Ragdoll
Ragdoll
Number 46 Blendsworth Close was an ordinary-looking house in an ordinary suburb, which was precisely what Gloria Bletch wanted. After months of attorneys’ letters and arguments over the sale of the marital home, she had no appetite for anything complicated. Her share of the proceeds would not stretch to another house in the city, but here there were three bedrooms, a small yard and a field where the children could play. She hoped that, given time, it would feel less like somewhere they had been forced to go.
The movers had arrived early that morning, loaded the moving truck and set off, with Gloria and the children following in the car. By lunchtime, most of the family’s belongings were stacked in the new living room. Once the last pieces of furniture had been brought inside, the men left, and Gloria carried a box marked Kitchen through to the counter. Brian and Sonia disappeared upstairs, their voices traveling along the landing as they inspected the bedrooms, each determined to claim the best one before the other could object.
“I’m having this one!” Brian shouted from a room with blue walls and a white built-in closet. He opened its doors, glanced inside and closed them again. Sonia looked into the largest bedroom, recognized that their mother would want it, and moved on to the smaller room beside it. There were four white wooden shelves next to her closet, enough for all her books with space left over. Her bed would fit against one wall, her cabinet opposite, and her writing desk beneath the window. From there, she would be able to see the field beyond the houses.
“You two! Come and make yourselves useful,” Gloria called. “These boxes aren’t going to unpack themselves.”
They hurried downstairs and began searching for their names among the labels. Sonia wanted to take her desk up first, but her mother was occupied with the kitchenware, and Brian had already found the box containing his stereo and music. She settled for her books. By the time she had carried all three boxes upstairs, her arms ached and the cardboard had left red marks against her wrists. She arranged the books across three shelves, pleased to have established something of her own among the unfamiliar walls, then went to the window.
Branches from the tree in the front yard almost touched the glass. Beyond them, the road ended in four neat houses, with the field stretching away along one side. Smaller houses lined the rest of the street, their yards divided by low fences and clipped hedges. There was nobody outside. At home, there had always been something to watch. Our old home, she reminded herself.
Turning away, she opened the closet to see where her clothes would go. One compartment contained a clothes rod; the other had a series of smaller shelves. At the bottom, sitting upright in the corner, was a rag doll. Its faded dress had been carefully spread around its legs, and a line of uneven stitches ran beneath one cloth arm. Sonia bent to pick it up.
“Hands off. That’s mine.”
The voice was so close that she jerked backward, striking her shoulder against the closet door. Sonia thought she had heard a child’s voice, but it could have been Brian putting on a funny voice to frighten her. She turned, expecting to find him behind her, but the room was empty. Out on the landing, she listened. Her brother’s voice floated up from the kitchen, followed by her mother asking where he had put the silverware box.
He must have slipped downstairs after shouting. It was the sort of thing he would do, although Sonia had not heard him pass her doorway. Perhaps the stairs did not creak like the ones in their old house. She returned to the closet, intending to examine the doll before he came back.
The corner was empty.
She searched both compartments, then checked behind the doors and inside her discarded book boxes. Nothing. For a while, she remained crouched beside the closet, trying to remember whether she had actually touched the doll. Perhaps she had only imagined it. Her teachers were always telling her to stop daydreaming, and her mother complained that she spent too much time with her head in a book. Her father understood. He wrote stories and often told her that imagining things was the best part of being a person. She wished he were there to ask.
Sonia made her way downstairs. Most of the boxes had been carried to their proper rooms, although few had been completely unpacked. Gloria and Brian were maneuvering the sofa around those that remained, trying to create somewhere they could sit that evening.
“We might move it again later,” Gloria told him. “For now, let’s put everything wherever it fits.”
A knock at the front door interrupted them. Their visitor introduced himself as Peter from next door and stepped inside at Gloria’s invitation, smiling at the familiar chaos of a moving day. Within minutes, she had persuaded him to help assemble the beds.
