by DW Gillespie
Just toys.
I never had much use for them, not the way I grew up, but when I was about seven or so, I found a box marked ‘Jack-Baby.’ It was near the back of the garage, hidden behind old Christmas decorations I’d never seen out, relics as strange as cave drawings. I wondered if my mom had hung them up back before I came along. I sat there trying to picture the house filled with winter decor, maybe with the smell of cookies in the air. I pushed the thought aside and dug into the box, rifling through a few foam blocks and baby rattles before finding a single, green-around-the-edges teddy bear. It didn’t make a lick of sense. The box was too big for just a few toys, and I got the distinct feeling that it had been full at one point. Maybe Andy had scrounged around in there, looking for something to burn.
It didn’t matter. When I looked at that bear for the first time, I didn’t see a toy that meant something, some sort of far-off relic of my early years. Just a bear. Cotton and button eyes, staring straight at me. My hand caught hold of something on the back, and I turned it over to find a little metal clasp. I turned it, winding it up, and a slow, plinking version of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ began to play. It wasn’t familiar, not exactly, but I couldn’t stop staring at it, listening to that song play all the way to the end.
But there was something. A twinge of a feeling. A subtle hint at something bigger. Looking at that bear, listening to that song, I saw that someone at some time had cared enough to buy it for me. Dad still bought me toys, but for as long as I could remember it had been a perfunctory thing, a motion we went through. He’d take me to Walmart on my birthday with fifty bucks in his pocket, and we’d stroll around, doing the math, seeing how far the cash would go. They aren’t bad memories, not really, but that bear spoke of something else. A different life. A life of anticipation and surprise. A life with sleepless Christmas Eves, and birthday presents neatly wrapped.
That bear, in more than one way, was my mother.
I drew it out of that musty box, and I clung to it. It moved into my room permanently, going with me wherever I went, and I slept with an arm slung over it, the smell of dust filling my nostrils every night. That’s how it was.
Until he came.
That summer changed everything, and I’ve never told anyone until now. The girl I was, without question, is gone, but those memories, the weight of what happened, will never leave me until I get it out. I mean to tell it. What I saw. What I did. Every last moment. So buckle up.
Chapter Two
Sallie Renner was a rich girl. Or is a rich girl. Or woman, or whatever. She’s married off now, and the two of us haven’t spoken in probably eight years or so. It’s easy now, so many years out, for me to try to trivialize our friendship, to try to make it less than it really was back then. I mean, she was a wealthy girl from the other side of town, the nice side, you might say. I was the daughter of a single father, a construction worker no less, and the pair of us never really had that much in common. It’s fair to ask, were we ever really friends at all? But no matter how I try, that narrative doesn’t quite hold as much water as I wish it did. It would be easier if it were true. But the reality is, she meant a hell of a lot to me. When I think back on the time we spent together, before the thing with the toys, it burns like a patch of dry brush catching fire in a dark field.
Warm. Inviting. Bright as daylight.
That was Sallie, or at least, that was Sallie and me, together, that little electric connection that certain friends have. There were sharp edges, moments that could bleed from blissful laughter into instant, dark reproach if the unspoken rules weren’t followed, but in those days, there were no rules.
Out of all my handful of friends, she was the only one who ever slept over alone, not like the small gaggle that roosted on birthdays or over the long, endless summers. No, Sallie and I usually slept over at one of our houses at least once a week. Her home was all wide spaces. Huge rooms, a football-field yard, endless walk-in closets, and yet we were never really alone there. Her dad and brother more or less let us be, but her mother – a crane-necked shrew named Ruth – never let us out of her sight. It was me, of course. Even when I was nine, I knew it. Compared to the rest of the PTA inner circle, my father was an unknown variable, something possibly wild, likely dangerous, and most importantly, poor. I never felt poor until I started going over to Sallie’s house, but her mother had a way of letting me know I was.
