(Originally published in The Doll Collection.)
I’m twelve when this all starts, and Daniel’s about to be five. And I thought he was like the rest of us, then. I thought he was like I had been, at his age. But he wasn’t. It could be he had been born different, of course. Or maybe one day, walking down the hall on his short legs there had been a click in his head, a deep, wet shift in his chest that made him roll his right shoulder, look at all of us in a colder way. Not just me and Mom and Dad. After that click, he looked at people in a colder way. I should have been watching him the whole time. I should have never slept. Then I could have seen him in his twin bed across from mine one night, when he coughed up a shiny black accretion, studied it in the moonlight sifting through our bedroom window, then wrapped it in a tissue, leaving it on the nightstand for Mom to throw away.
It was his soul.
None of us would know for years.
For our whole childhood he was just Daniel, always the full name. My little brother seven years younger, the accident that almost killed my mom, being born, like he’d been picking at the walls of her womb, latching his mouth onto places not made for feeding. He didn’t talk until he was four. The doctors said not to worry, that some kids just took their time.
This isn’t about him getting all the attention, either. This isn’t about me growing up off to the side, taping and gluing my action figures and trucks back together and starting them on another adventure I was going to have to make up alone.
I’m good with the alone part. Really.
Those first four years when Daniel wasn’t talking, the house was always buzzing anyway. New wallpaper, the trim painted over and over, slightly different shades each time, like a bird’s egg fading in the sun, its inside baked rotten.
Our mom and dad were preparing for our little sister. Trying to make her room at the end of the hall so perfect that she couldn’t help being born. Perfect enough that she wouldn’t listen to the doctors, who told Mom there was no way, that Daniel had messed her up too bad, too forever.
Dad wanted a little princess, see. And our mom would kill herself to give him that princess, if she had to.
So, when the baseboards finally matched the color of the new knobs on the cabinets, when the corners had been sanded off all the coffee table and footboards, when Dad had parked all the tractors in a line by the barn, then reparked them again, it finally happened: Janine.
Our mom and dad named her early so they could coo to her through the tight wall of skin my mom’s stomach became. They named her so they could lure her out, so they could talk her through.
To explain it to us, what was happening, my dad got a black marker with a sharp point and drew the outline of a sideways baby onto Mom, like a curled over bean with fingers and toes and an open eye watching us. If we’d been a family that already had a daughter, we might have had a left over doll to use, to explain this process with, but what we had instead was Dad’s strong bold lines on our mom’s belly.
Years later, at a movie theater, I would see the outline of a person taped off on the street, where they’d died their dramatic movie death, and I would lean forward, away from my date. I would lean forward and turn my head sideways, to see if I could hear that person under the asphalt, whispering.
Daniel told us it’s how he learned to talk: hours on the couch with Mom in her seventh month, his head pressed flat to her bared stomach, Janine whispering to him.
When she died just like the doctors had said she would, Dad had to break down the bathroom door to keep Mom from eating all the soap from the towel cabinet. I remember him carrying her down the hall, bellowing at us to get out of the way. How her mouth was foaming, how her eyes were so blank.
I don’t know if she was trying to choke herself to death or if she thought she was dirty on the inside.
After she was sedated on the couch, and Dad was pouring me cereal at the formal dining room table we never used, I heard Daniel speaking words for the first time.
I stood from my chair, peered over the back of the couch.
Daniel had rolled Mom’s shirt up, had the side of his head pressed to her stomach.
He was talking to Janine.
It was the only time I ever hit him.
•••
Mom’s theory when she checked back into the world, it was that some people are born for a reason. That they’re born to do a specific thing. And, in teaching Daniel to talk, Janine had done that specific thing. It released her from having to be born at all.
We held a private service for her in the woods behind our house. I got dressed up and combed my hair flat and everything.
We walked single-file out to where we’d used to have picnics, under the big tree. It was maybe five minutes past the edge of the pasture. Our dad was trying not to cry. Our mom was squeezing his hand. Daniel was standing on the other side of the hole from me. I guess our dad had dug the hole the night before, or early that morning.
“Will the ants get her?” Daniel asked.
Because they always found our watermelon as soon as we cut it.
My mom shook her head no, not to worry.
The box they had for her was cardboard and waxy and as long as Dad’s arm. It smelled like flowers, and, because Mom’s stomach was still big, that box made less sense than anything else in the history of the world, ever.