“I was dreading those,” she admitted. “Brian and I were going to give it a try, but I could see us sleeping on mattresses for a week.”
While the three of them carried the remaining bed frames and fittings upstairs, Sonia searched for her clothes. Peter stayed longer than he had intended. Once the beds were finished, there was a cabinet to move and Sonia’s desk to carry up, and Gloria gratefully accepted each offer of help.
It was while they were flattening empty boxes that she asked how long he had lived on the street.
“A few years,” he replied. “It’s quiet. People tend to stay.” He glanced toward the ceiling. “Most of them, anyway.”
Gloria straightened. “What does that mean?”
Peter looked as though he regretted speaking. “Just stories about this place. There was an elderly woman here before our time. People say she died in suspicious circumstances, but I have no idea whether there’s any truth in it.”
“What sort of circumstances?”
“That’s the trouble. Nobody seems to know anything definite. It’s all somebody telling you what somebody else heard.” He rubbed at a strip of packing tape stuck to his finger. “There’s another story about people hearing a child crying after she died. Apparently, she didn’t have any children. That was what people found odd.”
“Probably the pipes,” Gloria replied. “Or the neighbors’ television. Sounds can be strange when you’re not used to a house.”
“Could be. I’ve never heard anything myself.”
“Ghost stories,” Brian muttered. “Everywhere’s got one.”
From behind a box, Sonia watched Peter pull the tape free. She wanted to ask whether anybody had mentioned a doll, but her mother had already returned to discussing the furniture. After a moment, Sonia lowered her eyes and carried on unpacking.
At six o’clock, Peter checked his watch and laughed. “I’d better get back. My wife will be sending out a search party. I only came over to say hello.”
Gloria thanked him at the door, then turned to the children. “I’m not cooking after all that. What does everyone feel like eating?”
“Pizza,” Brian answered.
Sonia agreed, and Gloria placed the order. They ate around the coffee table with the television on its cabinet and cardboard still crowding the hallway. Afterward, they watched whatever happened to be on, too tired to look for anything else. Eventually, Gloria gathered the empty pizza boxes and announced that she was going to bed.
Brian went upstairs with his headphones on, already choosing the music he would listen to as he fell asleep. Gloria barely managed to pull back her covers before settling into bed, exhausted. Sonia checked the closet once more while putting away the last of her clothes, but there was no sign of the doll.
Later, she lay facing its closed doors. The house sounded different in the quiet: a pipe clicked somewhere behind the wall, and downstairs a door settled against its frame. Eventually, tiredness overcame her curiosity, and she turned toward the wall.
“Have you seen my dolly?”
Her eyes opened. It was a child’s voice, close enough to have come from beside the bed. She could not remember falling asleep, yet the room had acquired the unfamiliar shapes and shadows of somewhere seen in a dream. She listened for a while, wondering whether she had heard anything at all, then climbed out of bed and opened the closet.
The doll sat in its corner, its skirt arranged around its legs.
“That’s my dolly.”
Sonia turned. A little girl stood beside the writing desk, watching her with an expression that was neither friendly nor frightened. Sonia had not heard the door open, and she was certain nobody had been there when she got out of bed.
“Who are you? How did you get in here?”
The girl looked past her. “Can I have her?”
Sonia glanced at the doll, then back at the girl. “Was it you shouting at me earlier?”
The girl nodded. “I thought you were going to take her.”
“I was only looking. I didn’t know she belonged to anyone.”
Sonia stepped aside, and the girl crossed to the closet. She picked up the doll and pressed it against her chest, smoothing the worn fabric with one small hand.
“Where did you put her? I came back and she wasn’t there.”
“She was with me.”
“But where were you?” Sonia looked toward the bedroom door. “Did my mom let you in?”
The girl shook her head.
“Then how did you get upstairs?”
“I came to get my dolly.”
Sonia frowned. That did not answer her question, but the girl seemed more interested in straightening the doll’s dress than explaining herself.
