“It was never James,” I say.
“I know what they did to you,” Minnie says. “I know about Gillian.”
Miniature feet knead, curl, and press. My body is a tiny balloon waiting for puncture. I advance, take Minnie’s mug from her cool hands, and say, “I think you should go.”
“Kate.” Her supplications are no different than James’s—I wonder if she sees the irony in that. My head throbs.
“Minnie, I’m tired. Please go.”
Minnie collects her things and walks to the door. I stand behind her, place my hand on her shoulder, and she’s shaking. She turns and smiles, but her face is foreign to me, an archipelago of cards kept close to the chest. Not yet ready to play her hand.
“I’m considering a new bake shop,” she says, after I’ve opened the door and our eyes are blinded by orange light. Dusk falls, and what’s left of the sun tries to shine through the leaf-laden trees. “Give Bunny Blake a run for her money. They say revenge is best served cold.”
“I thought you wanted beaches.”
“Beaches get boring, kid. I’ll be in touch.”
After she’s gone and I’m alone again, it occurs to me that Minnie isn’t tan.
Minnie isn’t tan.
His last word was Lucia.
TONIGHT, ELLIE SAYS, “Bake me one of your cakes. None of the fancy cartoon stuff, just something simple: two layers of vanilla cake slathered with tufts of chocolate frosting.” I tell her that I ran out of baking powder and vanilla extract, to which she responds, “Improvise. That’s always been your way.”
“You never wanted my cakes before.” I pout.
“Leave it to you to throw a tantrum when I’m dead.”
We don’t talk about the fact that I’m pregnant, although it’s obvious she knows. James is verboten. Jonah is nonnegotiable. She’ll walk out that door and never come back. Those are the rules. We stick to safe topics: local gossip and the laundry list of requests. After I bake her the cake, she cuts into it with a fork, takes a bite, and says, “You’re actually good. Insanely good. It’s like I’m eating a chocolate cloud or pillow. I can’t decide which.”
“And the dead give praise.”
“Next time, get me a book. Something carnivorous and Greek: Sophocles, Euripides, or Aeschylus—maybe Agamemnon?” She says, dryly.
I pull a book off the shelf: Medea. I recall a documentary I watched on a group of egret chicks pecking their sibling to death while the mother stood by idly, grooming her feathers. A drone voice-over stated, In the animal kingdom, infanticide is not about pathology. It’s about ensuring the strongest offspring survive.
“You would,” Ellie sighs, departing as swiftly as she entered.
Before I go to sleep, I check on Jonah. It’s getting harder now because of the smell, the bloated limbs covered in ice, and his blue pallor, but I do it for the possibility that he might speak to me again. Like when we were kids and he’d crawl into my bed when he thought I was already asleep and bury his face in my hair. You smell like milk, he used to whisper.
Look. I did what I had to do.
“Look at you, cleaning your feathers,” Ellie says. Standing behind me, she crumbles toast in her hand.
“MINNIE. I CAN’T sleep.” It’s four thirty in the morning and I’m standing outside Minnie’s house in my pajamas. Like I’m Michael Jackson.
Minnie’s groggy, startled, and her eyes are filled with sleep. “Come in, kid. Come in.” Once inside, she brews hot tea and tears mint leaves. I sit in the kitchen and the light feels medicinal, too bright for the night. Then I notice the photographs of a young man—dozens of them in frames.
“I didn’t know you had a son.”
“I don’t.”
“A lover?”
“Hardly.” She slices a blueberry muffin in half, a store-bought kind with its brown wrapper and nearly plastic sheen. “That’s your father when he was small.”
“He died. The day he died he phoned my mother.”
“Yes, I know,” Minnie says. Her words create a distance between us.
“Why don’t you have a tan?”
“What?”
“You went to South America and you look like you spent a month in Walmart.”
“I see pregnancy’s given you a sense of humor,” Minnie sighs. “Is this why you drove over in the dead of night? To dissect the color of my skin? Well, my dear Kate, I’m not tan because I wore sunscreen. Last thing a woman my age needs is cancer.”
“But even then . . .” I stare at her pale skin, untouched by the sun. Wouldn’t she have something? Why would she lie?
