Whispered Magics (12 page)

What had Princess Polly talked about? Oh yeah, leaving. Why
would she want to leave? Kate felt ice water in her middle again, but this time
it was nasty, because she realized if the dolls were alive that meant they
could see, and if Princess Polly could see, that meant all those long days and
days and days in the hospital, when Kate was looking at Princess Polly,
Princess Polly was looking back.

Of course she wants to leave, Kate thought, and this time her
eye felt hot and tears leaked down her cheek, tickling her ear. Mom cries when
she looks at me, and they won’t let me see a mirror. I’m only half a human, and
the rest of me is a monster. Even to a doll. More tears came, and then the
shaking in her middle, but oh, that hurt and so she tried to go empty inside
again, pretend the melted part was all plastic, with no feelings.

o0o

At night, there were the voices again.

“So what should we do tonight?” one of them said. Which doll?

Didn’t matter now. Kate said, “Princess Polly.”

Silence. Then a quick, squeaky, “What, Kate?”

She knows my name, Kate thought. Well, of course she would.

“Are you leaving because I’m a monster?”

Silence again.

Kate said, quick, “I know I’m all melted from the burns. In
third grade once this boy told us that skin melts when it burns. And all my
hair is gone.”

Princess Polly spoke in a high quick squeak. “Oh, no, no, no!
You’re not a monster! I just want adventures! Like you used to have with us!” A
wiggly, shaky voice. Was she crying, too?

A little of the ice melted inside Kate. “Oh. ‘Ventures.”

Kate felt tired just thinking about it. But she wanted the
dolls to talk more, so she made her middle tight again and said, “When did you
come alive?”

A long pause, and then Fashion Franci spoke. It had to be
Fashion Franci because she sounded so much like teenagers on TV. “Dunno. It’s
like, we don’t count days like you do.”

“Oh.” Well, that made sense, kind of. It was a relief when
something made sense, like it had Before. Until Kate went out for an ice cream
with her Dad and the red light changed to green, and then came pain, and the
world lost its sense. So far the new rules were: Kate was half melted, and Dad
was gone, and other grownups really didn’t pay attention to red lights, and the
only old rule that still worked was that Jen always got the best luck, always,
always, always.

So was there a new rule, dolls could talk?

Kate said, “When I was little I was sure you had feelings. But
you didn’t talk to me then.”

Another pause, and then this time Curly Cathy spoke. “We miss
the stories you did with the little girl.”

“What little girl?”

“The brown-haired one.”

“That’s my sister Jenny.” Kate thought that over. “I haven’t
done stories with her for a long time. I stopped way Before.”

The dolls didn’t say
Before
what?

“We miss them, like, totally.” That was Fashion Franci. Weird,
Kate thought. Fashion Franci almost always was the bad stepsister, or mean
princess, or wicked sorceress. That was because Fashion Franci looked so much
like the thirteen-year-olds who used to walk by the elementary school on their
way to the middle school. Some of them would laugh at the kids and yell
Babies! Look at the babies!
and other
stupid stuff.

Did Fashion Franci like being the villainess in stories? Jen
had said last summer that acting the bad guys was more fun in plays—

Kate pushed away that thought. It belonged to Jen and her good
luck.

“I can’t do stories with you anymore,” Kate said. “I can’t
move, so I can’t hold you like I used to.”

“You don’t have to hold us. You can tell us the stories,”
Curly Cathy said. “Then we can, like, act them out on our own when you’re
sleeping.” For a moment she sounded a little like Fashion Franci.

Kate looked up at the ceiling. Shadows of tree branches waved,
long and fingery, on the square patch made by the street lamp.

“I’ll make one up tomorrow,” she said. “Or do you want a story
from a real book? Do you listen when Mom reads to me at night, or Grandma when
she comes over? I’m having
Anne of Green
Gables
again. It’s my favorite book. Do you like that?”

“Your stories are more fun. We wish for them.” That just had
to be Princess Polly.

“All right,” Kate said.

“Good night,” Princess Polly said.

“Good night,” Kate answered, and for a long while there was
silence, except for the tapping of twigs against the window.

Kate said, “Do you want an outside or inside adventure?”