“You’ll have to go home. It’s late. Your mom will be wondering where you are.”
The girl looked directly at her but made no attempt to move.
“What’s your name?” Sonia asked.
“Lucy.”
“I’m Sonia. We moved in today.”
“I know.”
“Do you live next door or something?”
“I live here.”
Sonia frowned. “You can’t. This is our house now.”
Lucy tightened her arms around the doll. Before she could answer, the bedroom door opened. Gloria stood in the doorway, rubbing her eyes.
“Sonia, who are you talking to? You woke me up.”
“Lucy.”
Sonia turned to show her mother where Lucy stood, but the space was empty. The doll had disappeared with her.
“She was just here. We were talking.”
Gloria looked around the room, then checked the landing.
“There’s nobody here, sweetheart. You must have been dreaming.” She drew back the comforter and waited for Sonia to climb in. “Try to get some sleep now. It’s late, and I’ve got an early start.”
“Sorry, Mom.”
Gloria left the door ajar so the hallway light could reach the room, then returned to bed. Sonia lay listening, half expecting Lucy to speak again, but the house remained quiet. Before long, she fell asleep.
The following morning, sunlight streamed through the window, warming the covers. Sonia lay beneath them until hunger persuaded her to get up. Downstairs, Gloria was searching through a box beside the kitchen counter, surrounded by pans she had yet to find a home for.
“Morning. Have you seen the cereal?”
Sonia helped her look. They had bought milk the previous day, and once the box was found, breakfast required little more than locating three bowls. School did not begin for another couple of days, giving the children time to settle in and explore the neighborhood.
Brian appeared while Sonia was pouring her cereal. “I’m going over to the field after breakfast.”
“Can I come?”
He shrugged, and Sonia turned to her mother for permission.
“Yes, but stay together.” Gloria looked at Brian. “Look after your sister.”
He began to object, caught his mother’s expression and thought better of it.
“All right.”
After breakfast, Brian collected his soccer ball while Sonia put on her shoes. Across the field, he began kicking the ball around, watching a group of boys farther down who appeared to be organizing a game. Sonia stayed with him for a few minutes before wandering toward the trees along the far edge.
“Don’t go too far,” he called.
“I’m only going to look at the flowers over there.”
“Just stay where I can see you.”
She waved to show she had heard. By the time she reached the trees, Brian had gone to speak to the boys. Blue flowers grew beneath the branches, mixed with yellow blooms and small white daisies. Sonia crouched to examine one and became aware of somebody standing beside her.
“Lucy! Where did you go last night? You disappeared when my mom opened the door.”
“I didn’t. I was still there.”
“But I couldn’t see you. Mom couldn’t either.”
“I stayed until you got back into bed. Then I left.”
Sonia stood up. “Were you hiding?”
Lucy shook her head, apparently puzzled by the question. Sonia looked toward Brian, who was too far away to be of any help, then back at the girl. In daylight, Lucy seemed ordinary enough. Her dress was old-fashioned, but Sonia had seen stranger things worn to school on non-uniform days. There was no sign of the doll.
“Did you bring your dolly?”
“She’s at home.”
Sonia sat on a dry patch of grass and picked a few daisies, keeping the girl in view.
“I’m going to make a chain. Do you want to help?”
“I wish I could.”
“There are plenty. You can pick some of these.”
Lucy watched her break a stem. “My fingers don’t work.”
“You mean you can’t join them together? Here, watch.”
“No. I can’t pick them. I try, but they won’t stay in my hand.”
Sonia looked at Lucy’s hands. They seemed perfectly ordinary, and she was not sure what she was supposed to do.
“I’ll make you one, then.”
She demonstrated as she worked, making a slit in one stem and threading another through it. Lucy followed each movement without reaching for a flower. When the chain was long enough, Sonia joined the ends and placed it on her own head.
“Yours can be like this.”
“Nobody’s ever made me one.”
“Really?”
Lucy shook her head. Sonia chose longer stems for the second crown, working carefully while the girl watched.
