In Nightmares We're Alone (2 page)

The Kaylie doll, she’s the only one still wearing the clothes I bought her in. A pink summer dress with a cut Mommy says is too low. Mommy says Kaylie wants bad boys to like her. But when she tried to throw the dress away I cried and she let me keep it. She said, “I spoil you.”

I put on my pink dress, the one that’s the closest match to Kaylie’s. I sit on the bed and pick her up and hold her in front of me.

I say, “You’re the only dolly I need, Kaylie.”

On the table by my bed is the miniature comb Kaylie came packaged with. I brush the hair out of her face, look down at her eyes.

I drop her and stand up.

The eyes.

They’re wrong.

Not just wrong. Not just deep and human like Beth’s. Kaylie’s eyes are blue and green.

They weren’t blue and green before. They never were. I would have noticed. It’s ugly. I would have hated it.

I pick up Kaylie again without looking her in the eye. I grab all my other dolls off the shelf in one big armful. I head for the kitchen trash.

* * * * *

Mommy walks in as I’m shoving the dolls into the garbage can.

I hear her call, “Another new doll, huh, Macie? I see you were a good girl and didn’t touch the box.”

I can hear Buster jump up on her and Mommy swats him a good one like always. Poor old Buster.

“Macie…?” Mommy comes into the kitchen and I’m standing next to the garbage can. Somehow I know I’m in trouble before she even comes in. I want to get away from the garbage and hide, let a little time go by before she finds out. But one way or another I know she’ll eventually see the dolls there and be angry.

“What are you doing?” she says, off the look on my face, I guess. She looks down at the trash. “Macie, what is this? Are you kidding me?”

“I don’t want my dolls anymore,” I tell her.

“Macie, do you know how much I’ve spent on…? What is this? I made you all those clothes for them, I bought the materials, I… What? Why? Why don’t you want them?”

I can’t stop my lip shaking. I know Mommy. First she’s accusatory, then she starts yelling, and then I get whupped.

“I just don’t like them anymore,” I say.

“You liked them just fine yesterday,” she says. “What’s…? Did your sister say something? That’s what happened, isn’t it? Heather!”

“No,” I say. “She didn’t!”

“We’ll get this sorted out,” says Mommy. “Heather, get in here!”

I can hear Sissy coming and I start crying. I don’t know why the whole family is involved all of a sudden. They’re my dolls. If I don’t want them, I don’t know why I can’t throw them away.

“What?” asks Sissy, throwing her arms out emphatically.

“What did you say to Macie?”

Sissy sees me crying. She shakes her head at me. “I don’t know. What did I say, Macie?”

“Nothing,” I say again.

“Why does she want to throw all her dolls in the garbage?” Mommy asks. “What have you been telling her?”

“I don’t know,” says Sissy with an eye-roll. “Why don’t you ask
her
?”

“I’m asking
you
.”

Sissy says nothing. She just keeps shrugging her shoulders, looking between each of us with a baffled expression and silent laughter like Mommy’s the dumbest person she’s ever met. I know Mommy doesn’t make it easy, but Sissy isn’t very nice to her sometimes.

“Don’t you smirk at me, young lady,” says Mommy wide-eyed.

“Mommy, I just don’t like them!” I yell. “They’re just…” I don’t know how to explain about the eyes so I make something up. “They’re for babies.”

It’s silent for a really long time, then Mommy just repeats it. “Babies. They’re for babies.” She looks at Sissy and shakes her head.

“Don’t look at me,” says Sissy.

“Macie, honey,” says Mommy, still sounding irritable. “Take your dolls out of the garbage, put them back in your room, and then you can help Mommy open the new package and we’ll talk about this later.”

I say nothing.

“Macie,” she raises her voice a little.

And really low, without thinking about it, I say, “I don’t care about your stupid goddamn doll.”

Mommy’s jaw drops. Sissy chokes back a laugh, but it’s very audible for just a moment. Mommy turns to Sissy with wide eyes and Sissy has both hands over her mouth, the smile still visible.

Mommy walks to me and smacks me a good one, just like she did Buster. I know it’s coming, so I just stand there and look her in the eye. That seems to make her angrier.

“Get your dolls and go to your room!” she shouts, pointing down at the garbage can.

“No!” I scream.

