Paper Dolls (26 page)
Authors: Anya Allyn
“I’m sorry. I just feel stupidly helpless with my leg like this. I just don’t want anything bad to happen to you… ever again.”
“Okay. Understood.” But I didn’t understand. He’d never spoken to me in this way before.
Hi jaw tightened. “When I found out… where you’d been all that time, I was crushed. Never in a million years did I imagine…”
“No one did,” I said quickly.
“When your mother called me and told me you’d been kept underground, in the dark… I was over the moon you were alive, but at the same time I couldn’t deal with it, knowing how terrified you’d been of the dark as a kid.”
I twisted my mouth wryly. “I was still afraid of the dark until recently. I think I’ve been cured of that. But how did you know I was scared of the dark back then?”
“I was there,” he said softly.
“You couldn’t have been. You left when I was a baby. And when you came back the second time, you were barely there long enough to find out what my favorite cereal was.”
I could hear the bitterness in my voice and I hated it. I’d spent my life pretending that I didn’t care about my father not caring about me. I’d carried that pretense around almost as a badge of honor. To me, being tough had meant not showing the pain.
“You weren’t exactly a baby when I left. You were three.”
“No, that’s not true. Mom told me I hadn’t even had my first birthday when you left. There’s no photos of you with me after I turned one.”
“Look, your mother might have her reasons. I’m sure they’re good ones. And I’m quite sure I shouldn’t be dragging this stuff up now. But the truth is I left when you were three, soon after your mom lost the baby.”
“What are you talking about? What baby?”
His face softened. “The baby she was pregnant with when you were three.”
My legs felt weak.
“Mom never told me about a baby.”
He rubbed his eyes tiredly. “It’s probably not the time to get into this.”
I sat on the chair beside him, my back rigid. “I want to know.”
“Sure?”
“Very.”
“Well… this is what happened. I’m not proud of it. Back then, I was trying to get ahead in my career. I wanted to put in the hours. Your mom felt differently. She wanted me at home at night, to be a family. She was right, of course. I just didn’t see it that way. When she became pregnant that second time, I… accused her of doing it deliberately. I screamed and ranted and raved. Like a lunatic.”
He cursed at himself under his breath. “The last thing I wanted was another kid. Another kid meant your mother wasn’t going back to work for years, and we were already drowning in debt. I wanted the hotshot car and the hotshot house. I’m ashamed to admit to that now, but it’s the truth. One night, after the worst argument we’d ever had—she put you in the car and drove off. It was the middle of the night, and raining. I should have let her go, let her cool off. But no, I had to jump in my car and follow her.” He breathed a low sigh of regret. “She hit a tree. When I got to her, she was screaming in pain. I got you out of your car seat and checked that you were okay. You didn’t understand what was happening and thought that I was some big baddie who had hurt your mommy. You got away from me and ran and hid in the woods at the side of the road. Your mom was losing a lot of blood, and you were lost. In that moment, I felt like I was losing my mind.”
“I don’t remember… any of that,” I said slowly.
“No, I know you don’t. When we found you—the police and I, you were shaking and terrified. I had to take you to the hospital with me, but you didn’t speak a word the whole time. Not even when we had to tell you that your mom lost the baby.”
I tried to process what he’d just told me, but I couldn’t. In my head, I was running through old photographs like a slideshow. Photos of a mom who was plumper around the middle when I was three. “Why wouldn’t mom tell me she lost a baby? All this time, I lost a brother or sister and didn’t know it?”
“Sister. The baby was a girl.”
I leaned back in the chair.
“You totally withdrew after that night. Every day, when night fell, you began screaming. You couldn’t bear darkness. I felt like it was my fault. You woke screaming every night, telling us you wanted to go with the baby. You held on as though the baby could come back—be alive again. You held on and on and wouldn’t let go. And you blamed me—for the loss of the baby, for making your mommy upset that night.”
“That’s why you left?” A lump like cement formed in my throat.
“Yeah. That’s a big part of it.”
“How come… how come I don’t remember the baby?”