“But you can hold your doll, so your fingers must work,” she observed.
“That’s different. She’s mine.”
Sonia lifted the finished chain and lowered it onto Lucy’s head. As soon as she let go, the flowers fell straight through the girl, landing on the grass at her feet. Sonia’s hands remained suspended above her. She had watched the daisies pass through someone who looked as solid as she was.
Lucy looked down. Neither of them moved.
“Did that hurt?” Sonia whispered.
“No, but it always happens; nothing stays put.”
Sonia lowered her hands. She wanted to ask how, but Lucy’s face had changed. She looked as though she expected Sonia to get up and run.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sonia managed. “You can help me choose some more.”
Lucy looked at her for a moment before sitting on the grass beside her. Sonia kept picking daisies, although her fingers were no longer quite steady.
***
Lucy had occupied number 46 long before her death. She remembered it with different wallpaper, a coal fire and her own books beside the hearth. Toward the end, the stairs had become painful, and people had begun speaking to her in the patient voices they reserved for those they no longer expected to understand.
After she died, she discovered that the pain was gone. So were the restrictions of her aging body. For a while, she continued to sit in her chair and look out of the window, waiting for somebody to explain what she was supposed to do. Nobody came. It took time to understand that she could look as she wished. Eventually, she chose to appear as the little girl she remembered being, from a time before she had grown accustomed to being alone.
The doll had survived all of it. Given to her in childhood, repaired badly and loved beyond any reasonable use, it remained when her other possessions were carried away. Lucy could always touch it. Other things required effort, as though the house resisted her until she finally found a way to achieve her goal.
The families who came afterward rarely stayed. At first, she had tried to make herself known, but nobody welcomed a voice from an empty room. The children disappointed her most. However young she made herself appear, none could see her, only hear her. They ran from her, crying for their mothers, even when she took care to sound kind.
Eventually, she stopped trying to be so nice; if people were going to live in her house, she would make it known whether she approved of their actions or not.
One family brought a priest, who walked through the rooms splashing water and instructing her to go into the light. Lucy followed him, curious about where he expected her to go. There was no light, and he offered no further directions. Afterward, the adults congratulated one another on the peaceful atmosphere, apparently satisfied that the problem had been dealt with.
That night, she emptied the bathroom cabinet into the bathtub and turned every family photograph face down. When the mother began crying, Lucy felt a small, unpleasant satisfaction. They had invited someone into her house to remove her. They could hardly complain when she returned the favor.
Then Sonia arrived, and everything changed. Sonia could see her. More than that, she could look at what Lucy could no longer do and offer kindness instead of fear.
Lucy decided Sonia could stay.
***
Their friendship developed in the privacy of the little bedroom. They played store beneath the desk, arranged lessons across the floor and read aloud on wet afternoons. Sonia tried telling her mother, but Gloria’s concern about the move and the separation soon turned every conversation about Lucy into a conversation about making friends at school.
After that, Sonia kept Lucy to herself. Lucy encouraged this.
“She doesn’t believe you,” she pointed out one evening.
“She thinks I’m making you up.”
“Then don’t tell her anymore. What’s the point if she won’t listen?”
There was comfort in having someone who was always pleased to see her, particularly when her father failed to telephone or Brian made her cry. Lucy listened without becoming distracted. She remembered grievances long after Sonia had forgotten them, and she never suggested that perhaps the other person had not meant any harm.
As Sonia grew older, she came to understand that Lucy was dead. There was no other explanation for the flowers, the disappearances or the way she remained unchanged while Sonia outgrew her clothes. Once, she asked about it. Lucy became so quiet that Sonia wished she had left the question alone.
“Would you stop talking to me if I was?”
“No. I just wondered.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter then, does it? I’m here, aren’t I?”
Sonia did not ask again. She assumed Lucy had died as a child and understood why she might not want to talk about it. There were things Sonia preferred not to discuss either.
