pick: scrub the toilets or stocking?”
“Stock,” I said automatically, hefting the box. I’d already had
to bleach the dressing rooms once tonight. I didn’t want to have
to do the same to the bathroom.
“Thought so. Let’s get ahead on the new stock then and save
the morning crew the hassle.”
Working the back has its benefits—you have to lift the heavy
crap and scrub off the ick, but you also get first crack at the
donations. Our store’s got a bunch of dads in receiving, so the
toy section’s usually pretty sparse.
I was pretty startled to find that the box weighing me down
was filled with delicate dolls—not Barbie or American Girl but
real, old-fashioned dolls with brittle curls, frilly dresses, and thin
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porcelain skin. Some of the dresses were still dusted with
cobwebs.
Jackie saw me assessing the stash. “I used to collect dolls like
that when I was a kid,” she said. “Kept ‘em for when I had a little
girl.” She patted her sloping gut. “Joke’s on me, huh?”
I kept quiet. Another reason I didn’t want to fess up to my
visit to the clinic was Jackie’s fertility struggles. She was done
now but Carmen’d warned me off talking babies my first week
on the job. Twenty years of trying and four miscarriages had left
Jackie bitter.
“If I had any sense I’d buy them myself,” Jackie continued,
oblivious to my discomfort. “Dolls that old, you know one’s
gotta be Antique Roadshow quality.” Patting me on the shoulder,
she headed for the back.
The front door dinged as I set down the box and a regular
customer—this goth redhead that goes to my school, name of
Wendy—wandered in. Normally she’s got her buddy Eddie with
her, but I couldn’t see his faded-out dye-job anywhere.
Carmen shot Wendy a wave, and Wendy idly wagged her
fingers back; she seemed distracted, looking around the place
like she’d never seen it before. Wendy does that a lot around
town, striding past dangerous stuff like it’s not there, or crouched
on a bench muttering to herself, pausing like she’s talking to
someone else. People used to call her Wacky Wendy, but she’s
gotten stranger lately, conspicuous to the point where she makes
most of our class uncomfortable. No one jokes around her much
anymore, you never know when she might snap and haul a
handgun to gym or something.
Whatever. I had more important stuff to do than wonder
about that weirdo. I unpacked the dolls, examining each one
before setting it on the toy shelf, turning the idea of antiques over
in my head. Most of the dolls were old but not in pristine, Ebay-
ish condition—some had cracks and others were waterstained or
moth-eaten.
Ten minutes to closing, I was down to the last doll in the box.
This one was different, I could sense it the second I laid eyes on
her. Tentatively, I reached into the box, and it was like sticking
my arm in an icebox, cold eddying around my fingers in waves.
The doll was more than gorgeous. She was exquisite.
Coppery red curls, springy and firm, clustered around a
heart-shaped face. Her features weren’t the typical button nose
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and bee-stung mouth most of the others sported—less child-like,
more adult, with sharp, precisely shaped features—and her eyes
were completely unlike the sleepy blue and green marbles set in
the other doll faces. These were almond-shaped and pale brown,
amber-hued, flecked with gold. Even her clothing was different.
It was an older linin piece that reminded me of the Avonlea
books cluttering my bookcase.
I flipped the doll over, looking for the price tag, and sighed.
The others topped out at twenty bucks but my doll had been
priced at a hundred-fifty, easily half my paycheck, and an
obscene amount for furniture from our store, much less a toy
aisle baby doll.
Still, I knew I had to have her. Owning her wasn’t a choice;
it was need, stark and raving, clawing at my insides. The thought
pounding in my pulse, as if I was meant for this dainty, precise
thing or like she, inexplicably, had chosen me.
Across the store, Wendy turned my way, and for the first time
in months, I paused to really look at her. She’s always been
scrawny but now Wendy was much too thin, her skin so pale I
could make out the tracing of blue veins along her temples
against her faded black dye and grown out roots. Scabs laddered
across the ink that curled and curved across her collarbone and
wrists.
She looked sick but that didn’t change the queasy, taut
feeling I got in my gut when I realized that I had her full,
undivided attention. Wendy’s eyes seemed to glow, like she was
looking inside me. Instinctively, I cupped a hand across my belly.
When she blinked, the glow was gone.
Uneasily, I tucked the doll beneath my arm, backing toward
the break room. Carmen and Jackie, eager to go home, were both
too busy counting down the register to realize that Wendy hadn’t
left or that I wasn’t in the back closing up.
