I left Boston three months after we buried my baby sister. I moved back to the town I grew up in to be closer to my parents and my brother, Bryce.
“You don’t have to do this,” Bryce said, strategically arranging boxes in the back of the U-Haul. “Mom and Dad are gonna be fine. And I’m around.”
“Yeah, well, we’re already moving all of my shit, so . . .”
I didn’t trust my brother’s powers of perception. I knew that my parents were not fine, that he was not fine, that none of us was fine.
We stopped at a Burger King to break up the drive home. We got into a fight in the parking lot when he tried to squeeze the van into a spot that I said was too small, but he was sure he could defy the laws of the physical universe to back into. We weren’t speaking.
We ordered separately, paid separately. I was mad because I don’t even like Burger King but he was too hungry to hold out for a Wendy’s. We sat at parallel tables, each sulking in the same direction. There was a family sitting in the booth across from us. Mom, Dad, brothers, and sisters bickering over small plastic toys.
I didn’t have to look at Bryce to know that he was watching the family and that he was crying. He must have known about me, too, because he scooted over and we ate together.
I thought Audrey would have gotten a kick out of that.
I spent a week in my childhood bedroom fighting a losing battle with insomnia, flipping through old photos at four a.m., listening to my mother cry in her sleep. I realized I couldn’t stay there.
I found a place nearby via an ad in the back of the newspaper. I told Jade, my friend and former roommate up in Boston, and she said, “Did you go back to Jersey or back in time?”
“Both?”
I moved into the attic apartment of an old converted Victorian off Main Street, one of the houses I’d been obsessed with as a kid, incessantly pestering my parents about why we didn’t live in a house that looked like that. Like a big dollhouse.
It was owned by an elderly lady who wore floral housecoats and walked around with the TV remote glued to her hand. She had thin bluish lips and milky, viscous eyes. She looked like she could die at any moment, leaving behind a bunch of shit she ordered off QVC and stacks of Lifetime movies on VHS. She occupied the first floor. Her grown niece, Louise, and Louise’s husband, Jeff, lived on the second and third floors. They had several unsavory bumper stickers on the back of their pickup, empty bottles of Bud Light piled up in recycling. They smoked Marlboro Reds and had bad haircuts. We avoided one another.
The attic was small and cramped, a single room with a sleeping alcove, plus a tiny bathroom with a tub too small to lie down in, a toilet, and a pedestal sink. The kitchen consisted of a counter with a microwave and a hot plate, an adjacent mini fridge. The place had its charm, though, with wainscoting and crown molding, thick planked floors. It worked for me.
I brought my stuff over from my parents’ piecemeal. I constructed a makeshift dresser out of cardboard boxes, fearing real furniture would give my subconscious a sense of permanence I refused to grant.
It didn’t take me long to discover the doll.
She was in the cabinet built in underneath the window, placed carefully in a silk-lined damask hatbox. She was porcelain. She had shiny green eyes. They looked into mine with unambiguous focus. She wore a sweet blue dress with white lace trim.
“Aren’t you just a doll?” I said, thinking I was funny.
I figured she belonged to my landlord. I held on to her for a moment longer, stroking her soft blond hair and thinking of my baby sister, who hadn’t been a baby for a long, long time, even though I still thought of her that way. I thought about how when she was a kid, she had never liked to play with dolls. When she was three, she chose to be Maleficent for Halloween over Sleeping Beauty. She chose karate over ballet.
I put the doll back as I found her, thinking I would ask my landlord next time I saw her.
I forgot.
“Mom, did you want chamomile?” I asked, my voice rising over the scream of the kettle.
“That’s fine,” she said.
Her mood had improved, but not her appearance. The skin around her eyes was pink, raw from crying, her nose red and scabbed. She blamed herself for my sister’s death, and I knew I couldn’t convince her otherwise. Bryce had found her a good therapist, and he drove her to the appointments every Monday and Thursday. He acted like a real martyr about it.
I wondered where he had been when Audrey needed him. I bit my tongue. Where had I been? There was plenty of blame to go around. It drifted through the house, moving room to room, a faceless ghost.
Its presence did not go unnoticed.
“It feels heavy in here,” my mother said, sipping her tea.
“It’s too hot, Mom. The tea.” I sat next to her at the table. “What do you mean, it feels heavy?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Do we need to talk to Dad about moving?”
“We don’t, Mackenzie. I don’t want to be a burden to you and your brother.”
“You’re not. No burden.”
“Don’t you feel it? Heavy.”
“It’s hard. Of course it’s hard.”
“Sometimes I read these stories about people who’ve had loved ones pass and they’ll find something. The person they lost will come back and leave a sign, like a necklace on a pillow, to show they’re all right. Audrey hasn’t left anything.”
“She didn’t wear jewelry.”
She shot me a look.
I put my feet up on her lap. “I’m sure she’s in a better place and will talk to us when we get there.”
She pushed my feet off. “You don’t believe in God.”
“Maybe I do.”
She pursed her lips. “Don’t patronize me.”
“I’m not!” I said. “Jesus Christ.”
She laughed and it was the greatest thing to ever happen.
Something I’d been doing and not telling anyone about was going into my sister’s room and cleaning and reading her diary. I went through her closet, the one that Mom found her in, and took down all of her clothes and laid them out on the bed. I didn’t do anything but stare at them. Then I put them back.
There were certain things in her room I didn’t allow myself to touch. Her blankie, her nightstand, her candles, her scented lotions, her hair ties, her books, her snow globe collection—even though the globes used to be mine. My sister was born when I was eight, so a lot of the things in her room used to be mine. Hand-me-downs and knickknacks no longer wanted masqueraded as gifts. I didn’t want them back. I just wanted to be among them.
It was weird, I knew, but I gave myself permission because I was grieving.
She would have been mad. It was a violation of privacy, one that transcended death. But whatever. I was mad at her, too.
One night, after I got back from my parents’, I found the hatbox on the floor. I picked it up and opened it.
The doll was bigger than I remembered her, but otherwise looked the same. I put the lid back on and returned her to the cabinet, closed the doors.
“Good night,” I said.
I wrote myself a reminder to ask my landlord.
In the morning, when I woke up, the box was on the floor again.
I got a job at a café down the street, the same one I used to work at when I was in high school. It’d since changed owners and was now called Marlo’s instead of Monroe’s. It pretty much looked the same: Eccentric portraits of old ladies in feathered hats covered the brightly painted walls; retro furniture cluttered the space. A chandelier made of coffee mugs hung from the ceiling. There was a new espresso machine that had more buttons than I was used to, but I got the hang of it.
“Do you feel like shit working at your old job?” Jade asked me.
“If you mean ashamed, then yes,” I said. “But I missed it, to be honest. And if I run into someone from high school and they say something, I can just be like, ‘My sister died, so fuck you.’ ”
“True, true.”
Jade was the only friend I still talked to on a regular basis. I planned on getting back in touch with the rest eventually, whenever I could stomach the outpouring of sympathy. They meant well. It wasn’t their fault they didn’t know what to say or how to say it. Maybe they did. Maybe they were doing everything right and I just wasn’t handling it the way I was supposed to. Jade was the only one who didn’t treat me differently. I appreciated that.
There was that middle school field trip to Medieval Times, when I spent my hard-earned babysitting money on one of those princess cone hats with the ribbon. I brought it home and presented it to my sister, expecting eternal gratitude, or at the very least a thank-you and some mild excitement. She provided only disinterest, a sort of “what the hell am I gonna do with this?” reaction that left me bitter.
“Say thank you! Jesus!” my mother huffed from the kitchen, nose deep in one of her crosswords.