“Cassandra… you were almost getting to a place where you couldn’t be reached. We tried child psychiatrists and all of that, but nothing worked. Nothing brought you out of it. In the end… your mother made a difficult decision. She decided to make you believe the baby had just been a dream, make you believe the accident never really happened. I thought… when you were older she’d tell you the truth. But I guess she thought it was better to let it go.”
I chewed my lip. “Why are you telling me now?”
“Because… when you disappeared in that Australian forest, it brought me straight back to that time you disappeared when you were three. And I thought this time you were gone forever. I thought I’d never get a chance to tell you that I didn’t mean to be the hopeless father that I turned out to be. I guess I just wanted you to know that the reason I left was for your sake, to help you forget what happened.”
Emotions rushed through me. Nothing made sense.
“But you abandoned me… all those years.” It felt so strange to be saying those words to my father, words I’d pushed down deep inside for so long.
“I didn’t mean to. I guess I tried to pretend to myself you and your mom didn’t exist, to try to numb the pain. I tried again, when you were eight. I came back, as you know, and your mom and I tried to get it together. But there was so much unresolved stuff between us, we just couldn’t make it work. It was mostly my fault—I’ll admit that. I’d cut myself off for so long that I couldn’t… find a way back to my own family.”
“You still could have been a dad to me.”
“I know. I know… And I should have been. No excuses. But I’m taking this chance now to tell you that I did care. That I do care. And maybe one day, I’ll make it up to you enough that you’ll stop calling me Andy … and call me
dad
….” His voice cracked on his last words.
I stood and stepped awkwardly over to him. I didn’t know what to do next—I hadn’t so much as shaken his hand in the last seven years. I reached to hold his hand. He gripped it firmly, fear in his eyes—fear I was going to turn around and walk out. I dropped myself down to hug him. His arms came around me and he stroked my hair.
“I’m going to be there for you, Cassie. I’m not going to let any more years go by….”
The morning was still dark when I woke. I’d been dreaming, but not of Copper Canyon, not of the little Tarahumara girl.
I’d been in my neighborhood, walking down my street. Everything was so vivid, so real. I noticed small details everywhere—the variation in color of the roses in Mrs. Palmer’s garden, the smudged chalk on the sidewalk where some kid had abandoned their game of hopscotch
. I rounded the corner and saw the speed sign I’d run into and dented when I was eight. It had never been fixed or replaced. But now the sign was standing straight and without a single dent. Our garden, which mom never had time for, was blooming.
The furniture inside the house was newer—the old sofa mom used to throw a cover over to hide the rip was gone and traded with a leather recliner. A man with his back to me hummed as he stirred a pot of something in the kitchen. I stepped through and into my bedroom—at least, what used to be my bedroom. Two girls lay together on their stomachs on one of the beds, listening to music. I couldn’t see their faces, but you could tell by the lanky shapes of their bodies and by the waves of their long dark hair that they were sisters. They were perhaps six and nine.
A puppy bounded into the room and the girls turned their heads in unison. I strained to see their faces, but their features smudged and were lost to me as I woke.
I sat, tossing the blanket from me.
The sunshine-filled dream was replaced by a gray morning. I stepped from my room and along the corridor to my father’s room. Mountains rose like ancient monsters from the valley, sheets of rain blurring their many heads and thick bodies.
I still had so many questions. I wanted to know so many things about when I was three. All the things he’d told me last night whirled inside my mind.
I knocked lightly on his door. He didn’t answer. The door creaked on its hinges as I pushed it open.
The room was empty. The bed was made and not a single item of his remained in the room. Maybe he’d decided he needed better medical care after all. Maybe he had an urgent court case to attend.
Or maybe he’d decided he’d had enough of being my father.
I walked back along the corridor in a void.
How could he leave like that? Without so much as a note?
Molly stepped out in a singlet and pajama shorts, staring out in wonder at the torrents of water falling from the sky.
“My father left town.” I ripped a leaf from a potted lime tree and crushed it in my hand.
“I thought he was staying until we left.”
“Me too.”
Molly gave me a consoling smile. “Well, he needed that leg seen to. And we’ll be out of here ourselves in a few hours.”