She hits me again.

“Mom, leave her alone,” says Sissy.

Mommy turns and points a finger at Sissy. When Mommy’s back is to me, I turn and run. I’ll go to my room. I don’t care. But I’m not bringing any dolls with me.

I hear Mommy thumping down the hall after me, calling my name, but I don’t look back. I slam the door shut behind me. She gives an exasperated sigh and I hear her turn back to the kitchen.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” I can hear her saying to Sissy.

Sissy’s voice says, “I told you. I didn’t—”

“Where does she get that language from? I know it’s not from me.”

“Whatever. I agree with her about your doll anyway.”

Sissy comes walking down the hall with Mommy yelling after her. She goes in her room and the house gets real quiet for a while.

* * * * *

I’m lying face down on my bed, still pouting, when Sissy comes in half an hour later.

“Hey, creep,” she says. “How you doin’?”

I say nothing. I stay face down.

“Oh, are you mad at me too?” she asks. “Mom’s taking her nap, so you’re off the hook for a little bit.”

I roll over and look at her, still upset. She closes the door behind her, and sits on the bed with me.

“Macie,” she says. It’s weird. She usually calls me ‘creep’ or ‘retard’ or something, even when she’s being nice. “I shouldn’t have gotten mad at you the other day about Mom’s dolls. That had nothing to do with you. You don’t have to hate them just because I do. If you like them, that’s good. You should keep liking them. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“I
do
like them,” I say.

There is a pause. “So you just don’t like
your
dolls?”

“I like them too. But Mommy’s new doll ruined them.”

Sissy nods. She looks a little disappointed. “Mm. You mean you want dolls like Mom’s.”

“No,” I say quietly. “I want to smash the new one and burn it.”

I see curiosity spark in her face. “Is it… really pretty? Or…?”

“No. It’s horrible.”

“How did a horrible doll ruin
your
dolls?”

“It made me… hate them.”

Sissy cocks her head. She seems to search for a question and not find it.

“I want to see this new doll,” she says.

* * * * *

“Creepy,” says Sissy.

Beth’s sitting up there on the top shelf, dead center, with twenty more dolls on the bookshelf below her and ten more bookshelves around the room. Sissy and I are standing in the middle looking up at her, talking in low voices because Mommy’s sleeping on the couch in the next room and we’re totally busted if she wakes up.

“Right?” I say. “It’s like she’s alive or something.”

She gives me that
you’re retarded
look big sisters are good at. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Mommy said it’s called hetero… something.”

“—chromia,” says Sissy. “We just talked about it in Biology.”

“It’s really real?” I ask.

“Yeah,” says Sissy. “More common in cats and stuff than people, but yeah.”

I shudder. The room feels too cold all of a sudden.

“Do you think it’s an animal pretending to be human?” I ask. “Like a werewolf or something?”

Sissy snorts. She shakes her head.

“You know,” she says. “There was a time… long time ago… when everybody was afraid of witches. All these people, they thought a bunch of the women in their towns were witches. And people said, ‘My mom’s a witch,’ ‘My neighbor’s a witch,’ ‘My wife’s a witch,’ whatever. And the people in the town, they believed them.”

I must be making a face like I don’t believe her, because Sissy says, “It’s true. I’m not making this up. You’ll learn this in school in a few years. And what they would do, if everybody in the town decided somebody was a witch, they’d tie her up and burn her.”

I feel sick now. I want to run out of the room. I say, “Okay, I believe you. Stop. I don’t want to know.”

Sissy laughs. “Don’t get scared. You’re missing the point. The point is they were burning these women because they thought they were witches, when really they were just a little different. A little moody, or ugly, or tall. And in those days, if somebody had eyes like that, I’ll bet you somebody would say she was a witch. And because everybody was so scared, they got crazy, and they’d believe it even though it was stupid. And they’d burn her.”

I look up at Beth, sitting there with her stupid grinning face. “You think she’s a witch doll?” I whisper.

“No, stupid. There’s no such thing as witches. She just has weird eyes. Real people have eyes like that, and you know what? They’re just people. But in the old days, they’d burn them just the same, because everybody else
thought
they were witches. See, the scary people in the story weren’t the ones with the weird eyes, they were the crazy assholes who burned people because they believed in witches.”