“Thank you, Jesus,” my sister said, a master of sarcasm at four.
I tried to plan tea parties, play restaurant. I wrote up lunch menus with specials like grilled cheese and pizza bagels, hot dogs cut up in box macaroni.
“What can I get for you today?” I would ask in my best fluffy-waitress voice.
“Cereal.”
I could never tell if she was trying to be difficult or if it was embedded in her DNA.
Her rebellion against fashion started at five. She adopted a uniform of black leggings and oversized sweatshirts, both often marked with holes or stains. I took her shopping the day after I got my driver’s license and she sat on the dressing room floor wearing an enormous bra on her head instead of trying on any of the things I picked out for her. At the time I was frustrated, asking aloud why I bothered as she giggled at her reflection.
Now I can see that none of it was for her; it was for me. I was trying to mold her into the sister I wanted her to be, not the one she was. I should have embraced the sister I had, who was reading Stephen King novels in the sixth grade because she appreciated a good scare, who refused to go on the class camping trip because “Fuck that.”
She listened to every track of every album on the Rolling Stone 100 Greatest Albums of All Time by fourteen, texting me asking if I ever heard of the Doors.
I remember once I was home over winter break and my college boyfriend called to break up with me. I immediately sought out my sister, asleep in her room. I sat at the edge of her bed and woke her up. She yawned, unbothered, asked me what was up. When I told her, her eyes widened and she said, “Asshole!” and I felt better.
She had always been what we called “independent” but now knew was actually “withdrawn.” Up in her room, door locked, a do-not-disturb sign lifted from a hotel hanging from the knob. She was on the internet, watching TV, playing video games, reading. Texting. Normal teenage bullshit. Audrey being Audrey.
Whenever I would call or text or try to chat her on Facebook, she was unresponsive. I’d get maybe a few half-baked replies, and thinking she was talking to friends or distracted by homework, I let it go. I stopped trying.
“I’m bored,” she complained to me, squished in the backseat of Dad’s car on the way to some family function a few years ago.
“Join clubs.”
“Don’t want to,” she’d said.
“I think you’re confusing being bored with being lazy.”
“I’m not lazy. I just don’t feel like doing anything. I don’t like doing anything.”
“Sounds lazy to me.”
“Whatever.”
The doll didn’t belong to my landlord. She denied ever seeing it.
“Did someone live here before and leave it?”
“No one lived up there before you, dear,” she said. She was always using grandmotherly terms of endearment that sounded condescending. It was how she said them.
“It’s not Louise’s?”
“I would have remembered,” she said. “It’s a very lovely doll.”
I looked down at the doll. Lovely. I thought maybe she could be worth something. I never understood why some people collected things like dolls or Swarovski crystal Mickeys or anything like that, but looking at the doll, it started to make a little more sense.
“Well, thanks anyway,” I said.
“You can ask Louise.”
“I will,” I said, but I was lying.
“There’s a way to tell,” my mom said, “if they’re worth something. It’s the eyes. If the eyes are glass. Are they glass?”
I shrugged. I had used the doll as a conversation starter. I was in the market for things to talk about with my mother. Anything but Audrey.
Typically, I resorted to gossip, a useful tool I believed underutilized by grief counselors and therapists.
I would talk about my cousin Morgan selling makeup over Facebook in what I suspected was some kind of Ponzi scheme, or the weird growth on Uncle Greg’s neck that he refused to acknowledge, especially since it had started sprouting hair. I’d talk about the losers my friends dated, about how Katie was snooping on her boyfriend’s computer after suspecting him of cheating and found meetup ads he posted on Craigslist under the alias Lucky Todd. He went by James, but apparently James was his middle name. His first name was Todd. He blamed it on his roommate and Katie believed him. There was Jade’s fifty-seven-year-old sugar daddy who had kids her age. Then there was Liz, whose fiancé convinced her she’d contracted chlamydia from a toilet seat.
“People still get chlamydia?” my mom asked.
“Yeah, I guess.”
I left out the part about how I’d been seeing a woman before Audrey’s death. A tattoo artist from Somerville who had an undercut, a septum piercing, and an anger problem. We broke up before the funeral, when I told her she couldn’t come.
There was no point in mentioning it. It didn’t matter.
“Your friends are stupid,” my mom said.
“No, they aren’t.”
“They are. If you love like that, you’re stupid. But it’s a gift to be that stupid.”
My parents weren’t in love; that wasn’t a secret. They got along better now, though.
“You should go hang out with Violet. See some of your old sensible friends.”
Violet had been my best friend growing up. She still lived in town. She’d gone to community college and then started a business baking cakes for kids’ birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, weddings, corporate retreats, charity events, things like that. She’d also worked part time at the bakery at ShopRite. It was a simple life, one I had thought myself above when I went away to college. I’d judged her for her lack of grand ambition, but I envied her now. I’d never learned to be content with what I had like she did.
We’d kept in touch via liked social media posts, a sweet birthday comment and promise to make a phone date soon. We hadn’t actually spoken in years. But she came to the wake. She even cried.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said.
“Don’t just hang around here for my sake. That won’t make me happy.”
“I’ll call her.”
When I got home that night, I considered it. But then I anticipated the higher pitch of her voice, that obvious symptom of sympathy. She’d be surprised I moved home after I swore up and down I never would. I didn’t want to deal with it.
I looked at the doll instead.
I tried to figure out what her eyes were made of, if they were glass. I couldn’t tell. All I knew was they looked real. So real I could make out the dew in the corners, the dew of active ducts, of the ability to blink without ever actually blinking, to make tears without ever crying.
When I was little, I had dolls that closed their eyes when you laid them down like they were sleeping. If you never picked them up, they stayed that way. They never woke up.
This doll didn’t sleep. She couldn’t, not even if you laid her down. Her eyes would never close.
Chris Mulcahy was a boy I’d dated in high school whom Violet had also dated but in middle school. When you lived in a town as small as ours, it didn’t matter. Boys got passed around, borrowed like sweaters. He came into Marlo’s looking the way he did when we were together, dark hair disheveled because he woke up late, big blue eyes alert with paranoia like he’d forgotten something but couldn’t remember what. All in a way that made him cute and elusive. What did he forget? What was he dreaming of that compelled him to continuously press the snooze button? Was it me?
“Mackenzie?” he asked like he couldn’t believe it, like I was the Easter Bunny.
“Hey,” I said. To his credit, it was pretty surreal to be back where I worked in high school, seeing the boy I’d dated in high school who used to visit me and stand in the exact same spot.
“What are you doing back here?” he asked.
“I’m in town for some family shit,” I said. “Helping my parents out for a little while. My sister died. What can I get you?”
“Wow, I’m so sorry,” he said. “Wow. I can’t believe that. That’s crazy. I didn’t know.”
He wouldn’t. He never had Facebook, any of that. I doubted he even had an email address.
“Mocha?” I asked.
“Um, just a coffee. Black.”
“Okay. I just put a fresh pot on, so it’ll be a few minutes. Is that all right?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, sitting down at one of the tables across from the counter. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything,” I said. “Actually, I’d prefer you didn’t. Say anything. Not about that anyway. How are you?”
“Uh, me? Um, yeah. I’m fine. Yeah. I’m good. I’m just working with my brother. We have a closet business. Building out custom closets for rich people.”
“They need their closets.”
“Yeah, ha. They do. They really do. They, uh, have a lot of stuff.”
“I’m sure.”
“It’s good to see you, Mac.”
“You, too.”
