting and making noise.
I set down my glass of water and tore a few sheets of toilet paper from the roll. I handed them to him.
He took the toilet paper and blew his nose.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. I’d learned by now to say whatever I thought he wanted to hear. I knew the truth didn’t set you free, it got you hurt.
“But they thought it was.” He wiped his face with both hands.
So you killed them.
“They were supposed to love me.” He sobbed into his hands. His fingernails were thick and yellow. He dug them into his forehead. “If they had just loved me like they were supposed to . . .”
“It’s not your fault,” I said again.
“It’s not,” he said. “It was them.” He removed his hands from his face. His red eyes stared at me. “You know I would never hurt you,” he said.
“I . . .” I swallowed, trying to keep myself from retching again. The water I had just drunk churned in my empty stomach.
“Anyone who loves me back, I would never hurt them. You and Stacie, and Lola, and all the dolls, I would never hurt any of you.”
“Okay,” I said. Except raping Stacie, hitting me, starving us all. None of us will ever love you. The truth stuck in my throat, trying to push its way out like the bad bologna. I swallowed it with more water.
“We’re all going to be together,” he said. “Forever. A real family.”
Forever. Until he dies, I thought. Someday, he’ll die.
Stacie stood in the doorway, holding Lola. “She wants you,” Stacie said, and she set the baby on the floor.
“Dada!” Lola said, crawling toward him. “Dada!”
Kyle scooped her up off the ground. “Well, hello, baby.” He smiled at her, full big clown smile.
Stacie disappeared from the doorway.
“You are never going to get sick,” he said, cradling Lola. “You are never going to get the flu or eat any bad bologna. You are never going to be sad. You are going to know that people love you. Me and your mommy and your Auntie Chel. We all love you, and we’ll keep you safe.”
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