Minnie’s exasperated. It’s the first time I’ve been the recipient of her anger, an emotion once reserved for Bunny Blake and the other cinnamon-bun bakers in town. “Even what? What are you getting at, because I’d really like to go back to sleep.”
“I miss Jonah,” I say, realizing Minnie isn’t going where I want her to go.
“He’ll come back; he always does. You said so yourself.” Minnie sips her tea, drinks it for real this time.
“Know what I think? I don’t think he’s ever coming back. I thought he would, once, but now—now I’m not so sure.”
Door shut, locked, key in mouth. Choke.
As I leave I notice a photo tucked behind one of the frames. It’s a faded black-and-white picture of my mother, and that boy holding a saxophone. So this is how she smiles.
I want to learn Arabic, Lucia said. Who the fuck says that before they die?
“BECAUSE A WOMAN would never go near a car, much less ride in one, if there’s only a man in it. But if there’s a woman in the passenger seat, she’ll come closer. She’ll sniff it out and if you play it just right, she’s in. Another woman makes her feel safe. What woman would betray her kind? What woman would stand watch while another gets her head bashed in?” I tell Jonah that this is how we search the terrain and wait for signs of passing, of prey. We take the back roads; we chase storms. We pause in front of bus stops and say: It’s cold out. Why don’t you hop on in? I give the woman my scarf and jacket so she can feel warm, secure, and we drive for a while with the volume on the radio turned up. You play what’s familiar: top-forty songs with a beat. You offer your half of a sandwich because the next diner, restaurant, rest stop, is always a million miles down the road. The moment she leans her head against the window and her body goes slack is when you climb into the backseat and say, How about we play a game? The belt tightens around her neck and the sandwich makes her drowsy. I tell Jonah this is how we play.
“Sometimes I think that I’m not the one they should be afraid of,” Jonah says.
I laugh so hard it hurts. “There was a time when you actually thought you were someone to be feared? Silly rabbit.”
Jonah pouts.
I take his hand in mine and squeeze it. One year I crashed my bike into a tree and my father raced over and held my hand. Squeeze, I want to feel how much it hurts. I want to feel your hurt. “Time to play the big bad brother. Time to put me in my place.”
My hurt was always mine to feel. No one ever asks me about my hurt, if it exists for me. If hurt is something I can feel. No one asks me much of anything. I count my ribs with one hand.
THERE ARE MEN at the door and they’re knocking. Am I dreaming? No, the pounding is persistent. I climb down the stairs and open the door and there are three men with guns and a piece of paper. Minnie stands behind them.
They say, “We have a warrant to search the premises; we have a reason to believe . . . ; are you alone in the house?”
“I’m always alone,” I say. But there are others here, which I don’t say. They sleep beneath the floorboards and in coolers down below. Alice lives here. Jonah lives here. Lucia lives here, not by choice. The men don’t know that yet. They don’t know about my doll collection, and how I’ve been beating Jonah at crazy eights and gin rummy because his hands are in one cooler and his head in another. Minnie is strangely quiet, like Jonah, like mice. She just stands there. I blink, th
inking I saw a feather in her mouth.
Within an hour, they clasp metal around my wrists. (I don’t have a taste for it.) The men in blue talk about rights, how I have them, and would I like to phone an attorney? (No.) They ask whether it’s true that I’m pregnant, to which I snicker and laugh and say that this is probably the one life worth sparing. “You know, a joke,” I say. “You know, ha ha.”
“Funny,” they say.
“I have to tell you about Jonah. What he’s done. He’s dangerous.”
James is on the lawn, finishing a cigarette. He flicks it in the direction of my home and comes closer. “I hope the fucking house you bought with my money burns to the ground. You don’t think I know what you did to Ellie, to my son? The things you did to those people. I don’t even know you.”
“What I did to Ellie? I cleaned up after your slop, like I always do. And I gave the rest of them, the whole sorry lot of them, a fucking deliverance.” I pucker my lips and blow kisses. I’ll name my girl Ellie. I will hold her close and she will fall asleep and wake to the sound of the ocean. There are no barnacles here. They’ve drifted farther out, found deeper attachments.