I remembered in that moment how much he had loved me. It wasn’t because I was special. He was one of those guys who would marry whoever he was with because that’s how he thought it worked. He wrote me notes and drew me stick-figure pictures. We’d hang out in his bedroom and watch his betta fish fight. He’d play guitar and sing funny songs about the kids at our school. I’d kiss his neck and worry he expected more even though he didn’t. He was patient with me. We were virgins. We never had sex. I saved that for someone meaner.
Chris always invited me to family events, invitations I declined because I felt too awkward. I barely wanted to be around my own family. He had an older brother, a fireman father, and a mom who worked at the pediatric dentist. She was always ordering “sub sandwiches.” I never understood why the “sub” before “sandwiches” was necessary but that’s how they said it. It drove me crazy.
His older brother was going to, and eventually did, marry his high school girlfriend. I think his family expected the same of me, trying to include me in their rituals, getting me a Christmas stocking with my name on it and hanging it above the fireplace. It made me deeply uncomfortable. I knew I wasn’t going to marry him. And even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t have, because he would have asked me to change my name, and I would have had to say no because I refused to be Mackenzie Mulcahy. It sounded like the name of a local politician or a lifestyle vlogger, neither of which I aspired to be.
Sometimes I would get bored at his house and lock myself in his bathroom for long periods of time, cataloging his zit creams and scented body sprays. I told him I had IBS. I don’t. I could have come up with another excuse, or just not stayed in the bathroom for so long, but I think I did it to test his love for me. What high school boy would want to hear that from his girlfriend? But he didn’t appear put off by it. He saw it as an opportunity to start farting in front of me, which turned out to be the real nail in the coffin. Not the farting; that he expected me to love him enough to accept it.
It was an amicable breakup because he was an amicable guy. A few months later he was dating Jill Marvin and last I checked they were still together.
“Are you still with Jill?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, we got married.”
He showed me his ring. I wasn’t surprised by it, but I felt something else.
“We should get drinks while I’m in town,” I said. “Catch up.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Yeah.”
I handed him his coffee. I told him it was on the house, but I didn’t have that power. It would come out of my paycheck.
I called Violet later that day. She had the sympathetic tone I resented but it went away at the mention of Chris.
“Kind of weird he’s married to Jill,” I said. “The girl he dated right after me.”
“Could have been you, Mrs. Mac Mulcahy.”
“Jesus.”
“You’d be spending your whole life hiding in the bathroom! Eating sub sandwiches.”
“Sub sandwiches! I can’t believe you remember that.”
“I dated him, too, remember? Six months in the seventh grade. In middle school time, that’s basically six years.”
“I told him we should get drinks.”
“What did he say?”
“He said yeah.”
“Do you think you will?”
“Who knows?” I said. “We should get drinks. You and me.”
“Whenever! You should come over. See my house. I’m always testing new recipes and need feedback.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll come over soon.”
“Mom’s therapist wants us to come.” Bryce’s voice crackled through the receiver.
“Where are you?”
“Driving. Why?”
“Every time you call, it literally sounds like you’re calling me from the middle of a tornado.”
“The middle of the tornado is the eye, so that’s quiet.”
“Am I on speaker? It’s like you’re screaming at me, but I can’t even hear you.”
“Mom’s therapist wants us to come in for a session,” he repeated, attempting to annunciate. “Okay?”
“Do we have to?”
“Family session. All of us.”
“When?”
“Thursday.”
“Can’t. Working.”
“Our sister is dead, Mac.”
“You’re an asshole.”
I hung up.
As kids, Bryce and I spent a lot of time together because we were so close in age. He was born less than a year after me, my Irish twin. I forced upon him sagas of Barbies and Legos, long epics of backyard make-believe where I was the queen and he was a prince. He always asked to be a knight, but I vetoed it.
“You have to be a prince because I’m the queen and you’re my brother,” I told him. “Duh.”
He dutifully played along.
When we fought, we fought hard. One time I stabbed him in the back with a number two pencil. I think it was by accident during a wrestling session at the top of the stairs, but he claims it went down differently.
I wasn’t so selfish. I practiced soccer with him, played goalie, often catching the ball with my face. I let him have the good sled in the winter. We’d trudge down to the ravine, triumphantly taking on the steep slopes, shrieking with glee on the way down, throwing ourselves back up the hill to do it over and over again until our lips turned purple and we retreated inside for hot chocolate.
He was smart but not focused. He would start elaborate projects for the science fair and not finish. The night before, I would sneak downstairs and finish them for him. He never thanked me, but I could tell he was grateful. He even won a couple times.
When Audrey was born, there was a shift in the sibling dynamic. We were distracted by our new baby sister. I liked to dress her up in cute outfits and read her stories; he liked to construct stupid paper hats that made her look like a sailor and draw mustaches on her with nonpermanent marker, something neither my mom nor I found very funny but made my dad laugh like hell.
Bryce never got in trouble, not because he never did anything wrong, but because he was able to fly under the radar. I was dramatic, an attention-seeking overachiever in constant need of validation. Audrey was Audrey. Baby of the family, finicky but favored by default. Bryce got decent grades, played varsity soccer, got scholarships. Now he had a good job as a physical therapist and owned a condo. He was levelheaded and reliable. The ideal brother.
There were times when I felt threatened, like he and Audrey were closer to each other than they were to me. He teased Audrey a lot in that goofy big-brother way. It wasn’t cruel; it was a sitcom. He’d come in and she’d tell him to go away. He’d say something obnoxious; she’d roll her eyes. A laugh track would play somewhere off in the distance. I think he missed it, their relationship. He had a void for a sister, but it wasn’t one I could fill.
I switched my schedule around at work so I could go to the therapy session. My dad went, too, his discomfort permeating the room and making us all uneasy.
“I think it’s important to acknowledge this loss as a family,” the therapist said.
Then I stopped paying attention. I mostly just nodded and cried.
We went to Applebee’s after, ordered happy-hour appetizers and a pitcher of beer. My mom and I don’t like beer, but we drank it anyway. And a lot more. Peach sangria in fishbowl glasses. Shots of mystery-brand bourbon. We got so drunk we had to take Ubers back to our respective houses.
It happened before I got the door open. My key was in the lock when I heard it, the pitter-patter of tiny feet, faint music, the twinkly kind, like from a music box. Only I didn’t have a music box.
I pushed the door open and caught the doll perched on the edge of my bed, standing upright. When the door closed behind me, she fell onto the floor.
I was dizzy, too drunk to process what I’d just seen. I passed out immediately.
I woke up the next morning nauseous, with a pounding headache. I got up and shuffled into the shower. About halfway through shampooing, I remembered about the doll. The image frightened me: the way she had stood on my bed for that split second looking at me. I remembered the footsteps, the music. I didn’t bother to turn the water off. Grabbing a towel, my hair still sudsy, I went to see.
She wasn’t at the foot of my bed anymore. She was in her box in the cabinet.
I went back into the bathroom, this time locking the door.
I pulled my hair back in a messy bun, left my place, and went to my parents’ house to be with my mom, to clean. To occupy myself.
“Remember I was telling you about that doll?” I asked, up to my elbows in dishwater. “Mom?”
She was crying with her head down on the kitchen table. The therapist said it was normal, so I just kept doing the dishes.
There were still pictures of Audrey in the hall. Her school portraits with that distinct gloss and cheesy laser background. She wasn’t smiling with her teeth. She never did for photos. There was no way to capture her essence unless she wasn’t paying attention, and even then, if she caught you, she’d force you to delete the evidence.
I liked to remember her best smiling with teeth but there was nothing to help me. I had to rely on memory alone, and that scared me, because memories go. Like everything else, they go.
Chris texted me first, which was good because I discovered I’d deleted his number.
Hey Mac good to see you the other day. Still down to grab a drink?
