She hit him. She smacked him in the head with the butt of her palm. It rolled sideways and then back. He still didn’t look at her. Tears filled her eyes, and her throat closed down to nothing. She held it back for a moment, but then the sobs came.
She snatched the broken half of pencil sticking out of the top of his hand away, then slid another down into his fist.
“Draw! Draw! Draw!” Her voice rose to a shriek. He didn’t move, sat as stubborn as a mountain, looking ridiculous even on his oversized chair.
She shook his arm.
“Draw her!”
She hit him in the head again, and again his head rolled to the side, then slowly came back. He didn’t look at her. She grabbed his enormous face in both her hands and turned him to her, but he would not look into her eyes. “How do you know?” she asked. “How the fuck do you know? Are you doing this somehow? How do you fucking know?” She slapped his hairless cheek, and he finally moved. He turned his head away, buried it in the crook of his opposite arm as she smacked him with both hands on his arm and shoulders. Once she started in with both hands, she couldn’t stop. She pummeled him, imagining Lacee, imagining little lady Lacee covered in mud with bruises around her neck. This sick fuck would have made a doll of her. She screamed at him, but they weren’t words, or at least she couldn’t remember them.
“Carol, stop!”
Carol did stop, hand raised. She turned and through tears saw a person-shaped blur in the doorway to the dayroom, but she recognized Martha’s voice.
She fell to the floor, first to her hands and knees, then settling her forehead on the ground and her butt onto her heels, sobbing.
The Giant
Bobby spooned the Corn Pops out of his bowl and into his mouth. He’d prefer to have put his mouth to the bowl and shoveled it in, but he wasn’t allowed. He would have preferred to use a larger spoon, but he wasn’t allowed. He liked to eat out of a mixing bowl, but he wasn’t allowed. His parents wanted him to act like a “human being.”
He finished the Corn Pops in his bowl and reached for the box. He would have liked to drink the sweet milk between every bowl, but he wasn’t allowed, because he could go through a gallon of milk in one morning that way. So he poured more cereal into the already twice-used milk.
Bobby sat at the kitchen table, but he listened to his mother and Martha speaking at the counter. The island. He liked that it was called an island, and when he sat there on his stool, the big metal one, and when he remembered it was called an island, he’d put his feet on the bottom rung and imagine sharks swimming down below that would bite his feet if he sat them on the ground.
They talked more quietly than they normally would, but not so quietly that he couldn’t hear. The quiet voices let him know he should listen, because they might be talking about him.
“She said Lacee came back,” Martha said.
“Came back?” his mother asked.
“Turns out she met some guy on the Internet. He convinced her to go to a concert way over in Levington, where he lives.”
“That’s two hundred miles!”
“He bought her and her friend tickets to this concert, a friend in high school with a car, and she drove them out there. She said the police never connected it because Lacee is in junior high and the friend in high school, and apparently this other girl is such a problem child that her parents didn’t even report her missing.”
“How old is this Internet person?”
“Carol didn’t go into it, but over eighteen for sure. He had his own place.”
“I’m glad she’s all right, that she wasn’t… I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, and for Carol’s sake… But that little girl is trash. Her mother is trash. Carol might have come from the same background, but she’s…” His mother trailed off. He wanted to hear more about Carol.
“You wouldn’t hire her back, would you?”
“No. Of course not. We need to find someone, though. This is exhausting me, and I need to get back to work.”
Carol wasn’t coming back. Bobby wanted to fling his bowl. He wanted to smash the table. He almost did. Instead, when he caught the muscles in his whole body tensing, he held them perfectly still, then made them relax. He placed his hands palms-down on the table, let the lightning bolt trying to electrify him into motion pass through him, out of his palms, into the table, into the ground. He stayed still, like they’d taught him in the home.
Carol wasn’t coming back.
Bobby pushed his bowl away.
* * *
The ghosts of the little girls came to him at night. He knew he wasn’t dreaming. In his dreams, the world was strange. The house would be different, or his room, if he even had a house or room. When the ghosts came to him, his room would be exactly as it really was.
Before the little girls, he’d seen other things. Maybe not ghosts. Worse, darker than ghosts. The spirits of things that had never lived. Men in black coats who stood in the corners. He would try not to move, not to let them know he knew they were there. Things haunted him. Things lived under the bed. They’d take the form of snakes and bite his feet if he stepped down. They’d take the form of spiders and lower from the ceiling onto him, sending him careening around the room slapping himself. But they weren’t really snakes and spiders, but monster spirits. They’d disappear when the night man heard him moving and turned on the light.
He knew they were not dreams because dreams happened when you slept, when your eyes were closed. What your eyes saw, what your ears heard, that was the real world.
When the first girl came to Bobby, he knew she was not like the monster spirits who tormented him at night. She’d been alive once. She glowed. She had dark bruises on her neck. Blood had once run from her nose, and being dead, she had not wiped it away and it had turned to black crust. She was muddy. She explained to him she had gotten into the car with a man because it was raining hard, so hard her clothes were soaking wet like she’d jumped in a pool with them on. She’d asked for a ride home. He’d taken her to a place with trees and done things to her Bobby didn’t want to remember. He couldn’t forget, but he could refuse to put words to them in his brain. She said she screamed and screamed while he did bad things to her, until she almost couldn’t scream anymore.
Then the man choked her and when she woke up she was dead. She said it so strangely that it scared Bobby more than if she’d cried. If she’d cried, he thought maybe he could have put a hand on her back and patted, something that was usually too overwhelming for him to manage.
