Though Kate was all the way upstairs in her bedroom on her bed, she could hear her mother’s angry voice.
“Jen! Have you been messing with your sister’s dolls?”
Kate just barely heard Jen’s voice. “No! I dunno how it got there! But I’ll put it back.”
Tromp, tromp, tromp, click-click. That was the door handle. The door opened, then came the scrunch scrunch of cautious feet on the new carpet.
Kate opened her eye. Jen reached up to put the Princess Polly doll back on the shelf next to the row of others. Jen wore a Disney Princesses t-shirt. Shorts. Brown hair in three braids today. The middle braid reached her waistband in back.
Then she whirled around so fast that all three braids whizzed out, kind of like a kid helicopter. There was Jen’s face, round, brown eyes. Who was she being today? Kate didn’t care.
Jen grinned. “Your dolls been walking around the house?” Her mouth pruned up in fake disgust. “Think Princess Polly was looking for the bathroom? Princess Poopy,” Jen added, snickering.
Kate wondered if she’d thought bathroom jokes were that funny when she was in fourth grade. Yeah, probably. Right now she couldn’t remember, but she was used to that, too.
What she did remember—just now, she realized—were little voices during the night. It hadn’t been a dream. She’d heard them. Hadn’t she? Dreams and real used to get mixed up, but she was learning which was which.
“Want anything?” Jen asked, putting her hands on her hips. “TV on?” She pointed up at the corner, where Uncle Tad had put a TV, just like in her hospital room. “Can I get you anything?” She fingered the book lying on the little table beside Kate’s big hospital bed. “Read you another chapter? I can read that book. I read it when you were, um, gone.” Jen talked quickly. “It’s kinda old-fashioned, but I liked the part when Anne smacked her slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head.”
Kate wiggled her fingers sideways. Everyone knew that meant No.
“Okay.” Jen shrugged, chewed her lip, then she ran out, thump thump thump, forgetting to close the door.
The thumps went all the way down the stairs, then turned to slaps on the tile by the front door, where you turned to go into the kitchen.
Jen’s voice floated up the stairs again. “Kate still won’t talk to me. She won’t even let me read.”
“It’s all right. We’re to expect that.” Mom’s voice went high—almost as high as Jen’s.
It was strange how sounds were different from each room. Kate had never noticed that Before. She thought of her life as Now, and Before. Before, she hadn’t heard things like she did Now. How everyone’s voices were different for each room. How Jen’s voice was so light, and easy to listen to—like sunlight. Like water and sunlight. But when Mom’s voice was high, it reminded Kate of crying.
Kate didn’t want to think about crying, so she thought about words instead, how to make all the sounds she heard into words. Kitchen noises and somewhere, maybe in the den, the rumbly noises of the TV. She wished she could have a window open so she could hear birds, and kids playing, and even cars going by, hiss, hiss, but she couldn’t because Mom didn’t want to risk germs coming in.
She closed her eyes and slept away the day, until Mom came in at night. This was the best part of every day, when Mom read to her.
Mom bent and picked up Kate’s favorite book. She sat just out of Kate’s view. Kate listened to the rustle of pages.
“October was a beautiful month at Green Gables . . .” Mom read. Her voice was still high, and thin. “. . . when the birches in the hollow turned as golden as the sunshine and the maples behind the orchard were royal crimson . . .”
Kate closed her eye, seeing vivid autumn images in her mind.
“‘Oh, Marilla . . . I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it?’” As Mom read Anne’s words, her voice slowed down, and the icky highness went out, making her voice young again, and Kate felt the story fold around her mind.
She was no longer Kate, lying in this bed, with only one working eye, and nothing to do but look. Listen. She was Anne of Green Gables, at least until the end of the chapter, when Mom laid the book back down, kissed Kate very softly, and went out to let her sleep.
o0o
“I don’t care. I want to run away.”
“Like where are you going to go? Talk about being a total geek.”
Little voices came through the ripped fragments of dreams.
“I wish to find my castle. You ought to obey, because I’m a princess.”
“Talk to the hand!”
