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Doll Crimes 27
27I won’t lie about what I do and don’t remember. The eye in my forehead flutters like a black moth caught in a bad dream, fetching the images that shadow the back of my mind. Because the cliff-edge dividing what was and what is…the ink dot that bleeds in place before the line changes course. It starts falling down right about here.We made waffles and we burned them.And then my mother told me about Uncle Steve.***Momma was wearing her tan-and-sheepskin jacket, the one with the broken zip and the collar that flipped up against her ears. Faded and stained. It smelled the same way old books smell. She wasn’t wearing any makeup except for her mouth—a darker shade than normal, the color like the inside of a wound. She looked young and pale and kind of still. Maybe it was the chill on her bare cheeks, the way her breath puffed in tight bursts of vapor. She was breathing like her jacket was too tight and she couldn’t take air in all th
Doll Crimes 28
28We’re at the pizza place around the corner from Susie’s house. A takeaway spot with restaurant ambitions. Checkered tablecloths over plastic surfaces, fluorescent lights swapped out for candles melted into green bottles. The seating is too tight; tables and chairs crammed up against the counter where waiters do the ordering right over your head. The menu is written out in chalk on the blackboard up on the wall. Swirly letters all shaded skew. Margherita, but not like the cocktail.Regina, the name that makes boys smirk.“And what’s the little lady keen on?” Susie says to me. Smirking.“She likes calzones,” Mom says. “The more mushrooms the better.”My mother and I ate mushrooms together once a year or so back. The colors brightened up around us in booming tones, and the sand we lay on snaked in loops and patterns. I’d never understood before how everything is alive. Even dried-up water weeds. Even grains of sand. The moss growin
Doll Crimes 29
29Make the black marker tumble down an inch or two. We kept moving. We stayed at roadside motels, the safer ones with clean-enough swimming pools and no used needles or wasted condoms lying around the outside steps. Not the ones that looked too rowdy for kids our age. The worse ones were always small and sour-smelling. Water stains on the ceilings. Mattresses sloped down in the middle from years of heavy bodies and not enough turning. The bathtubs were stained with yellow rings no human hand could erase, and the mirrors were flecked with small black spots like fleas frozen behind the glass. At night the sounds of people yelling, of TVs playing too loud. Sounds masking other sounds.The check-out days, those were the best mornings. The quiet rush just before dawn. Momma ruffling my hair, dancing her fingertips to my armpits, kissing my cheeks to make me get up. Me giggling, kicking my feet, reaching my arms around her neck so she could
Doll Crimes 30
30We’re in a suburb of a city somewhere, and the suburb’s name is Rosefield. We’re on the money side of the place, the part where everything is glossy and clean. Trash-free sidewalks lined with fancy cars, cafés with frilled awnings spread over outside tables. Trimmed trees and perfect flower bushes. We got here kind of by accident, piling off the train after a lady who was hiding a kitten under her jacket. I caught the glimpse—bright green eyes mottled with brown, staring out at us from the shadow of a lapel. It tried once or twice to mew at us: tiny, bright-white fangs guarding a pretty, pink tongue. I say ‘try’, but maybe it did. The world can be loud for such a small voice, especially if nobody knows to be listening.“Follow the kitty,” my mother said when the woman stood, and jabbed me with her elbow. “Hurry. Animals are always a good sign.”I don’t know about that, but maybe.The cat didn’t really matter, of course. Not if yo
Doll Crimes 31
31I don’t know why I remember this night so clearly. That night we walked for hours, back when I was nine, maybe ten. Leaving someplace we would soon forget, heading toward someplace we’d never remember. The open world vacuous around us. It was dark, and we were cold. My mother stepped slowly for me. Shadows close around her feet, blooming then vanishing like blood spills seeping in and out the concrete. I looked up at her bare throat, the underside of her chin. The tips of her eyelashes clear against the curves of her cheeks. Her hair, recently dyed red, flared a cherry color as we passed beneath the streetlights. Momma walked street-side, and when the cars rushed by some of them blared their horns and flashed their lights.I would’ve been afraid, except I was with her.I should’ve been afraid, except I wasn’t.“It’s not always going to be like this,” she said, and paused to let a car rush by before she spoke again. “One day you and
Doll Crimes 32
32Photo albums. Do people still keep those? I’ve seen them more in movies than in real life. The movies have it wrong, too. Movie people have much nicer albums—they’re full, they’re glossy, like the pages get turned a lot. The albums I’ve looked through in strangers’ homes are sparse. Heavy, hardcover slabs of wasted pages. They hold a few old baby pictures, shots of grandparents, of long-ago weddings. Maybe a couple of unremarkable houses, a double-page spread of holiday shots. The albums are usually stored at the bottom of some bookcase or stashed in the back of a cupboard. Shoe-box corners. They’re always covered in dust.We don’t have an album, but we do have pictures. We keep our special ones snapped up with rubber bands, hidden down the side of our blue bag. The big one we stash at post offices and supermarket coat-checks, or lock up in hotel rooms, slid under the bed. It keeps our pictures safe among our collection of shoes and
Doll Crimes 33
33I wake up to the sounds of mom and Susie fucking. Specifically, I wake to the sounds of Susie fucking. The sounds my mother makes are nothing compared. I lie still for a moment, stiff and uncomfortable on this filthy couch, in my too-tight jeans, my eyes swollen from sleep and my hair tangled around my throat. I’m nauseous and slow and scared to move. There’s revolt in my body, it’s rallying forces. Like the second I stand, I’m going to throw up. Like the moment I think clear, reality will kick me in the gut.I nestle down and doze again for a while. When I open my eyes a second time, Susie is walking past me in his boxer shorts. No shirt. His gut is taut and firm, tough fat over tougher muscle, softening his lines. Not the other kind of gut, the heavier slap-barrel type that traps you down at the hips and thighs and makes you feel like you’re caught in a compressor. Crushing you, pounding through and around in smothering shudders.