When Bobby awoke in the morning, he could see her so clearly in his head. He felt her with him, her ghost. That was another way he knew she was a ghost and not an evil spirit. The evil spirits, the ones who could change shape and had never been alive, they only came out at night. He didn’t know where they went during the day. The dark places were like doorways. The darkest places. The closet. Beneath the bed. The two corners where no light went. If he stared into them, even before they came through, he could see them there, preparing. The black would start to swirl, like when there was water on the road so that the water was as black as the road, and then there was oil on the water. If he stared into the dark, it would swirl like that, and then shapes would emerge and he’d see the spirits waiting to come out and torment him.
The little girl glowed. Not at all like the evil spirits that arose from puddles of darkness, barely less black than the inky shadows they spilled from. The girl glowed. She was a ghost. And she didn’t go away. He couldn’t see her during the day, but he could feel her sadness. She wandered. He didn’t know how to help her.
Some nights she came to him, others, she didn’t. She kept telling him how she died, how much it hurt, how she’d screamed. He wanted to help her. Help her get to Heaven. He didn’t want to hear her story over and over.
One day, as he and Carol went to get ice cream, he saw her. He stopped right in the middle of the sidewalk, and turned slowly, afraid that if he moved too fast she’d disappear.
It wasn’t her. It was a picture of a doll. But it looked so much like her.
The doll he made, though, looked even more like her. He wanted to make it a happy doll. He thought maybe it would make the ghost girl happy. But when he was done, he felt she didn’t think it was done—she wanted him to show the world what the bad man did to her.
She still came to him at night sometimes and told him about the horrible way she died and showed him her wounds, but during the day, he thought she stayed with her doll-self. He thought maybe he’d helped her find a little peace. He wished he could do more.
Then another glowing ghost girl visited him. Then another. Then another.
He made dolls for them all, and then he felt them less during the day. He hoped that meant the dolls helped.
Amber the doll woman helped him. He liked her. She wasn’t fake nice. He thought she must like him for real, too.
Then they stopped going to the doctor’s office by the doll store, and he didn’t know how to tell Carol to take him there. But the ghosts kept coming.
So he drew them. He remembered what they looked like at night, floating in his room, staring with their big eyes, not at him, but into the darkness, a million miles away, looking at something he couldn’t see and didn’t want to, something you only saw when your heart stopped beating.
He didn’t know why they came to him. They weren’t as scary as the evil spirits, but they made him so sad. He felt bad for them, but he wanted them to go away.
* * *
Bobby wanted Carol to come back. Sitting across his dayroom table from his mother, he drew a picture of Carol. It wasn’t as easy as drawing superheroes or Power Rangers, because there weren’t as many things about the way Carol looked that were so different from other people. She didn’t wear a colorful costume with a shape on the mask that made the Power Rangers so fun to draw. She looked like a normal lady. But she was Bobby’s favorite lady in the world. His mother sometimes called him a mama’s boy, and he always thought,
I’m a Carol’s boy
.
He didn’t know why she hit him. He’d probably done something wrong. Something stupid. If he could, he’d tell her he was sorry, but he didn’t know how.
Then he did. He grabbed a different colored pencil, and drew himself beside her. He was way taller than her, and had an arm around her. If she saw that, she’d know how he felt and she’d come back.
He carefully pulled the drawing out of his book and showed it to his mother so she could take it to Carol. At first, she barely looked up from her laptop to say, “That’s very nice.”
Bobby shook the paper until she looked again.
“Oh, Bobby, it’s wonderful!” She took the drawing from him, and he felt excited that she understood. “Wait until your father sees this. I think that looks just like me. You’re such a good artist.” She kissed him on the head, then left the room with his drawing. He heard her go down the stairs.
He started on another.
* * *
The ghosts told him untruths. He didn’t know if they meant to. Maybe they couldn’t remember things exactly. Maybe dying did that to you.
The details of their deaths were always the same. They remembered the smallest details of how they died. They remembered how they fought, the sounds they made, how long it took before they were folded into a big duffle bag and tossed into the back of a car. They showed their wounds to him endlessly, night after night. They never grew tired of it. He would plead with them to leave him alone, to let him sleep. He would plead with thoughts, but he knew they could hear, because that’s how ghosts talked. Right into your brain.
They wouldn’t leave him alone. They kept coming back, again and again. They floated in the darkness almost every night, glowing, burning into his eyes, into his brain. They told their stories again and again.
But the stories started to change.
At first, they talked about how scared they’d felt. About how horrible it was to die.
Later, they’d sometimes talk about how bad they’d wanted it.
The first girl, the one who got caught in the rain, she said, “I stood in the rain and got all wet on purpose, to show off my puffy little nipples. I wanted to drive him crazy. I wanted it bad, and I loved every second of it. I cried, because it felt so good, the way he split me open.”
In his brain, Bobby begged her to stop. She didn’t. She went over every detail, and talked about how much she loved it, how it was all she’d ever wanted.
Then she’d come back another night, and the details were the same, but she’d died scared, so scared. She hadn’t liked it at all.
Even in the home, dressed in all white and living in white rooms with white tile floors, Bobby didn’t feel crazy. But now he thought he would go crazy if the ghosts didn’t leave him alone. He wanted help. He wanted someone to make it stop. He felt himself slipping, the way he’d slipped when that neighbor boy teased him day after day after day until he snapped. Until he couldn’t even think, so that he could barely remember what he’d done because the memories were all light and noise and feel, but not put together right.
The pressure was building again, and Bobby didn’t know how much more he could take.