by Lois Ruby
My radar’s up. He’s checking to see if I’m crazy. “Yeah?”
“And that these dolls are doing some curious things.”
“Yeah.”
“Will you tell me about it?”
I can’t trust him, can I? I mean, he left us. But he’s right there across from me, and his eyes never leave my face, and he’s going to sit there for a week, a year, a century, until I open my mouth.
So I tell him about ugly, broken Miss Amelia; and Dotty Woman with her dandelion sprinkles on perfectly good food; and Baby Daisy; and the doll I locked in the drawer, Isabella, who might be Lady; and how the dolls don’t stay buried; and about the dollhouse and the baby drowned in the bathtub; and about revenge and Sadie, who felt unloved, and her notebook and invisible writing; and crazy Emily.
It probably takes an hour telling him all this, and he never says a word, never laughs at me or frowns or snorts, though I hear his stomach growl. He just listens. When I’ve dumped it all out, especially the hardest part about the voices calling me an angry, angry girl, he reaches across the table and takes my hand. The wind is whipping around us, my nose is running, and my feet are Popsicles, but I don’t care.
He’s been quiet so long that his voice is hoarse when he finally says something. “You are an angry girl, Shelby.”
My head snaps back. I thought he was on my side! But he’s not through.
“You have every right to be angry, because I’ve done a terrible thing to you and Brian. There’s no way I can make up for it, but I hope as time passes, you’ll be able to forgive me and realize that I love you just as much as I ever did.”
I don’t want to cry. Tears are catching in my throat.
“It’s a cliché. You know what a cliché is? It’s something that’s so common that it doesn’t sound sincere anymore, but it’s also true. Your mother and I got divorced, but I didn’t divorce you and Brian. Do you understand that?”
“I guess,” I mutter with a pout.
“Then that’s a beginning of our long road back to each other.”
He’s still clutching my hand as I snuff back thick tears. “Crazy Emily’s in a psycho hospital in Denver. Mom says I need professional help. Do you think I’m crazy?”
“I don’t. I believe all these weird things are really happening to you, but maybe there’s a reasonable explanation that we just haven’t come up with yet. Driving here today, I heard this amazing thing on the news about thirty-one South African elephants who walked miles and miles in single file, for days on end, to pay their respects to a man who’d died.”
“What do some elephants have to do with anything?”
“A lot. The guy who’d died had devoted his life to saving elephants in the wild. Now, how did all those elephants know when he died? How did they communicate to one another that they were going to make this twelve-mile pilgrimage? And how did they find their way to his house?”
“Maybe they’re smarter than people think. Maybe they’re smarter than people.”
“Or maybe,” Dad says, “there are just some things in this universe that can’t be explained, like your dolls. Hungry? Me too. I read about a good Mexican restaurant up the road in Walsenburg. Wanna go?”
I nod. And back in the car, it doesn’t feel as tense as it did when we started out.
Dad turns on the radio, and the car rocks with loud Spanish music to work up our appetites for enchiladas.
Dad and I decide not to drive all the way to Pueblo for a shopping mall. Besides, who shops with her father? So, while we’re here in Walsenburg, we needle the car into the Crown Lanes parking lot and go bowling, like we used to before. It feels okay. Almost. Dad hurls that ball down the lane like he’s trying to murder the pins and keeps getting a six-ten split.
After three games — me rolling my highest ever, a 114 — Dad drives me back to Cinder Creek to trade me in for Brian.
I’m shy about asking, but I do it anyway. “When are you coming back?”
He’s got Brian’s stuffed backpack slung over his shoulder when he answers, “I’ll talk to Mom. We’ll set a weekend every month, how ’bout that? My six-ten split needs some serious work.”
I’m smiling when they pull away, and then my heart goes empty because it’ll be a long time until I see Dad again, and I’m churning with jealousy that Brian gets him for the whole night.
Once they’re gone, I head back to Mr. Caliberti’s cottage. Still no answer. Terpsichore doesn’t even come to the window to glare at me. There’s only one place they might be. At the doll graveyard I find Mr. C pacing back and forth, stabbing the ground with his cane, with the cat marching right behind him.