Who were those little voices? Kate opened her eye. Her room was half lit with faint blue light from the streetlamp two houses down. There wasn’t anything in her room anymore, besides the bed, table, TV, and below it the shelf containing her favorite dolls. Kate looked at the shelf. It was empty.
Where were the dolls?
“There aren’t any princesses in this land, so you can’t boss me.”
“She’s right.”
“Yeah!”
“Eeee-he-he-hee!” Who was that? Could that be her porcelain horse, Midnight? How was that possible?
“Then I must find my land,” stated the squeaky voice with the snobby accent.
Princess Polly.
“What-EV-er.”
That had to be Fashion Franci.
The dolls were talking! A cold feeling poured through Kate’s middle, just like someone had put ice water there.
“Dolls,” she said. Her voice came out crackly, because she didn’t talk much anymore.
The voices stilled.
Kate waited, and finally closed her eye.
o0o
In the morning the dolls were back in their places on their shelf. Kate saw that, and then her mother came and all the nasty stuff happened—tubes and bandages got changed. Air no longer hurt so much, but it all felt awful. In the hospital the nurses used to talk to Kate, a stream of baby talk mostly, while they did the jobs. Mom didn’t talk. Her breathing was loud, like your breathing gets if you’re smacked in the guts by a basketball, and once, on one of her first days home, when Kate opened her eye she saw Mom’s lips were white and her eyes looked like crying eyes.
Kate hated to see those eyes, because it made her want to cry, but crying hurt too much, so she always kept her eye closed in the mornings. She listened to her mom’s breathing, and when at last the nasty stuff was done she felt the soft touch of Mom’s hand on her cheek, the brush of her lips on her forehead.
This time it wasn’t so bad because Kate had something to think about besides how much everything on her left side hurt, and Mom’s breathing, and her sad eyes.
She licked her lips. “Mom.”
“Sweetie?” That high voice again, like, Is something wrong?
Kate said, “My dolls were talking. In the night.”
Kate had thought her mom would find it interesting, too. But instead she gasped, like the basketball had just smacked her again. Kate opened her eye, and saw her mom’s eyes wide, her brow all wrinkly with worry.
“Honey?” Now her mom’s voice was really high. “Is the medicine—making you think funny?”
Funny wasn’t funny, like laughing. Mom was scared.
Kate said, “In my dreams.”
“Oh.” The lines in Mom’s face smoothed away, and Mom said, “Oh,” again, an easy breath, not one that hurt.
All right, so she couldn’t tell Mom about it. How about Jen? A little squirt of hot lava inside Kate’s chest came with the thought: no, not Jen.
Kate could heard Jen slamming around downstairs as she got ready for school. When Mom went back down, their voices zapped back and forth, like a tennis game with words, Mom saying hurry up stuff, and Jen saying I’m hurrying things back.
Kate thought about the dolls, and what she’d said to Mom. Maybe it really had been a dream? No. Kate was sure now what was dreams and what wasn’t. In her Before dreams she was still taking ballet and nothing hurt, and Dad was sometimes there, too.
Dad. Kate opened her eye to look at the dolls sitting silently on her shelf, rather than think about Dad. Did the dolls really talk in the night? There was Princess Polly, with her long silvery hair and her satin and lace ball gown. The most beautiful doll in the world, that’s what Mom and Dad had said when they gave her to Kate on her fifth birthday.
Kate thought about all the long story-games she’d played with those dolls Before. She’d missed the dolls because of the stories, she knew that now, but she hadn’t been able to say it in the hospital—talking had hurt too much then—and all she’d said was Dolls and so they’d brought Princess Polly to sit there where she could see.
It had been nice to look at that pretty hair and the ball dress, and to try to remember some of the old story-games. But Kate didn’t think about the old stories now. She stared across the room at Princess Polly in her place on the shelf, and wondered how it was that she could be alive. Well, why not? Nothing else in the world made sense anymore, not according to the old rules, so why couldn’t her dolls suddenly talk?
What had Princess Polly talked about? Oh yeah, leaving. Why would she want to leave? Kate felt ice water in her middle again, but this time it was nasty, because she realized if the dolls were alive that meant they could see, and if Princess Polly could see, that meant all those long days and days and days in the hospital, when Kate was looking at Princess Polly, Princess Polly was looking back.
