Chapter 12: In the Doll’s Place

I’d stopped being able to not know. That was the state he’d worn me down to — lying awake with the locked door at the end of the hall pulling at me like a sore tooth you can’t keep your tongue off, the not-seeing itching worse than any seeing.

The crawl had been the turning of it. Two days back, in the pitch dark, I’d felt the bare of him pressed up against the last of me, one push short of the end of everything, and it told me he wasn’t going to keep to the deniable dark much longer. And now my mother was about to get in a car and leave me alone in that house with him for four days. Whatever was behind those two locks, I had until she came back to learn how much trouble I was really in. The thing itself was down there, in the one room I’d never been inside, and I was done circling it.

I worked it out lying on my bathroom floor, which was where I did my thinking now.

I couldn’t get through the door. Two locks, windows that didn’t open from the inside — he’d told me that himself, months ago, the windows don’t open, it’s a security feature, bragging, not knowing he was telling me how the trap was built. I couldn’t break in.

But the door opened for one thing every night, and walked it down, and locked it in.

I was the same height as her to the half inch. The same shoulders, the same thin wrists, the same straight nothing of a shape. Same hair, same voice, same face, near enough — he’d said it himself, in the sun. You and me see everything. If I put her somewhere he wouldn’t look and stood where she stood, in the gray dress, still, and let him come up out of the basement and say I’m going to run her updates and take my arm — he’d walk me down himself. Through both locks. Into the one room.

He’d carry the key in his own pocket and put me on the other side of the door with his own hands, and I’d finally be inside it, and I would see everything there was, the stash, the setup, the whole of what he’d built, and I would know.

I’d get out before it went anywhere. That part I didn’t think hard about, because it was obvious. I’d see what I came to see and then I’d stand up out of the pose and say his name in my own voice, and whatever he did after that, at least it would be out in the open, at least there’d be no more not-knowing.

I was clever. I’d always been clever. I’d spent a whole summer watching him and he’d only just started watching back. I could get into a room and back out of a pose before a fat slow man could do a thing about it.

Two days ago, on a basement floor, a fat slow man had done plenty about it — more than I could stop, right up to the last inch of me. I knew that. And I set it down and stepped over it, the way my mother stepped over everything, because the other side of it was that I couldn’t run him anymore, and I’d been running him since I was nine, and I was not ready to be a girl who couldn’t. So I called it a fluke, a thing he’d got lucky at in the pitch dark, the once, and I told myself that on my own terms, in a pose I’d chosen, I’d be up and out and gone before he laid a hand on me. I’d never once had to test that. I was sure of it anyway.

I had two days, and I spent them getting ready.

The doll was the first problem — I couldn’t be standing in the hall in the gray dress and have her standing there too, so she had to go somewhere he’d never think to look and she had to stay put. She did what I told her. She also did what he told her, and I didn’t know whose voice won if we both gave her an order, so on the Wednesday while he was at work I tested it.

“Sara. Go into the pool-house bathroom and sit down on the floor and don’t come out until I come and get you. Don’t answer to anyone but me.” She said, “Of course, Cara,” and went, and folded herself down onto the dark tile, obedient, my own face going calm in the pool-house shadow.

I stood in the doorway and watched myself agree to be hidden away, and it was the easiest thing in the world, and that frightened me worse than if she’d fought.

Then there was being her. There were three of the gray dresses — he’d bought her a set — and I took one and put it on in front of my mirror and did my hair the flat way she wore it and stood the way she stood, hands folded, chin level, and I practiced going still.

It was harder than it looked. However still I made myself, something in me kept moving — a sway, a shift, a breath I hadn’t decided to take. I stood in the glass in her dress and made myself into a thing that didn’t, and held it, and counted, until my own reflection went patient and dead-eyed and strange, until if I let my eyes go soft I couldn’t tell anymore which one of us in the mirror was the machine.

Thursday, my mother’s car came at ten. She hugged me without wrinkling her linen and told Sara to keep an eye on my eating and got in and was gone down the drive.

And the house went quiet, and my father came up from the basement into the quiet and stood in the kitchen and looked at me for a long moment across it, the two of us alone in it now for the first time in my life, and he smiled the flat smile and said, “Just us, then.”