In the woods near the picnic tables, years ago, when Meg was a child, she heard teenagers whispering to each other about her father’s crying. On the fountain walls, the white paint faded away under crosses and encrypted symbols of gangs long gone and hearts with girls’ names spray-painted inside. Her father painted circus animals on the fountain—elephants and tigers and lions and hippos. His sprawling circus dominated the graffiti with white roses of cotton candy clouds in the sky above royal blue tents, cadmium-red hoops of fire, and huge muscular beasts with bright, intelligent eyes. Often he cried when his animals were painted over by the graffiti artists in the park. Sometimes when one of his favorite animals was defaced, he disappeared for weeks so that Meg wondered if he was ever coming back.
Her childhood was marred by his leaving, just as his painted animals were marred by teenagers who laughed as he cried, smearing the tigers with silver chains.
Ashes clung to curtains inside the log cabin where her mother played harmonica, the songs her father loved, songs about the railroad and men who worked nights returning to sleeping children. Her mother’s metallic music drifted through open windows like rain, the melody inviting him to come back home.
Remnants of Meg’s childhood littered the living room, a stuffed monkey made of yarn, a large ventriloquist’s dummy dressed like Donald Duck, and a naked Rainbow Bright doll turned upside down on the windowsill. She once loved that doll more than anything in the world, and it bothered her to see the doll abandoned. But because her father’s circus had been painted over again, or because she was pregnant and hadn’t yet told her mother, she was too embarrassed to pick the doll up and dress it and put it in the rocking chair where it used to sit.
As she lit a cigarette, a man’s hand reached through the open window to graze the doll’s foot. The hand lifted the doll into the air by its bright red hair, and the doll was gone.
She opened the door and saw her father stroking the doll’s hair, dirty fingers catching on tangled yarn. With his new beard, he looked like a much older man. He was dangling a handful of silver jewelry, which he held out to Meg. She didn’t want to put the necklaces on, but she put them on anyway. Tangling and untangling, the tingling silver dazzled her in moonlight.
As her mother approached her father, fingers running through his matted beard, he ignored her and only looked toward Meg. The necklaces left dark marks on her hands when she touched them and made her neck itch. She was afraid to ask where the necklaces had come from.
“You’re pregnant?” he whispered.
She didn’t answer.
After entering the house, he kept dropping his cigarette in the wrong places, forgetting to snuff out the tip. He set the couch on fire, and Meg’s mother killed the flames with the fire extinguisher that flooded the room with white powder. Meg could barely see her parents’ faces through smoke-haze. They were coughing, and she could hardly breathe. But the fire was out. Her mother opened a window as her father clutched the doll to his chest.
“Hank,” her mother yelled, “for God’s sake.”
“What have you done?” Meg asked.
“Hell,” he said.
“You drink too much,” her mother said to her father, “and you smell bad.”
“I smell?” he asked, sniffing the doll.
Meg wanted a cup of coffee and offered him one. He refused and she suspected he had never liked her coffee because she mixed Maxwell House with Folgers Crystals.
Before he left that night, he asked to take the doll with him. She was drinking coffee with her mother. They held the warm cups in their hands, waving to him on the dark porch as he drove away singing a lullaby, buckling the doll into the passenger’s seat as if it were a child riding beside him.
“Say bye-bye, Rainbow Bright,” her mother whispered as if to the wind. “Say bye-bye, Daddy.”
Meg didn’t want to say anything, so she went inside to pour herself another cup of the bittersweet coffee that tasted of metal, ashes, oatmeal, stale cigarettes, roses, rancid cashews, and candles.
A month later, Meg noticed her belly’s reflection in the lake. As she stood on the shore, her mother and father whispered to each other about the chains. The girl’s body drifted slowly, and the boat stalled. When the boat reached the shore, men were tugging the chains, taking up the slack, dragging the body to the grasses.
The girl’s hair was full of mud, and some of the mud was coming off on the rocks. The sheriff put a towel over the girl’s face, or rather the place where her face used to be. People crowded closer to look at the body before the coroner came to take it away. The girl’s skin was gray. Her chest was torn, and her broken ribs resembled driftwood.
Meg’s father stared at the lake and hid the doll inside the folds of his army jacket, hunched against what he concealed as he crept along the muddy shore.
Meg followed the sound of laughter in the trees and found her father dancing in the moonlit park. The darkness of oak shadow surrounded him as he spun the doll above his head. Cigarette butts floated in rainwater under the golden monkeys he had painted. The monkeys’ red hats burned above slender necks encircled in delicate chain. The chain stretched outside the frame of concrete wall behind the fountain, tethers unseen.
The shadow of the doll’s hair hid his gaze in darkness.
Meg watched in silence. The way he caressed the doll with tenderness and pure, undisguised joy—wonder, even—made Meg shiver. She couldn’t bring herself to turn away. The doll was filthy, stained, torn. It hurt her that her father seemed to love the doll more in spite of its stains.
She took a step closer to him. He stopped twirling.
“Who are you?” he asked, approaching.
“You’re my father,” she whispered, unwilling to look at his eyes. Not wanting to see his face, his expression, she focused on his old boots, the thick, uneven crust of caked filth that clung to the snakeskin.
“I know who I am,” he said, spitting on the grass. “Who the hell are you?”