The men lower my head into the backseat and there is Minnie, triumphant, but also sad. “I’ve been patient, Kate. I’ve lost a sister and a nephew because of your family.” In a few weeks’ time, I will learn that the day Tim died he phoned my mother, told her he could break free of his second wife and grown daughter (another half of me exists) and that they could finally be together. And I’ll never know if it was her refusal and the soft click of the dial tone—childhood love wasn’t good enough—or whether something else in his life burned the ground beneath his feet, but after Ellie hung up he put a small pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Who knew in a few moments time I would be sending Ellie off into the dark to meet him? Pushing the pills into her mouth, pressing down hard on the pillow—I gave her the greatest gift and I didn’t even know it then. And all this time Minnie was playing detective, picking up clues from Jonah and meeting with the women who’d slipped away. Her job, the detectives told her, was to detect cracks along the surface and keep me from leaving.
“I knew you weren’t in Cartagena. That’s dramatic, even for you,” I say. Then I’m ten again, with my mother and her lamb mask and our car speeding down the street, driving straight through the dark. You must know that I never followed her willingly; I was a fait accompli. In the distance, I could hear a suitcase snapping and a car, four cylinders, burning road. I’m out, Lionel says. Good luck in the nut house.
Maybe if you hadn’t said Lucia, I would’ve been right behind you. I would have run barefoot into the dark alongside you. Couldn’t your love have been about me?
Jonah? Can you hear me?
TELL ME ABOUT THE JOY
2014–2015
BEFORE THEY TAKE my baby girl away, I trace an outline over her tiny mouth with my finger. She smells like cotton and clean, warm sweaters folded into drawers. Although I know they’ll change her name, I end up calling her Rebecca. I didn’t have the heart to call her Ellie; I didn’t want to give her all that history. I imagine my girl swathed in pink chiffon and having a strong affection for owls. I picture her as tall as my knee, my hip, my shoulder, my head. Her voice will fill rooms. She will color outside the lines and create her own books, hundreds of them. She will raise her hand when no one else will. She will own a Christmas tree and decorate it. She will have nosy neighbors and a mudroom. She will live by the water even though she’s desperately afraid of it. She will wear blue at her wedding because why not? She will have real photos of a complete family in frames. She will never take it all for granted. When she’s older she will read the books written about me, and watch the videos from the trial with her husband by her side, holding her hand. Squeeze it so hard that it hurts. I want to feel your hurt. She will never visit me here while I’m alive, but she will stand over my grave when I’m dead. She will leave me hyacinths, because she read somewhere that those are the flowers I liked.
We will never be as close as we are now. I have five more minutes with you. I spend them imagining your whole life with me in it.
Over the past year, a man with a briefcase visits me daily. I learn that Julia Cassavetes isn’t dead, not by a long shot. In fact, she’s very much alive, although the clock’s ticking on her cancer (tick tock, tick tock), and she, along with her sister, have identified me as one half of the Doll Collector. The other half has been cremated. At the hearings, Minnie chimes in with circumstantial evidence of seeing Jonah and me return from one of our excavations. James talks about how he wanted to change the locks and buy a gun, but Ellie laughed it off, saying, Kate wants me to love her; she’d never hurt me.
I shake my head. Obviously, I didn’t do those monstrous things. I’m a baker; I make cakes in the shape of cartoon and sitcom characters. That was all Jonah and his friend, Lionel. (Can you give us a description of this Lionel? Do you know anything else about him? Where he lives? How your brother knew him?) In response, I tell them that everything I’ve done has been about protecting Jonah. Do I look like I would do those gruesome things? Sew those girls’ mouths shut and bury them in the walls, all wrapped up in cellophane? The Doll Collector? Seriously?
Look at me.
“How is it then, Kate, that your brother ended up in your basement, in parts? How did his head and torso end up in one ice cooler, and the rest of his body in another?” an attorney will ask me.
“Objection,” my attorney shouts.
“Well, that’s complicated,” I say.
“Did you murder your brother?”
“Murder? No, he was already dead.”
