Hadley carefully maneuvered a pea with her fork from one end of her dinner plate to the other. Isaac wasn’t allergic to legumes other than peanuts, so they ate peas almost every day. She was certain she was turning green.
“Why isn’t O the first letter of the alphabet?” asked Isaac. He was famous for asking random questions designed to make Hadley ask “What?” She couldn’t resist.
“What?”
“O is like zero. So it should be first, doncha think?” He shoved a spoonful of peas into his mouth, chomped a few times and then grinned. His teeth were covered in green mush.
Hadley rolled her eyes and sighed.
“I’m taking some time off next week,” said Ed. “I’ll paint the halls and the living room then.”
“We picked Desert Dusk. Just like the old apartment, Haddy.” Her mother beamed.
Hadley smiled and nodded. She was trying hard to be cheerful. When she’d left the attic that afternoon she’d discovered a plate of cookies—chocolate chip cookies with the chocolate still shiny—waiting at her door. It was a peace offering from her mother. Just like old times. Hadley had lifted the plate, but her pinkie finger seized and the cookies slid off, dropping to the floor in a heap of gooey crumbs. When she apologized for ruining the gift, her mother pretended she had no idea what Hadley was talking about.
“I almost forgot,” said Ed. “My boss gave me three tickets to the Pirates game next week.”
“Wow!” shouted Isaac. A pea torpedoed from his mouth, landing on the table in front of Hadley.
“Three?” said her mother, glancing at him nervously. “For you and the kids, of course.”
People often spoke of the fifth wheel as being unnecessary, but Hadley was beginning to feel like the fourth wheel—on a tricycle.
“Of course,” said Ed. “You like the Pirates, Haddy, don’t you? Isaac and I are huge fans.”
“Pirates? Sure.” Hadley smiled weakly. “I like football.”
Isaac burst out laughing. “The Bucs are baseball, silly.”
“Bucs?”
“Bucs. As in buccaneers,” said Isaac. “As in pirates.”
“Looks like you have a lot to learn about sports,” said Ed, tousling Hadley’s hair.
“Sports. Great.” Hadley smoothed her hair and took a deep breath. Her mind drifted toward the dollhouse.
Of course she hadn’t played with dolls in years, but this was different. The dollhouse fascinated her. Everything was identical to her new house. The tiled roof, the octagonal windows high in the attic—it even sat on a wooden base complete with a driveway, artificial grass, and a garage set back with a room above it. It was as though someone had taken her house and shrunk it.
Hadley had once visited a strange museum in Niagara Falls. It was full of all sorts of weird miniature exhibits. There was a pair of shoes that had belonged to the tiniest woman that had ever lived, plus a bunch of shrunken heads—supposedly real heads—that had had their skulls removed and then been sewn back up and stewed in herbs by the Shuar people of the Amazonian lowlands. There was even an entire woman shrunk to the size of a doll—though Hadley had read later that it had been a fake, most likely created using goatskin.
Questions mushroomed in the darkest regions of her brain. Whose dollhouse was it? Who built it? And why had its owner left it behind?
The idea of dolls suddenly reminded Hadley of the eye. Her hand swam into her pocket but came out empty. It must have slipped out when she’d fallen in the attic. She resolved to search for it later.
“Pass the biscuits,” said Isaac.
Hadley handed him the basket of warm buckwheat blobs. Her pinkie finger was still stiff. Another casualty of the fall.
Ed crammed a slab of meat into his mouth and talked while he chewed. “We’ll stay in motels and eat at greasy diners. I’ve saved up vacation and my boss says I can use it all next summer.”
The words next and summer snapped Hadley’s attention back to the dinner conversation. She struggled to catch up. “What are you guys talking about?”
Her mother looked at Hadley as if she had three heads. “I’m sure I told you. We’re going to take a family vacation next summer. A road trip south.”
Hadley’s chest tightened. Her fork fell, sending a glob of mashed potatoes splatting onto the table. “You promised I could go to Camp Greenly Lake with Sydney next summer. Remember?”
“I said maybe.” Her mother swiped at the mess with her napkin, only making it worse. “But things have changed.”
Hadley felt the last grain of her old life slip through her grasp. The thought of going to camp with Sydney next summer was what had made leaving her best friend bearable.
After the dishes were cleared, Mom, Ed, and Isaac decided to play a board game. Hadley leaned against the door frame.
“Come on, Haddy,” said Ed. “We can be teams. You and me?”
He patted the seat beside him. The skin around his eyes crinkled when he smiled. He was trying so hard to be nice. Hadley really wanted to take him up on his offer, but when she opened her mouth what came out was, “Some other time.”
Isaac rolled the die and drew a card. He had to act out a word while Hadley’s mother and Ed had to guess. He danced around while they shouted random things like “Potato!” and “Sherpa!”
Beyond their voices, Hadley heard something else—a low wispy wail, like the sound of a child crying. It was coming from the enormous fireplace in the living room.
The oak mantel stretched floor to ceiling. It was covered in elaborate carvings. With the empty timber basket sitting there, it reminded Hadley of a great grinning mouth. Wind whispered down the long shaft, echoing out the brick firebox.
The timer buzzed.
“Goggles,” said Hadley softly. “Isaac’s word was ‘goggles.’”
“Of course,” said Ed, putting his arm around Hadley’s mother and winking. “It was so obvious.”
Her mother seemed to really enjoy the game. She and Hadley only ever played things like chess and checkers and gin. Most games didn’t work well when there were only two players.
It was funny how Mom and Ed had met. Hadley’s mother was a parking enforcement officer. Ed was a painter. One day, he had to make a quick stop at one of his work sites and couldn’t find parking. She’d given him a ticket for parking illegally. He thought she was so beautiful that he double-parked in the exact same spot every day for the next three weeks, hoping to see her again. He got about a dozen tickets before she returned to that block. He said he would have gotten a million tickets if that was what it took to find Hadley’s mother again.
They’d barely started dating when they’d decided to get married. They hadn’t introduced Isaac to Hadley until they were already planning the wedding. It all happened so fast; a license, a bunch of daisies, dinner at a fancy restaurant, and it was a done deal. There wasn’t even time to blink.
“Sometimes,” her mother had said, “you just know it’s right.”
Hadley wondered what had made things so right with Ed and so wrong with her real father—so wrong that Hadley had never even been allowed to meet him. So wrong her mother kept no pictures of him at all. Whenever she’d asked her mother what he was like, her mother always said the same thing: He’s not a very nice person. Let’s leave it at that.
Hadley went to bed early. She lay awake for hours, teetering on the brink of sleep. Now and then a low groan rippled through the walls. Her mother said old houses were like old people—they had tired, creaky bones.
She tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable, but her mind overflowed with wild thoughts she couldn’t tame. Thoughts about Sydney making a new best friend. About strange dollhouses, and tricycles that moved on their own. About ice-cold hands clawing her ankles. And one-eyed dolls.
Hadley had just drifted off when something startled her awake. She sat bolt upright. In the slit of space between the floor and her bedroom door, a shadow skittered past her room.