I thought about it. Did I really want to hang out with him? Meh. Not particularly. But I did want to get out of my parents’ house, where I’d been lingering, avoiding my own place. Avoiding the doll. The memory of it standing on my bed and the mystery of how it got there, it unnerved me. Had I imagined it? Had I taken it out and left it there, forgotten about it? Thoughts of the doll manifested in a persistent chill. It was impossible to get warm, or to close my eyes and not see hers staring back, bright and unblinking.
I needed a distraction.
I told Chris yeah, I’d meet him for a drink. I picked a bar a few towns over where I doubted we’d run in to anyone we knew.
I spent hours getting ready. I chalked it up to boredom but there was probably a dash of desperation mixed in. I wanted to look exceptional. I felt I had something to prove, but I wasn’t sure what. Maren, the tattoo artist I’d been seeing, liked me best no makeup, messy haired, natural scented, raw animal magnetism. Which was weird because she was always done up, face painted on, hair styled, lingerie.
I tried not to think about her. When I did, I missed her.
“You look good,” Chris said, flagging down the bartender.
“Thanks,” I said. “You look the same.”
He laughed. “Is that supposed to be mean?”
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
He ordered us two whiskeys.
“So, you’re married,” I said.
“Yeah, yep. About a year. It’s cool. It’s pretty much the same. Like, the relationship is the same. I guess it kind of changes in a good way. It’s hard to explain.” He blushed a little.
“I get it.”
“You’re married?”
“No, I meant, like, I get what you’re trying to say,” I said. “I’m single.”
He nodded.
He told me his parents were doing well. His dad had retired, and his mom had taken up knitting, selling scarves on the internet. His brother and his wife had just had a baby, a daughter they named Spring Angel.
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Really. That’s really her name.”
I remembered what it was that had made me fall for him, why I had liked him so much in high school. He was sweet like a ripe peach. Hometown boy. Football on Sundays, help a stranger change a flat tire, adopt a rescue dog and name it Rex, volunteer to coach Little League, collect cans for the food drive. He was good.
And he played guitar.
“I loved you in high school,” I said, downing my whiskey. “I did.”
He waved the bartender over and ordered us two more.
“I’m telling you so you know. After Audrey, I don’t want to leave anything unsaid.”
“I loved you, too,” he said. “A lot.”
“I knew. I mean, I know you did.”
He put a hand on the back of his neck and pulled. “I don’t think you do.”
I cocked my head to the side, a question.
“Nothing,” he said quickly. “Just . . . I think I, like, hid how much I liked you because I knew eventually you’d leave.”
“Well, I’m back now,” I said, sighing.
“You’ll leave again. You always wanted, like, more for yourself. That’s part of why I liked you so much.”
“Thank you.” I should have left it there, but he made me feel safe, so I kept talking. “I needed to hear that. Part of me keeps wondering what would have happened if I’d stayed. If I wasn’t so obsessed with this idea of leaving, that life was better someplace else. Would I be happier if I had stayed? I could have been there for Audrey. Seen the signs.”
“You can’t think that way.”
“No, I know,” I said, something fat and wet in my eye, “but I do. And it’s true. If I’d been here, she would still be alive.”
“Mac.”
I was full-on crying then. “And it’s not like my life is so great in Boston. I’m not saving the world. I’m not traveling like I said I would.”
“Hey, let’s go outside, okay?” He threw cash down on the bar and looked around apologetically. People were staring.
We sat in his car, the same one he’d had senior year, the very car I broke up with him in. He let me rest my face on his chest while I cried. He smelled the same, too. Probably used the same body spray.
I was crying so hard I couldn’t catch my breath, but I wasn’t crying for Audrey. I was crying for me. For my mistakes, my disappointments, my guilt, my shame. It was excruciating, the guilt. I couldn’t live with it and mourn my sister. My brain wasn’t letting me. It knew I couldn’t handle both. I would die.
I tried to picture the holidays. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving. I couldn’t see the empty seat at the table. I couldn’t visualize it. I couldn’t imagine peeling apples for the pies by myself. Audrey and I had always done it together, making it a competition to see who could peel the fastest. She always won. She didn’t know that I let her, that the competition was a ploy to get her to participate.
I was blind to this future without her. The idea of it gave me vertigo.
I kissed him to snap myself back into the present.
He kissed me back.
We were kissing.
Our kisses were hungry. It was the gluttonous kind of kissing that’s never enough. I put my hand on his knee, slid it up until I could feel the stitching of his fly, the stiffness underneath. I went for the earlobe, a remembered weakness.
His breath bottomed out. He loved it.
His head went back as I unbuttoned.
“Stop,” he said suddenly. “No, no. I can’t. I’m married.”
“I know,” I said.
“That means something to me. I can’t. I’ve never cheated before. Fuck. What do I do?” He turned away from me.
I was agitated. It was better than being depressed but not as good as being fucked. “Well, don’t tell her. Let’s just pretend this never happened.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Chris,” I said. “Please. You felt sorry for me. I was upset. This is familiar. Forgive yourself and move on.”
He chewed on his lip as he adjusted himself.
“I didn’t just feel sorry for you,” he said.
In the years I’d known him, in all the time we’d been together, he had never hurt me until then. He pitied me. I saw it in his face.
“I’m good to drive,” I said, opening the car door. I hesitated before closing it. “Don’t tell her, okay? It will only cause more problems that no one needs, okay? Forget it.”
“Okay, yeah. I will.”
“Take care.”
“Wait, Mac.”
“What?”
“I really did love you.”
I didn’t say anything else after that. I shut the door.
On the way home I stopped for Chinese food at the place with the best noodles. I got it to go, planning to eat it in bed while watching a dumb movie on my laptop.
I called Jade from the car. “I kissed my married high school boyfriend.”
“Liz called off the engagement,” she said. “She got another itch and I guess it was the final straw.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I don’t want you feeling sorry for yourself.”
“I’m allowed.”
“Not because of that,” she said. “Stop making stupid decisions. You’re better than that.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
“Hey!”
“I don’t want you to implode. We’re getting too old for it to be cute.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Thank you so much for that.”
“You need me to come visit you in Mount Bumblefuck?”
“Nah. I’ll be back soon, I think. A few more months.”
“You will, Mac. You’re not going to get stuck there.”
“I know.”
“At least you didn’t fuck him.”
“I would have,” I said. “And you’re one to talk. Affair with Count Pennypacker.”
“What can I say?” she said. “We’re a couple of bad dolls.”
I told her I had to go. I pulled over to the side of the road to puke out of my car window. It wasn’t the whiskey, or the smell of the takeout or the guilt, or the regret over what I’d just done. It was the doll. It was the thought of going home to find the doll standing there, waiting for me. I couldn’t bear it. The sense of dread that came over me made me feel small and soft as an egg.
I decided to sleep at my parents’ that night.
I woke up early the next morning and wandered around the house quietly on my toes. I watched TV on mute. I made my parents breakfast, careful not to make any noise with the pans. My dad grabbed his plate of French toast with a mumbled “Thanks,” but my mom spent the rest of the day thanking me profusely for being so thoughtful.
“You’ve always been like this. Ever since you were little,” she said. “Always thinking of others.”
I made breakfast because I was awake and I was bored. I left the dishes.
I thought about Maren, who had told me all the time how selfish I was, and the night before with Chris.
“Not really,” I said.
“You are. Very sweet.”
“I mean, sometimes I do nice things but it’s mostly for me,” I said. “If I’m being honest, I think it’s mostly for me.”
“Is this that whole ‘no selfless good deed’ crap? Because I’m not in the mood.”
“No, Mom. Never mind.”