“You found him that way.”
“Not exactly.”
“May we approach the bench, your honor?” my attorney implores.
After three months, they sentence me to an institution where I will live out the remainder of my days in a locked room with a tiny window. In this room there is a toilet, a sink, a mattress, and a camera that films my every movement—film my daughter will one day request and watch in her bathroom. I spend four hours a day in therapy and the rest medicated. Lately, I’ve been distrustful of paper so I’ve taken to writing on the walls. I write small so I have enough room to tell you everything.
The doctors ask me if it hurts, and how many times do I have to say yes before they hear me? How many times do I have to tell Ellie, out loud, that I love my daughter before she believes me?
Outside the room, I beg everyone to call me Rebecca but they say my first and last name, Kate Kelleher, as if it were a disease. Kate Kelleher, how are you feeling today? Kate Kelleher, we think it’s time to increase your dosage. Kate Kelleher, we noticed that you haven’t touched your peas. But inside, I imagine that I am Rebecca and I recreate every year of her life. It’s hard being an infant and toddler with all the outbursts, tantrums, and half words spit out, but I long for childhood; I dream of swing sets, ice-cream cones, and picture books. My world is simple, clean, and large enough to fit everyone.
It’s possible to live your whole life in your head.
WHEN I AM small, my mother tries to bathe me in bleach. When I am ten, she holds my head underwater as I kick and scream and choke on chlorine. Why do you hate me? I ask. Oh, Kate, it’s not about hate; it’s about love. There’s so much I don’t want you to see, and you’ll see all of it and hate me for not saving you from it. Children create these magical, complete worlds that adults find ways to ruin. I want to save you from ruin. Do you understand, Kate? No, but I say I do.
THERE IS A woman on a hotel bed and her hair is on fire. I’ve bound my hands with ropes—you can’t imagine how hard that is to do—and hold a lighter, Lionel, to the ends and feel soothed by the sour smell of hair singed from the ends. I remember burning my cheek. I remember lying down as Gillian and waking, like from a dream, as Kate. The day before my mother died my father called to give her one last chance. Going, going, gone, he said, trying to crack a joke, trying to bring some
levity to the fact that they were no longer who they had once been. She told him that they were no longer children—their time had passed. The day my mother died she was making toast. I watched her set down the phone and move about the kitchen carrying her grief. I close my eyes and will my goodbyes, and with every want, every wish, every farewell, I’m forced into a darkness that waits only for me. My body is a house and all of the lights flicker, fade, and burn out. I run to the bathroom and hurl myself against the shower wall. I cut the ropes. The curtains are aflame. I leave a room blazing.
What have I done?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
KIRA HENEHAN READ seventy pages of this book, and I’m grateful that she pressed a hot poker against my back, urging me to keep going. I’m humbled by my early readers (you know who you are!), who gave incisive and necessary feedback. I’m forever indebted to everyone who’s stuck by me since my first book, patiently following my strange journey to this novel’s publication.
Thank you, my tireless and wise agent, Matthew Carnicelli, for being my champion, editor, truth-teller, and cheerleader for the past decade.
If I could stretch my arms and hug you from the West Coast, Jennifer Baumgardner, I would. You saw my vision for this book, understood Kate’s complexity, and I’m grateful that extraordinary risk-taking editors like you exist. The whole team at the Feminist Press has been nothing short of amazing—you have all my deepest gratitude, love, and donuts. Thank you, Jisu Kim, Alyea Canada, Drew Stevens, Lauren Hook, Lucia Brown, Suki Boynton, Hannah Goodwin, Lucy Stewart, and Nikkia Rivera—I couldn’t have dreamed of a more beautiful book, from cover to cover.
My deepest gratitude to Joe McGinniss Jr., Laura van den Berg, Liza Monroy, Matthew Sharpe, and Kelly Braffet for your careful read and kind words.
Finally, thank you to my friends who are my family, for dragging me out of the darkness and into the light. Amber Katz, Lara DeSignor, Persia Tatar, Nadine Jolie Courtney, and Meaghan Cleary—your kindness during my darkest moments and friendship mean more to me than you could ever know.
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