“Meg.”
She looked at his eyes, his wide clear eyes, and saw his face was splotched, splattered with what appeared to be black paint, almost dry. His hands were glistening with the dark substance that stained the doll.
“Meg?” he whispered.
He stepped closer and held the doll out to her. She knew better than to back away.
She pretended to admire the doll.
“She’s dirty, ain’t she?” he asked, his lip trembling.
That’s when Meg smelled blood. He stepped into a patch of moonlight and the redness glistened—blood drying on the doll, his face, his hands, his boots.
“Ain’t she?” he asked, again.
“Let’s give her a bath,” Meg said, leading him to the fountain.
They knelt beside the fountain, dunking the doll into the murky water. Ripples of blood ebbed as she reached down to touch his fingers, rubbing her hands against his, holding his wrists.
Once the blood washed away from his skin, Meg was sorry to see that he had no wounds, that the blood was not his own.
“Our baby,” he whispered, gesturing with his bearded chin toward the wet doll, limp and heavy in his hands.
Meg almost took the doll from him, then reminded herself that it was just an old toy. She imagined her baby forming like a secret inside and tried to think of ways to keep it away from him.
“Who died?” she asked, speaking to him as if he were a naughty child. “Whose blood is this?”
He laughed at her.
When he was asleep in his car, she pried the doll from his hands.
The police, displeased with her for washing the doll, wanted certain incriminating details, and she knew what she looked like during the interviews—the unfortunate pregnant girl talking to the young detective.
“The doll,” he said, “could prove useful, whether or not a victim is located.”
Thinking of the body in the lake, she studied the doll on the desk and wondered what her father would do once he realized the doll was gone. Wrapped in thick, clear plastic, the doll looked like trash, like cloth and yarn and plastic that had been tossed away with scraps from the butcher’s shop.
“He’s a good man,” she whispered.
The detective left the room and rushed back, his short hair wet with perspiration.
“We found him in his car and the lady in the trees behind the fountain.”
“How is he?”
“She’s dead, and your mother wants to take you home. I don’t want you to go with her. Okay?”
“Why?”
“He’s asking for you. He says he wants the doll back, says he needs it. Says he will only talk to you. Get him to write it down. It will be easier that way.”
When her father looked at her, he began to whimper.
“I want to make things right,” he whispered.
“Write it in a letter to me,” Meg said.
He reached for the pen, pulled the paper closer and hunched over the pages for hours—sighing, snorting, growling, and ripping at the tablet before he was finished.
Afterward, he handed the pages to Meg and slept for hours. He would never talk about what he had written.
“It’s not much, but it’s enough,” the detective said, relieved.
The letter, which looked as short and sloppy as she expected, was much more coherent than she imagined, although as a confession it never made much sense. Her father’s tears had turned the paper soggy and fragile so that the pages dried crisp and brittle, wrinkled. His words read as follows:
Darling, I saw her in the parking lot, one of the people from old times. But she wasn’t old. She was as young as she ever was. She saw me. She knew. I walked to her. She walked to me. I touched her. Hi, ya, she said, as always she said to me when I was a boy. You remember me? Yes. You remember what happened? Yes. Can you do it just like you saw it? Yes. You will? Yes. You remember what it looked like? Oh, yes. Pretend like I am it and you are the one with the chains. The chains are in the trees. You’ll find them there. Pretend like I am not me. Do it, just like you saw it. Don’t stop, no matter what, until it’s finished—even if I tell you to stop, even if I beg. Understand? Yes, I said. Then, I did.
After Meg’s baby was born, her father kept asking the police if he could have the doll back, but the doll wasn’t really a doll anymore, just hunks of molded cloth, wispy stuffing, mashed plastic, and frayed yarn. Somehow he just couldn’t understand. He still wanted the old doll, now more than ever, and even began to write Meg letters about the doll although she claimed she had no idea what had become of it.
“Where is she?” He kept asking. “What happened? I don’t remember what happened. Where did she go? Please, I just want to hold her and hold her.”
Meg visited him in prison with her son in her arms, the boy burping milk on her shoulders as he smiled at her father. She wanted to tell her father what her life was like now that she had a child, but sometimes she found it hard to explain things to him. He had no patience for her stories about raising the child. In fact, he didn’t want to talk about his grandson, the boy she had named after him. He only wanted to talk about the baby elephant from his childhood that was beaten to death after refusing to perform a circus act.
“He was screaming and trying to crawl away on his knees like a human being,” her father said.
Putting her hands over her son’s ears and smiling at her father as if nothing were wrong, the way she sometimes smiled when he was near, she imagined her father as a boy watching the elephant die, but she couldn’t imagine the expression on his face. Secretly, she suspected that if the elephant had died another way her father would have been another type of man. He might have been free, holding his grandson in the open air and laughing at the park, carrying the child near the fountain.
A week before her father was sentenced to die, someone sent her a weapon that looked like a small flashlight. The package had no return address. The note, which wasn’t signed, read:
This will render any attacker helpless and is safe to use on animals and persons under the influence of alcohol and narcotics.
After unwrapping the weapon from its clear package, she turned off all the lights in her house. Her son cried for joy as she flipped on the switch and pointed the weapon at the windows, but it was only a tiny light shining in the dark.