They didn’t explain it to us.
We raised our voices, sang one of the children’s songs Mom had been humming down to Janine since the first month.
It was nice, it was pretty, it was good.
Except for that box.
It fit into the hole perfectly, and all four of us used our hands to clump the dirt back in over it. Then my dad pulled a little sharpshooter shovel from behind some tree and scooped a little more on, and tamped it all down into a proper mound.
“No marker,” our mom said, her hand over her own heart, like cupping it. “We’ll be the marker, okay?”
This is how families survive.
“Okay,” Daniel said, trying the sounds out.
Dad rustled Daniel’s mop of hair. It was like a hug, I guess.
“I think he’s had the words in there the whole time,” Dad said.
“My big boys,” Mom said, and lowered herself to her knees, pulled Daniel and me to her and held on, her belly between us, a hard, dead lump.
“Okay,” Daniel said again, quieter.
He wasn’t talking to us.
Three nights later I woke softly, my eyes open for moments before I could see through them, I think.
They were fixed on Daniel’s bed.
It was empty.
I trailed my fingers on the walls, felt my way through the darkened house. Living room, kitchen, utility. Dad’s study, Mom’s sewing room. Their bedroom, the two of them breathing evenly in their musty covers.
Then Janine’s room at the dead end of the hall.
I would get in trouble if the sound woke my parents—Janine’s room was already in the process of becoming a shrine—but I clicked the light on.
It was like stepping into a cupcake. Everything was lace and pink and white-edged, like a thousand doilies had exploded, fell into an arrangement that before had only existed in our dad’s head.
Daniel wasn’t there either.
I turned the light off, trying to muffle the sound in the warmth of my palm, and in that new darkness I saw a firefly bobbing outside the window.
Except it was a yellowy flashlight, moving through the trees.
Daniel.
I pulled my shoes on without tying the laces and crept out the front door, left it open a crack behind me.
Five minutes later, I caught up with him.
He’d seen where Dad put that little sharpshooter shovel. It was just his size.
By the time I got to Janine’s grave, he’d already dug down to the waxy cardboard-box center.
I reached out to stop him—he didn’t know I was there—but it was too late.
He’d already stepped down into the open grave, the box not supporting his weight, the sound of a jumbo staple popping loud in the night.
And then I didn’t say anything.
What he pulled up from that box, holding it under the armpits like a real baby, was the doll Dad had bought for Janine, the doll he hadn’t had to demonstrate the baby in Mom’s stomach.
She’d been stripped naked, of course.
If her eyes rolled open, it was too far for me to see, and too dark.
•••
Because I’d left the door open, when I got back to the house there was something turning in slow deliberate circles on the couch.
A possum. It was following its rat tail around and around, like it had lost something, or was patting down a bed for itself.
It hissed at me, showed its rows of teeth, sharp all the way back to the hinge of its jaw.
I fell back, clutching for the coat rack, to pull it down in front of me, maybe, to hide what was going to be my screaming escape, but what my fingers dug into, it was the shirt of Daniel’s pajamas.
He didn’t even look over at me as he crossed the living room, the shovel held over his shoulder like a barbarian axe.
The possum screamed when he swung the blade into it, and by the time our mom and dad had clambered into the living room, my dad with his pistol held high like a torch, my mom’s silk sleep mask pushed up on her forehead like a visor, the possum was biting at its own opened side, and rasping.
Daniel looked up to Dad, then to Mom.
The shovel was twice as tall as he was.
“Daniel,” our dad said, his voice trying to be stern, I think.
It didn’t work.
“Oh,” Mom said then, and stepped back from the bloody couch. From the dying possum.
The possum’s babies were calving off. They’d been hidden under the dark back fur on her back. They looked like malformed mice.
I clapped my hand to my mouth, threw up between my fingers.
Daniel brought the flat of the shovel down on the fastest of the babies, was, as our dad said later, too young to know better, too young to understand.
Dad wasn’t standing where I was, though. He wasn’t close enough to hear Daniel.
Daniel was whispering to someone.
•••
I’m thirty-eight now, and that night under the tree, The Night of the Possum, as we came to call it, it’s still as clear in my mind as if it just happened.
Daniel would be thirty, I guess.
And, I wish I could trace a line from the year Janine died to now, and put hashmarks on it. This is Daniel’s first date. This is the neighbor’s new colt. This is when he figured out the bus lines—when he figured out he could go into the city by himself. This is him in the guidance counselor’s office, the counselor not finding an explanation for him in any of the college textbooks she’d saved.
