The Doll Maker (2 page)

He could only imagine what he must look like to her.

‘Hey,’ he said.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You know. I’m good. Ran into a low branch back there. Cut me pretty fine, I reckon.’

He was lightheaded, and not just from the watered down Scotch and flat beer and warm Comfort. He had lost blood.

The waitress glanced over his shoulder, back. She’d seen him come out of the woods. Bad for him, worse for her. The night was getting deeper. As exhausted as he was, he knew what he had to do. She would get the short ride, but she’d ride.

He turned, scanned the parking lot, looked at the steamed windows of the diner. No one was watching. At least, no one he could see.

‘You don’t happen to have a Band-Aid or anything do you?’ he asked.

‘Maybe.’ She unzipped and ransacked her purse. ‘No, sweetie. Best I can do is a Kleenex, but I don’t think that’ll help. You’re bleeding pretty good. You should go to the hospital.’ She pointed at a blue Nissan Sentra in the lot. ‘I can take you if you want.’

He chucked a thumb toward his rig. ‘I’ve got a first aid kit in my truck,’ he said. ‘You any good with that stuff?’

She smiled. ‘I’ve got a whole passel of younger brothers and sisters. Always getting in scrapes. I think I can manage.’

They walked to the far end of the lot. More than once he had to slow down, dizzy. When they got to the truck he unlocked the passenger side first. The waitress got in.

‘The kit’s in the glove box,’ he said.

He closed the door. On the way to the driver’s side he unsnapped the closure on his knife sheath. It was a six-inch Buck, razor sharp.

He opened his door, pulled himself into the cab, angled the mirror toward his face.

The whore had sliced him good.

While the waitress lined up the gauze and the foil-wrapped alcohol swabs on the dashboard, he pushed back the mirror, glanced around the lot. No other drivers, no one coming out of the diner.

He would do it now.

Before he could slip the knife from its sheath he noticed something in the parking lot, right near the entrance to the path. It was a small red wallet. It matched the red vinyl of the waitress’s purse. For any number of reasons, he couldn’t leave it there.

‘Is that yours?’ he asked.

She glanced to where he was pointing, put down the first aid kit, looked in her purse. ‘Oh, shoot,’ she said. ‘I must have dropped it.’

‘I’ll get it.’

‘You’re a doll.’

He stepped out of the truck, walked across the lot, his head throbbing. He had a few Vicodin left. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the vial, chewed them dry, trying to recall if he had an inch or so of Wild Turkey left in the truck.

He picked up the wallet, thought for a moment about opening it, about learning the waitress’s name. It didn’t matter. It never had.

Still, his curiosity got the better of him.

As he opened the wallet he felt the hot breath brush the back of his neck, saw the long shadow pool at his feet.

An instant later his head exploded into a supernova of bright orange fire.

Cold.

Lying on his back, he opened his eyes, the pain in his head now a savage thing. The world smelled of wet compost and loam and pine needles. Snow whispered down, catching on his eyelashes.

He tried to stand up, but couldn’t move his arms, his hands, his feet. He slowly turned his head, saw the whore’s dead body next to him, the scorched holes where her eyes used to be. Something – some animal – had already been at her face
.

‘Stand up.’ The voice was a whisper near his left ear.

By the time he managed to turn his head, no one was there.

‘I … I can’t.’

His words sounded distant, as if they belonged to someone else.

‘No, you cannot,’ came the soft voice. ‘I have severed your spinal cord. You will never walk again.’

Why
? he wanted to ask, but knew instantly that he could no longer make a sound. Perhaps it was because he
knew
why.

Time left, returned. It was morning somehow.

He looked into the gently falling snow, saw the axe, the bright steel wing glimmering in the splintered daylight like some silent, circling hawk.

Moments later, when the heavy blade fell, he heard them all – as he knew he would on this day – every dead thing beckoning him toward the darkness, a place where nothing human stirred, a place where his father still lay in wait, a place where the screams of children echo forever.

• • •

At just after six a.m., as every other day, Mr Marseille and I opened our eyes, dark lashes counterweighted to the light.