I ought to ignore the clenching in my gut, the fluttering of my
heart—what could weirdo Wendy do anyway? Nothing. I should
rush up to the front with the doll and ask if Jackie could put her
on hold for me, or keep her in the office or something until I
could figure a way to afford her. I should put her down. I should
go talk to Carmen, rent a Redbox-
Wendy started toward me.
All the shoulds vanished immediately.
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Panicking, I bolted, the doll still gripped tight in my arms.
Behind me I heard shouting—Carmen and Jackie realizing
that something was wrong as the fire door burst open, and I
darted into the alley—Wendy yelling incoherently, and the blare
of an alarm that both seemed loud and muffled at the same time.
There was a bus closing its doors at the bus stop on the
corner. I raced up and pounded once. The driver glared but
popped the door to let me board before pulling away.
Behind me, the yells faded as I fed the very last of my cash
into the till and then, exhausted, drifted further into the bus with
the doll tight in my grip. The bus was empty for a Thursday—a
homeless dude drooled in his sleep on the back seat, a couple
Asian tweens midbus whispered together, and a prim old Indian
lady avidly read 50 Shades behind the driver.
I sat between the old lady and the kids as the bus pulled away
from San Jose toward the highway.
I didn’t even know where we were going, only that I’d
forgotten to pick up my check at the start of my shift and that if
I went back I was risking getting arrested for shoplifting the doll.
I couldn’t go home—even if Wendy didn’t know exactly where
I lived, she’d be able to find out easily enough. We weren’t
allowed our cells on the floor, so my phone was in my locker at
work. I couldn’t call Carmen for a ride.
Hell.
But I had the doll. There was that at least.
“Thank you for saving me,” said the girl in the seat beside
me. I hadn’t heard her board the bus or settle down, she was just
there, subtle as smoke, and when her hand cupped my elbow, her
fingers were cold and thin, pale, tipped with blue.
She had the most beautiful amber eyes. Her name was Joyce.
I don’t know how I knew that, but I did.
“No problem,” I whispered, closing my eyes as Joyce leaned
over and whispered quickly to me, enveloped in her sickly sweet
scent, cradled in a swiftly rising fog.
*
It’d been a huge mistake to let the girl realize she was
watching, Wendy knew, but she was off her game tonight, had
been for weeks. She knew the two employees vaguely, they went
to school with her; she’d had Carla or Corrie, or whatever her
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name was, last year in Art, and the other girl, Lucy or Lana or
Lorrie, in English.
C-whatever was yelling now, but Wendy had tuned her out,
trying to follow the dimming scent of the dead, squinting through
the grey and wasted Never after the bus as it pulled away.
Wendy knew that she didn’t need to rush off and catch up
with the ghost clinging to the girl. She just needed to get an idea
where they were going and stalk them from there. The bus line
would be able to give her the next few stops, but ever since their
spat, Eddie’d been avoiding her, so he was out for a ride up to
the City, especially to chase down a ghost.
Not for the first time that day, Wendy wished she hadn’t lied
to Piotr for so long about her reaping. He’d have busted ass to
chase the bus and jump aboard; would have dragged the Walker
out by its stinking, rotting cloak and held the bastard down while
Wendy called the Light and sent it back to whatever god would
accept a Walker’s cannibal soul.
Ignoring the girl still hysterically yelling at her, Wendy
tucked her hands in her pockets and walked back to her father’s
car. In theory, she could drive the sedan up to the City, but lately
she’d been lifting his ride too often as it was, and she wasn’t sure
she felt confident enough to handle San Francisco’s twisting,
cluttered streets on her own without wrecking the sedan.
Then again, that Walker had seemed pretty damn intent on
following L-girl closely. She moved, it moved. It was the
damndest thing. In all the time she’d been reaping, Wendy’d
never seen the like. Living human body heat burned the dead, so
souls avoided the living and humans never had a clue that the
dead were nearby. It was a win-win situation all around as far as
she was concerned. Fewer people to observe her doing her thing,
for one.
The thing that ate at her was the way the girl had seemed
protective of the Walker, like it wasn’t just trying to tick itself
into a nibble off her soul … like she could see it. But that was
ridiculous. The living—the regular, normal living, at least—
couldn’t see the dead.
Wasn’t it?
“Mom would know what to do,” Wendy muttered to herself
as she slid behind the steering wheel. What she wouldn’t give to
be able to talk to her mom just once more. Advice. Any advice
would do.
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Without her mother, Wendy felt like she was barely treading
water, constantly threatened by the tidal pull of her “job” and the
rest of her ridiculous, confusing life. She’d never wanted this
burden she’d inadvertently inherited from her mom, and now she
was left to sink or swim all alone.
