by Lois Ruby
The cat leaps off the mantel and takes a running dive onto Mr. Caliberti’s lap. “There’s my sweet girl.” He nuzzles into her gray fur. Clear across the room I can hear her purring.
“I’m reminded of a frolicky old song you may not have heard. Here’s how the chorus goes.” Mr. Caliberti sings it in a deep, roaring voice, like it’s opera:
Boys and girls together,
Me and Mamie O’Rourke,
Tripped the light fantastic
On the sidewalks of New York.
“They danced, the singer and his sweetheart, on the sidewalks of New York. Just picture that.”
I’ve never been to New York. In fact, I am totally lost and starting to worry about Mr. Caliberti.
He’s not through yet. “So, young miss, when I say that Terpsichore trips the light fantastic, am I honestly saying she dances? Or, more elegantly, that she is light-footed and graceful in her lissome movements?”
Yep, I’m pretty sure Mr. Caliberti has a few screws loose in his head. I think they call it dementia, when old people stop making sense. And dementia sounds like demented! Is he trying to tell me that Sadie was demented, in the same way that Emily was crazy, and that I’m going to end up like them because there’s something sinister in our house that turns nice girls into lunatics? Now I’m terrified! I have to get out of here. As soon as I stand up, Terpsichore leads the way to the door. She wants me out of here, too. Why does Mr. Caliberti’s cat hate me?
It’s deathly quiet in the house with Brian gone. I’ll never get over it if Dad took him bowling today, too. That’s special for Dad and me.
Mom says, “Notice how nice and toasty it feels now? Odd thing. The heating man said there wasn’t anything wrong with the furnace, but that the pilot light had blown out. You and Brian weren’t down in the cellar messing around with it, were you?”
“Nothing could make me go down there!” I protest.
“Must have been a gust of wind,” Mom says unconvincingly, since we both know that the cellar has no outside windows.
I think it was the dolls, up to their vengeful mischief, but I keep this to myself. Mom would freak if she heard me say it. I’m scraping the last of our chicken salad into a fridge container when someone knocks at our kitchen door. Mr. Caliberti’s shadowy head is visible in the small window.
“We should have invited him for dinner,” Mom says, taking out another bowl for strawberries in case Mr. Caliberti wants some.
When he steps into our kitchen, I’m shocked to see that his face is as white as Elmer’s Glue. He’s carrying a black trash sack bunched at the neck. It’s big enough to hold a pony, but it’s almost empty.
“Come in! Have some strawberries,” Mom chirps.
Mr. Caliberti holds up the bag, rattling the contents that have sunk to the bottom. “I took the liberty of disposing of my humble garbage in the trash bin on the lot.” He waits for some sort of reaction. Mom bustles around, clearing the table and stashing things in the fridge, while I wait to see what he’s getting at.
His voice shaky, he says, “Terpsichore jumped into the trash bin and mewled so frantically that I felt compelled to investigate. This is what I found.” The bag fans out on the table, scattering the salt and pepper shakers and a pile of napkins. Mom has her face in the pantry; I hear her sliding cans back and forth. Mr. Caliberti opens the sack with such drama that I can’t resist peeking in over his shoulder — and gasp!
Inside the bag is a tangle of dolls.
Mr. Caliberti gazes into the dark bag. “Some heartless creature tossed these beauties away as if they were nothing more than unworthy refuse.”
I don’t have the heart to tell him that I’ve tried to bury them over and over again, because suddenly I realize that these dolls are more to him than just toys, that they represent real people he’s cared for. Loved. His eyes seem to deepen with sadness as he says, “Who would do such a terrible thing?”
One by one, the dolls are lined up across our table, and Mom backs out of the pantry with a sickly look on her face.
“Mom! Tell me it wasn’t you.”
“I was so worried about you and Brian, with your wild ideas about these dolls, as if they had supernatural powers. And I felt you were getting dangerously attached to something that was pure fantasy. I thought if I dug them up and threw them in the trash before Tuesday’s pickup, we’d be done with it all, and you could start school like a normal person.”
“Mom!” I keep staring at those dolls on the table. There’s Miss Amelia, looking totally worn out, and Baby Daisy, sweet and pink with the blue bow glued to her porcelain head. Next to Baby Daisy there’s a boy doll I’ve never seen before, wearing an old-fashioned white sailor suit with one of those funny pointed sailor caps. His face looks very serious.