This is Mom and Dad, watching him return again and again back into the trees.
This is me, growing up to the side.
My first date was with Chrissy Walmacher. The neighbor’s new colt is hers. I sat with her while it was dying, for horse reasons I never really understood. This is me and Chrissy, riding the bus to a concert in the city. This is the guidance counselor, veering her to this school, for that life, and veering me to a different school, for a different life.
This is me at thirty-four, standing at my dad’s funeral, my mom there, Daniel pulling up at the last moment, his suit perfect, his face set to “mourning,” his eyes drinking the scene in for cues.
We had had the same grades, played the same sports.
Without me providing the model of what to do, I think Daniel would have had to reveal himself. As it was, he could just step into my shoes, follow my lead, fit in, attract zero attention.
What Dad died of, it wasn’t anything. Just cigarettes. Just too many years.
Standing there, I was only on my second job of the year. I’d tried normal jobs, offices, even manual labor, but indexing books in the privacy of my apartment on the second floor was finally the only thing that fit. It was work that made sense.
Contracts were getting fewer and farther between, though. There’s software that can do what I do, more or less. With a little fine-tuning afterward, even I have a hard time telling any substantial difference.
Dad dying, it wasn’t a windfall for me, or for Mom or Daniel either, but it was going to help. My grief was a little bit of a mask as well.
After the funeral, to escape the house, I drove Daniel down to the bar my dad had been loyal to, the years after Janine—before he cut drinking off altogether, at my mom’s request.
This was the real funeral. Walking through a space he had walked through, at our age. Moving as he moved, our reflections in the smoky mirror perhaps vague enough to fall into step with his. We were trying his life on, and, before we’d even sat down, we were finding his life not that interesting.
Saying goodbye, it’s complicated.
Daniel ordered the same beer I did. He’d never cared about beer, probably wasn’t even going to drink this one to the bottom.
“So what’s what these days?” I asked.
I’d seen actors on TV open conversations exactly like that, in places like this.
“You know,” he said.
He’d bloomed into an electrical engineer. In his senior year, when I was first getting on the job market, I remember him building model intersections on Dad’s shop table, and wiring stoplights, giving them this or that trigger, this or that safety. The traffic was imaginary, but the lights always clicked through their cycles perfectly.
Mom and Dad would stand in the doorway, Mom’s hands balled at her throat with pride.
Everything they’d been saving for Janine, they heaped it onto Daniel.
My one-time girlfriend Chrissy Walmacher’s second wedding had been two weeks ago. She’d invited me, and it had put a picture in my head of me standing at a white fence, looking over. Just another sad postcard I sent to myself in a weak moment. One of many.
“Any girls to speak of?” I asked.
Daniel leaned back, shrugged his right shoulder in that way he had, like he was about to shove his right hand deep into his pocket for the perfect amount of change. He wasn’t looking at me anymore, but at a college girl with hair so metallic red it had to have just been dyed, or colored, however that happens. She was sliding darts from the dartboard, one booted foot pulled up behind her like she was kissing someone in a movie.
“Stay single,” I told him, raising my glass. “These are your good years.”
He came back to me, his fingers circling his own mug.
What he didn’t say, what he didn’t ask, was, How would I know this gospel I was preaching?
Big brothers are required to say certain things, though. To give advice, whether it’s from experience or from a book of celebrity interviews that now has a comprehensive index.
“You going to miss him?” Daniel said then, watching my eyes for the lie.
“He’s Dad,” I said, taking another long drink.
“But still.”
Behind me a dart struck home, and the red head tittered.
“I miss him for Mom,” I said.
“Yeah,” Daniel said, nodding like this was true. Like this was something he hadn’t thought of.
“I saw you that night,” I said then, trying to spring it on him. “Did you ever know?”
I’d been saving it for more than half my life.
Daniel looked to me, his head turned sideways, like for clarification.
“Night of the Possum,” I said, in our family way.
“Oh, yeah,” Daniel said. “The possum. Man. I’d nearly forget her.”
Until just that exact moment, I’d never once thought of that possum as having a sex. But of course it had been a mom. It had had babies. Of course.
Her.
The way he said it was so personal, though. So intimate.
“What did you see?” he said, setting his mug down after touching the beer to his lips again. He wasn’t drinking it, I didn’t think. He was just doing what I did. He was fitting in. He was looking like one of us.
