Small World (21 page)

out. Then he trundled off to curl up under the puff on his narrow boy’s bed, beaten emotionally as well as physically. He loved her dearly but it was hard to visit her, just because of that; there was so much grief and regret, guilt and sadness between them. He drifted off, determined not to let the past, his own and his parents’, dictate his future, and knowing just how impossible that was going to be.

. . . When no authentic ransom demands were received by midweek, the focus of the investigation shifted to a closer examination of the journalist’s private life. Architect Jeff Fairboume was genuinely distraught by his estranged wife’s disappearance, authorities believed. Friends of the couple agreed that while the marriage was clearly over, Jeff and Leyna remained on good terms. Shaw dated a wide spectrum of politicos, bureaucrats, and media stars, but there were not, apparently, any deep or passionate attachments. The case remains a painful puzzle. . . .

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. . .
Dorothy ‘Dolly’ Hardesty Douglas, in Washington last week to retrieve her Doll’s White House from the Dalton Institute dollhouse show, had a mystery man in tow. He was clearly younger than she, underlining what’s been suspected all along: that Dolly’s young at heart. . . .

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The dark, soft and yielding, promised walls, corners, edges. Even without light, it was not hard to know what was herself and what was her environment. Herself. Every part of what she called herself felt crushed. Every breath was paid in teeth-clenching pain. She willed her body to an unnatural stillness.

After a time, there was a lightening of the pain, so that she could think, in starts and stops. This was bad. Whatever had happened to her. Scary. She could still, and did, reject the creeping insistent thought that this was more than bad, this was dead.

The darkness overtook her frequently, blotting out the pain and speculation. She dreamt, eventually, of earthquakes, volcanoes, meteors, shooting stars. She was a small spaceship. Or a stray bundle of gases hurtled loose from some far sun. Space was great, black, cold, and curiously scratchy.

She woke in bed, a satisfaction. Naked but not cold. Very warm, in fact. The sheets were pleasantly heavy and textured. She was in shadow, the bed draped to veil the light. An oxygen tent, she thought, relieved to be able to identify it. Carefully, she let herself down into the gentle cradle of the dark. She was safe.

Dolly was setting up the dollhouse, a task, she told Roger, that would take two or three days. She gave him the bed for Leyna, a dismissal he recognized.

He found a shelf in a closet for it and installed her. He had other tasks to attend but he came back, compulsively, to check her. It was almost more than he could do to tear himself away from the wonder of her. She was still in shock; it worried him but he Was helpless. Once, while he watched, Dolly came up behind him.

'Is she okay?' she asked anxiously.

‘Fine,’ said Roger, telling himself, too. ‘She’s fine.’

They stood staring at her.

‘Did you ever read the story of the teeny tiny woman? Or maybe your mother or someone told it to you when you were a kid?’ Roger blurted at last.

Dolly shook her head. ‘No.’

‘I look at her and that’s all I can think. The teeny tiny woman.’ ‘Oh.’ Dolly twitched impatiently at the obvious. ‘She’s that. So what’s the story?’

‘It’s a kid story. It goes something like: There was a teeny tiny woman who lived in a teeny tiny house. You can go on forever describing all the teeny tiny things she lives with, her teeny tiny cat, and her teeny tiny canary, whatever. Anyway, the teeny tiny woman starts feeling a teeny tiny bit hungry. She goes out and for some reason, goes to the graveyard. She finds a teeny tiny bone on a grave and takes it home. She’s so tired when she gets home, that she puts the teeny tiny bone away in her cupboard—’

‘—her teeny tiny cupboard?’ Dolly interrupted, caught up in the tale.

‘Yeah,’ Roger agreed. ‘Anyway, she goes to sleep. In the night, she’s wakened by this teeny tiny noise. She hides under the covers and it gets a teeny tiny bit louder until finally she understands it’s the teeny tiny bone, saying, “Give me my bone.” I always thought that was silly, the bone asking for itself, but I guess you’re supposed to understand that there’s a ghost that owns the bone and it’s as much in the teeny tiny bone as any of its other bones. And it’s not going to be happy in a teeny tiny soup or that cupboard. It wants back to the graveyard. So the teeny tiny

woman ignored the cries of the teeny tiny bone and tries to sleep, but every time she dozes off, the damn thing starts crying again. And each time it cries, it gets a little louder. So finally she screams back at it; she screams “Keep your old bone.’”

