The Dollhouse

Chapter 40

"DIDN'T you get my letters?"

They had utilized the bus line from state to state to visit an ailing godmother, who lived just an hour away. In a blur of Joyce's chatter, I repeated no, I hadn't received her letters, and no, I had zero warning they were coming.

"-you stopped coming to school, and I had to hear from Maurice Pulvey that you moved to Pennsylvania! Fancy that!" Joyce exclaimed. Her braces were absent from her enormous toothy grin. "Mama thought it wasn't proper, a young girl traveling alone by herself. But thank goodness my brother offered to come with me."

Tinny laughter roared from the television. The images flickered across the screen like subliminal propaganda, warped faces stretched into smiles.

The flashbacks seeped in behind my eyes.

The woods. The highway. Winston Connors, abandoning the dark street in disgust.

I had tricked myself into believing those harrowing moments occurred an entire lifetime ago, the memory protected behind a dead-locked door of disgrace. There had been a time I'd even second-guessed what had happened that night. Shame grew from bones, latching on to my innards like some fast-acting cancer. I knew the feeling at once.

The feeling alone confirmed the harsh reality.

Marcus appeared older now. More handsome than he ever had been, his lazy arrogance betrayed by his posture. Sat beside Rudy on one of the couches, one leg crossed over the other, a horrid sense of normality to the scenario. The sun was waning the way that the diseased spring did over the north-east, and my stepmother clasped her hands like a preacher on the cusp of asking some rowdy youths to leave. Even Father Edgar's facial muscles twitched, despite his ability to entertain such alive conversation.

No one caught the captured look in my eyes. I felt like I'd been lured under false pretenses, ready to burst with news of my father - and now there was polite talk of what fruits were in season, and Violet was saying that the price of the apricot had decreased at the grocery market.

Joyce hardly seemed like the dorky girl with socks pulled up to her knobby knees anymore. Her adolescent body had filled out more gracefully, and her hair had darkened and snaked past her shoulders.

Joyce held herself differently, somewhat - like she had suddenly understood she had become an object for boys to look at. Her braceless teeth made a tentative apparent every time Rudy spoke, and I wondered if her brother saw the way she looked at him.

"Why don't you come along to pot luck tomorrow?" Arabella offered, with a wolfish snarl to her words that only I appeared to notice.

"We might just do that," said Marcus. "Assuming Lydia is alright with it."

He wanted to lord it over me.

And I was being forced to play host.

"I don't-"

"Oh my, look how dark it's become!" Joyce jumped up and seized me by the wrists again. "We better get head off - we've pretty much got custody of our godmother's car, which is neat. I promise to catch you up on all the news from back home tomorrow! Oh, it was so good seeing you, even if we had to wait such a wickedly long time for you to return home."

"It was nice to meet you," Marcus added, extending a hand towards the clergyman.

If only she would grow out of her naive nature, too. "See you soon, yeah?"

"I can hardly wait." The response to my former friend tasted like filth, sour words strangling each syllable.

As each fateful stroke of the clock swept by, I sat in a state of shock. Figures melted away and my family retired to their rooms, and the lights slowly softened and turned off one by one. The last twenty-four hours had been brutal. Not only had Joyce shown up with her brother whose name left me on the verge of a breakdown, but my body was having a queer response.