He wasn’t, though.
Not even close.
•••
According to Daniel, he’d been out to Janine’s grave in private in the weeks since her funeral—a behavior learned from Mom and Dad, he claimed, from following them on the sly, making their little pilgrimage of grief before dinner two or three times a week, if it was just a casserole cooking. He’d been there, sure, but never with a shovel. Never to dig that little cardboard coffin up. What did I think he was, a ghoul? Can a kindergartner even be a ghoul?
“That’s what I’m saying,” I told him, a beer deeper into this night of nights. “You were just, like, curious, I think. As to what we’d actually buried.”
“Janine,” he said.
I stared at him about this, waiting for him to see it.
I’m an indexer, Daniel an electrical engineer, but still, we’d both figured out long ago that what happens with Mom’s kind of miscarriage is that the body either reabsorbs the fetus or the body chunks it up, delivers it bit by bit, to be assembled never.
Not pleasant to think about, but the human body’s crawly and gross when you look too close.
Each of us figuring that out about Janine, it was probably why we’d gone into comparatively sterile work settings: desks, drafting tables.
Nothing with blood.
“It would have messed me up, though, right?” Daniel said, touching that warm beer to his lips again. “Given me a unique perspective on—on life.”
I took a real drink, waited for him to say the rest.
I didn’t want to disturb this moment.
He was watching the redhead behind me again, talking to the two girls she was with. It was like he was taking a series of still shots with his mind. With his heart.
The reason he was dismissing my question about girls was because girls were all there was for him. I could tell by the way he watched her. But it would cruel for him to flaunt it in front of his big brother. In front of his practically celibate big brother.
“If I’d dug her up like you say, I mean,” Daniel said, coming back to me for a moment. Holding my eyes with his, probably so he could gauge how I was taking this: as hypothetical, or as confession.
“You did dig her up,” I said. “That’s why you had that little shovel. For the possum.”
“It was right there on the porch,” Daniel said, his voice falling into that little-brother whine I hated. “I was on my way back from the bathroom and I heard you, came to see. The door was open behind you, man. The shovel was right there where Dad left it. It’s where he always left it, for snakes. Remember?”
I studied the grain of the table-top, trying to track this version.
Mom had had an encounter with a king snake. That little sharpshooter shovel did have a handle at the top, perfect for holding the shovel blade steady over a snake’s head.
But I’d seen.
“So, if you’d dug her up,” I finally said. Because there had to be some ground he would cede.
Daniel pushed air out his nose in a sort of one-blow laugh, a version of the way Dad used to dismiss our pleas for money or keys or permission, and said, “Then…she would have been dug up?”
“We should go out there,” I told him.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “There wouldn’t be anything,” he said. “Not after all these years. Maybe an eyeball. Those are hard plastic, right?”
“You’re talking about Janine,” I said.
“We’re talking about a doll,” Daniel said. Obviously. “And, say we go out there, and that doll’s still there,” Daniel said, leaning over his beer. “Would that somehow prove that I dug up the…the surrogate of Janine, and then put her back exactly as she’d been?”
He was right.
“Or it would prove that nobody’d ever dug her up at all,” he said, lifting his beer and setting it down, for emphasis.
“I thought—” I said then, looking behind to the group of college girls as well, “I guess I just thought that…you were a kid, man. I thought that, that you might really think that stupid doll wasJanine. Whether you dug her up or not.”
“It. Whether I dug it up or not.”
“I thought you’d think that that was what Mom had had inside her all along. That, I don’t know, she would have grown up into a mannequin or something. That everybody was always walking around with these dolls lodged in them, waiting to get out.”
“The women at least,” Daniel added, in his playing-along voice.
“It’s your theory,” I said. “Or, I mean, it would have been.”
Daniel wasn’t watching the college girls anymore. Just me.
“I was five,” he said, finally. “Not stupid. But thanks, big brother.”
I nodded like I deserved that, and kept nodding, drank another beer, talked about nothing, and left him there with the college girls, didn’t talk to him for two years, I think it was. And that was just for Mom’s funeral.
Her granite headstone came in two months later.
Carved into it was that she’d been mother to three beautiful children.
I ran my fingers over the jagged valleys of those letters, and watched cars pass on Route 2.
“Guess you can die of being alone,” Daniel had said to me earlier that day, about Mom.