Mom sinks into her chair, bracing her chin in the V of her hands. “I’m sorry, Shelby. I thought it was the right thing to do — a mother’s intuition.”
Mr. Caliberti says, “But, my dear, they were not yours to dispose of.”
“I suppose it was wrong, but done for the right reasons.”
I can’t believe she’d do this to Mr. Caliberti and me! Fighting back tears, I introduce her to each doll, so they’ll be real to her, just as they are to him and me.
“This one is called Miss Amelia. She’s Aunt Amelia, seventy-five years ago, kind of broken up because Sadie Thornewood didn’t like her. See the baby? Her name’s Daisy, who was Sadie’s little sister. Who’s this one, Mr. Caliberti?”
“That’s dear Dorothy Grabowski, Sadie and Daisy’s governess. The kindest of souls was Dotty.”
I flash on the grave marker, Dotty Woman. She’s young, but she’s in a black dress, old-lady black shoes, and a frilly apron. A stiff lacy cap sits atop her rolled-up hair that’s the color of pink cotton candy. What’s nicest about her is the wide smile that stretches across her cheerful face. Her eyes, though fixed in porcelain, are like twinkling little marbles.
“Who’s the boy in the sailor suit?” Mom asks gently. I know she’s trying to make up for tossing the dolls in the trash.
Mr. Caliberti lifts the doll that I’m now guessing is C.B. He closes both hands around it. “It is I, then known as Canby Berton, when my eyes first fell on the lovely Amelia Stanhope.”
Mom gazes miserably at him and murmurs, “So sorry, so sorry.”
“And this one is Betsy Anne,” Mr. Caliberti explains. “Lovely thing, is she not?” Her big, blue, unfocused eyes stare straight ahead, perfectly round, with black pupil dots smack in the middle. Her mouth is open, silently singing. The eyes and mouth make her look forever surprised, shocked by something. She makes me feel uneasy, as if she disapproves of me.
Oh, like it’s all about me? My mind kicks in with a picture of the doll graveyard. I remember five tongue-depressor grave markers on one side, and a larger, lonely stone marking Lady’s grave across from the others. Six graves. But there are only five dolls lying side by side on our kitchen table: Miss Amelia, Baby Daisy, Dotty Woman, Betsy Anne, and C.B. We’ve never found Lady, either in the grave or in the house, but she makes six. Why is there no grave meant for Isabella, who’s safely locked in my dresser upstairs? At least Mom couldn’t get to her, since I’m walking on the key in my sock. It’s curious that Mr. Caliberti never says a word about Isabella. Doesn’t he know about her?
Then I think, If Sadie stashed Isabella in the hatbox in our closet, maybe she never meant to bury her.
Mom says, “One grave was empty, the one with the larger headstone opposite the horseshoe.”
Mr. Caliberti nods in agreement. “That would be Lady’s grave. No one’s ever had the courage to entomb her.” He looks puzzled for a moment, then says, “There ought to be an additional grave, an unmarked eternal resting place, not unlike the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.”
“Whose?” I ask.
“Ah, ’tis a mystery,” says Mr. Caliberti. “Sometimes it is occupied, sometimes it is not.” He fixes his eyes on mine with such intensity that I have to
turn away or they’ll burn holes in my face. “You will understand in the fullness of time, young Miss Shelby.”
That’s what Aunt Amelia said, that we’d understand in the fullness of time, but what does that mean?
Mom’s bursting with questions. “So, if Miss Amelia represents our aunt when she was a girl, and Baby Daisy is Sadie Thornewood’s little sister, and Dotty is the governess, and C.B. is you, Mr. Caliberti —”
He beams with pride. “I was a handsome devil, was I not?”
“You were. You are,” Mom says. “But who is, or was, Betsy Anne?”
I’m wondering that, too.
“Good of you to ask. Betsy Anne was Sadie’s better self. She is the avatar of all of Sadie’s best qualities, the ones she was never able to show the rest of us because she was so haunted by the lack of love. Her father traveled the world, don’t you know.” Mr. Caliberti looks at me, and a half-smile forms on his lips. “He traveled from Kathmandu to Timbuktu to Xanadu, and had no time for Sadie. Mother Thornewood was a cold codfish, unlike my Amelia, whom I would describe as fried haddock, all crusty on the outside, soft and sweet on the inside, and a little bony. No, Mother Thornewood’s heart was pickled in icy brine. She never had a smidgen of love for her older daughter.”