“These are steaks,” she once said as she stared down the long, straight ruler of her nose. “You’ll need a knife.”
Despite the room, it was stifling over there, and after a handful of times and countless begging, Sallie somehow convinced Ruth to let her spend the night with me. I can still picture her perched on the edge of the porch as we drove away, the three of us piled into the front of my dad’s filthy truck that farted black smoke as we drove away. She was right not to trust us, of course, but one time was all it took. Once Sallie got a taste of freedom at my house, I don’t think we ever spent the night at hers again.
It’s not like we were getting into trouble, not really anyway. Sure, there were more than a few bad influences around Tristan Circle, that wide loop of road dotted with single-floor homes, some impeccably kept, others practically spilling trash onto the street. There was a row of squat apartments behind us, just across a short span of creek, and that was where most of the trouble started. Sallie saw her first fight behind those apartments: two fifteen-year-olds, shirtless, spitting, rolling in the mud until they tired out and just sort of gave up. She took her first puff of a cigarette back there with me, though neither of us felt compelled to keep it up after that. We both saw our first thirty seconds or so of a porno in one of those apartments, a grainy VHS that showed something so anatomical I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around it. We walked back into the daylight shaking our heads and questioning whether it was real or just some kind of kinky special effect.
All this is to say that, yes, I was a bad influence on Sallie. I never held a gun to her head, but just being in my presence was enough to rub off on her, as if my upbringing and inherent griminess were somehow absorbed into her skin. Over time, she opened up more about her mom, specifically about her mom and me. It was a pretty simple concept. Ruth didn’t want us to be friends anymore.
“Forget her,” I told her, and I meant it too. I’d gone my whole life without a mom. So could she.
But soon I started to see a change happening, some kind of backlash against a backlash, you might say. Having me for a friend was, in many ways, a middle finger to her mother, a knife to cut a hole in the blanket that was smothering her to death. This was all well and good for both of us, but after a while, Sallie began to revert. It’s hard to explain, but she started to turn…childish. I mean, we were kids, I have to stop and remember that, but we were just old enough to not feel like kids. We knew what we were doing, we knew who we were, and the last thing we needed was for Ruth to stick her pointy nose into our business and tell us what to do.
The source of the whole thing was my inability to grasp what Sallie’s life was like. I guess I couldn’t really understand the power of parents the way she did. My dad was more of a nonentity than anything else, a swell guy I truly loved, but not a major player in my day-to-day. I woke myself up, ate a bowl of cereal, caught the bus to and from school, and let myself in with the key we hid under a rock next to the porch. In other words, I was calling the shots.
But Sallie relied on her mom and dad for everything. They took her to movies. They ate dinner at a table. They had family game night once a week. There was power there because, quite simply, there was love there as well. I didn’t see that when I was nine. How the hell could I? But I see it now, and in hindsight, that change in her makes more sense now than it ever did before.
She started carrying a doll with her when she came over. Started quietly snuggling with it when we finally went to bed. She didn’t lug it around nonstop, but it was always there, in a
backpack, waiting for her to sneak it out when I wasn’t looking. It was a girl, all felt, in a pink dress with yellow yarn hair. I’d leave the room for a minute and catch her twining the gold locks into fat braids. It wasn’t like my bear. That was mine, something secret, a thing I kept hidden from Sallie whenever she came over. We were girls now, not children, and so I hid my toys away.
But this.
This sudden reversal to silly girlishness felt wrong somehow. A betrayal even. A slap across my face.
So I made it very clear that I hated the doll, hated all toys in fact, hated how childish they were. Hated them even as I hid my own away from her. It was a wedge, a sliver of distance between the two of us, a thing carefully slid into place by none other than Ruth herself. It was a very clever thing, a reminder of who it was that truly loved her more than I ever could, and it might have been enough to do the job by itself if given enough time. But something else intervened and did Ruth’s work instead.