“Okay,” Wendy muttered. “Okay. Risk the City? Or try to
catch her at home or at school? What is her name?!” Wendy
pounded the steering wheel and rested her head against the top
curve. The shouting had stopped. The thrift store was now dim
and quiet.
“Lucky,” she recalled suddenly, and it felt right. It was such
a bizarre name for a girl Wendy vaguely remembered had been
given nothing but crap hand after crap hand her whole life. Jerk
boyfriend who even oblivious Wendy knew cheated on her,
orphaned in the same ice storm that took Eddie’s dad, crashed
out with family in those teeny little studios four blocks from
Wendy’s place.
Lucky fell in gym and broke her nose. Lucky went to
Homecoming in a borrowed white dress and got her period.
Lucky took the class pet home over the weekend, and it came
back squashed by her aunt.
Lucky, Wendy thought, flicking on the engine and pointing
the sedan toward the City, has never been lucky. And now she
was in the worst scrape of her life, though she probably had no
clue. That Walker was different from the others. Wendy didn’t
know why or how, just that it was, and that if she didn’t fall into
a little luck of her own, then Lucky might be joining her parents
sooner than she ever imagined.
*
The bus let off near the wharf. I got off, clutching the doll to
my chest, and drifted toward the piers—normally thrumming
with tourists all times of day and night, but a cool fog licked my
ankles, eddying across the water.
Everyone else must have bailed, I reasoned, and felt more
than heard the chuckle as my new friend walked beside me. The
world seemed so different now that she was here—everything
clearer and at the same time darker, harder, swathed in grey and
glimmering with faint, distant lights, pinpricks like dying stars
guiding my steps down alleys I’d have never dared after dark
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before, invisible fingers tugging at my pants as I passed.
Maybe it was because it was long past sunset, but I didn’t
recall this part of the City being paved with cobblestones. There
was a wall up ahead, black-spotted with mold like watching eyes,
and on the breeze tendril-drooped blossoms like cobwebs sifted
on the breeze, caught in the rising wind, buffeted by the
oncoming storm.
I shivered and tucked the doll closer into my arms, cradling
her tight, and bent to brush a kiss against her forehead. She was
warm in my arms, her miniscule nails sharper than I expected,
pressing into the curve of my elbow. I gripped her tighter; if I
dropped her, she’d crack against the cobblestones, brittle bone
china turned to dust and dismay.
“Keep walking,” the whisper behind me said, and I nodded.
Joyce knew best. She’d found me, hadn’t she? She would save
me.
There. We were closer now, and I could see it even
through
the rising fog—the bridge rising up, decrepit and rotting and new
and yet not.
I didn’t know how or why I was seeing these two places
overlaid against one another like pictures from another time
imposed on the world I knew, but there was gravity to the grey
place, somber solemnity, and I was just so tired of the struggles
of the bright world, my world.
If given an opportunity, I’d dive into the mist and never come
back.
“Soon,” Joyce promised me, and I dared a glance back at her.
Her amber eyes filled my vision, so bright, so big, but at the same
time there seemed to be something subtly wrong with her face …
I shook my head, breaking the hallucination. Idiot, I berated
myself. Joyce was exquisitely shaped, sharp and pristine and
beautiful. Her skin was smooth, poreless, and moonlight pale,
and her hair hung in perfect corkscrew ringlets. I stank like sweat
and dust and bleach. Joyce smelled charnel sweet, overblown
roses and midsummer honey.
But the skull, the rot, a whisper like a sob came from the back
of my mind. Didn’t you see the loose flap of her tongue? I pushed
the voice down, burying it deep. Joyce, I knew, was flawless,
inside and out. Not like me.
Not like me at all.
Joyce took my hand in hers, careful of my doll— her doll I
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knew now, fashioned with her bones and blood and hair and
dust—and together we drifted toward the bridge.
***
Wendy wasn’t even out of the parking lot when C-girl
pounded on her passenger side window, startling the hell out of
her. “LET ME IN!”
Flipping the girl the bird, Wendy was about to drive off when
the passenger door, treacherous, faulty thing, popped open. C-
girl dove into the seat and slammed the door shut. “Drive! Follow
that bus!”
“That’s what I was doing!” Wendy retorted waspishly but
accelerated anyway. If she had any sense at all, she’d kick C-girl
out, but Wendy was tired of handling every emergency on her
own. Without her mom or Eddie, she was kind of at a loss with
dealing with normal people. The dead were more her forte, and
before Piotr, she’d just send them into the Light without
bothering to learn their names.