“How could a mother not love her own child?” Mom asks, her face pinched with bewilderment.
After a sigh, a long pause, and a couple of false starts, Mr. Caliberti finally says, “Sadie was not a lovable child.”
“No such thing!” Mom cries.
Maybe there is. Maybe she was pure evil. But as quickly as I think that, I remember passages from Sadie’s diary. She was sick, suffered horribly with headaches that wouldn’t quit, and she was too weak to walk on her own. I’ll bet deep down, she was just a lonely, scared kid, starved for love. How different from Brian and me, with our two loving parents (even if they don’t love each other anymore). All at once I’m flooded with sympathy for Sadie. But those dolls she tormented didn’t have any way of knowing the real, inside Sadie Thornewood. They hated her right back. Same for Emily.
It’s not a bit fair, but now I’m going to have to make up for every awful thing Sadie and Emily did.
I MEAN, REALLY, CAN ANYTHING ON EARTH BE worse than the first day in a new school? I’m in a long-sleeved, knee-length green tunic and black leggings and high-top sneakers, and no one’s dressed like me, not even the newbie sixth graders.
Here at Enderbrook Middle School, eighth graders are the stars of the whole show. They know the local Enderbrook uniform: jeans and college sweatshirts and flats. They all have that Enderbrook strutty walk, and they do that stupid Enderbrook fist bump/hip bump thing. They know their locker combos by heart. And they think they’re really hot because they say hola instead of hi or hey.
The sixth graders, of course, wander around in a fog in this big, wide Enderbrook world, but everyone’s dying to help them. Since I’m in seventh, I’m not supposed to be confused in the building anymore, but I am so lost. I’m the only new kid in my whole grade and probably the youngest seventh grader on earth, and there’s nobody here to say, “Two miles down A Hall is Mr. Ebert’s Language Arts class, but they changed the room to C Hall, and he pronounces his name AA-BEAR,” which I didn’t know until after I said “EE-BERTTT,” like a total ignoramus.
At lunch, no one bothers to tell me that no seventh grader would be caught dead at the table by the patio window, where I’ve just plunked down my tray in a nest of eighth-grade vipers.
I hate this school.
Elbows on my left and right creep closer and accidentally dig into my sides, but where am I supposed to sit? When someone taps me on my shoulder, I nearly leap out of my skin. I think I recognize the girl from my math class. She balances her tray on one hand and crooks the index finger of her other hand, motioning for me to follow. What have I got to lose? I swing my legs over the bench and, of course, clumsily kick the person next to me, which makes milk slosh all over his tray. Before I’m even on my feet, the pointy elbows have moved in to fill the space I’d just occupied.
My rescuer says, “Seventh-grade tables are over here.” Her perky ponytail whips around her neck as she weaves and ducks her way through the roaring crowd and flying milk cartons and plastic sporks and leads me to a crowded table.
She issues drill-sergeant orders: “Make way for a greenie, troops.” Nobody moves a muscle. They just look up from their pizza slices and wilted lettuce and orange wedges and squish together to make room for us. She rules, but I get a sense they’re not happy about it.
Her spacey grin is full of metal. “Welcome to End of the Earth Middle School, otherwise known as Enderbrook. I’m Darcy, and you’re not,” she says. “So, who are you?”
“Shelby. Just moved here a week ago. Well, not here here. Up the road, to a place called Cinder Creek.”
“You must be in the house that crazy girl lived in. Emily somebody.”
“Smythe, yeah, that’s my house,” I say with a deep sigh.
“Truly true?” She yells across the table, “Hey, guys, this is Shel. She lives in the nuthouse at Cinder Creek.”
Nobody seems impressed, but Darcy thinks this is big news. “That’s the house with the dolls, right? The spooky ones?”
I’m dying to ask Darcy what she knows about Emily and the dolls, but before I know it, the bell rings for the end of the lunch hour — if you can call twenty-five minutes a lunch hour — and everybody’s on their feet tossing stuff into the trash and clattering trays helter-skelter on a conveyer bell. I haven’t even eaten a bite yet.