A deep breath of air escaped me. “Without the book.”
“It wasn’t here to be found.” Molly turned to face me, her green eyes intent. The color of her eyes was always startling without her contact lenses in. “But we can’t give up. We’ll find a way—we have to.”
1920
34. ANOTHER EXISTENCE
The shadow. The shadow will be coming for me.
When I crawl over the hessian bags, the hardness of the gold and diamonds doesn’t hurt my knees as before. Something blocks the way out, something that covers the entire entrance to the cave. Panic courses through me. I try to push against the hard surface but nothing happens. I’m trapped in this terrible place.
There’s a tear in one of the bags and I can see something inside that isn’t gold and diamonds. It’s an arm.
A human arm
.
In terror, I squirm my body around and crawl the other way. I keep moving. The tunnel goes forever—up and down and on and on. But I don’t tire and the rock walls don’t scratch my limbs. It’s as though I am in a waking dream.
I hear wind and know I must be close to the end. My feet drop into a pool of water. Before I realize what is happening, I am over my head in water. Drowning. I cannot swim. Desperately I strike out. I’ve been under the water now for minutes, but my lungs don’t strain. I feel nothing. I crawl from the water onto rocks.
I sit and survey the enormous cave around me. There seems no way out at this end either. Then I spot a small patch of sky above, dotted with stars. Grasping a network of tree roots, I climb to the top. I look out into a world where everything is wrong. The trees are gone. Everything is blanketed with ice. Screams echo and bounce dully on hard surfaces that gleam under a purplish moon—a moon that is obscenely large. And something is coming, something that knows I am here. A silver eye flashes.
I flee back through the tunnel, crawl
away, away, away
. I must be deep within some kind of feverish dream. I am back with the diamonds and the dead body. My feet kick at the obstacle that blocks the way. I fall
through
. On my back I stare up at the statue of Saint Jerome. Someone has concreted him against the rock. How did I fall through him? The fever is making me delirious, so delirious I am seeing things, going crazy.
I stumble through the carousel of the dollhouse and out to the world. It is not night out there. It is day. A day so bright it blinds me.
A vehicle roars in from the dirt road and parks a distance away from the house. Men in suits jump out with rifles, leaving the doors open as they rush towards the house.
I don’t care about Audette and don’t know if I should care about Henry either. But I run after the men into the house. The men’s guns are raised to their chests. Henry and Audette sleep on the sofas, dressed in formal clothes—but not the clothes they wore last night. Whiskey bottles and glasses litter the table. The gramophone record is stuck in a groove, playing the same scratchy piece of Chopin over and over. Audette’s hair is different—cut in a new, short style.
Has more than one day passed since I hid in the tunnel? Was I in there for days and they just left me there?
The men see them from the foyer and nod at each other. One of them deliberately knocks the ballerina statue that grandfather bought for grandmother to the floor. It shatters with a loud crash.
In the ballroom, Henry and Audette stagger to their feet. I hide behind the velvet curtains, watching….
Audette’s eyes are open in a frightened but hazy stare. “Who the hell are you two?”
The man in the pin-stripe suit tips his chin up. “We’re Baldcott’s men. His brother’s no longer accepting your story that Allan left your little party that night and you don’t know what happened to him.”
“Listen here.” Henry advances towards the men. “We’ve sworn blue in the face that it’s true. My fourteen-year-old cousin disappeared the same night. We don’t know what happened to either of them.”
“Oh yeah? Well it’s been four days without answers,” says the man. “Don’t take this personally… but….” He shrugs. A lazy smile edges across one side of his face. He raises his gun and readies it to shoot.
Audette makes a strangled cry and holds her hands out as though to protect herself.
The men begin shooting. They shoot and shoot and shoot—the sounds richocheting in my head like stones. Audette and Henry remain standing for a few moments, then slump to the floor—Henry across Audette. A look of surprise is still stamped on Henry’s face. Bright blood streaks across Audette's pale green dress and drips onto the floorboards. Her knee is shattered from the bullets and her leg juts out at an odd angle.
Shaking, I back into the wall.
The men stomp away up the stairs.