It was a Saturday in late May. I can’t remember the exact date, but I knew that school was almost out for the year, maybe just a couple of weeks left, I think. I remember it so clearly because we were putting on an end-of-the-year show in my living room, a big production like kids do. There was a musical number (Sallie), a deep, well-rehearsed monologue (me), and a dance number performed without consent by my fat, tiger-striped cat named Memphis. Sallie had brought her dad’s video camera, a small one for those days that recorded onto small tapes about half the size of cassettes. We meticulously set it up on the end table near the back door, one of the few places open enough to record our masterpiece. The two of us made hand-painted title cards, selected the music, and rehearsed until we were nearly bored of the whole thing.
By the time the actual show time rolled around, it was nearly eleven, and after yawning through the first two acts, we prepared the stage for Memphis, who was sleeping next to the water heater, just as I knew he would be. The stage was a three-sided wall of cardboard lit by a pair of flashlights. The words, Kitty Kat Dancin’ were crudely scrawled on the back wall. Andy strolled out of his room to get a drink while we were setting it up, and he just shook his head.
“What?” I said defensively, suddenly feeling childish, something I hated.
“You’re asking for it,” he replied. He didn’t joke with me very much, and generally, my brother seemed to want to stay away from me the older we got. Still, if the moment struck, we could have some good times, the sort of deep belly laughs that only siblings could inspire. It had been years since I had seen him really smile at me, and he didn’t smile then, not quite, but I could tell he wanted to.
“Asking for what?” I demanded.
“Have you ever met Memphis?” he said sarcastically.
“Uh, he’s my cat, ya butthole,” I replied. Not very clever, but right along my usual operating speed.
Again he shook his head, and I fully expected him to stroll off into his bedroom. With a grin, he poured himself a glass of Coke, pulled up a kitchen chair, and waited for the show to start. He didn’t have to wait long.
I’m still not entirely sure what our plan was, but I was certain, once the cameras were rolling, that Sallie and I would be able to make a convincing dancing cat. I scooped Memphis up from his endless nap, and he purred and curled into me, no doubt expecting me to bring him to bed with me like I did most nights. Instead, I carried him to the clear spot near the back door where his stage, his chance at stardom, awaited.
“Action!” I told Sallie, and the show began.
As the director of this particular piece of art, I took the majority of the scratches myself. I felt like it was my duty. In his defense, Memphis was surprisingly slow to anger. It wasn’t until the second verse of ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’ that he really dug his claws in. The whole thing was a disaster, but the truly amazing part was hearing Andy’s laugh. I had forgotten what it sounded like.
“Shut up!” I demanded, but it was too late. It was like my brother had sprung a leak, and the laughter was just pouring out uncontrollably. My face was red, and blood was dripping from half a dozen small cuts on my hands. I could have walked away, could have joined in and laughed myself, but instead I walked over and slapped him hard enough to leave a bloody print across one cheek. He was, as I well knew, the mean one of the two of us. I’d seen it, the way he could instantly grow violent and threaten the people around him, so I flinched, waiting for it. He only let his head drop a bit and slunk back to his room. Still fuming, but a little ashamed, I grabbed Sallie by the arm, and we stomped off to the bathroom to tend my wounds.
We also, all unknowingly, left the camera running.
Ruth had promised to pick Sallie up early on Sunday, a promise she kept, and the gentle, almost polite beeps from the driveway sent Sallie scurrying. In seconds, she was gone, and I was left to pick up the remains of our show from the night before. Ironically, I had to kick Memphis off the cardboard stage.
“Get!” I spat. “If you didn’t want to dance on it, you don’t get to sleep on it.”
It wasn’t until I had the thing folded up and tucked under one arm that I noticed the camera. It was dead by then, the battery sucked dry overnight. I stashed it away in my room, careful to hide it in a dresser just in case Andy came digging around for it, looking for some way to exact revenge. I still felt bad about the night before, but I wasn’t ready to apologize, not yet anyway. I didn’t think much more about the camera until that afternoon when the phone rang. My father got to it first, and after a few words of bland, inoffensive chitchat, he handed the phone off to me.