Of course she wants to leave, Kate thought, and this time her eye felt hot and tears leaked down her cheek, tickling her ear. Mom cries when she looks at me, and they won’t let me see a mirror. I’m only half a human, and the rest of me is a monster. Even to a doll. More tears came, and then the shaking in her middle, but oh, that hurt and so she tried to go empty inside again, pretend the melted part was all plastic, with no feelings.
o0o
At night, there were the voices again.
“So what should we do tonight?” one of them said. Which doll?
Didn’t matter now. Kate said, “Princess Polly.”
Silence. Then a quick, squeaky, “What, Kate?”
She knows my name, Kate thought. Well, of course she would.
“Are you leaving because I’m a monster?”
Silence again.
Kate said, quick, “I know I’m all melted from the burns. In third grade once this boy told us that skin melts when it burns. And all my hair is gone.”
Princess Polly spoke in a high quick squeak. “Oh, no, no, no! You’re not a monster! I just want adventures! Like you used to have with us!” A wiggly, shaky voice. Was she crying, too?
A little of the ice melted inside Kate. “Oh. ‘Ventures.”
Kate felt tired just thinking about it. But she wanted the dolls to talk more, so she made her middle tight again and said, “When did you come alive?”
A long pause, and then Fashion Franci spoke. It had to be Fashion Franci because she sounded so much like teenagers on TV. “Dunno. It’s like, we don’t count days like you do.”
“Oh.” Well, that made sense, kind of. It was a relief when something made sense, like it had Before. Until Kate went out for an ice cream with her Dad and the red light changed to green, and then came pain, and the world lost its sense. So far the new rules were: Kate was half melted, and Dad was gone, and other grownups really didn’t pay attention to red lights, and the only old rule that still worked was that Jen always got the best luck, always, always, always.
So was there a new rule, dolls could talk?
Kate said, “When I was little I was sure you had feelings. But you didn’t talk to me then.”
Another pause, and then this time Curly Cathy spoke. “We miss the stories you did with the little girl.”
“What little girl?”
“The brown-haired one.”
“That’s my sister Jenny.” Kate thought that over. “I haven’t done stories with her for a long time. I stopped way Before.”
The dolls didn’t say Before what?
“We miss them, like, totally.” That was Fashion Franci. Weird, Kate thought. Fashion Franci almost always was the bad stepsister, or mean princess, or wicked sorceress. That was because Fashion Franci looked so much like the thirteen-year-olds who used to walk by the elementary school on their way to the middle school. Some of them would laugh at the kids and yell Babies! Look at the babies! and other stupid stuff.
Did Fashion Franci like being the villainess in stories? Jen had said last summer that acting the bad guys was more fun in plays—
Kate pushed away that thought. It belonged to Jen and her good luck.
“I can’t do stories with you anymore,” Kate said. “I can’t move, so I can’t hold you like I used to.”
“You don’t have to hold us. You can tell us the stories,” Curly Cathy said. “Then we can, like, act them out on our own when you’re sleeping.” For a moment she sounded a little like Fashion Franci.
Kate looked up at the ceiling. Shadows of tree branches waved, long and fingery, on the square patch made by the street lamp.
“I’ll make one up tomorrow,” she said. “Or do you want a story from a real book? Do you listen when Mom reads to me at night, or Grandma when she comes over? I’m having Anne of Green Gables again. It’s my favorite book. Do you like that?”
“Your stories are more fun. We wish for them.” That just had to be Princess Polly.
“All right,” Kate said.
“Good night,” Princess Polly said.
“Good night,” Kate answered, and for a long while there was silence, except for the tapping of twigs against the window.
Kate said, “Do you want an outside or inside adventure?”
The dolls didn’t answer.
Well, they had to sleep, too, Kate thought.
Next day, after the nasty stuff, she got a surprise: Doctor Carlotta. She liked Doctor Carlotta, who had said when she first came that the other doctors would heal her skin. Doctor Carlotta tried to heal minds.
She had a nice voice, with laughs in it. No matter what Kate said, Doctor Carlotta never got angry or teary, so Kate never felt bad talking to her.