Strange, transparent bodies pull free from Henry and Audette’s bodies. The faces of the transparent beings are frozen with fear. They investigate their chests and see the bullet wounds and blood.
"Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!" yells Henry over and over. He hits the floorboards with his fist. Audette stares at him with her mouth hanging open and her bottom lip quavering. I step out from the curtains and go to them.
“You… died…” My mind is numb, caught in some horrific nightmare from which I cannot wake.
Audette gasps at this. She crawls away with jerky motions and huddles on the floor in a corner of the room.
Henry laughs like a crazy man, his voice high-pitched and breaking. "So now we're all dead...."
"I'm not dead,” I say quickly.
"Wake up sweetheart. You're dead as a doornail.” He makes a dismissive gesture in the air with his hand. “I looked for you for two days before I found you in the wall behind that statue. Found the old man’s secret treasure stash too. Sorry for leaving you there, but well, you were dead. I cemented the hole up with the statue of Saint ‘Rome as a mark of respect.”
“Please stop talking…” My voice crushes into itself.
The body… the body I crawled over in the tunnel.
That was me?
My back slides down the wall. Henry stares over at his body then turns his head sharply away, his eyes squeezing shut. Audette stays in her corner, like a captured pawn on a chess board.
The two men return downstairs with sheets they have pulled from the beds. They wrap Henry and Audette’s bodies in the sheets and carry them out to their car, cursing and swearing at the weight of them. The wheels of the car squeal on the gravel as the car tears away.
Nausea rises in my stomach. I can’t stay here any longer with the ghosts of Henry and Audette. My feet make no sound as I walk up the stairs and to my room. Everything is as I left it. Grandfather’s note flutters on the mirror, but my image does not show in the mirror’s glass. The breeze coming through the window has more substance than me. I sink to the floor before the dollhouse, before the perfect family in their perfect house. The metronome of the grandfather clock ticks through my chest. Time has stopped for me. I feel no heartbeat.
The world hangs in grayish streaks of light, streaks that become lighter. Something calls me. Am I about to slip inside another existence? I want to go. Everything within me wants to go.
But I cannot go. I don’t know where it will take me. Grandfather made me promise patience. I must wait.
Anguish crawls along my spine, sharper than the shadow’s barbs. I kneel here, before the perfect existence of the dollhouse, looking out over the river, until night closes over me.
Days and nights flit past—I am barely aware of their passing.
On the day I return downstairs, Henry is sitting on the blood-spattered sofa and Audette is pacing the floor. Both of them appear to be drifting rather than sitting or walking and I know that I must appear to be drifting as well. I sense that it is the last vestiges of my human consciousness that keep me from falling through the floor into the miles of dirt and rock beneath me. I could fall and fall and fall—perhaps even fall from the earth itself and haunt the empty darkness of space.
Henry nods a greeting but Audette ignores me, just as much as she ever did. She walks unsteadily to the front door with her busted knee. She shrieks as her hand passes through the handle. She tries again and again to no effect.
Henry eyes her with interest. “You have to believe, Audette.”
“What?” she snaps.
“You have to make yourself believe you’re solid. I mean, how else did Jessamine manage to get out of the underground? She would have had to push a button for the elevator, right Jess?”
“Yes.” I stare coldly at Audette.
“That’s because she didn’t know she was dead.” Henry raises an eyebrow. “We can all do this.”
“How?” says Audette impatiently.
“The book,” he tells her. “The first book of the
Speculum Nemus
—the Mirrored Tree—talks about what to do if you were to get left… between worlds.”
Her mouth turns down. “So now we’re relying on that musty old book to help us. It didn’t show us the way to the other worlds before.”
“That’s because we needed the second book, dearest.”
Audette gives a noisy sigh and flounces off to another room.
“What are you talking about?” I ask Henry. “What book?”
Henry shrugs. “The book your grandfather went chasing halfway around the globe to collect.”
“Grandfather? That’s why he left me? A book?” My voice falters.
“Not just any book. Dear old gramps was involved in some pretty dark stuff.”
“You mean… the stuff about going to other worlds?”