When Sonia was ten, she arranged to go on an outing with a school friend’s family, but one of her shoes disappeared just before she was due to leave. Gloria searched beneath furniture while Sonia grew increasingly upset, until the friend’s mother finally telephoned to explain that they could wait no longer. Later, Sonia found the shoe inside the closet, beside the doll. Lucy was sitting on the bed.
“Never mind. We can play now.”
Sonia accepted this as consolation. At twelve, a birthday invitation vanished from her desk before she had shown it to her mother. Sonia remembered the party as being the following weekend. By Monday, she learned that she had missed it. That afternoon, the invitation reappeared beneath the doll.
When she asked Lucy whether she had moved it, Lucy looked offended.
“Why would I want an invitation? They haven’t invited me.”
Sonia could not prove anything. She put the card away, but afterward she became more careful about where she left things. Lucy never admitted to interfering. She simply became easier company when Sonia stayed home.
There were good years too, and enough of them to make the rest seem manageable. Lucy could be funny, unexpectedly clever and fiercely attentive. Her old-fashioned expressions amused Sonia, who assumed she had learned them from her parents. They shared books, invented stories and spent hours discussing people Lucy knew only through Sonia’s descriptions. Sonia grew accustomed to the strange limitations of their friendship, although she never became comfortable with waking to find Lucy beside her bed.
“Were you watching me?”
“I was waiting.”
“You could wait somewhere else.”
“But you might wake up.”
As Sonia grew older, the demands became harder to accommodate. Homework interrupted games; studying for exams took up evenings. Once, after she spent a Saturday with friends, she returned to find every book removed from its shelf and stacked against her bedroom door. Lucy watched while she struggled to push it open.
“What have you done? I can’t get in.”
“You forgot about me.”
“I told you I was going out. You were here when I asked Mom.”
“You didn’t say you’d be all day.”
Sonia pushed harder, sending a stack of books sliding across the carpet.
“So you’ve done this because I went out?”
Lucy turned away.
Sonia put the books away herself. She did not tell her mother, partly because she could imagine the endless questions and doubted her mother would believe her anyway, and partly because she knew how peaceful the house became once Lucy had been reassured. She had learned to give in before thinking of it as putting Lucy’s demands before her own wishes.
***
Get Elaine Sharp’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
For Sonia’s sixteenth birthday, Gloria organized a party. School was finished, the exams were over, and Sonia wanted an evening with her friends without having to account for every minute of it. Gloria carried bowls of potato chips, little sausages, breaded chicken pieces and dips into the living room while Brian sampled whatever he could reach.
Lucy watched from the stairs.
“Will we do something afterward? You could read to me when they’ve gone.”
“I’ll probably be too tired. We can do something tomorrow.”
“You always say that now.”
Sonia stopped on the stair below her. “Lucy, it’s one evening. Please don’t start. I want to enjoy my birthday.”
“I know when your birthday is. I’ve been here for all the others.”
“I know you have. But my friends are coming, and I’m going to spend time with them.”
Lucy moved aside to let her pass. Sonia went upstairs to finish getting ready, resisting the urge to turn back and reassure her again.
By eight, the living room was crowded. Music competed with conversation; somebody had spilled a drink and was now trying to mop it up, and Gloria was pretending not to notice how much food Brian had eaten. Sonia stood beside the sofa laughing at something a friend was telling her.
Lucy waited near the fireplace. She tried speaking, then tugged Sonia’s sleeve. Sonia brushed at her arm without looking.
These people knew almost nothing about Sonia. None had sat through the nights when she missed her father. None had listened while she cried about school. Yet Sonia laughed and talked so freely with them, while Lucy had to beg for a few minutes of her attention. Lucy’s annoyance grew into anger. She would show them. She would show Sonia just how much ignoring her would cost.
She placed her palm against the wall and concentrated on the vibration beneath it. Slowly, the warmth drained from the room. A girl rubbed her bare arms, and Gloria went to check if the back door was shut. Sonia thought little of it and went to fetch a cardigan, then returned to the conversation.