If I felt guilt over Audrey, I couldn’t begin to fathom what she was going through.
“Want to go see a movie or something?” I asked.
“A movie?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh. Yes, actually. That sounds fun.”
I took her to see some pleasantly formulaic romantic comedy. We stopped at CVS beforehand and bought a bunch of candy: M&Ms and Mike and Ikes and Red Vines. We smuggled them into the theater. We’d been doing this for as long as I could remember, sneaking in candy. A lot of people did it, but it felt sacred to me. A precious secret my mother and I shared.
She seemed upbeat on the drive home, better than she’d been in months, and I wondered if I could be enough for her. If I was enough daughter. Seeing her happy again, I wondered if it was possible for me to shine so brightly I could make her forget about Audrey, make it okay that she wasn’t around. This line of thinking coaxed me to say something I knew I shouldn’t, curious how my mother would react.
“Sometimes I don’t miss her,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said, immediately remorseful. “I don’t know why I said that.”
“What did you just say?”
“Nothing, Mom. Forget I said anything.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Mom, please.”
“Drop me off at home. I don’t want you around the house tonight.”
“Mom.”
“Mackenzie Jeanette. You’d better keep your mouth shut right now, so help me God.”
“Fine. Sorry.”
I procrastinated going back to my apartment. I went to two different strip malls, stumbling from Marshalls to Old Navy to HomeGoods, looking at useless shit I didn’t need and trying to convince myself that I needed it. I left empty-handed.
When I finally got home, I opened the door cautiously. I made noise. I announced my presence.
“I’m home now,” I said. “I’m coming inside.”
The doll was away in her box, the room quiet and empty. I was by myself.
“I kissed Chris,” I told Violet as she set down a mug of homemade hot cocoa on the table beside me.
All the furniture in her sunroom was white wicker. There were American flag pillows, flowers in mason jars, a rooster in the corner, which I worried was taxidermy. The flowers were real. I touched them.
“You did what?” she asked.
“Yeah, I kissed our collective ex. Our married ex.”
I could tell Violet because she wasn’t judgmental, and she always kept my secrets, no matter how salacious. She was too pure to gossip. A perfect confidante.
She sat down next to me, slurping some whipped cream off her hot chocolate. There were chocolate shavings on top, too. I eyed mine and thought it too pretty to drink.
“How’d it happen?”
“I don’t know. We were talking and I got upset about Audrey and then I was crying and then I kissed him. He kissed me back but then he freaked out about it. I told him not to tell Jill.”
“Good call.”
“You think he will?”
She shook her head. “Probably not. He’s not as dumb as he looks.”
“Your house is so nice, Vi. I can’t believe you live here. It’s goals.”
“Thank you, thank you! I’m happy with it. It was a lot of work, but I’m happy,” she said.
“How’s Danny?”
Danny was her longtime boyfriend. He was generic, which was her type. She was a serial monogamist. When it didn’t work out with one generic, she’d switch him out for another. I could barely tell the difference. I don’t think she could either.
“He’s great,” she said. “We’ve been talking about getting married.”
“God,” I said. “You’ll get married in, like, a barn. With all candles. Wine bottles as vases.”
She laughed. “Oh, Mac. You know me so well.”
“I do.”
“And I know you,” she said. “It’s not a weakness. Asking for help. It’s not weak.”
I picked up my mug and drank. Too sweet.
“If I need help, I’ll ask,” I said.
“No, you won’t.”
I doubled down. “I’m good.”
“Okay. But know I’m here if you need me.”
“I know,” I said. “Thank you.”
I took another sip. The sugar went straight up. Instant headache.
“I said something shitty to my mom the other day. I said that sometimes I don’t miss Audrey, which was stupid, and I don’t know why I said it to her of all people. But it was a lie. I don’t think I miss her at all.”
I looked over at Violet, waiting for a reaction. Her face was expressionless.
“I mean, I didn’t spend that much time with her. I was in Boston for the past seven years. She and I never talked on the phone. We barely texted. I saw her when I came home for holidays and stuff, but there hasn’t been a holiday. So, I don’t know. I don’t miss her. Because it’s not real yet. It is, but it isn’t. I can’t articulate it. Like, I’m sad. But am I sad enough? Should I be struggling to get out of bed? Crying more? My grief kind of comes and goes. I’m not in constant mourning. That’s bad, right? I mean, I mostly just feel guilty all the time. Like I fucked up. Like I did something wrong. Like I was a bad sister.”
“You weren’t a bad sister.”
“Yes, I was. I was a bad sister. I was caught up in my own shit. And if she didn’t react to something the exact way I wanted her to, I was a bitch. Maybe not directly to her. In general, I was a bitch. I’m a bitch.”
“Mac.”
“You know it’s true. You know me.”
“You’re not a bitch.”
“See, you’re too nice. That’s why we get along so well. We balance each other out.”
“I think you need to stop worrying about how you think you’re supposed to be dealing with it and just deal with it,” she said. “There’s no right or wrong way.”
I thought about the doll. She’d been on my mind like a blister—a distress I’d gritted my teeth through and tried my best to ignore. I thought about telling Violet. Offering up the doll as proof that there was in fact a wrong way to deal, and that wrong way had a lot to do with a mysterious porcelain doll and my fixation with her. My fear. My suspicion. Maybe then she’d get it, get that there was something very, very wrong with me and how I was handling the loss of my sister.
But I already sounded crazy enough.
Violet tapped her pastel-painted nails against her mug.
I said, “Are you serving me melted chocolate? Is that what this is? Because it’s fucking delicious.”
She laughed. “Basically.”
I got into the habit of drinking. I would pick up a bottle of bourbon at the liquor store after work and bring it home to my apartment. Drink it squished in the tiny bathtub, legs dangling over the sides, torso soaking in a heap of excessive bubbles, candles burning, wax melting into the tiles. It was indulgent. I felt like I should have been taking quick cold showers instead. But I took baths. And I drank.
I stole a snow globe out of Audrey’s room. A small one of New York City, inside it the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Twin Towers still standing, flecks of fake snow. I got it on a visit when I was young, too young to remember. I gave it to her when she was too young to remember. I pocketed it during one of my secret trips to her bedroom. I kept it with me. I held a bottle in one hand, the globe in the other, and sat in the bath, waiting to prune up.
I got out when the water cooled, wrapped myself in my thick hotel robe, and put on my fuzziest socks. I sat on my bed reading. There was a rustling over by the window. I assumed the wind. It persisted.
When I brought my eyes up from the book, I saw the doll climbing down from the shelf.
I blinked twice. She landed on the floor with both feet, her black Mary Janes making a faint tapping noise as she began to walk across the floor toward the bathroom.
I stayed perfectly still, paralyzed by shock and awe. I couldn’t tell if I was breathing. I was numb, save for a burning sensation at the base of my neck, like someone had struck a match against my spine.
The doll walked into the bathroom. There was a moment of silence before the door began to creak closed, hinges wailing. It lacked the momentum to latch. A few seconds later, I heard glass breaking.
The doll reappeared, opening the door and pausing there in the doorway to look at me. I thought she might speak.
She began to walk in the direction of her hatbox. When her back was to me, I started to cry, my body’s best stab at a reaction to what I was witnessing.
She turned her head, a hundred eighty degrees, back to me.
I bit down on my quivering lip until she turned away and settled back in her box, bringing the lid over the top with her small porcelain hands.
Time passed. Time enough for me to regain control of my limbs, grab my phone, and lock myself in the bathroom to call Bryce.
I almost stepped on a shard of broken glass. The snow globe, which I must have left on the edge of the tub, had been shattered.
“Bryce, I need you to come over now.”
“It’s midnight.”