Or, not about Mom, but because of Mom.
He was talking about me, though.
I was becoming the male version of a spinster.
It can happen when you grow up without enough light.
Ask anybody.
•••
For the next year and a half or two years, Daniel was a ghost. He lived in the city, I even knew where, but the life he led—it wasn’t even a mystery to me, really. I assumed it would be a follow-through of who he’d been before. And I was happy for him. One of us deserved that.
I was out at the farm, sleeping in the same bedroom I’d slept in as a boy.
Someday I’d move into Mom and Dad’s room, I told myself. Someday.
The lacy drapes in Janine’s room were so fragile now that touching them made them crumble. Nearly three decades of sunsets can do that.
At night, crossing to my desk for another round of pages, I would find myself watching the window over the kitchen sink. For fireflies. For Janine. She never came, though. She’d never even been born. Finally, as I’d known all along was going to happen, I walked out into the trees with a new shovel, to settle this argument.
Our big tree was the same as it had always been. In tree-years, the intervening decades hadn’t even been a blink.
The grave mound was long gone, of course. Now there were beer bottles and old magazines scattered around, meaning teenagers had discovered our idyllic spot. The models in the magazines were wearing clothes from years ago, staring up at me from the past.
I pushed the blade of the shovel into the ground, leaned over it, gave it my meager weight and dug deeper than my dad had, just to be sure.
Nothing.
That night I dug two holes.
The next night, three.
On the fourth night, angry, I raised the shovel before me formally, like a cross I was about to plant once and for all, and sliced down through a long slender root. I closed my eyes, sure this had been the tap root. That this tree had lived two hundred years just to have me kill it by accident. Kill it to settle a debate that was only happening in my head.
If it had been the taproot, and if my dim recollection that this was a good way to kill a tree was accurate, it would be a week or more before the leaves wilted at the edges, anyway.
I didn’t know if I could force myself to watch. Meaning this tree was either going to be alive or dead to me for the next few decades. When I’d think about it, the picture of it in my mind would shudder between possibilities, and that clutch in my gut would either be guilt or relief. Either absolution or condemnation.
And Daniel was right: the waxy cardboard box, it had long since been reclaimed. I kept hoping for at least a rusted staple to prove the burial, the coffin, the funeral we’d all been complicit in staging, but even staples would have turned back to earth, this long after.
It was about this time that something started going wrong with my stomach. With my digestion. The doctor my plan allowed told me it was nerves, it was stress, that I would push through, get better. Not to worry. Then he clapped my shoulder, guided me back out into the daylight of the city.
I stood in the parking lot by my car for longer than the attendant understood. He watched me the whole way past his little guard booth, perhaps trying to gauge for himself the news I’d just received. It would be a game you would come up with just to stay sane, sitting in that guard booth day after day.
I was dying, I didn’t tell him.
It was that house. Living there, it was killing me the same way it had Dad, the same way it had Mom. Because I had no real connections to the world, no fibers or tendrils reaching out from me, connecting me to people, the world was letting me go. Letting me slip through. Maybe it was even mercy.
And the house was the mechanism. My stomach had been fine before, my digestion nothing I’d ever had to think about.
Radon, lead paint, asbestos, contaminated water, treated lumber sighing its treatment back out: it could be anything poisoning me.
I had to warn Daniel. Sell the house after my funeral, I would tell him. After I’m gone, get rid of it. Don’t keep it because of Janine. She was never even real, man. And she’s not there anymore, either. I looked. I looked and I looked. She’s gone. And it’s for the best.
Driving to the address I had lodged in my head like a tumor, the townhouse listed under Daniel’s name for years in our shared legal documents and invoices, I indexed in my head the talk I was going to give him. It made it more real, having an index. Being able to turn to this page for that part, another page for a different part.
It calmed me, kept me between the lines the whole way over.
I parked behind his garage, blocking him in if he was there—the visitor slots were all taken—knocked on his door. No answer. I didn’t knock again, just sat on his patio and studied the sides of my hands, my stomach groaning in its new way. After twenty or thirty minutes, the super or maintenance man came by, greeted me by Daniel’s name.
“Brother,” I corrected, stopping him, waving off the apology already coming together on his face.
“Oh, yeah,” the super or maintenance man said, close enough now to see. “Mr. Robbins not home yet?”
“Guess not,” I said. “I can wait. He didn’t know I was coming by. Kind of a surprise reunion.”
