The Dolls

by Kiki Sullivan

  I’m sitting on the deck just after sunset, trying to figure out how it’s seventy degrees here in the dead of winter, when my phone rings.

  It’s Meredith, who launches into an off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday” as soon as I say hello. “So how’s podunk Louisiana?” she asks when she’s done assaulting my eardrums.

  “Well, it’s not New York. And this whole town is surrounded by a big wall, so it’s like we’re completely trapped.” I feel a million miles away from my best friend as I hear laughter and honking horns in the background. The sounds of the city sure beat the silence out here in the middle of nowhere. Aunt Bea and Boniface have gone into town to pick up some things for the new bakery, and I feel like I’m the only person left on earth. I absentmindedly flick on and off the flashlight I’d grabbed from inside, watching the deck alternately illuminate and plunge into darkness.

  “You won’t believe how crazy the wedding was today without you,” Meredith says.

  “The Michaelsons?” I ask, trying not to sound as sad as I feel. “Or the Harrises?” For the last year and a half, Mer and I have worked for Blossom and Bloom, a florist in our neighborhood. The owner, Pauline, always said I had a sixth sense about which flowers fit which brides. Working for her is one of the things I’ll miss most.

  “The Michaelsons,” Meredith replies. “It was just me and Pauline because David called in sick. We ran out of lisianthus and had to figure out what to sub in.”

  “What’d you use? Texas bluebonnets?” I lived for those emergencies, the ones where you ran out of the blooms you were intending to use, so you had to find something else, something that fit both the bride’s vision and your own sense of the couple.

  “We only had purple statice.”

  “I’m sure that worked great,” I lie. Purple statice is a filler, so the substitution would have changed the whole feel of the bouquets. I’m so dorky—I’m the only person in the world who would care about something like that.

  “Anyway, what did you say about there being a wall around the town?” Meredith asks, and I’m relieved for the change of subject because it momentarily stops me from thinking about the life I left behind.

  I quickly recap what Aunt Bea told me about the gate. Then I tell her about the weather, the cemetery just beyond the garden wall, and the strange, swirling mist.

  “No offense,” Meredith says when I’m done, “but Carrefour sounds crazypants.”

  I’m surprised to realize I feel a bit defensive. “It’s not so bad.”

  “Whatever you say. Anyways, what’re you doing for your birthday?”

  “Nothing yet.” In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if Aunt Bea has even remembered, because it’s just after eight p.m., and she hasn’t wished me a happy birthday. No cake. No ice cream. No singing. Nothing.

  “Maybe Bea’s planning to surprise you.”

  “Maybe.” I turn the flashlight off and tap it absently against my knee.

  I’m about to tell Meredith about the intimidating-looking Pointe Laveau Academy when something darts across the backyard. I blink into the darkness and sit up, my heart pounding. Meredith launches into a story about how Jon Dashiell hit on Holly Henderson right in front of her boyfriend, but I’m not listening. “Shhhh,” I finally manage.

  “Did you just shush me?”

  “I think I heard a noise,” I whisper. “There’s definitely something in my backyard.”

  “Kind of like how you always thought you saw some guy lurking in the shadows here in Brooklyn?” she asks, laughing.

  “No,” I mutter, feeling stupid. Three months ago, I’d begun to notice a slender man with white-blond hair loitering behind me wherever I went. I’d be walking home from school, and I’d catch a glimpse of him in the shadows, or I’d be window-shopping in SoHo with Meredith and see his reflection in a glass storefront. When I finally told Meredith about it, she’d laughed for a full minute. Like she’s doing now.

  But I tune her out as I strain to see across the darkness. The moon is half full, so it’s casting light over my mother’s rose garden, which Boniface has so carefully maintained. Beyond that lies her vegetable garden, lush with greens, tomatoes, and herbs. It backs up against the cemetery wall edging our property. That’s where I see a shadow slinking along now.

  I squint, then draw in a sharp breath as I realize it’s human-shaped. I blink a few times and can just make out the faint silhouette of a person methodically picking something from one of the plants near the wall.