The dolls didn’t answer.

Well, they had to sleep, too, Kate thought.

Next day, after the nasty stuff, she got a surprise: Doctor
Carlotta. She liked Doctor Carlotta, who had said when she first came that the
other doctors would heal her skin. Doctor Carlotta tried to heal minds.

She had a nice voice, with laughs in it. No matter what Kate
said, Doctor Carlotta never got angry or teary, so Kate never felt bad talking
to her.

“So how is it, being home?” Doctor Carlotta said.

“It’s okay,” Kate said. “Mom cries. She tries to hide it.”

“We talked about that,” Doctor Carlotta said.

“Yes,” Kate said. “I know she loves me. I know she misses Dad,
too.” I know she hates to look at her monster daughter, Kate thought, but she
couldn’t say it, not even to Doctor Carlotta, because grownups always said
something nice like how outsides don’t matter. Kate knew from school that
outsides did matter.

“And your sister?”

They had talked about Jen once. How it was pure accident that
Dad and Kate had been alone in the car that day, except it hadn’t been
accident, really, because Jen hadn’t been home. She’d been at a ballet
rehearsal because she’d gotten picked to be Clara in Nutcracker—Jen, Kate’s
younger sister, who’d only studied ballet two years. Kate had studied four
years, and her sister was already in her class, and Kate had had to be a Party
Child four years in a row. Dad had taken Kate out for ice cream because she
felt bad.

It wasn’t Jen’s fault, Kate knew that. It wasn’t Jen’s fault
that she was good at ballet, and the summer Before, when they both tried out
for children’s theater at the rec center, Jen got to be Annie and Kate was one
of the orphans who just sang and didn’t even have a line. It wasn’t Jen’s fault
that the person ran a red light when Kate was in the car and Jen was in her
special rehearsal.

It was one of the rules of the world that Jen would always be
lucky.

Kate felt the lava inside. She didn’t want to talk about Jen.
What for? Like Mom’s hurt breathing when she looked at Kate, and her monster
half, it was not going to change.

So she said, “Do you think dolls could come alive?”

Doctor Carlotta said, “Only by magic. After all, they don’t
have hearts or lungs. They don’t breathe or eat. Live things do, even those
under water.”

Magic. That made sense. “Is there magic?” Kate asked.

“I have never seen any,” Doctor Carlotta said. “But that
doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

o0o

The next chapter of
Anne
was about saving Minnie May Barry from dying of the croup. At night, when the
dolls woke Kate, she had a story ready, all about how Midnight had been put
under a spell, giving him a terrible sickness, and the other dolls had to race
against time and various villains to get the medicine to save him.

Kate knew that it was kind of a stupid story—that she’d stolen
it from her chapter of
Anne
, but
she’d almost forgotten how to make up stories. The story part of her brain felt
like it had gone to sleep and it was hard to wake it up, and her middle and her
throat hurt because it was so hard to talk.

The dolls seemed to like the story, though. Princess Polly
said
Very well!
and Fashion Franci
said
Cool!
and Curly Cathy said,
Oooh!
and Midnight neighed in a high,
squeaky voice.

The next night was a better one, and the night after that was
still better. Story pictures came back into Kate’s mind again, one at a time,
like kids coming out after Hide and Seek. First one, then another, then more
and more, a lot of story-children, all danced round being something, whatever
Kate wanted.

Kate thought about stories all day as she lay there, watching
the sky change through the window, and the waving tree branches. Twigs became
witch fingers, and the long tumbling train of gray clouds changed into boulder
creatures, stalking at the witch’s command.

Next morning, Jen’s voice woke Kate, yelling about how she was
coming, she just got out of the shower.

Kate kept her eye closed. She looked at the reddish gold
morning light through her eyelid. The hospital light had always been a kind of
glare-white. Germs couldn’t live in that light, which felt the way bleach
smelled. Kate liked real light much better, especially golden-silvery candle
light, and reddish-gold fireplace light. The peachy light of sunset and the pale,
pale blue before the sun reached the window. Magic light, she thought. Can I
give light some kind of power and put it into a story?

