12

THE SEA DOLL

June 19

The sea was unfettered, the waves high, the wind rising sharply from the water. There was a bright sun burning across the sand dunes. Martha thought that it wasn’t a day for nightmares, it was a day in which you were glad to be alive—and she remembered how she’d been awakened in the night by the sound of Lindy crying aloud from her bedroom. A nightmare, a kid’s nightmare, like some dark animal come to feed on the child’s brain. She put her arm around Lindy’s shoulder as they crossed the dunes. Tommy was walking some distance ahead, pausing every now and then to examine something. A crab, maybe. Or a starfish. She glanced at Lindy, whose face was shining from the sea wind.

“You feeling better now?” Martha asked.

Lindy nodded, smiled at Martha. “I don’t even remember the dream,” she said. She kicked her feet in the sand and glanced out toward the sea. “It was like there was somebody in my room …”

Somebody in my room, Martha thought. And what had Rosie said at breakfast about the nightmare? Fingernails scratching against glass? Something like that. Martha stared a moment into the yellow sun. There were connections here that she didn’t like to think about, a linkage that distressed her. A scratching on doors. Fingernails drawn back and forth. Claws. She felt the wind surge under the toilet door again and she repressed a shiver, but the surface of her skin was chilly.

“How far is it to the car?” Lindy asked.

“Three miles, maybe four.”

Lindy shrugged. “It’s a nice day for a walk.”

Tommy was turning round, coming toward them, holding something in his hand. Something concealed in his closed fist. Martha thought, Don’t let it be something gross, like the carcass of a dead gull. Something gross and worm-riddled. Tommy had the odd habit of fetching dead things inside the house back home. Once, about three or four years ago, he had brought home a desiccated frog; another time it had been a small bird whose rotted bones swarmed with maggots. He must have outgrown such morbid curiosity by this time: please. He was grinning as he approached them and Martha could feel herself flinch.

“Tommy, whatever it is, I don’t want to see it,” she said.

“It’s nothing.”

“Hey, I know that look on your face, kid,” Martha said. “What is it this time? What have you got hidden in your hand? A mangled octopus? A squashed fish?” And she looked away, watching sunlight glint on water.

“I swear, it’s nothing,” Tommy said, and he opened the palm of his hand very slowly.

Martha glanced quickly, aware of an object in her son’s hand, aware at the same time of Lindy moving closer to Tommy to examine whatever it was he held.

Sea-drenched, misshapen, its brown hair streaked, its glass eyes dulled and bleached—a child’s toy, a doll in a lacy dress whose colors had been ruined by the sea. A simple tiny doll, delicately molded from porcelain. Lindy put out her hand to touch it.

“See,” Tommy said. “I told you it was nothing.”

“It gives me the creeps,” Lindy said.

“Why? It’s only a kid’s toy.”

“I don’t know,” and Lindy shrugged. “It’s probably been in the sea for ages by the look of it.”

Martha gazed a moment at the blank features of the thing and she tried to imagine it rising and falling in the motions of the ocean, floating upward, downward, twisting and turning in the tide like some strange dead fish. Specks of sand crusted the hair and eyes. A little girl’s lost toy, a sad misplaced thing. It looked old, almost antique, and she wondered how long it had been tossed around in the sea. A sea mystery: the child who had owned it was probably a middle-aged woman by this time.

“It was just lying over there in the sand,” Tommy said, as if he were seeking an excuse for having picked the thing up in the first place.

“What are you going to do with it, kid? Take it home as a souvenir of your summer vacation?” Martha asked.

“Yeah. Right. I can show it to my buddies,” Tommy said and looked suddenly sullen.

Martha reached out and took the doll from the boy and held it between the palms of her hands. The porcelain surface was cold against her skin, colder than she had somehow expected. She gazed at it for a time. And what she wondered was why it seemed so oddly sinister to her, almost as if—and this thought spooked her—it had been left out on the sands for some reason. Tommy was meant to find it, stumble across it, fetch it.

Goddam, that was such an idiot idea, she had to dismiss it from her mind entirely. The sea claimed all kinds of things, driftwood and beach balls and rubber rafts and oars, it claimed the bones of dead men and the ships they’d sailed in—why wouldn’t it also seize away the small doll of a child, for heaven’s sake?

A kid lets the tide suck it away.

Simple.

Very simple.

Maybe there’s a few tears and a sense of loss and then forgetfulness as the years go past.

The random sea, she thought.

It takes away, then it gives back, and it works to no schedule, it operates to no known clocks. Tidal movements. Shifts of silt. The silent stirring of sand.

Now she held the doll rather awkwardly, as if she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with it: Give it back to the ocean? Rescue it from the sands and the tides?

“It’s ugly,” Lindy said. “I mean, it’s really ugly, Martha.”