  “Hey!” I drop my phone and call out. “Hey you! Stop!” I’m dashing across the backyard in defense of my mom’s beloved garden before I realize how stupid I’m being. How do I know it’s not some creepy guy waiting to rob our house—or worse?

  Suddenly, there’s a thud, and the person goes down hard.

  “Damn it!” comes a curse in the darkness, and I’m hugely relieved to realize the voice is female. I almost trip over her, and as I beam my flashlight down, I see a girl about my age with wild, sun-kissed blond waves. She’s in a white cotton dress, and her feet are bare.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I demand.

  “Who in the hell are you?” the girl shoots back in a thick southern accent.

  “I live here. This is my yard. What are you doing in it?”

  She looks perplexed. “But this is the Cheval mansion.”

  “Yeah, so? I’m Eveny Cheval.”

  The girl stares at me like I’ve just told her I’m the President of the United States. “Huh?” she manages.

  “I just moved in,” I say, growing more confident. “And I want to know what you’re doing on my property.”

  “Uh, picking herbs,” she says, adding defensively, “My friends and I pick stuff here all the time. It’s no big deal.”

  “What do you need herbs for?”

  “Recipes and stuff,” she mumbles.

  She’s obviously lying. “What, is Boniface growing pot out here?”

  The girl laughs and unfolds her left hand. “Not that I know of,” she says. I peer at her palm. Indeed, I see only lavender, thyme, and lemongrass.

  “Told you so,” she says. She sticks out her right hand to shake mine. “I’m Glory Jones.”

  Her grasp is warm and firm, and she grins at me as I help her up. “So you must be starting school in Carrefour?” she asks as she brushes the earth off her dress. When I nod, she asks, “Pointe Laveau?”

  “Not that I have much of a choice.”

  Glory shrugs. “It’s not so bad. You get used to the uniforms. Plus, it’s fun to accessorize.” She jiggles her armful of bracelets and bangles.

  It still sounds like torture to me, but I find myself smiling anyhow. “You go there too?”

  “Yeah. Maybe we’ll have some classes together. Do you know what you have for first period yet?”

  I shake my head. “I actually don’t start until next week.”

  “How come?”

  “I think the days off are my consolation prize for my aunt dragging me halfway across the country on my seventeenth birthday.”

  “You’re seventeen?” she asks in a small voice. “When? Today?”

  “Yes . . . ,” I say slowly.

  “Oh.” Glory gives me an uneasy smile. “Well, it was nice to meet you, Eveny.” She’s already backing up. “I’ve got to go meet my friend Arelia now. I guess I’ll see you at school next week. And, um, happy birthday.”

  I stare after her as she hurries away. I’m still trying to figure out what just happened when she pauses and turns to face me. “Listen, Eveny,” she says solemnly, “be careful.” And then she’s up and over the back wall.

  I blink into the darkness, then shake my head. Glory Jones was weird. But I like weird.

  By the time Aunt Bea arrives home a couple of hours later, I’ve called Meredith back twice, but her phone’s going straight to voice mail. I try not to feel hurt that she’s out celebrating my birthday without me.

  Aunt Bea brings me a chocolate cake from the market
in town, and although it tastes a little like cardboard, I’m grateful for the effort. “I wanted to bake you something special,” she tells me, “but my pans and mixing bowls haven’t arrived yet. I promise, I’ll make you whatever you want next week.”

  She finds a single, dusty candle in a drawer, and she and Boniface sing “Happy Birthday” to me as she sets the cake down atop the little table on the back porch. Boniface flips a switch inside the house, and the garden is illuminated by a hundred little fairy lights overhead. I take a deep breath and prepare to make a wish, but a gust of wind sweeps in and snuffs the flame for me. I shiver, even though it’s not cold outside.

  “Happy birthday, sweet girl,” Aunt Bea whispers into my hair. She walks away without another word, leaving Boniface and me to eat our cake in silence.