“Here,” the maintenance man said, and stepped past, and, just on the authority of family resemblance, opened the door with the master key, pushed it open before me as if to prove this was really happening.
It was an indication of how little of a threat I looked to be. An indication of how frail I must appear, that sitting on patio furniture in the sunlight could be considered cruel, could be something he would want to save me from.
“You can die of being alone,” I said to myself, once I had Daniel’s door pulled shut behind me.
Daniel’s place was much as I guess I’d imagined it: black and white prints bought as a set—some national park, and the sky above it—a sectional leather couch, a large television set rimed with dust. An immaculate kitchen. Ice-cold refrigerated air.
I called Daniel’s name just to be sure.
Nothing.
I settled into the couch, couldn’t figure out his remote control.
I felt like an intruder. Like one of those people who break into vacation homes and move through them like ghosts, running their palms over the statuettes, over the worn arms of the dining room chairs.
I almost left, to do this right, to call him, arrange a proper visit.
For all I knew, when he came home, there would a girl under his arm, fresh from happy hour, him having to guide her shoulders so she could find the couch. So she could find the couch occupied by her date’s pale reflection.
I stood, breathing harder than made sense for somebody alone in a room, and told myself just the bathroom, and that I was to leave it exactly as it was, no splashes, no drops, no towels hung obviously crooked, no smudges on the mirror. And then I would leave.
Except, on the back of the toilet was a mason jar, one of those kinds with the lids that have wire cages on them, to trap all the air. Behind the thick glass was what I assumed to be potpourri, or some sort of collection of dried moss strands. I picked it up gingerly, turned it to the side.
It was hair. Long winds of dry hair.
I rolled the jar in my hand, studying it. The hair was in sedimentary layers. Like a curio from a gift shop.
I shook the jar timidly. All the hair stayed the same. And it really was hair. I set it down, zipped up, and was going to leave it there, had told myself it was the only sensible thing to do. It wasn’t sensible to interrogate stranger’s decorations. And that’s what my brother was, by now, a stranger.
Still. I came back to the jar, tried to twist the top off to smell—this had to be something decorative, something all other single men knew about as a matter of course—but the lever had rusted shut, from the steam of a thousand showers.
“Good,” I said out loud. This wasn’t my business anyway. This wasn’t my life.
When I saw the metallic red hair a few layers up from the bottom, though, my fingers opened of their own accord.
The jar shattered on the side of the toilet, the hair unwinding on the tile floor, taking up the space of a human head, and still writhing, looking for its eventual shape.
I could still hear that red head’s dart sucking into the dartboard. Could still see her standing at the line painted onto the floor of that bar. But I couldn’t see the rest of her life.
She hadn’t been the first, and she hadn’t been the last.
The way I made it make sense was that Daniel had become a hair stylist instead of an electrical engineer. That, when he’d hit thirty, he’d changed professions, gone with his heart instead of a paycheck. He got more interested in the people in the crosswalk than in the traffic cueing up at the lights.
Daniel who was just as indifferent with his wardrobe and appearance as I’d always been. He’d be no better a hair stylist than I would.
Still, this couldn’t be what it seemed.
I felt my way out of the bathroom, made myself walk not into his bedroom—smelling where he slept would be too intimate—and not back down the stairs like I’d promised myself, but to the only other door on this floor I hadn’t been through. The only door that was closed.
I told myself I was just going to reach in, turn the light on in there long enough to catalog it as storage or living space—I might need to stay here one night someday, brother—but then, the door open just enough for my forearm, my hand patting the wall for a light switch, something scurried behind me.
I turned, didn’t catch it.
The sense the sound left in my head, though, it was an armadillo, somehow.
No: a possum.
I clutched the door frame, my heart slapping the inside walls of my chest, a sweet, grainy smell assaulted the inside of my head, and looked into what was neither living space nor storage, exactly.
This was an operating room.
On the table, tied down at all four corners, was the latest woman.
All Daniel’s attention had been focused on her stomach.
He’d been looking for something, I could tell.
Above the table, on the ceiling, was a large mirror. Meaning the girl had been alive when this started.
I shivered, hugged my arms to my side, and felt my chin about to tremble.
On one of the flaps of skin that had been folded back from her middle, there was still a black line.
Daniel was drawing that baby shape on the body before he cut in. And he was cutting in to free the doll, the doll he knew had to be there, the doll Mom and Dad had practically promised was going to be there.