Dolly, her face flushed with delight, was puzzled. ‘It doesn’t seem to be a very logical story, though.’

‘No. There’s all kinds of questions to ask. Was the teeny tiny woman a cannibal, making soup out of bones from the graveyard? Why was the bone lying around to begin with? And why, at the end, is it sufficient that she say “Keep your old bone”? Anyway, I like it.’

‘It’s cute,’ Dolly said. ‘I like the part about the teeny tiny house.’

‘You would,’ Roger teased, but she had dallied enough.

‘Don’t you have things to do?’ she chided.

Sighing, he put the little bed back out of harm’s way.

There was the little matter of the grounds. She handed him that one like it was going out for a bag of fries and burgers. It was going to be legal, though. She handed him a whopping wad of cash and told him to buy the turf.

Done almost as soon as said. A trip to Connecticut in a rented pickup netted a satisfyingly discounted deal with a big landscaper. Zip zap at the nearest rest stop and the enormous rolled strips of turf were in two shoeboxes. Another landscaper in another county was the source of a quantity of shrubbery, a truckload that fitted nicely, after alterations, into another shoebox. One more stop, just like the others. Rosebushes, perennials, a list of vegetation in Dolly’s precise upright hand. It took two days to assemble everything necessary but the trees, and most of that was spent driving, or visiting McDonald’s. It was hard work, all that driving.

‘Nobody sells mature trees,’ he explained to Dolly, who hardly even looked up from the drifts of packing materials that threatened to inundate her.

‘Steal them, darling,’ she advised. He replayed that throaty rasp dozens of times, driving around Westchester, looking for the right trees. It gave him shivers that started somewhere in his testicles. How many women, he marveled, understood that a man needed a challenge?

He did his best, as always, and substituted a mere four trees on her list. Central Park turned out to be a surprisingly rich source.

Then there was a long, endless day putting it all together, over a rambling discussion about zapping fertilizer and laying on the water and artificial light for the plants.

At last Dolly staggered away from the Doll’s White House, cramped up and hungry in the wake of her frenzied reconstruction. Roger put aside the work on the grounds until the next day. They wallowed together in the Health Club pool at the peculiar hour of 3:00
a.m.
, and then wallowed a few more minutes : n Dolly’s bed. Roger was inspired to get up again, and returned to serve corned-beef hash with fried eggs on the top and beer on the side. Dolly ate as much as he did, rolled over, and dropped into the sleep of utter fatigue. Piling the dirty dishes on a tray, Roger left them in the kitchen, a little treat for Ruta in the morning. He felt too excited, too nerved up to sleep and decided to check on his teeny tiny woman before he gave in to the tug of satiety.

She was a bundle in the shadows of the canopy, curled like an unborn baby. Her hair was splayed across the pillows in dark wings, her eyelashes melted in the dark smudges under her eyes. She was alarmingly insubstantial. Roger’s stomach gurgled happily, full of comed-beef and eggs and beer, and he felt guilty. He touched her gingerly, and she winced away in her dark sleep. At least she was still alive.

A tiny foot slipped from beneath the covers. He moved it, between thumb and forefinger, back under the quilt, and tucked it in. He was awash with strange and alien emotions. Rubbing his :hest idly, he wondered if the eggs and corned-beef had not been a mistake. The teeny tiny woman in the dollhouse bed evoked feelings in him that he had never had for anyone. She was his. Even Dolly wasn’t really his. Roger Tinker created this small person. It made him feel godlike. He wanted to take good care of her. Make her happy. With that vow, he made his way back to bed.

For a moment, waking up, she thought she was in her old room. It » as delicious to be back in her white four-poster with the rose petit-point canopy. Her mother would call her soon, and have breakfast waiting for her, so she wouldn’t miss the bus. No, that w asn't right. No bus, it was summertime. She could stay in bed as late as ever she pleased.