  That night, I lie awake in bed for hours. The wind howls angrily outside my window, and I swear I can hear sirens in the distance. Finally, with Glory Jones’s odd words of caution ringing in my ears, I drift off to sleep.

  I rarely dream, but the images that assault me tonight are as clear as the vision I had of my mother’s funeral. First, I see the hallway outside my bedroom door, then the stairway leading to the front hall. As I begin making my way down the steps, I’m hit with the sudden, powerful scent of rusted iron in the air, and that’s when I see it: blood beginning to pour out from beneath the closed parlor doors, pooling thick and nearly black on the hardwood floor.

  I gasp and begin to run back up the stairs, but the crimson ocean is rising fast, and soon I can feel it, hot and sticky, licking at my ankles and then my legs. “No!” I cry out. The faster I retreat up the stairs, the faster the tide advances until there’s nowhere else for me to go. The whole house is filling with blood. . . .

  I wake with a jolt, screaming. Aunt Bea rushes into my room and turns on the light. “What happened?”

  “A nightmare,” I gasp as I try to catch my breath. My legs still feel wet and sticky. “There was so much blood. . . .”

  “It was only a dream.” She strokes my back, and my heartbeat begins to return to normal.

  After she’s gone, I stare at the ceiling for a long time. It’s not until the first rays of dawn begin to filter through my windows that I finally drift off into a dreamless sleep.

  3

  Storms pound the bayou all week, making it impossible to venture out on one of the old bikes from the shed in the backyard. Like many people who grew up in New York City, I never learned to drive, and Aunt Bea is too busy setting up her bakery to teach me now. She’s making several trips a day into town to prep her kitchen space, in hopes of opening sometime next week. I keep offering to help, but she insists this is something she has to do on her own.

  Now I have nothing to do but explore the house while the rain comes down in a steady, driving rhythm. I try to imagine my mom walking these same halls when she was my age, but I can only visualize her as she was when she died: twenty-eight years old, already worn down by life, the premature lines around her eyes suggesting the weight she must have felt on her shoulders before she killed herself.

  I wander from room to room, trying to piece together my family’s past as lightning illuminates the cloud-spackled sky. In the living room, I see black-and-white photos of a woman in a flapper outfit—my great-great-grandmother, perhaps—and of two teenagers listening to an old-time radio in what looks like the early 1960s.

  In one of the photos on the wall alongside the staircase, Boniface is holding my mom and Aunt Bea as little girls, one on either shoulder, as he grins at the camera. He doesn’t look much younger than he does now, although the photo must have been taken thirty-five years ago.

  I continue up the stairs to a big piece of glossy, polished wood hanging from the wall. The words carved into it are so ornate that I have to squint to make them out.

  For each ray of light, there’s a stroke of dark.

  For each possibility, one has gone.

  For each action, a reaction.

  Ever in balance, the world spins on.

  Weird, I think. It sounds almost like a warning. Or maybe I’m just taking it that way because I can’t shake my creepy dream.

  I spend the next several hours searching every picture in the house for an image of my dad, the piece of my family history I understand the least. I’ve only ever seen one photo of him: a faded picture where he’s standing in my mother’s rose garden, holding one of her purple Rose of Life blooms and grinning at the camera. Aunt Bea hates his guts, though she’s made a point of telling me that his leaving right before I was born had nothing to do with me. “He just wasn’t the man we all thought he was,” she always says.

  By Wednesday evening, the only place in the house I haven’t explored is the room off the front hall with the blood-red doors, the one from my nightmare.

  “I’m still looking for the key,” Boniface keeps telling me.

  There’s a sharp knock on the front door at two thirty Thursday afternoon, just as I’m in the middle of texting with Meredith about a bag she’s debating buying at Michael Kors.

  I bet it’s the UPS man with my Pointe Laveau uniform, I text as I get up to answer the door.

  I can’t believe you have to wear a uniform, she texts back. CRAPTASTIC!!!!!!

  I want to be insulted, but I completely agree. Plaid and a white oxford shirt are not exactly the fashion statement of the year.

  But when I swing the door open, it’s not the UPS man at all. It’s a guy my age with brown hair, muddy hazel eyes, and a deep tan.