Janine was still whispering to him.
I shook my head no, no, please, and when I turned to leave, there they were on the wall. All the dolls he’d—not found, that was impossible, that was wrong.
The dolls he’d bought and salvaged and sneaked home. The dolls that completed the ritual he’d learned at five years old.
They were all wired to a pegboard, their smooth plastic bodies covering nearly every hole, and the pegboard was the whole wall, by now. This was the work of years. This was a lifetime.
To honor them, the blood and meat the dolls had been wrapped in to simulate the birth for Daniel, it had been left to dry on them.
I threw up, had to fall onto my hands to do it, it was so violent.
And then the scurrying again. In the hall.
I looked up just after something had crossed from one side of the doorway to the other. And where my ears told my eyes to look, it wasn’t up at head-level, at person-level, but at knee-level.
Instead of a possum now, what I saw in my head was the doll my dad had bought for Janine. The one we’d buried. Only, it was crawling around on all fours, its elbows cocked higher than its back, its face turned up, to keep its eyes opened.
And when she talked, it was going to be that same language she’d taught Daniel. That same dead tongue.
I stood, fell back, dizzy, not used to this kind of exertion, and my hand splashed into the insides of the girl on the table, and I felt two things in the same instant. The first was the warmth of this girl’s viscera, when I’d assumed she’d been dead for hours, long enough to have cooled down. The second thing I felt was what Daniel was always looking for: a hard plastic doll foot. From the doll inside each of us, if you know where to look. If you cut at the exact right instant, and reach in with confidence, with faith.
My hand closed on the smooth foot and the moment dilated, threatened to swallow me whole.
I brought my hand back gently, so as not to disturb. So as to pretend this hadn’t just happened.
Whatever was in the hall had seen, though. Or heard the girl’s insides, trying to suction my hand in place.
Save her, a hoarse voice whispered, from just past the doorway. Don’t let her drown.
I stared at the wall of dolls, none of their lips able to move. I stared into the black abyss of the doorway. I studied the front and backside of my gore-smeared hand.
“Daniel?” I said. Because I’d recognized the voice. Because who else could it be.
“Save her,” the voice whispered again, from lower in the hallway than a person’s head would be.
Unless that person was crawling. Unless, in the privacy of his own home, that person flashed around from room to room like that. Because that was who he was. That was what he was.
“Please,” I said.
No answer.
I backed to the wall shaking my head no, shaking my head please, and, from this new angle, could see into the supply closet, the one Daniel had taken the door off of. Probably because his hands, in this room, didn’t want to be touching doorknobs.
The doll our father had buried in our childhood, she was standing between two stacks of foggy plastic containers.
She’d been dressed, was just staring, her eyelashes black and perfect, her expression so innocent, so waiting.
Janine.
I wanted to fall to my knees—to give up or in thanks, I wasn’t really sure. I put my hand to my face and didn’t just smear my cheek and open eyes with the black insides of this dead girl, but my lips as well. My tongue darted out like for a crumb, just instinct, and the breathing in the hall got raspier. Less patient. Like this was building to something for him.
It made me cough that kind of cough that comes right before throwing up.
Out in the hall, Daniel sighed from deep in his mania, and then there was a sound like he’d fallen over. From my wall, I could see one of his bare feet through the doorway, toes-up.
It was trembling. Like something was feeding on his face. Like the possum had come for him after all these years.
I crashed to the doorway to protect him, my little brother, to kick away whatever had him by the face.
It was just Daniel, though. He was spasming, his whole body, his eyes closed. It was a seizure. It was ecstasy.
“Daniel, Daniel,” I said, on my knees now, taking his head in my lap.
He trembled and drew his arms in tight, his mouth frothing.
After a whole life of being alone with his task, with his compulsion, with his crusade, I’d finally joined him, I knew.
This wasn’t a seizure, it was an orgasm. A culmination of all his dreams. I was the only one who could possibly understand what he’d become. What he was doing. And I was here.
His breath, it smelled like soap, and I had to picture him flaking a bar into a pile then lining his gums with it.
I sat down farther, to better cradle his head, and, when I had to angle him up to an almost sitting position, his eyes rolled open and he looked over to me, then down to my stomach as well, for the gift he’d been denied. The miracle he’d trained himself to sense.
My stomach. My digestion.
It wasn’t nerves. What I was experiencing, what I was feeling, it was smoother than nerves. More plastic.