“Sallie?” I asked.
“Her mom,” he answered with a cocked eyebrow.
We never talked about Ruth, but I got the sense that he wasn’t nuts about her either. I suppose that handing the phone off to a nine-year-old was proof enough of that theory.
“Hello?”
“Jack,” a tart voice said, “Sallie brought a camera to your house.”
It could have been a question, but the tone made it a simple, blunt statement.
“Yeah…” I said, and my dad tapped a knuckle on my forehead and frowned. I looked up just in time for him to mouth the word ma’am.
“Yes, ma’am. We were making movies. She left it over when—”
“It’s very expensive.”
I didn’t really know what to say to that, but she didn’t give me a chance to respond.
“I can’t come just this minute. I have too much to do. Can I trust you to keep it safe until this evening?”
“Uhh…yes, ma’am.”
I wasn’t quite sure what she thought I would do in a couple of hours. Maybe sell it for crack.
“Good. I’ll come over after work…wait…I’m on the phone…”
I could hear some kind of commotion on the other end of the line, and I instantly recognized the voice. Sallie sounded worked up, and despite Ruth’s protests, her daughter kept nipping at her heels.
“Yes. Yes. Fine,” she said to Sallie. “I’ll be over tonight,” she directed at me. “Now Sallie wants to talk to you.”
There was a fumbling of the phone and a smattering of annoyed whispering.
“Mother!” Sallie said. Then footsteps, plodding away, followed by a slamming door. “Ugh. Jack, you there?”
“Yeah. What was that all about?” I asked as I too fled to my own room on the cordless phone.
“She’s just ridiculous. Dad doesn’t even care about the camera, but she’s in there shitting bricks.”
“I noticed.”
“Look,” she added, a bit nervously, “I also left…my doll.” She paused for a second, just long enough to let my eyes finish rolling. “I just got out of there so quick this morning. I’m pretty sure it was over by the back, where Memphis made his big debut.”
She was right. I remembered it from the night before, because I had been especially annoyed that she felt
the need to drag that stupid thing out when we were so busy. It was sitting on the end table, just next to where the camera had been.
“I remember,” I said, sounding annoyed. “I musta missed it this morning when I got the camera. I’ll find it.”
“Thanks,” she said quietly.
After the call, I kept thinking about the way her mom had talked to me, and I muttered something smart-assy to myself when I walked into the living room. I checked the spot where I had seen the doll the night before. Then I checked the floor underneath the table, behind the couch, and under the couch.
Nothing.
I knew, almost at once, that Andy was to blame, but I knew better than to go storming in there without any proof. Then it hit me.
The camera.
I had no clue how long it had been running, but I felt confident that it had lasted long enough to catch him in the act. Even as disinterested as he was, Andy knew how much Sallie loved that toy, and getting back at her would be wonderful payback against me.
Sallie had had enough forethought to bring her dad’s power cord in case the battery went dead, so I hooked it up along with the AV cord – one of the white-yellow-red setups. We still had it plugged in up in the cluttered playroom from the night before. I don’t know why we called it a playroom. There was a tiny TV, some board games, but little else. It was really just another hiding place for us whenever my dad felt like being conversational and we just wanted to be alone.
Once everything was plugged in, I hit Rewind and ran the whole thing back to the beginning. Then I hit Play and sat back against the orange beanbag chair. There were some sputtering images of our rehearsals: Sallie wearing a black wig that made her look surprisingly like me. Me slowly explaining how the choreography of this scene or that scene would work. Jump to the stage, half askew, the camera being nudged into place and the world turning slowly into focus. I squinted and cocked my head this way and that, trying to find where the stupid doll could be hiding. Just once, for a second, I saw it, leaning against a lamp on the end table, right where I remembered it. Then we adjusted the camera again, and it was gone from the frame.