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Epilogue
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Doll Crimes 1
1My mother, she’s standing at the counter with her hair shining loose over her shoulder, her eyes just as bright, her smile so wide she can only be oblivious to the lipstick marks on her teeth. She’s laying her change out onto the counter, one coin at a time, placing each down with a sharp, metallic tap on the smooth space between the till and the gum rack. The tapping sound, clear and deliberate behind the dancing wall of her voice, feels like the echo of a giant clock in the background. Ticking down to something. Tap-tap like tick-tock.“Eighty-nine,” she says. Tap-Tick. “Ninety.” Tap-Tock.Beside the rows of coins, stacked up to tens in neat piles, are two crisp bills. Beside the bills are her intended purchases. There are only three—a vanilla-scented lip balm, a box of salted crackers, and a carton of full-cream milk. “One hundred,” she beams. Tap. Tick. “Nearly there.”She’s twenty cents off the total. She’s fumbling in the de
Doll Crimes 2
2My mom was fifteen years old when I arrived in her world, and the way she tells it, you’d swear there was never a sign for her that she was even pregnant. “You gave me the worst cramps I ever had in my life,” she’s said to me. Like I was a forgotten tampon or a plate of bad seafood. “But when I first saw you, it made it all okay.”I know it’s not okay, and she knows it’s not okay, but since so much of life is pretending what’s horribly wrong is actually really okay, maybe the truth doesn’t matter so much in the end. Pretend okay. Real okay. Maybe there isn’t always a difference. A teenager gets pregnant, or not. A baby is born, or not. So many beautiful, terrible journeys leading out from so many different possibilities. Like a pane of glass cracking, fractures making fractures, a fragile crisscross of lines spreading out in a spiderweb shatter. “When something scary happens, or something hurts you, you have to weigh the bad up
Doll Crimes 3
3Where we are now, this town has been home for a touch over two weeks. It’s a moderate size suburban square, sprawling, kinda poor but not trash-torn. There’s a water tower up on one of the higher hills, which you can see from almost everywhere around. It doesn’t look so big from a distance, though it must be, or it wouldn’t loom like that. Metal bars and splayed legs. A dome-topped cage held high. The high street isn’t long but it snakes around in sections, hiding the post office behind the supermarket, the library behind the mechanics. I don’t know where the schools are yet—maybe tucked farther back.My mother says this town is a perfect ‘launch pad’. Small, safe. Separate, but connected. It has a coach depot and a train line and a highway running by. It’s a place with many exits. No locked doors. We live like rumors in towns like this. Sketch-book versions of ourselves with scratched-out features and unknown names. Vague address, no
Doll Crimes 4
4No matter how clearly I see it all in my mind, I’m not always sure how true what my mother tells me really is. How bad it was, I mean. Memories have a way of getting uglier when they’re of someone or something we don’t like. It’s not like my mother starved to death, or lost her teeth from malnutrition when she was carrying me, or died giving birth to me, so she must’ve had some kind of help. That Man must’ve been doing something for her. For us. Or, someone had to.The way she talks, the way she changes… I don’t always know what to believe.“Well, there was your Auntie Clem, of course,” Momma says. “When I first found out I was pregnant… You can’t imagine how I felt. I was very young, and very alone. A stupid kid about to have a kid. I understood enough to be scared of you. You were this major thing about to happen to me, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do about you. I wanted to kill myself just to get out of it all. I even
Doll Crimes 5
5When we get back ‘home’—Susie’s home, more a collection of random furniture and broken knick-knacks crammed within solid walls than it is a ‘home’—my mother shrugs off her jacket and throws it on the kitchen table. I set down the milk, the eggs and lube I carried under my own jacket. I keep the two packs of gum in my back pocket. Those are for me. “We didn’t think to take any bread,” my mother says. She rolls her eyes at me, smiling.Aren’t we silly? that smile says.I sit down at the table and watch her as she moves through the unfamiliar kitchen, checking cupboards and drawers and back shelves. She finds a frying pan, a bottle of sunflower oil. A brick of cheese at the back of the fridge wrapped in grease-paper and mummified to something hard that crumbles to shards when she breaks off a corner.“Parmesan,” she smiles at me. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t.She makes us scrambled eggs. Soft yellow lumps spiced with finely grated
Doll Crimes 6
6Susie has a laptop, like the one I want one day. Silver and flat with keys that light up. I want to learn how to type, when I’m older. I want to teach my fingers to move that fast. My eyes fixed on the words in front of me. Those messages I see. Susie doesn’t have a dog, but I think he’s the type who’d suit one. Something big and burly up on the couch with him, his arm slung around snug shoulders. His fingers rubbing a soft ear in slow circles. I know how it might feel.I can’t find Susie’s porn collection. I guess it’s on the laptop, but I don’t know the password. I’ve searched everywhere for magazines—I want to know what type he’d buy. Ball gags and whips, wide eyes streaming tears, bulging at the choke. There’s a kind of man who likes this look—tears black with mascara, streaking down soft cheeks. That kind of man: you can’t always tell. Maybe he goes for the blonde types, pink types, the types who giggle a lot and pretend they d
Doll Crimes 7
7The longest we ever stayed put in one place was from when I was a toddler to around age five, six at most. Old enough to remember, but not in any solid kind of way. That place in small-town Carris. Our smallholding on the edge of a rural, mountain-locked valley. If I hear or say the word home, this is what I remember. The house, the driveway, the trees. Like a house in a forest, except for the road. The summer thunderstorms, and the way the roof creaked. The warmth inside, burning out.“Each memory you hold is just a moment that’s already passed,” my mom says. “The only way to be happy in life is to live in the now.”She would look wise saying this if it wasn’t for her smile. Goofy, with squinted eyes and tongue caught between her teeth. It means she’s planning something, about to say something completely different, because really she’s desperate to change the subject.“…and now, I say we go get doughnuts.”“… and now, I say we fin
Doll Crimes 8
8The city we’re visiting today, it’s one we’ve been to before. At least, that’s what my mother tells me. We must’ve last been here when I was still really young. It has a few streams and canals zigzagging through it. It has unusually narrow roads. There aren’t as many tall buildings, not over six stories anyway, and a lot of people ride around on bicycles. It’s pretty, but kind of worn down, run down, trash in the gutters and faded posters on the lampposts and outer shop walls, half-torn and weathered. “Let’s see if we can find it,” my mother says.We’ve been walking this street a long time now, following the fence with its line of trees, looking for the entrance to the park. The fencing that surrounds it has been erected flush against the original low stone walls; a high crisscross brace of metal with barbed wire nesting along the top. Maybe there are problems with crime in the area at night. Probably the park has only two workable
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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.