  “Eveny?” he asks, staring at me like he’s seen a ghost.

  “Yes . . .” I’m wondering why he seems to know me. He’s in a black suit with a pale blue shirt and a dark gray tie; he looks like he’s on the way to a prom.

  “It’s Drew Grady.” His baritone has an appealing southern twang to it. “Don’t you remember me?” He grins, and suddenly, I do.

  “We used to play together,” I say. His mom was friends with my mom, and they’d sometimes get together to chat while we chased each other around the playground on Main Street. “I used to dump sand in your pants.”

  “Every time our moms’ backs were turned,” he says with a laugh.

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “My mom heard you and your aunt had moved back. I didn’t believe it, but I was walking by and saw all the curtains open.”

  “Dressed kind of formally for a walk, aren’t you?” I ask. From the way he’s shifting around, and the fact that the suit doesn’t quite fit in the shoulders, I’d bet that he’s more of a Levi’s kind of guy. He looks itchy.

  His face registers surprise, as if he’s just remembered what he’s wearing. “Oh, right. Well, I’m on my way to a funeral.”

  “Geez, I’m sorry. Whose funeral is it?”

  He looks down. “A girl at Pointe Laveau Academy. Same year as us.”

  “Really? That’s so sad.”

  Drew shrugs and clears his throat. “Well, um, it was good to see you, Eveny. I’ll come back at a better time.”

  “Wait!” I call as he starts to walk away. “Can I come with you?”

  “Um . . . ,” he begins.

  “It’s just that I’ve been stuck here all week.” I realize how odd my request sounds, but I’m desperate to go anywhere. “I’m completely bored.”

  “You want to go to a stranger’s funeral with me?” Drew asks.

  Sure, it’s probably not the most appropriate thing to do, but I’m going to go crazy if I don’t get out of the house. “Please?” I venture.

  “Yeah, okay, it’ll be nice to have some company,” Drew says after a moment.

  I ask him to hang on for a second then race upstairs to throw on a gray dress and a black sweater, which are the most somber pieces I spot in a scan of my closet. I shoot Meredith a text to tell her I’m going out and will talk to her later, but she doesn’t reply.

  When I get back downstairs, Drew points to my ballet flats. “You’re going to want something other than those.
It’s really muddy after all the rain this week.”

  I settle for the battered motorcycle boots that saw me through last winter’s snowstorms in New York, and although I feel stupid wearing them with a flouncy dress, Drew gives me a thumbs-up. “You look real pretty,” he says, his cheeks turning a cute color of pink.

  I leave a note for Aunt Bea, then hurry out the door. “So what happened to the girl who died?” I ask as we trudge through my backyard.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t hear,” he says. “She committed suicide. The way she did it was awful, actually.” He points to a spot in the cemetery wall where a few bricks are missing, and he offers me a hand to help boost me up and over. I land with a wet thud, and mud flies up around me, staining my dress.

  “Why, what did she do?” I ask as he splashes over the wall too. I’m trying not to think of my mom and her suicide.

  “Apparently she drank a bottle of vodka, then stabbed herself in the chest. Right through the heart.”

  “Through the heart?”

  Drew looks down at the soggy ground as we begin walking again. “The medical examiner told the paper she was probably dead within seconds. But what a horrible way to go.”

  I shudder. “The police are sure that she did it to herself, that it wasn’t murder or something?”

  Drew looks at me sharply. “Of course not. Things like that don’t happen in Carrefour.” His tone is final. “Anyway, I heard the police found a suicide note. There’s a rumor that it was some kind of a satanic ritual or something.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Drew shrugs. “Let’s just say that this is a place where things sometimes happen without an explanation. Strange things.”

  “Oh, great,” I mutter. What has Aunt Bea gotten me into by moving us here?

  The ceremony has just begun as we approach, and we’re careful to tread quietly. People still turn and stare, though, and I’m not sure whether it’s because I’m the new girl in town or because sloshing into the middle of a funeral is plain rude.