His back’s to me. “Are you okay, Mr. Caliberti?” I ask as I get closer.
“Well, look at it!” He points at the little half-circle of graves. A gasp escapes my lips: Every single grave’s been dug up, and each one is empty.
The dolls are gone.
MY HEAD’S THUMPING WITH RAGE. WHO WOULD do such a terrible thing? My hands shake like Aunt Amelia’s used to, and I feel hot blood stampeding through my veins. “Did you do this, Mr. Caliberti?”
“Child, these old bones could not lower themselves to the ground for such high jinks and rise to tell about it. Do you see me up on my feet?”
Terpsichore is wound around Mr. Caliberti’s leg. That skinny cat couldn’t have done this much damage. Not even a big dog like Chester could have done it. Brian? That first day, when we reburied the Miss Amelia doll, and she somehow got out of the grave and up into the dollhouse — well, it’s possible Brian dug her out. He said he didn’t, and he seemed just as surprised by it all as I was. No, not even Brian would do this. But then, who did?
“Where are they, Mr. Caliberti?”
“A veritable conundrum.”
Whatever that is. The dolls must be up in the attic, but how? And more importantly, why? “Sadie’s dollhouse, I’ll bet that’s where they are.”
“Sadie’s legacy lives on,” Mr. Caliberti says with a sigh, and Terpsichore whines in agreement.
Letting the screen door slam good and solid, I fly into the house, almost past Mom, but she just has to trap me.
“How was your afternoon with your father?”
“Fine,” I say.
Mom twists the dishcloth in her hands and stares me down. “Did you tell him about the dolls?” I can’t tell if she’s just worried about me, or if she’s really worried I’ll stop hating him and she’ll lose me.
“He gets me, Mom. Unlike you, he doesn’t think I need a head doctor.”
Her face and shoulders sag. Oh no, now I’ve hurt her feelings. I reach out to hug her, and she pulls me tightly against her. I can hardly breathe, but it’s been a long time since she’s hugged me this hard. When I pull away, we both have tears in our eyes.
“I need to go up to the attic,” I tell her softly.
“Sure, honey, go on.”
The day’s shadows have fallen, and the attic is darker than ever. Why didn’t I grab a flashlight? I tilt the open side of the dollhouse in front of the window. Furniture slides around, a bedspread falls off, a tiny chandelier sways — but the bathtub’s dry with no baby facedown in it. No one stands by the window watching for us, or sits at the kitchen table waiting for breakfast. The house is totally deserted.
So where are the dolls?
“MOM!” I yell, jumping down the last rungs of the ladder with Chester nipping at my heels. “Do you know anything about the dolls from the graveyard? Did Brian bring them in here and hide them as a big, fat joke?”
“If Brian brought them in, I didn’t see it happen,” Mom says, “but I have good news for you. Your UV penlight came earlier than expected while you were gone. Now you and Brian can get your cryptology project going before school starts on Tuesday. Maybe you can get extra credit for it in science. The box is on your bed.”
I make a beeline for my room, with Mom right behind me asking, “Where are the shopping bags?”
“We didn’t go to the mall.�
� I open my door, and there’s the box tantalizing me, but Mom wants to talk.
“How did you spend all those hours?” she asks.
“Bowling.”
“No new school clothes? Figures,” she mutters. “You can always count on Sam Tate to do the right thing.”
I tear open the box and read the instructions. It seems simple enough, even for somebody like me who’s not too technologically gifted. I’m sure not waiting until Brian gets home to get right into Sadie’s notebook.
But that turns out to be another slow process, moving the pen from word to word like somebody who’s just learning to read. Worth it, though, because I’m getting lots more info on the Tasmanian she-devil, Sadie:
Mother dotes on that bleating little pink thing she’s calling Baby Daisy. Just plain Daisy would be enough, wouldn’t it? Or how about Daze? Mother kisses her wrinkled forehead and nose and pulls her close and is all smiley for a change. What is so special about a baby? I’d rather have a cocker spaniel puppy to keep Plumy company. Dotty and Celeste and Amelia and all the rest of them, except Father, who’s in Romania, they can’t wait to get their hands on that shrill Baby Daisy, while I’m invisible over here, even with Plumy on my shoulder squawking, and even though my face is flushed with fever. Dotty Woman has laid a cool cloth across my forehead that makes me shivery, and my hands shake as I write in my journal. No one notices, Mother least of all.