“So how is it, being home?” Doctor Carlotta said.
“It’s okay,” Kate said. “Mom cries. She tries to hide it.”
“We talked about that,” Doctor Carlotta said.
“Yes,” Kate said. “I know she loves me. I know she misses Dad, too.” I know she hates to look at her monster daughter, Kate thought, but she couldn’t say it, not even to Doctor Carlotta, because grownups always said something nice like how outsides don’t matter. Kate knew from school that outsides did matter.
“And your sister?”
They had talked about Jen once. How it was pure accident that Dad and Kate had been alone in the car that day, except it hadn’t been accident, really, because Jen hadn’t been home. She’d been at a ballet rehearsal because she’d gotten picked to be Clara in Nutcracker—Jen, Kate’s younger sister, who’d only studied ballet two years. Kate had studied four years, and her sister was already in her class, and Kate had had to be a Party Child four years in a row. Dad had taken Kate out for ice cream because she felt bad.
It wasn’t Jen’s fault, Kate knew that. It wasn’t Jen’s fault that she was good at ballet, and the summer Before, when they both tried out for children’s theater at the rec center, Jen got to be Annie and Kate was one of the orphans who just sang and didn’t even have a line. It wasn’t Jen’s fault that the person ran a red light when Kate was in the car and Jen was in her special rehearsal.
It was one of the rules of the world that Jen would always be lucky.
Kate felt the lava inside. She didn’t want to talk about Jen. What for? Like Mom’s hurt breathing when she looked at Kate, and her monster half, it was not going to change.
So she said, “Do you think dolls could come alive?”
Doctor Carlotta said, “Only by magic. After all, they don’t have hearts or lungs. They don’t breathe or eat. Live things do, even those under water.”
Magic. That made sense. “Is there magic?” Kate asked.
“I have never seen any,” Doctor Carlotta said. “But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
o0o
The next chapter of Anne was about saving Minnie May Barry from dying of the croup. At night, when the dolls woke Kate, she had a story ready, all about how Midnight had been put under a spell, giving him a terrible sickness, and the other dolls had to race against time and various villains to get the medicine to save him.
Kate knew that it was kind of a stupid story—that she’d stolen it from her chapter of Anne, but she’d almost forgotten how to make up stories. The story part of her brain felt like it had gone to sleep and it was hard to wake it up, and her middle and her throat hurt because it was so hard to talk.
The dolls seemed to like the story, though. Princess Polly said Very well! and Fashion Franci said Cool! and Curly Cathy said, Oooh! and Midnight neighed in a high, squeaky voice.
The next night was a better one, and the night after that was still better. Story pictures came back into Kate’s mind again, one at a time, like kids coming out after Hide and Seek. First one, then another, then more and more, a lot of story-children, all danced round being something, whatever Kate wanted.
Kate thought about stories all day as she lay there, watching the sky change through the window, and the waving tree branches. Twigs became witch fingers, and the long tumbling train of gray clouds changed into boulder creatures, stalking at the witch’s command.
Next morning, Jen’s voice woke Kate, yelling about how she was coming, she just got out of the shower.
Kate kept her eye closed. She looked at the reddish gold morning light through her eyelid. The hospital light had always been a kind of glare-white. Germs couldn’t live in that light, which felt the way bleach smelled. Kate liked real light much better, especially golden-silvery candle light, and reddish-gold fireplace light. The peachy light of sunset and the pale, pale blue before the sun reached the window. Magic light, she thought. Can I give light some kind of power and put it into a story?
Kate opened her eye. Someone had left her bedroom door open, though Mom always shut it when she left.
“Mom! I can’t find my pink dance skirt! Where did you put it?”
Jen dashed by, dressed all in blue, her hair in two lollipops on her head. Who was she being today? Thump, thump, thump. She stomped to her room. Right now she was being a brat.
“If you didn’t sleep in so long, you wouldn’t have this problem.” Mom was on the stairs, her voice sharp. “You find the skirt. You’re going to have to take some responsibility for yourself, Jenny. I have enough of my own.”