It was mid-November, and although the frost had not yet touched the windows – this usually comes to our eaves in late December – there was a mist on the glass that gave the early morning light a delicate quality, as if we were looking at the world through a Lalique figurine.

Before we dressed for the day we drew our names in the condensation on the windowpane, the double
l
in Mr Marseille’s name and the double
l
in mine slanting toward one another, like tiny Doric columns, as has been our monogram for as long as we both could remember.

Mr Marseille looked at the paint swatches, a frown tilling his brow. In the overhead lights of the big store his eyes appeared an ocean blue, but I knew them to be green, the way the trees appear after the first draft of spring, the way the grass of a well-tended cemetery looks on the Fourth of July.

On this day, beneath our drab winter overcoats, we were dressed for tea. My dress was scarlet; his suit, a dove gray. These were the colors of our amusements, you see, the feathers by which we cleave our places at the table.

‘I don’t know,’ Mr Marseille said. ‘I just don’t know.’

I glanced at the selections, and saw his impasse. There had to be a half-dozen choices, all of which, from just a few feet away, could be described as yellow. Pale yellow, at that. Not the yellow of sunflowers or school buses or taxicabs, or even the yellow of summer corn. These were pastel shades, almost whitish, and they had the most scandalous of names:

Butter Frosting. Lemon Whip. Sweet Marzipan.

Mr Marseille hummed a song,
our
song, almost certainly turning over the words in his mind, perhaps hoping for a flicker of inspiration.

I soon became distracted by a woman with a small child, passing by at the end of our aisle. The woman wore a short puffy jacket and shockingly tight denim jeans. Her makeup seemed to have been applied in haste – perhaps reflected in a less than well-silvered mirror – and gave her an almost clownish look in the unforgiving light of the store. The child, a toddler at oldest, bounced along behind the woman, deliriously consumed by an oversized cookie with brightly colored candies baked in. A few moments after they passed from view I heard the woman exhort the child to hurry up. I don’t imagine the little boy did.

At the thought of the mother and child I felt a familiar yearning blossom within me. I scolded it away, and turned once more to Mr Marseille and his assessments. Before I could choke the words, I pointed at one of the paint swatches in his hands, and asked:

‘What’s wrong with this one? Candlelight is a delightful name. Quite apropos,
n’est-ce pas?’

Mr Marseille looked up – first at the long, empty aisle, then at the myriad cans of paint, then at me. He replied softly, but forcefully:

‘It is
my
decision, and I
will
not be hurried.’

I simply hated it when Mr Marseille was cross with me. It did not happen often – we were kindred and compatible spirits in almost all ways, especially in the habits of color and texture and fabric and song – but when I saw the flare in his eyes I knew that this would be a day of numbering, our first since that terrible moment last week, a day during which a young girl’s blood would surely be the rouge that colored my cheeks.

We rode in our car, a white sedan that, according to Mr Marseille, had once been advertised during a football game. I don’t know much about cars – or football, for that matter – and this was not
our
car, not by any watermark of legal ownership. Mr Marseille simply drove to the curb about an hour earlier, and I got in. In this manner it
became
our car, if only for the briefest of times. Mr Marseille, like all of our kind, was an expert borrower.

The first thing I noticed was that the front seat smelled of licorice. The sweet kind. I don’t care for the other kind. It is bitter to my tongue. There are some who crave it, but if I’ve learned anything in this life it is that one can never reason, or truly understand, the tastes of another.

We drove on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the magnificent divided thoroughfare that I’ve heard is patterned, after a fashion, on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. I’ve never been to Paris but I’ve seen many photographs, and this seems to be true.

I speak a cluttered French, as does Mr Marseille – sometimes, for sport, we go for days speaking nothing else – and we often talk of one day travelling from the City of Brotherly Love to the City of Light.

The trees along the parkway were deep in their autumn slumber, but I’ve been on this street in summer, when the green seems to go on forever, bookended by the stately Museum of Art at one end, and the splendid Swann Fountain on the other. On this November morning the street was beautiful, but if you come here in July it will be breathtaking.