Lucy kept her hand in place.
The windows clouded. A boy made a joke about the heating, and everyone laughed. Sonia’s laughter was the worst of it.
Lucy remembered a horror film one of the previous families had watched, the mother curled into the corner of the sofa with her hands over her mouth. In one scene, blood had seeped through the walls. The effect had seemed absurdly simple. Now Lucy pictured it against the familiar wallpaper.
A dark red line appeared beside the fireplace. Another opened near the door, followed by several more, thin streams creeping down all four walls.
“What is that?” somebody asked. “Is that blood?”
A chair shifted across the carpet. Then another moved, slowly enough for the girl sitting on it to look down before she screamed. A bowl tipped, scattering food across the table, and the room broke into panic. Gloria tried to reach the light switch while guests pushed toward the hallway.
There was no blood. Lucy had learned that people’s minds could be persuaded more readily than objects could be moved. Once they believed they were in danger, they supplied much of the fear themselves. The chairs required effort, but the sight of the walls did most of the work.
At last, Sonia looked at her.
Lucy looked as innocent as she could and just smiled.
***
Sonia found her upstairs after the last guest had left. Downstairs, Gloria was scrubbing at a wall on which there was no mark. She had already tried water and dish soap, unable to accept that something she could see so clearly would not come off.
“What is wrong with you?”
Lucy sat beside the closet with her doll on her lap.
“They’ve gone now. You can stop shouting.”
“Everyone ran out of here screaming. Mom’s downstairs trying to scrub blood off the walls, and you’re sitting there pleased with yourself.”
“It wasn’t really blood.”
“That doesn’t make it all right! They thought it was. You wanted them to believe it was. Why?”
Lucy picked at the doll’s sleeve.
“I asked you to talk to me. You wouldn’t even look.”
“I was having a party, Lucy. I told you we could do something tomorrow.”
“You’ve been with them all evening.”
“Yes, because they’re my friends.”
“You’ve got me, though; you don’t need them.”
Sonia shut the bedroom door, then stood with her hand on the handle.
“I’m allowed to have other friends. I don’t belong to you.”
Lucy’s fingers stopped moving. For a moment, the room grew colder.
“I didn’t say you did.”
“You don’t have to. Every time I go somewhere, something happens. You hide my things, or you make a mess, and I end up trying to keep you happy. I’m tired of it.”
“You used to want to be here.”
“That doesn’t give you the right to frighten everyone. Mom invited them into her own house.”
Lucy lifted her face. The expression on it made Sonia take a step backward.
“It was my house before any of you came.”
Sonia opened the door again.
“Then you should have left it empty. You can’t let people live here and punish them for having a life.”
Lucy stared at her.
“Stop it,” Sonia continued. “All of it. We can’t carry on like this.”
For three days, nothing happened. Sonia almost persuaded herself that Lucy had listened. On the fourth, a friend came over to pick up a borrowed jacket. Before the girl had taken off her coat, a heavy dragging sound began overhead.
Sonia went upstairs and tried her bedroom door. It opened only a few inches before catching against her writing desk, which had been pushed across it from inside. Through the gap, she could see Lucy.
“You can both wait outside; I don’t want either of you to come in here.”
***
After that, the house became somewhere Gloria dreaded returning to after work, knowing she would have to endure another night before she could leave again in the morning. Doors slammed while she was alone. Footsteps approached her bedroom and stopped outside it, the silence afterward somehow worse than the sound. Once, she heard Sonia calling from upstairs while her daughter stood beside her in the kitchen.
Gloria lost weight. She checked locks, called an electrician and began sleeping with her light on. Sonia’s friends stopped visiting. Over the years, Lucy had learned to make herself visible when she wanted to frighten someone. She no longer bothered to look like a child when she did. Several of Sonia’s friends reported an elderly woman watching them from the landing, her hand resting on the banister as though she were waiting for an opportunity to come down.
