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Doll Crimes 17
17My mother would hate hearing this, but she wasn’t the only one who got hurt back in Carris. She wasn’t the only one who had stuff to cry over. I knew that same fist-round-the-ears feeling, the same helpless fear of a mismatched fight. Powerless. My mother’s unravelings were sporadic, sharp. Her mind a drawstring bag with a snapped cord, contents sliding out the mouth, slipping loose across the floor. A storm of tiny, shattered marbles. Funny how when she was hurting me, she thought she was the one really hurting.Those moments got closer together in the weeks before we left. She would hate hearing this, but they’re the reason I feel the same when she says we had to leave Carris.Not because of Clem, Momma. Because of you.I don’t remember where I was when I first recalled this, but I feel the sun beating down on me, tightening my damp skin. My hair is wet and whatever I’m wearing clings across my breasts, between my legs. My eyes
Doll Crimes 18
18My mom and me are both asleep on Susie’s surprisingly clean queen-size when he gets back from work. We’re stripped down to panties and t-shirts, and it’s okay, I think, because so far I don’t see the need to sleep with jeans on in Susie’s house. And I’ve always loved to sleep close to my mother when I can. Her scent is different when she sleeps, something spicy in the warmth of her sweat. She holds me closer, too. I bury my face in her throat and she locks her elbows through my arms, and the only thing that’ll wake us is the pins and needles in our hands and fingers when our stopped blood rushes free.I’m lying with her in the darkness when I hear his key in the lock, the door squeak open, the scuffle of his feet, the door slam shut. Footsteps.The room darkens a touch.“Well, isn’t this nice,” he says in a loud voice, in a tone that pretends this isn’t nice at all. “Where am I supposed to sleep?”I’m used to this kind of stupid q
Doll Crimes 19
19Take a thick black marker and draw a line. Before Carris, after Carris. Hold the pen in place too long and watch the ink spread into a wide, bleeding dot. The point of hesitation before we launched off the edge.Those final days.I didn’t know my mother and Clem weren’t friends enough for me. This word Clem chose for me: Lonely. When Clem was gone, I didn’t know I wasn’t friend enough for my mother. The word my mother chose for herself: Isolated. When Clem was away, my mom and me spent our evenings and hours of our nights together, curled up with popcorn and salted crackers, watching dumb TV shows. We still do this now when we can, but it was different then because the house in Carris was home. Not ‘we can be anywhere we want to be’ home, but the home where our pillows smelled like our hair, there wasn’t a room that didn’t have signs of us in it, and we all knew the exact right way to jimmy the back door handle so it wouldn’t stic
Doll Crimes 20
20I don’t want to talk to Susie. What do Susie and me have to talk about, anyway?It’s morning again. Day again. At least for now we’re ‘rich’. I wonder if he even knows. About our money, I mean.I brush my teeth, I wash my face, I comb my hair out with my fingers. I dig through my mother’s shoulder-bag—the denim one with the hole in its lining—and scratch out her lipstick. The dark mulberry one she says is too old for me. I paint my mouth the way she does—watching the lines, following the dips and slopes. I leave my eyes naked.I’m this girl, I tell myself when I look again at my full reflection. If I had my way, this is the only makeup I’d ever wear. Enough me and enough not-me. The dark shade brightening my skin, lighting up my irises. My face nude but not unmarked. A child with a woman’s mouth. Only my eyes are entirely my own.I pull on my boots and grab my jacket. I ease the front door shut behind me so the deadbolt
Doll Crimes 21
21From the day we left Carris and started moving around, in every place we went and in every area we stayed, there would be a park nearby. Some of these parks had ponds, some of them had swing sets and jungle gyms. Some had ice-cream stands and hot dog stalls and small wooded enclaves interspersed with picnic tables. Sections bright under sunshine, others dark from shade. “We need to stay close to places where you can still go do things outside,” my mother said. “Play and stuff. What’s a childhood without any trees.”What’s a childhood without any trees.The way she said this, it wasn’t a question. I knew she was feeling bad for me, thinking about how big the Carris house was compared to these places we were living now. Swapping all our open space for strange buildings and zigzagging streets. Looking out at a horizon of jagged roofs, and not the Carris hills that rolled around town and rippled in a soft, gliding ascent toward the mo
Doll Crimes 22
22“Do you want to meet one of our new friends?”Carris, in those weeks before we left.My mother was making waffles when she asked me this. She was standing barefoot in our big kitchen with its sticky wooden floors and its tricky taps, pouring batter into the iron griddle. The mix made a soft hissing sound as it hit the hot metal. It was early afternoon—late in the day for waffles. Clem had left sometime before dawn without saying goodbye. Mom told me this last part the moment I walked in the room. She didn’t say goodbye to you.“She’s going away again?”“Not going away again,” Mom said. “Just gone away for the night.”Which night? How many nights? She didn’t say if that counted the night coming or the night before. I didn’t ask. If she was gone again tonight, I had stale popcorn and bad TV ahead of me, searching for my mother’s smell in the cushions while she walked through darkness towards the gate. Towards…who? People she so
Doll Crimes 23
23I’m not supposed to smoke, you know. Mouthfuls of it, warm swirls hovering at the edge of my esophagus, burning like tiny fireballs on the way down. My lungs crackle open, seize. I choke back a cough, jets of smoke jolting out my nose in staggered silver puffs. I wait a moment. I try again. My hands already shake from the nicotine. The nausea comes next.My mother has always smoked. Clem did, too. “It’s not a good habit for a kid,” my mother has told me. “Staying away from cigarettes keeps us girls pretty.” Winking. Sliding a menthol between her lips.It started with the guys offering me cigarettes back when I was nine or maybe ten, eleven or maybe twelve. Handing them to me when my mother wasn’t around, flicking open a box to show me a deck of slim, spicy-smelling tubes neatly packed in tight rows. The filters all clean as cotton without the scorch, the stain that marks them later. Would you like one?Something secret in their
Doll Crimes 24
24Those early days at the petting zoos and the public gardens, the nature spots and caravan parks. I remember them. Those hours we spent in the picnic areas where the shade fell over us in heavy, dark dapples. I kind of miss them. Those times we bought sparkly ice cream floats and bright red hot dogs and gave ourselves hiccups from laughing between swallows. Sitting out on the grass or at the wooden benches. Under the trees or beneath the sky. By the fire areas, at the camping spots. The scents of cut grass and scorched meat cutting over the dark, mud-smell of deeper soil. Momma’s smile switching sizes, sometimes so wide I could see all the way to the back of her tongue, other times so small it was just a sloped curve. Her smile waxing and waning, her upper lip dipping in when her mouth stretched out. Lipstick marks on her teeth. Traces of red rubbed off on white. Smiling at something I said or did, something she noticed. Silly question
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