I unsnapped my shirt, looked down where Daniel was, and the vague outline of a tiny hand pressed against the backside of my skin when I breathed in, like it was stable, it was steady. It was me doing the moving.
I pushed away, into the hall wall, let Daniel’s head fall to the carpet and bounce, his eyes closing mechanically, his right foot still trembling.
I was breathing too fast and I was breathing not at all.
And I could hear it now too, the whispering.
From the shop.
A whispering, but a gurgling, too.
The doll in the dead girl’s still-warm entrails. The doll Daniel had wanted me to save.
The whole wall watched me cross the room on ghost feet. I looked to Janine for confirmation, and when she didn’t say this was wrong, I plunged my hand back into the remains on the table, found the foot I’d felt earlier, and birthed this smooth plastic body up into the light, the body’s corruption stringing off it.
When I turned the doll right-side up, its eyes rolled open to greet me, its lashes caked with blood.
I carried the doll by the leg to Daniel, and brought it up between us like a real fresh-born baby, but it only made him shake his head no, like I wasn’t getting it. Like I didn’t see.
“Over, over, over again,” he said, turning sideways to reach down the hall. He tried to stand to go down there but wasn’t recovered from his fit yet. He fell into the wall, slid down.
I looked where he’d meant to go, though.
The only light that way was the bathroom.
I drifted there, the doll upside-down by my leg again, its hard plastic fingers brushing my calf through my slacks.
The hair. The sedimentary tufts of hair.
That had to be what he meant. Over, over: start over. The traffic light goes red, then it cycles back to green again, and hovers on yellow, spilling back to red.
I carried the tufts of hair back, jewels of glass glittering on those dried strands.
When I knelt down by Daniel again, he opened his mouth like a baby bird and I knew I was right: this was part of his process. You save one doll from inside a woman, and you start over with hair from one of the other women. Like paying. Like trading. Like closing a thing you’d opened.
“Here, here,” I said, fingering the hair from the jar, packing his mouth with it. His eyes watered, spilled over with what I took to be joy. “It’ll be all right,” I whispered. “We’re saving her, Daniel. We’re saving her.”
He coughed once, hearing his name, then again from deeper, and, using two fingers, I shoved the wad of hair in deeper, so it could bathe in his stomach juice like a pearl. So it could become a soul for him again.
I kissed him once on the forehead when his body started jerking again, this time for air, and, when he bit the two fingers I was using to make him human again, I inserted the new doll’s hand instead.
It held the hair in place until Daniel calmed. Until he went to sleep. Until there was no more breath.
I moved his right foot, to get his tremble going again, but there was nothing left.
My little brother was dead. His mission was over.
I kissed Daniel’s closed eyes, my lips pressing into each thin eyelid for too long, like I could keep him here, at least until I removed my lips.
Behind those eyelids, though, the balls of his eyes were already turning hard like the yolks of boiled eggs.
This is how you say goodbye.
I stood, wiped that new doll’s ankle clean—plastic holds prints—and stepped back into the shop, used a scalpel to remove the patch of carpet I’d thrown up into. I rolled that carpet up like a burrito.
Without looking up to them, I nodded to the open-eyed dolls then turned the light off with my wrist, stepped over what was left of Daniel, and made my way through the living room, out the front door.
“He ever show up?” the super or maintenance man asked, suddenly pruning something in the flower bed that didn’t need pruning. Meaning he’d had second thoughts about letting me in. He was standing guard, now. He was on alert.
In one hand I was clutching a small patch of rolled carpet I’d never be able to explain.
On my other hip, her cool face in my neck, was Janine.
I looked back to the door I’d just locked.
“No, never did,” I said, “but there’s water on the floor in his kitchen.”
The super or maintenance man stood, his brow furrowed.
“Sink?” he said.
“Refrigerator,” I said back, and followed him back in, pulled the door shut behind us, twisting the deadbolt.
Ten minutes later I stepped out again, my breathing back to normal, almost.
“Well that was different,” I said to Janine, and hitched her higher.
Walking along the side of the house back to the garage, to my car, I had to turn my head away from her to cough, and then place my hand on the wall to steady myself.
What is it? she asked
Her voice was perfect.
I spit a shiny conglomerate of segmented blackness up into my palm, and studied it.
“Nothing,” I told her, and somewhere between there and the car, I left my soul behind me on the ground.