Thump, thump, thump. Down the stairs again, the two voices going back and forth like the game of tennis. Angry voices, fast, smack, smack, smack, back and forth. More like a war of tennis.
The front door slammed. That was Jen being driven to school. Kate was glad she did not have to go to school. Kids made fun of ordinary kids at school. She knew what they would say if they saw a half-melted monster.
o0o
“I think I know why you’re alive,” she said to the dolls that night.
“Can’t we have our story?”
Who was that? The voice was so quick. It could have been any of them—except maybe for Fashion Franci, who always talked like a TV airhead teenager.
“I want to talk about this,” Kate said. “You weren’t alive when I was little, or I would have known. You’re alive now because you got the half of me that isn’t alive anymore.”
The dolls were quiet. Then, “Where is our story?” asked a small voice that she did not recognize.
Kate told them the story about the witch with the light-magic. They liked that story a lot. Kate knew it was true because they didn’t just say it was good, their voices sounded different than when she had talked about being half alive. They were happy and excited, though they were always polite and talked one at a time—even when they argued at the very end, because Curly Cathy wanted to be the Princess in Kate’s story, but Princess Polly said she was always the princess.
Fashion Franci said, “Like what-EV-er. I like being the witch because bad guys are more fun!”
“Jen said that once.” The words just sort of came out.
The dolls were quiet.
Then Curly Cathy said, “You don’t tell her stories anymore.”
“No, because she didn’t like my stories,” Kate said. “Anyway, she said it about acting, not about stories.”
“She did like your stories.” That had to be Princess Polly, it sounded so bossy, even in the high squeaky voice.
“No she didn’t,” Kate stated, and she got a memory from Before. Jen, seven years old, saying The dolls all talk the same. You should make the voices different, and she’d started to do the story over, making different voices.
Kate had stopped sharing her doll stories. In fact, she’d stopped acting them out with the dolls, because it had been spoiled. Jen had spoiled it, and for a long time Kate hadn’t done any stories, until one day at school they had to write one, just Before, and Kate couldn’t act it out. She had to put it into words. It was different that way—but she’d kind of liked it when she was done. That story didn’t go away into the air like smoke, the way the old ones had. Written down on paper, she could visit it again.
But that, too, was Before. Now she couldn’t hold a book or read.
“Dolls?” she said. “How did you know Jen liked my stories?” But the silence was the empty one she’d gotten used to. It meant they’d gone to sleep.
So she went to sleep as well.
o0o
“Once upon a time,” she began the next night, “there was a girl. She was half alive. The doctors gave her plastic surgery, and turned her half into a doll. The half that had been alive went into her dolls, and they too became half alive—”
“I don’t like this story,” came a small, squeaky voice. Kate couldn’t tell who it was.
“That’s because it’s true,” Kate said. “In stories, you get what you want. In true life, things get taken away. Your magic might get taken away, too. If you’re alive because you got life from my monster half—”
“It’s not true! It’s not! It’s not!”
That wasn’t a doll voice, Kate realized, and the ice water poured all through her, a waterfall, cold and horrible. The voice cried, a muffled sound as if a real face—not a doll face—had been smooshed into the carpet.
“Jen,” Kate said. The cold water changed to boiling lava. “It wasn’t the dolls. It was you. You, you liar.”
“You wouldn’t talk to me,” Jen whimpered. “You hate me!”
“No, I don’t,” Kate said.
“Yes you do! You hate me, and you blame me for Dad being dead, or why won’t you talk to me?”
“Nothing to say.”
“Yes, there is.” Jen gulped, kind of like a frog. “Yes, there is. You talk to Mom. You talk to Doctor Carlotta. She says it’s because you have to think things through, but that’s just what grownups say when they know you’re right.”
“You talk to Doctor Carlotta, too?” Kate said.
“Yes—and so does Mom. And all we talk about is you!”
The lava boiled and boiled. “So the magic wasn’t real, then. I hate that. You lied.”
“It was real,” Jen cried. “In the stories it was, just like when we were little!”
“No, you just did their voices. You made me think they were real.”
“That’s the magic.”
“And you told me my stories were stupid. I did the dolls wrong.”