“I guess,” but Martha wasn’t sure if she agreed. There was a quality of sadness, a forlorn feeling, to the thing.

“Throw it away,” Lindy said.

A note of adamance in the girl’s voice. A command. Throw it away, Martha, get rid of it, there’s something wrong with the thing, it belongs to somebody else and we have no right to touch it.

“Back into the sea?” Martha asked.

“Sure,” Lindy said. “Why not? That’s where it came from.”

Why was she so reluctant to discard the damn thing, Martha wondered. She held it a moment longer, glanced at Tommy—who had lost all interest in the proceedings—and then she walked to the water’s edge, laying the doll face upward in the tide. It turned over, its lace dress billowing as it caught water; it turned over and over, the eyes opening and closing weirdly as the tide tugged at it and sucked it backward and then it was as substantial as a jellyfish, barely visible beneath the strength of the running sea, drifting as carelessly as any piece of flotsam. Martha watched it go until she couldn’t see it any longer.

Lindy said, “It’s logical,” and there was something final in her voice. Ashes to ashes. Water to water. Everything goes back to the sea eventually. Even old dolls. Martha ran a hand softly through the girl’s hair and then they walked along the beach, Tommy still moving a little way ahead, kicking sand up as if the act of finding the doll had pissed him off thoroughly. Martha watched her son a moment, the stooped shoulders and the sea breeze scurrying through his curls and—for no good reason she could think of—she was consumed with an extraordinary sense of love for the boy. A raw connection of emotion coming out of nowhere, flaring up out of nothing, just the sight of the child shuffling through the sand.

The intensity of a mother’s love.

The terrifying vulnerability of caring without question, without doubt.

“How much farther?” Lindy asked.

“Three miles, I guess,” Martha said. Three miles of soft sands and a stinging breeze and a sun that seemed cold at the very core of its heart—as if it had lost interest in warming the recesses and shaded places of the planet.

The doll, Lindy thought.

A doll that lies in the sand like a dead person.

An abortion.

A fetus.

Only porcelain and fake hair and unreal eyes and nothing else.

Nothing else, not really.

Not really anything, not anything at all.

And yet—

Yet

How did you know, how did you know the name of the goddam doll, how did you know that once upon a time some child had called that doll Sarah? How the hell did you just get that feeling out of nowhere, where did that come from?

Information just doesn’t fall out of the sky like a shower of meteorites, but you knew that once a child cradled that doll and called it Sarah.

Sarah Sarah Sarah.

Now how did you know something like that?

Creep City. The doll talked to you, right?

The doll just came right out and said:

Hi, Lindy, I’m Sarah.

That was bullshit. That was just plain old bullshit of the kind your imagination is always spewing up inside your head, all the vomit of the crazy things you can’t stop thinking about, dreams and nightmares and somebody scratching on glass and a finger touching you in the private place between your legs and the weird sense you felt of wanting to be filled, filled and possessed and loved—

It fades.

It just fades.

A nightmare and a doll called Sarah.

She stopped and took off her sandals and shook sand out of them and then she stared across the dunes at Tommy and watched the way he moved, watched the slenderness of his hips and the motion of his body and the way the wind teased his thick hair, and what she suddenly wondered was whether Tommy had been the intruder in her dream.

But that wasn’t true at all.

She just knew the man’s name.

Spelled the way it had been spelled on the board.

The stupid board.

ROSCOE ROSCOE, whoever Roscoe was, whoever he might have been once.

(Once, past tense, why did she think of it like that? Why did she give it any kind of credence at all? A stupid board game with Tommy just screwing round, goofing off on her, why should she believe there had ever been any human being called Roscoe—when it hadn’t been anything except a part of Tommy’s retarded game, nothing more than that, so why why why did she think it had been Roscoe who had come to her in the black heart of her dream and opened the balcony door and touched the wet center of her body with the tip of his finger, why would she think that when it wasn’t anything more than a game Tommy had played on her—but she knew, she knew, she knew there was a Roscoe, there had been a Roscoe once, maybe last week, last year, maybe a century ago, but she knew there had been a man called Roscoe and she knew it was this man who had come to fill her nightmare, who had opened the door of her room and touched her, God, yes, yes, had touched her and made her feel something she’d never felt before, yes, yes, Roscoe, not Tommy’s game, not anything like that, no no no.…)

She pushed her fingers through her hair and she could feel the sea breeze slip through the thin material of her T-shirt and the way the nipples of her small breasts hardened as the breeze, with a cold touch, thrust against them.

And she turned her face to look out toward the horizon, where the chill sun glinted and no ships sailed and the world was empty, as if it had never been created at all. She crossed her arms beneath her breasts and for the first time in her life she thought, I want someone to stroke my breasts.

To suck them.

I want Roscoe.