CHESTER AND DAD ARE BOTH PANTING WHEN they come back. They must have had a good run. I’m standing in the front hall with my jacket zipped up over my mouth. Dad puts one arm around me lightly, and I shrink away, but what I really want to do is pull his other arm around me so I can nuzzle into his chest.
“Ready to go, Shel?”
“I guess.”
Watching all this, Mom says, “Brian will be waiting for you at about four.” Then she sighs and returns to the kitchen. Chester looks from Dad to me and back. He must be totally confused. Can you divorce a dog?
In the car, Dad asks me, “Seat belt buckled?”
The best I can do is nod.
“The closest shopping mall is in Pueblo, about eighty miles away. But that’s okay. It’ll give us time to talk. Anything new with you?”
I shrug. We’re not even out of the driveway yet and we’ve run out of things to say.
He keeps quiet, and I stare out my window until we get to I-25, and then words burst out of him, startling me so much that my head nearly hits the roof of the car.
“Shelby, let’s get this straight. I’m your dad, you’re my daughter, and we have to talk. Forget the shopping for a while. We’re going to find a picnic table and sit down across from each other, and look at each other’s faces.”
“I don’t …”
“Don’t argue.”
He swings off the road at a sign that says LUDLOW NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARK, and we drive in a half-mile over bumpy dirt. It’s not a big fancy museum or anything, just a deserted spot out in an open field, with a few panels of dusty exhibit info — and a dugout where thirteen people suffocated during a coal miners’ strike a hundred years ago. Great place to have a heart-to-heart talk, right?
He must have scoped it out on his way to Cinder Creek, because he leads me right to a picnic table under a big rickety tent, and he doesn’t waste any time getting to the bone he has to pick.
“Mom tells me you’ve found a bunch of dolls at Aunt Amelia’s house.”
My radar’s up. He’s checking to see if I’m crazy. “Yeah?”
“And that these dolls are doing some curious things.”
“Yeah.”
“Will you tell me about it?”
I can’t trust him, can I? I mean, he left us. But he’s right there across from me, and his eyes never leave my face, and he’s going to sit there for a week, a year, a century, until I open my mouth.
So I tell him about ugly, broken Miss Amelia; and Dotty Woman with her dandelion sprinkles on perfectly good food; and Baby Daisy; and the doll I locked in the drawer, Isabella, who might be Lady; and how the dolls don’t stay buried; and about the dollhouse and the baby drowned in the bathtub; and about revenge and Sadie, who felt unloved, and her notebook and invisible writing; and crazy Emily.
It probably takes an hour telling him all this, and he never says a word, never laughs at me or frowns or snorts, though I hear his stomach growl. He just listens. When I’ve dumped it all out, especially the hardest part about the voices calling me an angry, angry girl, he reaches across the table and takes my hand. The wind is whipping around us, my nose is running, and my feet are Popsicles, but I don’t care.
He’s been quiet so long that his voice is hoarse when he finally says something. “You are an angry girl, Shelby.”
My head snaps back. I thought he was on my side! But he’s not through.
“You have every right to be angry, because I’ve done a terrible thing to you and Brian. There’s no way I can make up for it, but I hope as time passes, you’ll be able to forgive me and realize that I love you just as much as I ever did.”
I don’t want to cry. Tears are catching in my throat.
“It’s a cliché. You know what a cliché is? It’s something that’s so common that it doesn’t sound sincere anymore, but it’s also true. Your mother and I got divorced, but I didn’t divorce you and Brian. Do you understand that?”
“I guess,” I mutter with a pout.
“Then that’s a beginning of our long road back to each other.”
He’s still clutching my hand as I snuff back thick tears. “Crazy Emily’s in a psycho hospital in Denver. Mom says I need professional help. Do you think I’m crazy?”
“I don’t. I believe all these weird things are really happening to you, but maybe there’s a reasonable explanation that we just haven’t come up with yet. Driving here today, I heard this amazing thing on the news about thirty-one South African elephants who walked miles and miles in single file, for days on end, to pay their respects to a man who’d died.”
“What do some elephants have to do with anything?”
“A lot. The guy who’d died had devoted his life to saving elephants in the wild. Now, how did all those elephants know when he died? How did they communicate to one another that they were going to make this twelve-mile pilgrimage? And how did they find their way to his house?”
“Maybe they’re smarter than people think. Maybe they’re smarter than people.”
“Or maybe,” Dad says, “there are just some things in this universe that can’t be explained, like your dolls. Hungry? Me too. I read about a good Mexican restaurant up the road in Walsenburg. Wanna go?”
I nod. And back in the car, it doesn’t feel as tense as it did when we started out.
Dad turns on the radio, and the car rocks with loud Spanish music to work up our appetites for enchiladas.
Dad and I decide not to drive all the way to Pueblo for a shopping mall. Besides, who shops with her father? So, while we’re here in Walsenburg, we needle the car into the Crown Lanes parking lot and go bowling, like we used to before. It feels okay. Almost. Dad hurls that ball down the lane like he’s trying to murder the pins and keeps getting a six-ten split.
After three games — me rolling my highest ever, a 114 — Dad drives me back to Cinder Creek to trade me in for Brian.
I’m shy about asking, but I do it anyway. “When are you coming back?”
He’s got Brian’s stuffed backpack slung over his shoulder when he answers, “I’ll talk to Mom. We’ll set a weekend every month, how ’bout that? My six-ten split needs some serious work.”
I’m smiling when they pull away, and then my heart goes empty because it’ll be a long time until I see Dad again, and I’m churning with jealousy that Brian gets him for the whole night.
Once they’re gone, I head back to Mr. Caliberti’s cottage. Still no answer. Terpsichore doesn’t even come to the window to glare at me. There’s only one place they might be. At the doll graveyard I find Mr. C pacing back and forth, stabbing the ground with his cane, with the cat marching right behind him.
His back’s to me. “Are you okay, Mr. Caliberti?” I ask as I get closer.
“Well, look at it!” He points at the little half-circle of graves. A gasp escapes my lips: Every single grave’s been dug up, and each one is empty.
The dolls are gone.