“Exactly. So he did tell you some things.” His eyes sharpen. “What did he tell you?”
I struggle to remember. “Just that… he needed the final pieces of the puzzle. But he’s coming back for me soon. He promised.”
He snorts. “He was obsessed with going back to a particular time. And obsessions are not healthy. Don’t be surprised if little Jessamine got overlooked….”
“You can say what you like, Henry, but you’re not close to grandfather like I am.”
“Don’t you mean,
like you were
? You’re dead and he’s still alive. Unless someone knocked him off, which is entirely possible. Anyway, yeah we all know Miss Perfect was the apple of her grandfather’s eye. I, on the other hand, am barely blood. Just the son of an unmarried cousin.”
“Grandfather still treated you like his own grandson. Paid for your expensive boarding school and then took you onboard the circus.”
"Yes, yes, yes and I’m eternally grateful and all that blather. I’ve learned more from that old coyote than I ever expected to.” A grin spreads across Henry’s face. “I read his precious book. The first of the Mirrored Tree books. Well, more to the point, I paid for others to interpret the book for me. Very interesting stuff.”
“Whatever the book said, I don’t want to know. All I know is, grandfather would never do the despicable things you and Audette did….”
A gleam fades in Henry’s eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“I saw what you did that night. I saw what really happened to Thomas.”
His mouth falls open. “How?”
“I went down there, to the dollhouse one night, to see where everyone was. And I found them. And I saw you and Audette… and Thomas.”
“Well you weren’t supposed to see any of that. You don’t understand what we were trying to do, kid. That Thomas character just wouldn’t stop snooping. He thought we were up to no good and he was determined to expose us.” He shrugs with his palms open to me.
“I saw what the shadow did to Thomas.” My tone is flat.
Henry drops his hands down, stops trying to explain himself away.
“What on earth was
that thing
?” I ask him.
He makes an exasperated sound, like the one Conrado used to make when he was trying to teach me how to get my timing right on my trapeze performance. “That thing was nothing
on earth
. Nothing
from
earth. We tried to open a crack, a door onto another level. But I inadvertently opened a world where great serpents are real. Almost drove me insane the first time I laid eyes on one of those things. But there’s more than her out there—much, much more. Anything you can think of, anything you can imagine—is real… somewhere. We dream of such things, here on earth, never realizing in our dream-state our minds are peering into other worlds.”
“No….”
“I’m afraid it’s true. We thought that the worlds just consisted of us, of humans, with infinite copies of us living on infinite earths in infinite universes. And there is. But there are other universes, other beings—infinite universes filled with them. The place where we encountered the serpent is just one speck of sand on an endless beach.”
He smirks at my horrified expression. “Look, you saw that your grandfather’s efforts were weak and ineffective. He drove himself looney trying to reach the other worlds. He spent every cent he had on obtaining the books that would teach him how to get to these worlds. But the second book proved so elusive, he bankrupted the circus. I was trying to find a shortcut. You can’t blame me for that.”
“Grandfather told me… about the other worlds. He said… he said I could see daddy again.”
Henry nods slowly. “Life exists on many levels, Jessamine. You’re dead of course on this plane of existence, but you’re living a billion different lives…
out there
.”
I turn to stare at him.
“And yes, you have your precious daddy on other worlds.”
“That’s what grandfather was trying to do…,” I whisper.
“Yeah. Trying to go to a world where your father wasn’t dead yet and stop it from happening—never buy that cursed Wheel of Death for the circus. Live in that house he was building in Florida for part of the year and travel the rest of the year.”
“How do you know… all of this?”
“I was part of the group that were helping him… in his endeavors. The group was called the Nemus—Latin for
tree
. Most of the others were people who had lost loved ones, people who desperately wanted to go back in time. People who had the money to fund your grandfather as he tried to get the books and the knowledge.”
I remembered the people in grandfather’s tent that night, remembered Zeke—the man who had lost his children in a fire, remembered the woman with the heavy jewelry pleading for a guarantee.
“But the whole thing went on for years,” Henry continued. “I tried looking into other… avenues. Ways of making it happen quicker.”
