Instead of working on my English assignment, an essay about The Crucible, I’m sitting on my bed, staring at the Limoges butter dish on my dresser. The dish sits next to the nesting dolls my mother found at a yard sale for me. Most people don’t know that nesting dolls are made from one block of wood—one origin, one wooden parent for each family of dolls.
The smallest doll is a solid piece of wood that doesn’t open. It looks like a tiny bowling pin painted like a girl. Even though there are five dolls altogether, I think of the set as one girl with other girls inside her, one girl with many faces, many bodies. Each doll is painted by hand, her faces so detailed that you can see the individual brush strokes. She has rosy cheeks, perfect little circles of red like a toy soldier. Her hair is tucked into her cape, with just a little tuft of dark curl peeking out, a tendril over one eye.
I try to tune my mind into Clarisse’s location, but she feels out of range now. It’s been over a week since I’ve seen her, since we dropped her off at her house on our way back from Treasure Island. I watched her walk to her front door, her flip-flops slapping the soles of her feet with each step. She waved good-bye without turning around, and then she was gone.
I unlock my phone and begin a text to Clarisse. It’s midnight, but I’m sure she’s still awake. I type and then erase several drafts before finally getting the message right.
Hey. Want to hang out this weekend?
I add a happy emoji to the end of the message, a smiling cat with hearts for eyes, and then hit Send. I open my laptop and go to a study guide page for The Crucible. I click on John Proctor’s name from the character list and read:
In a sense, The Crucible has the structure of a classical tragedy, with John Proctor as the play’s tragic hero. Proctor is a good man, but one with a secret, fatal flaw.
I open a new tab, Google “tragic hero,” and click on the first result, which explains:
A tragic hero is a literary character who makes an error in judgment that inevitably leads to his/her own destruction.
My phone dings, a text from Clarisse: Can’t this weekend, maybe next? George bought a boat. We’re taking it out to Caladesi Island.
She doesn’t invite me to come along, doesn’t include a little yacht emoji at the end of her message. I open another tab, Google “Treasure Island Oliver,” and then hit Enter. I click the first link, and a video news clip loads on the screen.
It begins with a reporter in a royal blue skirt and blazer, standing in front of a hospital entrance, her blond hair pulled back in a sleek ponytail. Her voice is clear and even. “A Massachusetts teenager was brutally attacked on Treasure Island Beach and is now fighting for his life in a Bay Area hospital. The family has reached out exclusively to Action News to share their story in the hopes that one of our viewers may know something, anything, about what happened to him.”
The piece cuts to a man in his mid-fifties wearing round wire-rimmed glasses. A bloated IV bag hangs on a metal pole behind him. “We just don’t know why. Why anyone would do this to Oliver,” the man says. Oliver resembles him so much I want to look away.
The reporter continues. “Oliver Vernon, from Lowell, Massachusetts, was staying at the Gulf Breeze Resort at Treasure Island Beach with his family when he went for a walk on the beach after sunset. It wasn’t until the next morning that his family realized that he hadn’t returned to the resort. They contacted hotel security and had just begun searching the beach when the unimaginable happened—a sanitation worker discovered Oliver in restrooms next to the beach access parking lot, suffering from a traumatic brain injury that has left the young man unable to explain what happened to him. Oliver is here at Tampa General, and although authorities are working diligently to find his assailant, there are no leads in the case and little physical evidence. Oliver’s father, Tim Vernon, spoke with me in his son’s hospital room. Oliver’s mother was too distraught to talk on camera.”
“The police are doing all that they can,” Tim says. The video cuts to a school photo of Oliver, who is handsome and smiling in front of a gray marble background. “But they are basically at a standstill. If someone knows something, anything, we ask that you please call the Treasure Island Police Department. You can remain anonymous. We just want answers.” He takes off his glasses for a moment and wipes tears from his eyes.
The reporter stands in front of the hospital entrance again. A phone number appears along the bottom of the screen. “If you have any information about what happened to Oliver Vernon, please call th—” I pause the video before she can finish.
A cold sensation begins in my feet, moving up my body like a current until it reaches the back of my neck.
In The Catalog of Everything I’ve Done Wrong, I add an entry: hurt someone’s child.
I minimize the window and open a new blank document to begin writing about John Proctor as the tragic hero. My hands fly across the black keys, filling one, then two, then three pages. I’m inspired, ideas bouncing from my brain to my fingertips like magic. As I write, I imagine a shearing, a sawing of limbs, a taking away. I whittle the character down like soapstone, make him smaller and smaller, until eventually he is nothing at all.