Sissy looks at me like I’m supposed to laugh, so I force myself to. I don’t know if I get the point of the story exactly. I’m just kind of afraid Beth might be a witch doll. But I guess she probably isn’t because Sissy says they don’t exist. Sissy’s pretty smart. Smarter than Mommy, even.

“Come on,” says Sissy. “Forget that thing.”

She walks out of the room and I mean to follow her, but all of a sudden I swear I hear something whispered really quietly. I jerk my head to the left.

But all that’s there is that doll. Stupid ugly Beth with her mean little smile, staring at me with her two-colored bitch eyes.

I get out of the room as fast as I can without looking scared. It still feels too cold in there. And the more that dolly stares at me, the more it seems like she wants something from me.

“Sweetheart,” says Mommy the next day, cracking open my bedroom door a couple hours after supper, talking in that peace-maker voice because we haven’t been talking since yesterday.

She comes into the room and I turn on my side and face the wall. I don’t want to talk. I already know she took my dolls out of the garbage can. I know they’re in the house somewhere and as soon as I fold, Mommy will make me take them back into my room and put them back on that shelf, sitting there in my room where they’ll watch me while I sleep, watch me with Beth’s eyes.

No. I don’t want them.

I hear Mommy take a seat in the pink little chair of my coloring desk, situating herself next to my bed. “Look what I’ve got,” she says in that feigned excited voice mommies use when they want you to get all lovey, or when they want the dog to play fetch.

I don’t look.

“Macie,” she says curtly, changing vocal tactics, a full one-eighty in half a second. Mommy’s a master tactician.

I turn over and look at her. I already know what to expect.

Mommy’s got a big smile on her face and she’s holding out Kaylie. Kaylie wearing a new dress. A long-sleeved summer dress that goes all the way up to her throat and wraps around so tight it’s like it’s strangling her. As though that were the problem. As though I’d love my dolls again if the only one left untainted by Mommy was suddenly just as tainted as the others.

Lucky me.

“I liked her better before,” I say.

Mommy looks hurt. She puts the doll on her lap and sighs deeply. “Well I just don’t know what to say, Macie. I just don’t know what to say.” When grown ups don’t know what to say, they always say it twice.

She doesn’t speak for a little while and I certainly don’t have anything to say, so I roll over on my back and look up at the ceiling.

“If you don’t want your dolls anymore, that’s fine,” says Mommy finally. “We’ll give them to Goodwill or something. But you’re not getting any new toys just because you wanted to throw away your old ones. I predict in two or three days you’re going to get really bored and you’re going to wish you still had your dolls to play with.”

I keep giving her the silent treatment so she says okay and stands up. She turns to me as she heads for the door.

“Last chance,” she says.

I don’t like the tone, like she’s babying me. Like I’m not a big girl and I can’t make my own decisions. But at the same time, I know I’ll miss Kaylie. I want to keep her, but not in a house with Beth. Not in a house where…

“What color are her eyes?” I ask.

Mommy gives me a weird look. “Who?”

“Kaylie.”

Mommy looks down at the doll.

“Blue.”

“Both of them?”

Mommy laughs slightly, confused. “Yes, sweetheart. They’re both—”

“I’ll keep them if you get rid of Beth.”

The smile that was on Mommy’s face a moment ago freezes and drips away. “Oh. Oh, I see.” She comes over and takes a seat next to me on the bed. “Macie, if you want one of my dolls, maybe we can work something out where you look after it for me for a while, but Beth is… rare. She’s a special edition. You know, they only made—”

“I don’t want Beth. I just don’t want her in the house.”

Mommy pauses. “Why not?”

“Because…” I look for a lie or a half-truth but I can’t find one. Mommy sits there impatiently. I can’t think of anything and I end up going with the truth. “I think she wants to hurt me.”

For a little while Mommy just looks at me, then she shakes her head from side to side. “Oh, honey. Have you been watching scary movies? Or reading books that—”

“No.”

“Did Sissy give you comic books again? Where are they?”

“Mommy, listen!”

She turns to me and raises her eyebrows, waiting for me to explain, and I suddenly realize there’s nothing more to explain.

“She looks at me… in a way that… Her eyes… It’s not just that they’re different colors. It’s like they’re… too human. You know?”