15

 

 

 

 

15

 

 

Momma’s told me once or twice—and sometimes I remember—about the doll I had when I was really little. Samelsa. A name I made up myself. Mom says I wouldn’t stand for it when anyone dared mishear me and try to call her ‘Sam’.

“Sam is a girl-name for hookers and strippers. Maybe waitresses,” she says. “I think you knew that, too. Even then. If people dared call your doll ‘Sam’ you’d give them the blackest evil eye. That look on your face! It was like a witchy old woman who’d just caught her neighbor’s dog peeing on her front porch.”

It makes me giggle, the way she says this. Like I’m a shrunken hag underneath what people see, and they should really be afraid of me.

Samelsa had a plastic face with painted freckles and big blue eyes that stayed stuck open. She was always staring. In my lap or under my arm or under the covers with me, she stared at Momma, she stared at the walls, she stared at the ceiling. When I turned her around and looked at her, she stared at me. I took her everywhere. A part of me remembers as much—the feel of her soft bulk under my arm, pressed against my ribs. Her hair in matted whorls of plastic, coarse and prickly beneath my hand.

“You were so lonely,” my mom says. “It took me way too long to figure out you needed friends. I thought the only friend you needed was me. And there you were, playing games and make-believe with a doll that couldn’t even talk back. I’m sorry, babe. I was just a kid myself, you know. An angry little girl with a baby she loved but didn’t know how to take care of.”

I remember holding Samelsa on my lap when Momma and me first started doing puzzles at the kitchen table. Her small, soft body slid off my knees when I jiggled my feet, when I moved around too much. She’d hit the floor and stare up at me with her solid, ever-open eyes. Waiting for me to reach down and take hold of her, pull her close to me again. I remember pressing fresh raspberries to her plastic face—an act of love, of sharing—and my horror when the pink-red taint wouldn’t wash off after. Raspberries still make me think of Carris. There was a bush somewhere down by the fence, heavy with caterpillars. They showed up each year in the spring. Tiny, misplaced hairs twitching in the foliage, fatter and fatter as the weeks passed, until some got so heavy they fell off their leaves and smashed themselves on the pavement below. Green mulch and shattered skin-casings sticking to the soles of my shoes. If I stepped on them barefoot, the cold crush of their insides slid up between my toes. So I stopped where I stood and stared down in sick fascination.

I guess Samelsa was with me then, too.

This part I can’t say myself, but the way Momma tells it, one day I walked over to the well at the bottom of the slope behind Auntie Clem’s house, and threw Samelsa down there. I don’t remember doing this at all, but I see her small boneless body falling away from me, vanishing down the black hole. I don’t remember it, but I hear the splash.

“I guess she must’ve done something wrong,” Mom says. “For you to toss her away like that.”

I guess. I didn’t ask her, or myself, What crimes can a doll commit? I don’t ask now either, because why try? The way my mother says things happened isn’t always the way I remember them. It gets confusing when I look at the in-between. It gets difficult, because the eye I hide starts to itch like it wants to open, and I don’t want my normal eyes closed when I hear the real answers.

Maybe I did it in fury, in a tantrum. Spoiled kids probably do ruin their toys more than normal kids. Maybe I did it to test my own courage. Walking to that circle of stone wall, pulling myself up to the edge on my elbows. Staring into the cold black. Dangling Samelsa over the edge. Knowing how final it would be, letting go.

Maybe I did it just to see if I could.

“It surprised the hell out of me,” my mother says. “It scared your Auntie Clem. Shook her up. She didn’t want to believe you’d done such a thing. She was so upset over it, I’d swear it was like she was the one who’d given you that doll.” And she chuckles, but it’s a dark sound and she shakes her head.

My momma talks in a voice like sliding, pointed silver when she tells me Samelsa got tossed down the well, and nobody understood why. She holds my hands, she pushes her gaze deep into mine. “I took it as a sign,” she says.

A sign for her to interpret. Why did she decide this was a sign for her, when I’m the one who did it? I’m the one who committed the crime. Not her, not my doll. I’m the one who took something helpless, something I loved, and threw it away into darkness.

“All mothers make mistakes,” my momma says. “Even a baby doll-mother like you were then. Every mistake a mother makes is a solution that turned out wrong. Thinking back on you throwing your doll away, it was one of the things that helped me decide we needed to get out of Carris. The place was so small and so isolated we were both half-crazy. I knew no matter how strange or scary a future alone might seem, I had to try and do what was best. I had to figure out what that was.”

“But I loved my doll.” It’s a fact I feel, even if it isn’t one I really know.

“Maybe you did, babe,” my mother says. “And maybe you didn’t. You can’t always trust your memories.” She holds her index finger up as she speaks, fat and curled as a caterpillar. Twitching between words. “Especially childhood memories. Your imagination is so big and so bold when you're young, you don’t always know the difference between dreams and facts. I remember how it is. How the things you dream up can seem so real.” My mother’s silver smile softens. She moves her gaze away from mine. She lowers her hand. She says, “Remembering things wrong can get people into trouble for no reason at all. You don’t want that on your head. Believe me.”

I know this is true. I also know there are lots of different parts of trouble hidden around in so many separate pieces of the truth.

“Trust me,” she says. “Be careful what you remember. Be careful what you say you remember.” What she means is, Be careful about saying what you think you know.

What Momma doesn’t say, but what we both know: I never needed that doll anyway. My mother is the closest thing I’ll ever have to a sister. She’s the best friend I’ll ever know. If blood is thicker than water, then together the two of us make blood and water both equally thick. We make it something liquid and viscous and shining, a bonding of the essence, shifting between her and me. So much more important than thread and stuffing and glass eyes, wrapped in a half-torn dress.

***

I still feel bad about that doll. The one I saved from a hooker name. A doll I carried around with me for years, and now remember only in flashes. Bare, bright impressions, like seeing something through burned retinas. Seared over everything in a glowing silhouette.

The same as Loki.

I barely met Loki, but when I remember him it’s with a sick stirring so deep and violent it’s like there’s a clawed hand rammed down my throat. Churning my guts around. Turning my insides into so much fine flesh confetti.

I remember Uncle Steve and his puppies. The ice tea in the milkshake glass. Those sounds, the click and purr the camera made. And that other kind of light, flashing in my eyes.