“Bryce, I’m not fucking around. Get over here now.”
“Are you at Mom and Dad’s? Is something wrong?”
“I’m at my place. Mom is still mad at me. Just come over. Now. Please?”
“Okay, okay.”
I carefully picked up the shards of glass and placed them in the garbage bin. I talked to myself as I did it, repeating, “This isn’t real,” over and over again until I believed it.
I doubted my sight. I rationalized. I was tired, drunk, stressed, not wearing the glasses I was told I needed in the fourth grade but never got.
It was a creepy doll. It wasn’t so far out that my mind would go there.
I thought maybe I had broken the snow globe by accident. Maybe I was having a Fight Club moment. Maybe I was the doll.
But then the scratching started. The sudden sound of the latch straining against the pressure on the other side of the door. And the laughing. The giggling. Like a little girl’s but not. It wasn’t the laugh of a girl.
“Bryce?”
The scratching intensified. I thought the wood was splitting, splintering. Soon. Soon the doll would claw her way inside.
I was nauseous, my heart thumping so violently I swore I could see it through my robe. The edges of the world frayed and then there was nothing.
I woke up to Bryce’s pounding. I opened the door to find him red-faced.
“Jesus, Mackenzie. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Is she out there?”
“What?”
“The doll! Is the doll out there?”
“What doll?”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on or do I have to guess?” he asked. “You’ve got whiskey breath.”
“I’m not drunk. There’s a doll. An old doll I found when I moved in here and she’s terrorizing me.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Oh, shut up,” I said.
“Didn’t say anything.”
“I know how it sounds, okay? I’m not an idiot. But I swear to God, I’m not making this up.”
“I believe that you believe you’re being terrorized by a doll.”
“Fine,” I said. “Can you stay with me while I pack a bag? Can I crash at your place?”
“Where’s the doll?”
“On the shelf over there.”
He walked over to the shelf. “In this?”
The cabinet was already open. He picked up the hatbox.
“Don’t!”
“No?”
“Put it back! I’m serious.”
“Why don’t we throw it out?”
“It doesn’t want me to!” I said, surprising myself. “It’ll get mad.”
“Ah. Yes. Of course.”
We didn’t say another word to each other on the way back to his condo. He handed me a blanket and a pillow without a case. He pulled out the couch.
“Night,” he said.
He left the light on.
In the morning he made me strong coffee and a Toaster Strudel.
“You have to stop drinking.”
“I wasn’t drunk. And don’t tell Mom.”
“Too late,” he said. “You have to go to therapy. By yourself.”
“Goddamn it!”
“Don’t blame me,” he said. “What was I supposed to do? You were talking some Toy Story shit.”
“I’m going to hit you.”
“Just don’t stab me again. I think I still have lead poisoning. Traces of lead.”
“You are so stupid.”
“Mom should have put you in therapy after that. You and your pencil shank.”
“Exceptionally stupid.”
“Sharpening it up with, like, a Swiss Army knife in your room.”
“If I had a knife, why would I have needed the pencil?”
“Waiting for the perfect opportunity . . .”
“I’m leaving now.”
“Watch out for killer teddy bears.”
“Watch out for writing utensils. Prick.”
About an hour later, I received the call from my mother.
“Six o’clock tonight. Don’t be late.”
“Mom.”
“Not an option.”
“Fine.”
“You’ve always been dramatic.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Overactive imagination. When you were five, you were convinced a little boy named Jedediah visited your room at night.”
“I have no recollection of that.”
“You said he was dressed like a Pilgrim and had black eyes.”
“Jesus.”
“This will be good for you, Mackenzie. It’ll help. I worry about you.”
Normally I would have refused but I was grateful to be forgiven after what I’d said to her in the car and didn’t want to push my luck.
“I’m going. I’ll go.”
“Thank you.”
I went to therapy. I showed up tired and sloppy, my hair frizzed, mascara smudged. The therapist wasn’t fazed. I guess she was used to that sort of thing.
“I’m here because my family thinks I’m crazy,” I said. “They thought that before Audrey died, too. So . . .”
“Why do you say that?”
“They’ve told me. They’ve said it.”
“How does that make you feel?”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“It makes me feel like I have a Cassandra complex or something. Like with this doll.”
“What doll?”
“This doll that I found in my apartment. It’s alive. It moves.”
The therapist gave no indication of surprise.
“When did this start?” she asked.
“Shortly after I moved in.”
“After moving back? After Audrey’s passing?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think that you might be associating the doll with your sister? She was much younger than you.”
“I don’t know. Audrey didn’t like dolls.”
“You could be projecting some of your feelings about the loss of your sister onto this doll. Do you find it difficult to discuss your sister’s death?”
“No, but can we talk about something else?”
“Like the doll?”
“Look, the doll is alive. I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“The doll is alive?”
“Yes.”
“But your sister isn’t.”
“I’m just here to make my mom feel better,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I spent the rest of the session venting about my failed relationship with Maren and avoiding any further discussion of Audrey or the doll.
Though it made logical sense that I would link my younger sister and the doll, I still didn’t feel comfortable going back to my apartment. I called Violet.
“I understand not wanting to be alone,” she said as she made up her spare bedroom for me.
“Do you have any wine?”
We drank a few glasses lying in the guest bed, playing nostalgia games and painting each other’s nails.
“You probably don’t believe in it,” she said, “but I know a medium. She’s a friend of Danny’s mom. She read for me once. She’s pretty legit.”
“Really? Remember that time we played with a Ouija board at Wren Coleman’s house, and she got so mad because you kept spelling out ‘poop’?”
She snorted into her wineglass. “I forgot about that.”
“She was pissed.”
“I didn’t believe in any of that until Sadie. She told me things she couldn’t have known. Things I never told Danny. Like, she knew my grandfather flew planes in the war and that my grandmother used to bake fresh bread whenever I would go over there as a kid. She said she died of lung cancer and kept touching her throat. It was pretty crazy.”
I had a vision of the medium telling me something about Audrey, like that she was somewhere happy and safe. That she didn’t blame me or Mom or anyone. I could tell her that I loved her and that I was sorry. Promise to stop touching her stuff. Even if it was a sham, I thought it would be nice.
I thought maybe it’d make the doll stop moving.
“Okay,” I said. “Set it up.”
The weather started to change. Summer slouched into autumn, the trees exposing their skeletons, leaves shriveling at their feet.
Violet turned the medium thing into a whole ordeal. She baked. Cupcakes, brownies. She served fresh ground coffee and hot apple cider with cinnamon sticks and set out a vegetable tray. She made dip. A casserole. She invited three other friends: two who had recently lost parents to cancer, the other apparently just curious and morbid. The air in her house was warm and silky from countless linen-scented candles.
The other friends cornered me, asked me questions. They touched my hands like they knew me. I would rather have been back at my apartment with the doll.
Not really, though.
I hadn’t slept at my apartment in almost three weeks. Not since the night with the broken snow globe. I returned only during the day to get new clothes or grab a forgotten charger. I kept the door propped open and stayed on the phone the entire time. Always with Jade.
“Stop calling me in the middle of the day,” she’d said. “I have a job.”
“I need you.”
“Okay, okay. I’m here.”
I slept at Violet’s or Bryce’s or my parents’. I continued to lift stuff from my sister’s room. Used school notebooks, stuffed animals. I stashed them in my old bedroom, bottom-left drawer of the dresser. In high school I had hidden condoms there.
I asked Violet if I could have my reading last and she said I could, but then one of the other girls started crying before her turn, so I went instead.
It was cold in the dining room. Sadie, the medium, looked like your average soccer mom with slightly better hair. She wore a turtleneck.