Kate opened her eye. Someone had left her bedroom door open,
though Mom always shut it when she left.

“Mom! I can’t find my pink dance skirt! Where did you put it?”

Jen dashed by, dressed all in blue, her hair in two lollipops
on her head. Who was she being today? Thump, thump, thump. She stomped to her
room. Right now she was being a brat.

“If you didn’t sleep in so long, you wouldn’t have this
problem.” Mom was on the stairs, her voice sharp. “You find the skirt. You’re
going to have to take some responsibility for yourself, Jenny. I have enough of
my own.”

Thump, thump, thump. Down the stairs again, the two voices
going back and forth like the game of tennis. Angry voices, fast, smack, smack,
smack, back and forth. More like a war of tennis.

The front door slammed. That was Jen being driven to school.
Kate was glad she did not have to go to school. Kids made fun of ordinary kids
at school. She knew what they would say if they saw a half-melted monster.

o0o

“I think I know why you’re alive,” she said to the dolls that
night.

“Can’t we have our story?”

Who was that? The voice was so quick. It could have been any
of them—except maybe for Fashion Franci, who always talked like a TV airhead
teenager.

“I want to talk about this,” Kate said. “You weren’t alive
when I was little, or I would have known. You’re alive now because you got the
half of me that isn’t alive anymore.”

The dolls were quiet. Then, “Where is our story?” asked a
small voice that she did not recognize.

Kate told them the story about the witch with the light-magic.
They liked that story a lot. Kate knew it was true because they didn’t just say
it was good, their voices sounded different than when she had talked about
being half alive. They were happy and excited, though they were always polite
and talked one at a time—even when they argued at the very end, because Curly
Cathy wanted to be the Princess in Kate’s story, but Princess Polly said she
was always the princess.

Fashion Franci said, “Like what-EV-er. I like being the witch
because bad guys are more fun!”

“Jen said that once.” The words just sort of came out.

The dolls were quiet.

Then Curly Cathy said, “You don’t tell her stories anymore.”

“No, because she didn’t like my stories,” Kate said. “Anyway,
she said it about acting, not about stories.”

“She did like your stories.” That had to be Princess Polly, it
sounded so bossy, even in the high squeaky voice.

“No she didn’t,” Kate stated, and she got a memory from
Before. Jen, seven years old, saying
The
dolls all talk the same. You should make the voices different
, and she’d
started to do the story over, making different voices.

Kate had stopped sharing her doll stories. In fact, she’d
stopped acting them out with the dolls, because it had been spoiled. Jen had
spoiled it, and for a long time Kate hadn’t done any stories, until one day at
school they had to write one, just Before, and Kate couldn’t act it out. She had
to put it into words. It was different that way—but she’d kind of liked it when
she was done. That story didn’t go away into the air like smoke, the way the
old ones had. Written down on paper, she could visit it again.

But that, too, was Before. Now she couldn’t hold a book or
read.

“Dolls?” she said. “How did you know Jen liked my stories?”
But the silence was the empty one she’d gotten used to. It meant they’d gone to
sleep.

So she went to sleep as well.

o0o

“Once upon a time,” she began the next night, “there was a
girl. She was half alive. The doctors gave her plastic surgery, and turned her
half into a doll. The half that had been alive went into her dolls, and they
too became half alive—”

“I don’t like this story,” came a small, squeaky voice. Kate
couldn’t tell who it was.

“That’s because it’s true,” Kate said. “In stories, you get
what you want. In true life, things get taken away. Your magic might get taken
away, too. If you’re alive because you got life from my monster half—”

“It’s not true! It’s not! It’s not!”

That wasn’t a doll voice, Kate realized, and the ice water
poured all through her, a waterfall, cold and horrible. The voice cried, a
muffled sound as if a real face—not a doll face—had been smooshed into the
carpet.

“Jen,” Kate said. The cold water changed to boiling lava. “It
wasn’t the dolls. It was you. You, you liar.”

“You wouldn’t talk to me,” Jen whimpered. “You hate me!”

“No, I don’t,” Kate said.

“Yes you do! You hate me, and you blame me for Dad being dead,
or why won’t you talk to me?”

“Nothing to say.”