Doll Crimes 34
34Look, I hardly knew the woman. I mean, I barely remember her now.Clementine Elizabeth Bough. I once saw a man on a jet-ski shatter through a wave. That’s how thinking about her feels. Careening. Crash. I wondered how different it would be if the wave was a brick wall. How he would look on the other side. Remembering her is a lot like this.The man who came to visit that night, his name was Lance. Lawrence. Something. “Your momma’s friend Lance is coming by,” Momma said. She was smiling at herself in the spare bathroom mirror, her makeup bag opened up in the sink. Bottles and tubes and shiny plastic pencils. It was the bathroom with ‘the best light’ she said, softening the color of her cheeks and darkening her mouth. She couldn’t stop smiling, her hands trembling, smearing mascara on her cheek. She’d brought the radio in with her, and she was listening to something with acoustic guitars and high voices, a steady beat. Somethin
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Doll Crimes Epilogue
EpilogueSusie and me, we’ve decided my real age is seventeen. No more plastic bead bracelets, no more pigtails. No more cherry-scented lip gloss or strawberry-flavored gum. My real age is seventeen, we’ve said, but if anyone asks we tell them I’m eighteen. It was like a scene from the movie, the way we drove out of town. I sat in the passenger seat with the window rolled down, and it wasn’t so cold that I needed any arms around me. I wasn’t shivering so bad I couldn’t breathe. Maybe it was better than a movie, because usually in real life nobody cares that much. All those close-ups on faces. Panic or tears in the eyes. The parents rushing to the child. The kids rallying around their friend. All those understanding expressions, those touching words and heroic promises. In a movie, the star gets to be everybody’s priority. But nobody makes another person more important than them. Nobody puts everything of theirs on hold like that, not f
Doll Crimes 40-41
40She used to call me Angel-Kid. She used to call me Doll.Look, I hardly knew the woman. At least, that’s what my mother said, but I think she tried to help me once. I think she tried to stop this thing.“Little girls don’t need more than two eyes.”I know she never said this. Still, it’s her voice that speaks.