“Hello,” she said. She sat at the head of the table. I sat a seat away, not wanting to get too close.
She reached out for my hand. She had to stand up and hunch over the table.
“I can just, like, move over,” I said.
She smiled and nodded. She took a deep, hearty inhale.
“Who is Alex?” she asked.
I shrugged. “No idea.”
“There’s an Alex coming through for you,” she said, her voice buttery, sweet.
“I don’t know any Alex,” I said. “Boy or girl?”
“Male. A strong male presence. Alex.”
“Nope.”
She was undeterred. “He says you’ve always liked his smile.”
“Presumptuous.”
“He says he will see you later.” Sadie inhaled again. “You are very lost.”
I laughed.
“I’m seeing a spotlight. You want to be an actress.”
“No,” I said.
“Light. You need light. You search for light. Spotlight. Fame.”
“I don’t want to be famous,” I said. A lie. I wanted to be a little famous. Everyone does.
“I’m getting a Judy. Judy is coming through. Judy is here with us in this room.”
“Okay.”
“She says hello, darling. Judy.”
“Nope. Don’t know any Judy,” I said, starting to get antsy. I was eyeing the clock, calculating how much time I had left with the medium. She did only fifteen minutes. Any more than that she claimed was too taxing.
I realized then that the reading was a terrible idea.
“No Judy,” I said. “Sure the name is Judy?”
“Yes, Judy, darling. She says you don’t know her.”
“Oh, does she, now?”
“Judy. Judy has a message for you.”
“It’s not Audrey, is it? Not Judy. Audrey?”
“Judy. It’s Judy. Judy says—” Sadie’s face went white. She slammed her hands down on the table so hard I jumped. “Judy says the doll is not Audrey.”
“What?”
“The doll isn’t Audrey. It’s not Audrey. Mackenzie, darling, the doll is not Audrey. It’s not Audrey.”
I was choking, the air robbed from my throat.
“The doll is bad. The doll is bad. The doll is bad. The doll is bad. The doll is bad. The doll is bad.”
“Okay!” I stood up fast, the chair falling behind me. “I get it!”
Sadie shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
“Did Violet tell you something?” I asked before remembering I never mentioned the doll to Violet. “Do you know Bryce? Is this a joke?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t choose the messages that come through.”
“Come through where? I don’t know any Judy. I don’t know any Alex.”
Violet poked her head in. “Everything okay?”
“No,” I said. “This isn’t funny. I don’t know a Judy. I don’t know an Alex. I’m not darling. I came here to talk to Audrey. Aud-rey. That’s who I came to talk to. I want to talk to Audrey.”
“All right, come on, Mac. Let’s get you some cider,” Violet said. I saw her mouth, Sorry, to Sadie.
“Don’t apologize to her,” I said. “She’s messing with me. She’s a fraud. I don’t know anyone named Alex. I don’t know a Judy. Who the fuck is Judy?”
“Mac, calm down.”
“I’m not going to calm down. This is bullshit. My sister is dead and I’m talking to Judy? Who’s Judy? Where’s Audrey? Huh, lady? Where’s Audrey? Where’s my sister? When’s she coming through? Where’s Audrey?”
It was a scene. The whole house was silent except for the sound of me screaming my sister’s name.
“And how did you know about the doll? How did you know about the goddamn doll?”
Sadie looked solemn, sad for me.
“Answer me. Tell me,” I said. “Was this a joke? Tell me the truth. Please?”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Jesus Christ! Are you serious right now?”
She went pale again. “You have to get rid of the doll. The doll is bad. It’s not her. You have to get away from the doll.”
“Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. My sister is dead. Do you even give a shit? Do any of you give a shit?”
“Mac,” Violet whispered.
“You know what? Have fun with your grief brownies, cunts.”
I slid a casserole dish off the counter on my way out.
I went home to play with my doll.
The memories came back swift and ruthless. The time we got ice cream sundaes for dinner, just she and I, sitting in the back booth at Friendly’s, tying cherry stems into knots with our tongues and harassing the waitress for sides of hot fudge. The time in Florida on our family vacation when I took her to the pool after dark and we played Marco Polo. We walked back to the hotel on our tiptoes, sidestepping lizards on the pathways, keeping an eye out for loose change for the vending machines. We shared a bed that trip and she stole all the covers. I remember her warmth, how loud she snored, the weight of her on the mattress. Her prickly knees against my back as she tossed and turned.
“Hold still,” I hissed, but she slept through it.
I remembered the pictures she used to draw when she was little, the stories she wrote. Someone always died in her stories and I thought it was because that’s what happened in Disney movies. Someone died. I didn’t think about it as real life. But it is. People are always dying here, too.
I wondered how the world must have looked to Audrey, how bleak. I scraped the bottom of myself for whatever hopelessness I had, scrounging for the darkness that I thought might bring me closer to her state of mind. I wanted to gather enough to understand. But there wasn’t enough of it for me to know.
And there wasn’t enough of anything to keep her here. Mom wasn’t enough. Dad wasn’t. Not Bryce. Not me.
Not enough.
The doll was already in my bed. I climbed in beside her and petted her hair. It was yellow the way Audrey’s had been when she was a baby. When she was first born, I used to sing to her in her bassinet as she slept. “What a Wonderful World.” “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.”
“Silly, huh?” I asked the doll.
No answer.
Sometime after that, I fell asleep.
I dreamed of her future. Sitting at the kitchen counter filling out college applications. Sending me pictures of prom dress options, asking my opinion. She was going on alternative spring break with friends from her dorm, building houses in Iowa. She was out at a bar, with me, freshly twenty-one and drinking mojitos. She was graduating, her cap crooked, gown enormous because she didn’t order the right size. She got her first job, a new car, an apartment with hardwood floors and a dishwasher. She was in love, and it turned her green eyes neon with happiness.
Bryce’s nose was an inch from my nose. “Holy shit!” he kept saying. “Holy shit.”
“What is it?”
“What did you do, Mac? What did you do?”
“What?”
I felt a vague sensation running up and down my skin. I rubbed my eyes and sat up, and the sheets fell away. I found myself covered in scratches. I experienced a few moments of confusion followed by singular, horrifying clarity.
“What did you do to yourself?” Bryce asked me.
“It was the doll.”
I jumped out of bed and ran over to the bathroom mirror. My face was scratched to shit. My neck was bleeding. I reached my arms overhead and felt more scratches on my back, sharp divots in my skin, razor-thin.
Bryce was pacing. “What the hell, Mac? Violet said you had a meltdown. What’s going on with you?”
“The doll,” I said. It hurt me. It hated me.
“Not this again,” he said. “You have to stop with that doll, Mac. We’re getting rid of it. Setting it on fire. I don’t give a shit.”
He returned with the hatbox in his hands. He lifted the lid. He shuddered when he saw it.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said. “We’re having a bonfire tonight. I’m taking this.”
“Careful, Bryce. Be careful with it.”
“Sure,” he said. “We’ll do it at my place. Don’t let Mom and Dad see you like this.”
I was busy examining my scratches.
“Mac? Don’t let Mom and Dad see you.”
“Duh.”
“Get yourself together, all right? I can’t be worrying about you right now. Understand?”
“I didn’t do this!”
“Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“I hear you.”
After he left, I cracked a window and let the cool air in. A sense of safety descended in the space. I sat on the floor, tracing the red lines along my body and contemplating the sad, strange turn my life had taken.
If I lived in a world where dolls could come alive, couldn’t I live in a world where I could travel back in time to save her? A world where I could bring Audrey back from the dead? I considered the rules of reality, how easily they seemed to bend and break.
I thought I might say a prayer. I thought I might put my faith in something. I thought I might take my mom to church.