Oh, mercy me, HE just came in with a bunch of daffodils from the garden, and he DOESN’T EVEN LOOK AT THE BABY!!!! He nods toward me and says, “Morning, Miss Sadie,” and my heart flutters wildly. But then I see the way he lowers his head and shifts his eyes toward ugly Amelia’s back. I hate them all, every one of them! Whatever this illness is that’s plaguing me, I hope they all get it even worse!
Poor Sadie must have been pretty sick, and I feel sorry for her, but to wish it on everybody else? This word-by-word thing is making my eyes sting, and so are Sadie’s selfishness and rage. I have to quit for a while, but then the pen slides across another few words and my breath catches like it’s stuck in my chest:
… I ripped Amelia’s head off and tossed it under Father’s car when Dotty wheeled me out for a morning walk, and I feel so much better now!
I’m ping-ponging back and forth between sympathy for her and anger. My stomach flip-flops the same as it does when there’s a sudden dip on a Ferris wheel. This afternoon’s enchiladas burn in my throat. What kind of horrible person was Sadie that she’d rip a doll apart and throw the head under her father’s car? That’s brutal and heartless. But the diary says poor Sadie was in a wheelchair. I don’t know what to think about her.
Gets me wondering if I’ve ever been mad or upset enough to rip a head off. Not exactly, but my memory circles back to the scene I hate to watch on the screen in my own head: Dad’s wedding in July.
I said a team of horses couldn’t drag me to the wedding, but I went. Even Mom said I should go because the ceremony was a piece of my own future. There was no big white gown, no walking down the aisle, no flowers and organ, no wedding cake. Just all of us standing in the office of Terri’s minister, Dad holding Brian’s and my hands, and Terri holding Marcus’s hand.
Uncle Garrett, Dad’s brother, stood behind us, next to Terri’s mother, while Pastor Rhoda beamed at all of us. I felt frozen like a statue in the park. If you threw pebbles at me, I wouldn’t have flinched. The only good part was that Pastor Rhoda didn’t say, “You’ll be one big, happy family.” What she said instead sort of made sense, and this is how I remember it and play it over and over again in my mind until it gets scratchy like one of Aunt Amelia’s old records. She said, “Marcus, you don’t have much experience with fathers, and you’re used to having your mom all to yourself. You and Sam are going to have to learn how to swim these new waters together.”
Marcus smiled, like he was pumped to dive right in. I didn’t even want to stick one toe in the water. I was already drowning.
Pastor Rhoda put a hand on our shoulders, Brian’s and mine, and said, “I don’t know you as well as I know Marcus, but I want you to think about this in terms of the family groups you’ll live in.” She turned around and drew a circle on the whiteboard behind her and scribbled Brian, Shelby, Mom in it. She left a big space, then drew a Brian, Shelby, Dad circle. Okay, I got it so far, but it was the blank space in the middle that worried me.
“What I’m saying, Shelby and Brian, is that you will learn to navigate in all these circles, especially this new one.” She wrote Brian, Shelby, Dad, Terri, Marcus and ran the chalk around and around that circle until it was the biggest and thickest of them all.
My heart sank. “Never!” I silently shouted, searching for Brian’s eyes to make sure he was with me on this, but he wasn’t looking my way. He was leaning forward around Terri to peek at Marcus, since he’d never had a brother before. I kind of stepped back a little and felt Dad’s hand tug mine.
“I’m not saying it’ll be easy,” Pastor Rhoda told us with a sympathetic face. “But with patience and time, Brian and Shelby, and the loving guidance of both your parents, it will feel right, I promise.”
“How can you promise?” I blurted out, and then I was so embarrassed that I felt my skin, head to toe, turning all shades of red. Terri’s mother coughed, Uncle Garrett gently put his hand on my head, and Dad squeezed my hand.