Doll Crimes 39
39I drink coffee until it makes my heart beat too fast. The refills are free and the waitress doesn’t talk to me like I’m a kid. This is why I stay, I guess. The way it feels like I’m okay to be here. The way it feels safe. The seats around me fill up with singles and duos. Laptops and notebooks. Actual books, too. I don’t have anything to occupy my hands or my eyes except the cup in front of me. I test out white sugar versus brown sugar. Sweetener. Sweetener and white sugar. Sweetener and brown. Cup by cup. I don’t look at the people around me. Something about them seems too real. The things they’re frowning at, mouthing at, even as they sit alone and type stuff or write stuff or make their notes on printed pages. Like the thoughts they’re having might really be real.I only leave the coffee shop when my bladder fills up, my belly pressing too tight against my button-up jeans. I pay. I stand. Probably the coffee shop has its own restr
Doll Crimes 38
38None of this happened in any way I really know. I see it anyway. I don’t know how much of it is crazy kid-nonsense, tossed together like a junk pile of barbed wire and blunt razor blades. I feel it anyway. The rust, the scratch. The facts.Uncle Steve waited down at the gate in his car. The drive was long, and mostly through darkness. Backstreet twists and dirt-track roads. I rode up front in my mother’s lap, her arms wrapped so tight around me I didn’t need my winter jacket, not with her and the heater, and the glowing buzz of Uncle Steve’s voice. “You’ll be all right,” I heard him say. Over and over again. Talking to my mother, and not to me. “You’ll be fine. You’ll do great.”The cellphone he gave her was a Nokia, small and black. They don’t make those anymore.“There are people in this world who dream every damn minute of meeting a girl like you. Girls like the two of you.”“I don’t know if we can make it alone.”“You’d rat
Doll Crimes 37
37Susie drives me to the strip mall twenty minutes out of town. I sit easy in the passenger seat of his old Camry, my hands folded between my knees. The day is rising bright and blue.I would be afraid, except I’m with him.I should be afraid, but I’m not.The strip mall peels into view ahead. A long, flat building with sunshine sparkling white on its roof. “Go see a movie or something,” Susie says. “I’ll meet you out front at five. To fetch you, I mean. And bring you…home.”The last time I went to the movies, Momma and me sat in the back row. It was the middle of the day, but it was dark in there. Giant people loomed on the screen in wide-angle views and close-up shots. When they spoke, their voices came from all sides. The Uncle who sat next to me told me what to do. I heard his voice just fine, even across all the noise. I fell asleep right after. Mom didn’t wake me until the end.I don’t remember what the movie was about.“Y
Doll Crimes 36
36“It’s cold outside.”My mother said this, too. Zipping my jacket. Flipping the collar. Covering my feet. That last night in Carris. The night we left.She was shaking, but not from the chill. Something shooting through her in liquid pulses, stinging her from the inside.Momma’s scared.I don’t know where I was when this came back, but a voice is asking: Can she take those off?Who asks what? What ‘those’ are. I don’t know. I don’t know.“We have to get out of here, honey.” She was in her sheepskin jacket. Her mouth was very red. “Where’s Clem?” I said.And she started crying like she didn’t care I could see.When this memory came back to me, I was sitting cross-legged on Susie’s bed. My mother was fanning fresh Polaroids and I was imagining her and Susie having sex in the space where I sat. My mother’s thighs, the curve of his shoulders when they hunch. The lube my mother secrets up herself leaking past the sheets. She’d u
Doll Crimes 35
35This is your Uncle. This is my Friend.That slow, sick wave coming up my insides and sloping down my scalp. Those other things she’s said to me.Open your legs.Flash.“Fuck you, Susie.”I say this out loud, looking at my mother as she lies asleep across from me. Naked and weak on murky-white sheets. Passed out, wasted, drunk, drugged, or just very tired, or sexed-out, or whatever. I don’t know and I don’t care. Her breath catches in the back of her throat in half-snores. She won’t wake up. I guess this is rage, spitting through my nerves so my hands shake as I look through her jacket. Mock-zips, half-sized pockets. But of course she wouldn’t leave them there. I dig the blue bag out from under the bed. She’s already split the new pictures into their own envelopes. Three packs of three. It doesn’t matter which shots are inside. They’re all the same, even when they’re not. Behind me, Susie clears his throat. “I didn’t know Po
Doll Crimes 34
34Look, I hardly knew the woman. I mean, I barely remember her now.Clementine Elizabeth Bough. I once saw a man on a jet-ski shatter through a wave. That’s how thinking about her feels. Careening. Crash. I wondered how different it would be if the wave was a brick wall. How he would look on the other side. Remembering her is a lot like this.The man who came to visit that night, his name was Lance. Lawrence. Something. “Your momma’s friend Lance is coming by,” Momma said. She was smiling at herself in the spare bathroom mirror, her makeup bag opened up in the sink. Bottles and tubes and shiny plastic pencils. It was the bathroom with ‘the best light’ she said, softening the color of her cheeks and darkening her mouth. She couldn’t stop smiling, her hands trembling, smearing mascara on her cheek. She’d brought the radio in with her, and she was listening to something with acoustic guitars and high voices, a steady beat. Somethin
Doll Crimes 33
33I wake up to the sounds of mom and Susie fucking. Specifically, I wake to the sounds of Susie fucking. The sounds my mother makes are nothing compared. I lie still for a moment, stiff and uncomfortable on this filthy couch, in my too-tight jeans, my eyes swollen from sleep and my hair tangled around my throat. I’m nauseous and slow and scared to move. There’s revolt in my body, it’s rallying forces. Like the second I stand, I’m going to throw up. Like the moment I think clear, reality will kick me in the gut.I nestle down and doze again for a while. When I open my eyes a second time, Susie is walking past me in his boxer shorts. No shirt. His gut is taut and firm, tough fat over tougher muscle, softening his lines. Not the other kind of gut, the heavier slap-barrel type that traps you down at the hips and thighs and makes you feel like you’re caught in a compressor. Crushing you, pounding through and around in smothering shudders.