I slept instead.
Bryce opened two bottles of beer. He handed me one, motioned for me to sit down beside him on the back steps.
“Remember when we told Audrey we had a brother named Adam who was born before her and we kept him locked in the shed?” he asked.
“No.”
“We told her he was disturbed, so we kept him in Dad’s shed. You really don’t remember?”
“Should we feel bad?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you ever think something was seriously wrong? With Audrey, I mean.”
“No,” he said. “It was school. She was lonely or whatever. She never had a ton of friends. I mean, she had some friends. But yeah. I don’t know. It was in her head. It wasn’t us.”
“You sure about that?”
He shrugged, then chugged the rest of his beer. “Let’s light this bitch up.”
He started the fire. He had a nice pit, the kind they sell at Bed Bath & Beyond. Meant for toasting marshmallows, not demonic dolls. He got the hatbox from inside.
“You know, you might be right,” he said. “This thing might be evil.”
“Did something happen?”
He didn’t respond.
The air smelled of lighter fluid. When I closed my eyes, I envisioned the box in the snapping blue flames. I saw ashes that weren’t ashes, that would never be ashes.
I was overcome with the sense that what we were about to do was wrong. That burning the doll wouldn’t destroy it. That whatever malevolent force possessed it would just find another vessel. I had no explanation as to why I felt this way. Maybe I’d seen too many horror movies. Maybe I’d just lost my mind.
“Stop,” I yelled. “We shouldn’t burn it!”
“What? Why?”
“What if it isn’t a doll? What if it’s, like, a spirit or a demon living inside the doll? And if we burn the doll, it finds a new host or takes another form.”
Bryce looked at me a minute. “Okay. You’re officially crazy.”
“Bryce, please.”
“Mac.”
“Please! Listen to me.”
“I am. I’m not gonna burn it.”
“Thank you.”
“Sure.”
We stayed quiet for a long time until the fire died. He said he’d hang on to the doll until I decided what I wanted to do with it. He walked me out to my car, hugged me. We hadn’t hugged since we were children. It was awkward but nice and it made me cry. He was my whole history, my brother. My future, my partner in crime.
I spent the night with my face in my laptop, Googling things like possessed doll drop-off and evil doll disposal and Kübler-Ross. I discovered my stage and, after an extensive search, a paranormal expert in New Hope, Pennsylvania, who went by the name Ms. Mercury.
Dear Ms. Mercury: I’m having a problem with a doll that I found in my apartment. I think it’s evil. I don’t know where it came from. Is this the kind of thing you handle? Sorry if not.
She wrote back the next morning saying, Sorry to hear. Yes, I will take the doll. Please let me know when you will be by.
I got Bryce to drive out there with me the next day.
“I can’t believe I called out of work for this,” he said.
“I’ll buy you Burger King.”
He stayed in the car while I went to drop off the doll. He offered to take it for me, but I wanted to do it. It needed to be me.
Ms. Mercury lived in an old Colonial painted electric blue. There were gnomes along the pathway engaged in various gardening tasks; there was a sign that read, Don’t feed the faeries. I kept looking over my shoulder at Bryce’s car in the driveway, grateful he was there and that I hadn’t come alone. The doorbell chimed like a cuckoo clock.
She looked as expected. Long silvery hair, an excess of jewelry.
“Come in,” she said.
I could smell incense burning. A hint of cat piss. “No, thanks,” I said.
“Come,” she insisted, taking my wrist. She pulled me in before I could wriggle away.
Her house was somehow scarier than I had anticipated. The foyer was covered floor to ceiling in dated wallpaper and sepia-toned portraits of people frowning. She led me to a home office, completely generic aside from a corner sectioned off by a velvet curtain.
“Sit,” she said, drawing back the curtain to reveal a small round table and two metal folding chairs. There was a stack of frayed tarot cards on the table. It occurred to me then that this was the second mystic I’d sought out in the past week. I was instantly nauseous.
I put the hatbox on the table and pushed it toward her.
“You’re smart to get rid of it,” she said, shuffling the tarot cards. “It’s already quite attached to you.”
“Attached?”
She reached over and touched the scratches on my face. I turned away.
“I have a charm for you,” she said. She set the cards down and disappeared behind the curtain, returning moments later with a dyed rabbit’s foot on a beaded key chain.
“Keep this with you at all times.” She resumed shuffling, then spread the cards in a half-moon in front of me.
“Pick,” she said.
“I don’t want a reading, thanks. I just want to drop off the doll.”
She tucked her hair behind her ears and, with a shrug, folded the cards back into a tall, neat pile.
I stood up, ready to leave and put it all behind me. But I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask, “What will you do with it?”
“I have a trunk for such items. I’ll keep it locked in there for now,” she said. “I have a contact, a specialist in these cases. Very experienced with dolls. You’re welcome back to meet him. He’s quite handsome.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I live far.”
She tapped her bottom lip. “Okay, then, darling. That will be two hundred seventy-five.”
“Sorry?” I had heard her perfectly clearly. I just couldn’t fucking believe it.
“Twenty-five for the charm, and two fifty for the doll.”
“You’re charging me?”
She looked at me like I was insane. “Of course. I’m providing a service.”
“I didn’t realize,” I said. “I don’t have cash on me.”
“Quite all right. I take credit.”
I wondered if the trauma of the doll outweighed my disdain for bullshit. It didn’t.
“Never mind,” I said. I put the rabbit’s foot on the table and picked up the hatbox.
“Never mind?”
“I’ll deal with it. I’ll take it. Thanks for your time.”
“I don’t recommend you leave with that doll. It’s very, very dangerous.”
“Thanks,” I said, breaking into a light jog. I saw myself out. I didn’t exhale until I was back in the car.
“What took so long?” Bryce asked. “What happened?”
I shook my head. “Just drive.”
I opened the lid of the hatbox.
“It’s still in there?” he asked, almost running over a garden gnome while backing out of the driveway.
“She wanted three hundred bucks.”
“Christ!” he said. “What are you gonna do with it now?”
I thought about it for a minute. I rolled down the window for some air, hoping the wind on my face would help me figure things out. Maybe I should have paid the money. I worried I had just passed up my only opportunity to be rid of the doll.
But then I realized maybe I didn’t want to be rid of her. Maybe I liked the distraction. Maybe I liked the abuse. Maybe I liked her. Yes, she hated me, but her hatred was something I could understand. I hated me, too.
We got each other. We were bonded. Attached.
I decided I wasn’t ready to let her go just yet.
I rolled up the window. “I’ll come up with something.”
“You can’t keep that thing,” he said. “Mac?”
“I don’t want Burger King. Let’s get pizza.”
Later, we ate greasy slices of pizza on the living room floor, using our laps as napkins. Mom, Dad, Bryce, and me. We called it drive-in style but really it was just lazy.
Mom picked off her pepperoni and gave it to Dad. Bryce left his crusts for me. I left mine for Audrey.
“I’m not even going to ask what happened to your face,” my mom said. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
Bryce cleared his throat.
“I fell,” I said.
“You’ve always been a little uncoordinated,” she said. She suddenly started laughing. It got my dad going. Whenever she laughed, he laughed.
“Remember that time . . .” Her voice trailed off; she was laughing too hard to finish.
I went into Audrey’s room after Bryce left and my parents were asleep. I put everything I’d taken back in its rightful place.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
I lay down on her bed and closed my eyes.
A vague amount of time passed before I recognized I wasn’t alone.
I could feel someone there. A presence, a warmth. Weight on the mattress. Breath on the back of my neck.
I knew when I turned over I would find either the doll or my sister.
I waited a long time before I looked.