Just like that, in about ten eye-blinks, Dad and Terri were married. To each other. Pastor Rhoda hugged each of us and handed us a card with a string of wedding bells at the top and silver printing that said:
Samuel Edward Tate
AND
Teresa Augusta Millard
WERE JOINED IN WEDDED HARMONY AT
MOUNTAIN VALLEY CHURCH
IN THE PRESENCE OF GOD AND FAMILY
Then we all went out to eat at a Chinese buffet, which was a good idea, because everybody trotted back and forth to the buffet so many times that we weren’t all at the table at once and didn’t have to make normal conversation. The egg rolls were greasy.
After dinner, Terri’s mother whisked Marcus off somewhere, and Uncle Garrett took Brian and me home to Mom so Dad and Terri could go on a honeymoon. I hoped they missed their plane and had to sit up in the airport all night.
At home I tried to ignore Mom’s questioning eyes and left her to wheedle the whole wedding story out of Brian. As soon as I was alone in the bathroom, I ripped that silvery card into a million pieces and soaked them in the sink, then flushed the whole pulpy mess down the toilet.
Which is why Sadie ripping that doll’s head off reminded me of Dad’s wedding.
The strange thing is that the Miss Amelia doll we found in the doll graveyard does have a head. Is it the same head? Same doll? She’s ugly and roughed up, but she couldn’t grow a new head like an earthworm does. Do you screw a doll’s head on as if she were a bottle of salad dressing? Maybe I need to Google porcelain dolls.
Mom’s in the kitchen, of course, so I flip open her laptop on the dining-room table and type in porcelain doll heads….
THIS IS SO WEIRDLY SICK. YOU CAN BUY PARTS for dolls. There’s a really gruesome picture online of a human baby–sized porcelain doll, but it’s in five disconnected parts. There’s a bald head with a face that doesn’t have eyelashes or eyebrows, two chubby arms, and two stubby legs, but no torso body section. It looks like the kind of crime scene you’d never want to see.
I also discover that their bodies are stuffed with sawdust and paper pulp and gluey gook, and I almost gag reading that animal bones are ground up in the clay that’s used to make the dolls’ faces and hands and feet. Kids play with these things? I’m beginning to think dolls are super weird, in the same way that clowns are supposed to look hilarious but are really scary and pathetic.
And yet, there’s something so … human about these mysterious dolls at Cinder Creek, something that tugs at my heart. How is it possible that they know how and why I’m mad all the time, when Mom doesn’t seem to understand?
I keep readi
ng about porcelain dolls, scrolling through dozens of pictures of sad and happy and broken and beautiful and scary and scared faces. But in all that online research, I never see a screw-on head the size of Miss Amelia’s. Yet she has a head now. So what really happened to her? Was Sadie lying about ripping the doll’s head off? Can I believe anything Sadie says in her journal? No question about it, I need to get more info from Mr. Caliberti.
I zip past Mom, who’s playing around with her dehydrating machine for SerenaStockPot.com, and dash out the back door, which is the closest path to Mr. Caliberti’s cottage.
He opens the door before I even knock and says, “Terpsichore and I are perplexed and aggrieved about those emptied grave sites. Are you as well?”
“I sure am. I’m wondering if you can tell me more about Sadie, and then maybe we’ll understand what happened to those dolls.”
“What information interests you, young miss?”
“Well, was she a big liar?” Oops, there I go, thinking with my tongue again.
Mr. Caliberti gazes up at the ceiling fan that whirs around and around, whistling quietly. “There are bold-faced fabrications, and there are harmless departures from the facts. For example, I have recently returned from Timbuktu.”
“I thought you said you were returning from Kathmandu, or maybe Xanadu, not Timbuktu.”
“Precisely.”
I just shake my head in confusion.
“Kathmandu is a lovely city in Nepal, that is, Asia, and Timbuktu is an equally delightful city in Mali, which is in Africa. Xanadu is a phantasmagoric Eden. But does it truly matter which one I visited? All are faraway, exotic places with many splendors you have never known.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Caliberti, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Departures from facts, and facts are not truth, my young miss.”
“So, are you telling me that Sadie made stuff up, but she wasn’t actually lying?”
“Am I? Why, how clever of me! More to the point, what I am saying, for example, is that my companion, Terpsichore, is named for the honorable Greek muse of the dance. Come, kitty, kitty.”