One morning, Gloria sat at the kitchen table with a cup she had barely touched.
“Have you heard it too?”
Sonia looked up from her toast.
“The footsteps. The voices.” Gloria glanced toward the doorway. “Please tell me if you have. Brian’s heard things, but he keeps saying it must be coming from next door. It isn’t. I know it isn’t.”
“I’ve heard them.”
Gloria put down her cup.
“Then why haven’t you told me? I thought I was losing my mind.”
“I didn’t know what to say.”
For a while, her mother watched her. Sonia lowered her eyes.
“Seven years we’ve lived here,” Gloria murmured. “Why is this happening now?”
Sonia had no answer she could bring herself to give. She had spent those years believing she was keeping a friendship private. Now her mother was sitting in front of her, exhausted and frightened, and she could not explain why she had allowed the silence to go on so long.
That evening, she confronted Lucy.
“The woman my friends have seen on the landing. Was that you?”
“That’s how I looked before I died.”
Sonia stared at her.
“What do you mean, how you looked?”
Lucy shrugged her shoulders but said nothing.
“You’re a little girl.”
“Only because I want to be.”
Age gathered around Lucy’s eyes. Her cheeks hollowed, and her mouth drew inward before the change passed, leaving the familiar face once more. Sonia sat down on the bed.
“You were the woman who lived here.”
Lucy nodded.
For a moment, Sonia could hear Peter’s voice as clearly as if he were standing downstairs among the boxes again.
“All this time, you let me think you were a child. You let me feel sorry for you.”
“I was lonely. That wasn’t a lie.”
“But you knew what I thought.”
“You liked me like this.”
Sonia looked toward the closet, remembering the games beneath her desk, the lessons spread across the floor. She had assumed Lucy was another part of the house’s history, a child nobody had known about. Now she tried to reconcile those memories with the elderly face she had just seen.
“Was any of it real to you? Being my friend?”
Lucy’s expression hardened.
“You think it wasn’t real because I looked different?”
“No. I think you knew I wouldn’t question you if I thought you were another little girl.”
Lucy sat beside the closet and settled the doll across her knees.
“The other families,” Sonia continued. “You frightened them away too, didn’t you?”
“They weren’t nice.”
“All of them?”
“They wanted me gone.”
“Did they want you gone before you started frightening them, or afterward?”
Lucy tightened her grip on the doll.
“Mom’s sick with worry. She can’t sleep. She’s frightened in her own home.”
“Then she should stop bringing people in.”
Sonia shook her head.
“You’re not listening. She lives here, Lucy. So do Brian and I. You don’t get to decide who we see.”
“You used to be kind.”
“I am kind, but that doesn’t give you the right to rule my life. I was only nine when we came. I thought you needed someone to play with.”
“I still do.”
“Yes, but it’s different now, and I can’t be here every minute. I have schoolwork, and friends, and things I want to do. You can’t keep making me feel guilty for that.”
“You promised to be my friend.”
“I didn’t promise to stay nine.”
The bedroom door struck its frame so violently that Sonia flinched. From downstairs, Gloria called her name. Lucy did not turn toward the sound.
“She’s always taking you away.”
Sonia wanted to answer, but she was afraid of what Lucy would do next.
***
A week later, Gloria packed enough clothes for them to stay elsewhere. She had stopped trying to explain the house and no longer cared whether anybody believed her. Brian helped load the car while Sonia went upstairs for the last of her things.
Lucy stood beside the window, watching Sonia put a folded sweater into her bag.
“What are you doing with that bag?”
Sonia pulled the zipper closed. “Mom’s taking us somewhere else. She can’t stand another night here.”
“You’re going with her?”
“Of course I am, Lucy. I’m part of a family. I can’t live here on my own. What did you think would happen when you kept scaring everyone?”
Lucy glanced toward the landing.
“But you’ll come back. When she’s stopped being frightened.”