Except she couldn’t. Lying perfectly still on the pillow, she held her breath. The shadowy room around her faded. She did hurt still, all over. And she was horribly hungry and thirsty. There was

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no way she could be in her old room because it was someone else’s room now, had been for years and years, and the house was someone else’s, too. Since Mummy married David, and Daddy married Ruthann.

She lifted her head carefully, ignoring the pain. Now she could see that the posters were some dark wood, not white. The canopy was rose, though, but a solid rose silk, not rose-on-white, as hers had been. She laid back, staring into the curve of the tester over her. Not an oxygen tent.

Then she wasn’t badly hurt, only in ferocious pain from bruises, from healable things. Not in a respirator or a kidney machine or a body cast. Nothing heroic. She could stretch her limbs a little and the pain was even reassuring. Everything seemed to work, on the surface.

The desire to pee came on without warning. She struggled upright. No bell for a nurse with a plastic bedpan, not one that she could find. With more effort, she got her legs over the side of the bed. The pressure in her bladder was enough to make her feel panicky. She could see the rest of the room, beyond the gap in the bed hangings. Some of it anyway. A dresser. A fireplace. A door. Maybe a bathroom door.

She stood up and fell back nearly fainting. On the edge of the bed, she gathered her strength and concentrated, suppressing the outrage of her body. A hospital room this wasn’t. Not with a canopied four-poster and a fireplace with a marble mantel. Not any hospital she knew. But she did know something about four-posters in rooms with fireplaces and the kind of wallpaper whose patterns were shadows on the wall from where she sat. Groping her way along the side of the bed, she pushed the hangings out of her way. Just to the right of the bed, hidden before the folds of rose silk, was a commode. She slipped to the floor beside it, and opened the cupboard door.

A tear of relief seeped from her left eye. She pulled the chamberpot out and weakly shoved at the lid, until it clanked to the floor. She drew the pot painfully between her legs. It hurt to sit on it but not nearly as it hurt not to. Her urine hissed into the pot endlessly, its fumes rising hotly to her nose. Her stomach roiled in revolt and another tear escaped. At last it was over. She managed to replace the lid but was afraid she would spill the heavy pot putting it back into its cupboard, so she left it by the bed.

Now she sought the covers like a refuge. The tears streamed, her nose was running, and she was almost too weak to wipe it.

Using a corner of the sheet, she rolled it carefully away from her. The effort had tired her so much that hunger and thirst faded in urgency. She slid almost immediately into a fitful doze.

'Is she all right?’

Roger looked up from the chaos on the floor. It was necessary to modify the base that supported the Doll’s White House so that the new green stuff would keep on growing. It was more of a problem in gardening than anything Roger had a strong interest in, but it was something to do.

He couldn’t, however, ignore Dolly’s genuine concern. Taking .are of her possessions, he knew. There was no sudden love of Levna Shaw springing in Dolly’s small bony bosom, just because Leyna was now tiny and vulnerable. The thought of Dolly’s t'osom naturally kindled memories of Leyna’s, once a full reductive pair of moons peeping rosily from her blouse on a magazine cover.

‘Well?’ Dolly demanded.

'She’s just compensating. She’ll come out of it.’

No point in adding
I hope.
Roger could only project her response to minimization from the small amount of data he had -^cumulated testing smaller mammals. It was one of those risks t r. a t had to be taken, like when the first A-bomb was exploded and some of the scientists on the Manhattan Project thought there was a chance that it might ignite the universe, but hoped mightily that !t wouldn’t. And it hadn’t. That was the operative point.

Roger glanced at his wrist watch. ‘Time for exercise class,’ he told Dolly cheerfully.

After that, it was lunch time. Amazing how sanguine he had become at the prospect of a cup of plain yogurt and a quarter of a cantaloupe. Nasty stuff, cantaloupe. Sherbert of boogers. With the yogurt and fruit clotting in the pit of his stomach, and a nice touch of heartburn, not from the yogurt, which he didn’t mind anymore, but from not eating enough, he would cease to be cheerful. In the afternoon, he would finish the grounds model and r>ecome cheerful again, as dinner approached. He was taking it as it came.