We followed the group of girls at a discreet distance. They had attended a Saturday showing of a film at the Franklin Institute, and were now boarding a bus to take them back to their school.

Mr Marseille had thought of making our invitation on Winter Street, but decided against it. Too many busybodies to ruin our surprise.

At just after noon the bus pulled over near the corner of Sixteenth and Locust. The teenage girls – about a dozen in number, all dressed alike in their school uniforms – disembarked. They lingered on the corner, chatting about everything and nothing, as girls of an age will do.

After a short time, a few cars showed up; a number of the girls drove off in backseats, carpooled by one mother or another.

The girl who would be our guest walked a few blocks south with another of her classmates, a tall, lanky girl wearing a magenta cardigan, in the style of a fisherman’s knit.

We drove a few blocks ahead of them, parked in an alley, then marched briskly around the block, coming up behind the girls. Girls at this age often dawdle, and this was good for us. We caught them in short order.

When the tall girl finally said goodbye, on the corner of Sixteenth and Spruce, Mr Marseille and I walked up behind our soon-to-be guest, waiting for the signal to cross the street.

Eventually the girl looked over.

‘Hello,’ Mr Marseille said.

The girl glanced at me, then at Mr Marseille. Sensing no threat, perhaps because she saw us as a couple – a couple of an age not significantly greater than her own – she returned the greeting.

‘Hi,’ she said.

While we waited for the light to change, Mr Marseille unbuttoned his coat, struck a pose, offering the well-turned peak lapel of his suit jacket. The hem was a pick stitch, and finely finished. I know this because I am the seamstress who fitted him.

‘Wow,’ the girl added. ‘I like your suit. A
lot
.’

Mr Marseille’s eyes lighted. In addition to being sartorially fastidious, he was terribly vain, and always available for a compliment.

‘What a lovely thing to say,’ he said. ‘How very kind of you.’

The girl, perhaps not knowing the correct response, said nothing. She stole a glance at the Walk signal. It still showed a hand.

‘My name is Marseille,’ he said. ‘This is my dearest heart, Anabelle.’

Mr Marseille extended his hand. The girl blushed, offered her own.

‘I’m Nicole.’

Mr Marseille leaned forward, as was his manner, and gently kissed the back of the girl’s fingers. Many think the custom is to kiss the back of a lady’s
hand
– on the side just opposite the palm – but this is not proper.

A gentleman knows.

Nicole reddened even more deeply.

When she glanced at me I made the slightest curtsy. Ladies do not shake hands with ladies.

At this moment the light changed. Mr Marseille let go of the girl’s hand and, in a courtly fashion, offered her safe passage across the lane.

I followed.

We continued down the street in silence until we came to the mouth of the alley; the alley in which we parked our car.

Mr Marseille held up a hand. He and I stopped walking.

‘I have a confession to make,’ he said.

The girl, appearing to be fully at ease with these two polite and interesting characters, stopped as well. She looked intrigued by Mr Marseille’s statement.

‘A confession?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Our meeting was not by accident today. We’re here to invite you to tea.’

The girl looked at me for a moment, then back at Mr Marseille.

‘You want to invite me to tea?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.

Mr Marseille smiled. He had a pretty smile, brilliantly white, almost feminine in its deceits. It was the kind of smile that turned strangers into cohorts in all manner of petty crime, the kind of smile that puts at ease both the very young and the very old. I’ve yet to meet a young woman who could resist its charm.

‘Every day, about four o’clock, we have tea,’ Mr Marseille said. ‘It is quite the haphazard affair on most days, but every so often we have a special tea – a
thé dansant
, if you’ll allow – one to which we invite all our friends, and always someone new. Someone we hope will
become
a new friend. Won’t you say you’ll join us?’

The young woman looked confused. But still she was gracious. This is the sign of a good upbringing. Both Mr Marseille and I believe courtesy and good manners are paramount to getting along in the world these days. It is what lingers with people after you take your leave, like the quality of your soap, or the polish of your shoes.