“It doesn’t work like that. When you’ve scared someone, they don’t usually want to come back. Mom doesn’t know whether you’ll stop or carry on, so why would she want to? I told you we couldn’t carry on like this. You didn’t listen.”
“But I only did those things because you weren’t paying any attention. I don’t want you to go. Can’t you let them leave and stay here with me?”
Sonia gripped the handle of her bag.
“And I’m telling you I’m going with my family. I don’t know when we’ll be back, or whether we’ll come back at all.”
“You can’t leave me here.”
“I can’t stay just because you want me to.”
The door moved behind her. Sonia caught it before it closed, holding it open with her foot. Her mother was downstairs. Brian was outside. She fixed her thoughts on those small, ordinary facts.
“Lucy, open the door.”
“I wanted us to be friends.”
“We were friends. But now you frighten people whenever I do something you don’t like. What am I supposed to do? Stay in this room for the rest of my life?”
“I haven’t hurt you.”
“You think this hasn’t hurt me?”
Lucy looked at the bag, then at Sonia’s foot braced against the door. Her appearance faltered. The elderly woman stood before her, thin-haired and bent, with the same furious unhappiness in her eyes. Sonia could still see the loneliness, but she could no longer make herself responsible for it.
“Let me go.”
For a long time, Lucy watched her. Then the pressure against the door eased.
The doll lay on the windowsill. Sonia picked it up and held it out, an old habit of comfort surviving even now.
“Here. You’ll want her.”
Lucy reached forward. Her fingers rested over Sonia’s, cold enough to make them ache.
“Will you come back to see me?”
Sonia swallowed.
“I can’t promise you that.”
The cold pressure lifted from her fingers. Lucy had vanished.
Sonia did not wait to see whether she would return. She put the doll on the bookshelf, took her bag and went downstairs.
***
They stayed away for two weeks. Gloria eventually returned for more clothes, accompanied by Peter, who waited in the hallway while she went from room to room. Nothing moved. No footsteps followed her upstairs, and no voice answered when she called out, feeling foolish and frightened in equal measure.
Over the following weeks, they returned several times during the day. Gloria had the heating checked and asked the electrician to return, hoping somebody might find an explanation she could live with. Nothing was discovered that accounted for the cold rooms, moving furniture or voices, but nothing further happened either.
She could not afford to abandon a house she owned and pay indefinitely to live somewhere else. First, they stayed for an afternoon, then an evening. Eventually, with every light upstairs left on, they spent a night there. Gloria slept badly, but the house remained quiet.
They came home.
Sonia finished growing up. She studied, worked and moved away, carrying with her a reluctance to discuss number 46 that people mistook for unhappiness about her parents’ divorce. The doll remained on her bookshelf. Once, Gloria offered to pack it with her other belongings, but Sonia declined.
She never saw Lucy again.
***
Years later, Sonia returned with her young daughter. Gloria still lived at number 46, although the living room had been redecorated several times and Brian’s old bedroom had become a sewing room. The tree outside Sonia’s window had finally been cut back. In daylight, with her mother filling the kettle and asking about the journey, the house seemed smaller than she remembered.
Sonia went upstairs to collect a box of books, her daughter following close behind. The closet had new handles. Her old writing desk was gone. Only the shelves remained much as they had been, with the doll sitting at one end, its faded skirt spread neatly around its legs.
“Can I play with that dolly?”
Sonia looked up from the box. For a moment, she considered refusing. Nothing had happened for years. She had almost persuaded herself that whatever held Lucy there had finally released her. Her daughter was already reaching for the doll, carefully supporting its head.
“Yes. Be gentle. She’s very old.”
Her daughter smiled, then turned toward the closet.
Sonia’s hands stopped over the books.
“What are you looking at?”
“The little girl.”
Sonia rose slowly. Her daughter held the doll toward the empty corner, listening with the solemn attention she gave to instructions.
“She says I can have a turn.”
Then she smiled.
“As long as I give her back.”