Jen’s voice went high and squeaky, just like Curly Cathy’s. “I know I said you had to do the voices better, but don’t you see, that makes the magic better. Just like when Madame tells me I have to make my pirouettes cleaner, or hold my head up and not down, or when the drama coach tells me to change something. They tell me I’m wrong all the time, but when I get it right, the magic is better.”
“That’s not magic,” Kate said.
“Yes, it is.” Jen stood up, a skinny figure in a blue and white nightgown, with messy hair. She walked back and forth, in and out of Kate’s view, cradling Princess Polly in her arms. “It’s magic when you become someone else,” she squeaked. “If you do it really, really well, then the audience, like, will do it with you. Your stories are like that; you get to be the princess in them while the story lasts. And after, too, because you remember it. All your stories are magic, because when you tell them, I be them.”
“That’s not magic,” Kate said.
“Yes, it is! Yes, it is!” Jen ran to the window and back, her nightgown flashing in and out of the light. “It is, too! When I’m Clara, I’m really Clara, just for a little while, and those girls watching in the audience are Clara, too. And when they go home, they can remember Clara. How can that not be magic?”
It did sound like magic. So Jen could do magic, along with everything else. “All I can be now is a monster,” Kate said. The lava boiled, making her throat hot and her head ache.
“Don’t say it!” Jen was shrill, like Midnight neighing.
She came right up to the hospital bed. Kate couldn’t see her eyes, only the shape of her head and her messy long hair. But when she turned, light from the streetlamp shone on her wet cheeks.
“Don’t say it.” Jen leaned over Kate. Her breath smelled like mint toothpaste. “My whole family is getting taken away. Dad is gone, and Mom is a zombie. A mean one. She only sees me when she’s mad at me. And you, you’re taking yourself away.”
“I’m not making myself into half a person,” Kate said. “The car crash did that.”
“You’re letting it happen.” Jen wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Not the car crash! You turn yourself into a, a, a zombie when I come in—and you did it before the car crash, because you hate me!”
A monster, Kate thought. For the first time she wondered if what Doctor Carlotta had really been trying to say was that a person could be a monster inside, even when they fix the outside.
“So I thought, well, you don’t want me, but maybe you’ll want the dolls and do stories with them. I could be the dolls, and then we could get our old magic back, maybe.” Jen snuffled again, and hiccupped.
“When you told me to change the voices,” Kate said. “You meant . . .”
“Practice. Like I have to, in ballet.” Jen put Princess Polly on the shelf, and then Curly Cathy.
I practiced in dance but never got better, Kate thought. It was still a hurtful thought. But my stories got better, that’s also true. She remembered the teacher reading her story out loud, the one she’d written Before. And everyone in the class listened, quiet, just like she listened when Mom read. What had one of the girls said? Your story was so real!
So maybe magic could go from one person to a lot of people. And not just in a bedroom, with dolls on the floor, not even in an auditorium, with people dancing on stage and other people watching. She thought of Anne of Green Gables, written a hundred years ago, words on a page. Thousands of girls—including girls who lived long ago, that were now grandmothers and great-grandmothers—had read the words and had been Anne. And remembered her, a magical kind of memory that everyone shared.
I can do that, she thought. If I practice. I can do it even half-melted.
She looked at Jen, who put Midnight next to the other dolls, and then yawned fiercely and rubbed her eyes. Her eyes were puffy, Kate could see in the blue light of the streetlamp. She looked tired. She’d come in every night, but she didn’t get any chance to nap during the day.
Nothing outward had changed, really. Jen was still there, whole, with her long hair, and Kate was still in this bed, bald and half-melted, and it would be a long, long time before she could get up, and even so, she might still look half-melted. But she no longer felt half-human, turning into a cold plastic doll. Her inside felt different, because of her sister’s magic.
Things got taken away, but a person could make new things.
“Go to bed,” she said. “Mom will be mad if you sleep too late.”
Jen started toward the door, then stopped. “I’m sorry about fooling you,” she said.
Kate looked at the row of quiet doll silhouettes.” I’m sorry you had to,” she said. “When you come home, just be you, okay? Just be you.”