“It seems so clear that there are some people who can’t be rehabilitated.”
“I respectfully disagree,” he says. “I just took over a case from one of the older attorneys in our firm. I worked hard with the client for his parole hearing, and it was invigorating to see what I could do for him. He was young and stupid when he committed his crime, and now he can rejoin society as a productive member.”
She looks Anthony straight in the eyes and a wash of blackness pulls at her skull from inside. He’s so nice. He’s handsome. He’s doing what he thinks is right. And she’d love to go home with him and feel his skin under her palms and his taste on her tongue, but it just isn’t happening.
They’re so close to the burger place she can smell the fries in their oil from the exhaust fan on the roof.
“I feel awful saying this, but I just got hit by the worst headache,” she says.
She sees by his face that he gets it instantly. All that pressure, all that build-up, released in a second. There will be no dinner, no seduction. Her past has gotten in the way of enjoying things, once again. For him, their discussion was probably light and interesting; for her, it was like digging a nail into a paper cut.
His eyes search her face, and his shoulders slump almost infinitesimally.
“Let me walk you back,” he says. “I don’t want you to run into someone who’ll make blood drip off your elbows.”
MAY 21, 1872
The new home on Second Street was a bit of a disappointment but at least it got the family away from Uncle Hiram, that rude and distasteful man. It was also farther from the fishy smells of Crab Pond and the loud, machinic bravado of the mills and the train, all just a few blocks away when they lived on Ferry Street.
Their moving day had been relatively easy, although Mother had fretted about furniture being chipped during the cart ride over. The new home was a little strange; everyone had to walk through Emma’s bedroom to get to their own. Lizzie’s room was very small, but she knew Emma deserved the larger chamber.
After only one night on Second Street, Emma had asked Lizzie to help her move her bed so it blocked the door into their parents’ room. “Abby and Father can use the back stairs,” Emma had said.
“But that’s for the maid.”
Emma had shrugged. “He chose to buy a house without a central hallway. He can use the servant’s stairs, and she, too.”
As she had at Ferry Street, Lizzie loved poking around in Emma’s room, touching the ephemera left to her by their true mother: a cake of perfumed soap, a brooch Lizzie wanted desperately, but there was only one so it must go to the eldest. Emma cherished the Frozen Charlotte doll, undressable, molded in one immobile bisque unit with garish face painted on. Lizzie frequently asked if she might have it, since, at twenty years old, Emma was long past the age of playing with dolls, but she wouldn’t even let Lizzie hold it, concerned she would break it. The doll reclined permanently in a cigar box, with a scrap of calico as her blanket.
Whenever Emma was away for any secure amount of time, Lizzie would take a quiet tour of her treasures as if the room were a forbidden museum open only to very particular collectors. She perused, she touched, she placed things back exactly as they had been, so the curator would not notice upon her return. She spent the most time with Margaret, Emma’s name for the doll, but mostly, she was drawn to look at the photograph of her late mother, which was sequestered in Emma’s bottom drawer. It was a framed image of her in a paisley gown and a severe hairdressing, holding infant Emma firm on her lap with a dark-gloved hand. Emma, in her off-shoulder dress with lace-daggered hem, had been scared of the photographer.
Lizzie traced the loop of the necklace around her sister’s neck. Where had that ever ended up? She set the photograph up on the dresser top, and carefully balanced Margaret before it on her thick, flat feet, so she too could study the mother and daughter portrait.
Her father had often commented that Lizzie had her mother’s eyes, which were large and looked rather fierce. In looking at the photograph, though, Lizzie could see that her mother was more handsome than her.
Lizzie took the doll in her hand and sat upon Emma’s bed. They’d been in the new house only a month, and Lizzie liked exploring. The attic in particular was a vast and shadowy place.
“Emma’s room is so much larger than mine,” she said. “I have just this little closet, here. See?” she told the doll.
“She is the eldest,” said Margaret loyally.
“But must she have everything? Why did not Mother give me such a doll as you?”
“Emma already told you. You weren’t old enough for a bisque doll before she died. You had a soft rag doll, and where is she now?”
Lizzie gripped Margaret hard in her fist. She moved her thumb so it pressed against her mouth and nose, cutting off her breathing. She let the doll struggle for a bit before releasing her.
“You played too roughly with her,” Margaret continued. “So you have not a thing to remember your mother with, you bad girl.”
Although it was just a conversation she was having with herself, Lizzie found herself filled with longing and rage. Her mother was a black spot in her life around which everything else seemed to revolve. She couldn’t remember the face that must’ve loomed over her cradle, the deft hands that took care of her diapers and soothed her. Maybe her mother sang her to sleep. Lizzie’s small body must’ve slumped wearily against this woman’s larger one, but she couldn’t remember a moment of it.
As her mother lay dying, she had made Emma promise to take care of Lizzie. And so Emma was her lamp in the dark, and the other woman, whom she called Mother, was like a candle, far less important and prey to the wind’s power.
It was horrible not knowing the very special thing that everyone else knew about. It made Lizzie an outsider. Even Abby, who had taken her mother’s place, had been acquainted with her.
Lizzie spat on Margaret’s face and then used her sleeve to dry her off. Spittle lingered in the caverns of the doll’s eyes. She rose from the bed, readying to put Margaret back until their next secretive encounter. But her innate clumsiness made her lose her footing, and the doll sailed from her hand, crashing against the dresser front with a plink and then onto the carpeted floor with a thud.
“Oh, no! Dear Margaret, what have I done?” cried Lizzie, crawling to the pale white limbs separated from the torso. Margaret had lost both arms and one leg.
Breathing heavily, Lizzie positioned the limbs where the breaks were, trying to see if she might use glue to mend them, but Emma would see the hairline cracks. Lizzie would never hear the end of it; Emma enshrined that doll. In a panic, she gathered up the pieces and hurtled down the stairs.
The only thing she