“Come on,” Darcy says, pushing me through the crowd. “Where’s your next class?”
I quickly check a note stuffed in my pocket. “Room twenty-six, B Hall.”
“Better hurry, then. You gotta crawl through a rabbit hole to get to B Hall, then cross an alligator-infested moat.” She sees the horror on my face. “Slight exaggeration. Room twenty-six is right around the corner. Catch you later, Shel.” And she takes off down the hall the opposite way. I’m probably wrong, but it’s remotely possible that I just made a friend. It’s just that I don’t like being called Shel, as in peanut. Only Dad is allowed to call me that.
“How was the first day of school, sweetie?” Mom asks, scratching steel wool around a gigantic soup pot in the sink. Corn chowder: I can smell it. Ugh.
“Rotten. I got lost between my locker and the gym, so I was late to PE, and I wandered into an eighth-grade Algebra class by mistake, and nobody at Enderbrook wears black leggings, and I’m definitely going to have to get my hair cut.”
Mom dries her hand and reaches into the tool drawer for scissors.
“Pa-leeze do not even think about cutting my hair like when I was a little kid.”
“I was just getting ready to cut a bag of cookies open, Shelby,” Mom says, obviously hurt.
Then Brian bursts in like a hurricane and clatters his Legos lunch box on the table. The new Brian, Mr. Motor Mouth, spouts, “Six guys from my Cub Scouts are in my class! And my teacher’s a man. Mr. Burke. I thought all teachers were girls. School here’s way cooler than in Denver,” he announces, and I’d like to grab a handful of his coppery hair and give it a good yank. No fair that he’s happy at school when I’m as miserable as a fly stuck in a spiderweb. Plus, we won’t be going to Leaning Tower of Pizza, which we always used to do on the first day of school. If we left now, we might get there by breakfast, since Leaning Tower is about two hundred miles away. I hope Terri and Marcus choke on their pizza. Not fatally. Just until they turn blue and Dad has to do the Heimlich maneuver, and everyone points and stares at them.
Mom snaps me out of my fantasy. “Did you meet anybody interesting at school, Shelby?”
“Sorta. Maybe? This girl named Darcy. She knows about Cinder Creek. She knows — knew — Emily, the crazy one who used to live here.”
“It’s not nice to call her crazy,” Mom says as she cuts open a package of Oreos and tosses out three for each of us.
Brian
stuffs an entire cookie in his mouth, then mumbles with a blackish tongue covered in it: “I told everybody in my class about those weirdo dolls. They all want to come for a sleepover and see if the dolls turn into zombies in the middle of the night.”
“Brian!” Mom scolds.
I think I liked Brian better when he didn’t talk. I snap off the top cookie and scrape the yummy white stuff with my teeth. Dad hates when I do that, but he’s not here, is he?
“Mom, admit it, there is something eerie about those dolls,” I insist. “Even Mr. Caliberti thinks so, and he should know because, remember, one of them is meant to be him, when he was a kid.”
“Mr. Caliberti is a little … he’s not entirely with it,” Mom says. “Can we please put those dolls out of our minds?” She bribes us with two more cookies.
I think she still feels bad about digging the dolls up. Brian and I decided not to rebury them after Mom trashed them. Now they’re sitting on the top shelf behind glass in the hutch in the dining room. This way we can all keep an eye on them so they can’t wander off again, or cause any mischief. The Mr. Caliberti doll, C.B., is the only one standing, as if he’s the sentry guarding and protecting the other four dolls. I can see them from where I’m sitting here in the kitchen. Nobody’s vanished, I’m happy to report. But it still nags at me — they want revenge, they said so, and I know in my heart they’re going to get it. But I don’t know how.
Yet.
WHO’S IN MY ROOM?! I JERK AWAKE TO THE sound of someone calling my name.
“Don’t scare me like that, Brian!” I growl. “Isn’t this house creepy enough without you sneaking into my room before the sun’s even up?” Rubbing sleep out of my eyes, I look around, but there’s no one in the room.
I hear it again, a blurbbely voice that sounds like it’s underwater: “Shhhhhhelby … Shhhhhelby Constance.”