Addie

Addie had a thing with that doll. The children of the neighborhood weren’t supposed to know that, but soon they all did.
The child’s mother knew it first. Priscilla nearly lost her mind the first time she experienced her daughter’s giftedness. After an argument with the five-year-old over a tea stain left on her husband’s favorite haunt, his blue velvet wing chair, it happened. Addie knew she was supposed to pretend there was tea in her play teapot and little melamine cups. She was told by her mother to pour “air tea” for the dolls invited to her tea party. But the child had mischievously filled her toy teapot with her mother’s Earl Grey. A cup had overturned, staining the seat cushion of Jason’s coveted wing chair.
Priscilla had locked Addie in her bedroom. When she had gotten back downstairs, not three minute later, there was Addie sitting on the sofa, her nearly violet eyes filled with a mirthful dare. At first, her mother thought she must be mistaken. It must have been the doll Addie carried everywhere, Miss Flora, and not Addie herself sitting there. Because Miss Flora had indeed been sitting in that exact place on the sofa minutes before, as Addie had been sternly shepherded up the plush stairs and down the even plusher hall towards her bedroom.
Priscilla ran back up the stairs and turned the key in the lock of Addie’s bedroom door. And there sat Miss Flora on the child’s bed, her porcelain face wearing a smile similar to the one she had just left downstairs. The doll eyes smiled like her daughter’s eyes. They seemed to have a secret. It was, Priscilla somehow knew, the same secret her daughter’s eyes had twinkled at her just moments before. The only window in the room was still sealed tight and locked. Shut most of autumn and all of winter, it would always get obstinately stuck. It had always taken a Herculean effort to open it each spring. Anyway, leaving aside the question of time, there would not have been strength nor dexterity enough for such a feat to be perpetrated by such a delicate child.
Priscilla made Addie promise never to do “the trick” in the presence of others, not even her father. Addie wondered what was so terrible about the gift that it must be kept a secret. Her mother warned her that people could misunderstand and that such misunderstandings could lead to trouble for the entire family. Addie promised to be good. Her mother had almost told her about the fate of the Salem “witches,” but had bitten her tongue. Why scare the poor child needlessly? Priscilla asked Addie how she managed to trade places with the doll. Addie explained that she did not really know how she managed to accomplish the feat. She simply closed her eyes and pictured Miss Flora in her mind.
“Does Miss Flora ever talk to you?” her mother asked her daughter, down on her knees before Addie, praying that the answer would be “no.”
“No,” Addie said. “Don’t be silly, Mommy.”
It was two years later. Addie was seven, soon to be eight. Priscilla had watched her beloved only child for other anomalies, but life had been on an even keel, Addie was doing very well in school, and things had remained pleasantly normal for the family. Her husband had never seen the strange gift. Addie sometimes did “the trick” when she was feeling lazy, didn’t feel like walking upstairs to her bedroom. Odd times like that. But she did it much less often now, because she saw the toll it took on her mother’s nerves. Especially the one time Priscilla actually saw Addie disappear to be replaced by the doll. Before her very eyes. She had nearly fainted. Once she had even wondered what would happen should she film the act, should she try to actually capitalize on this prodigy of nature. Somehow she knew it wasn’t right to try to profit from it. It was all a genie in a bottle. It would backfire horribly. She just intuitively knew. Protect her daughter. Stay hidden. And Addie seemed to be doing the trick much less often, if at all. This was clearly in deference to her mother’s nerves. Addie was a good child. She would just outgrow it, Priscilla promised herself.
Priscilla knew it had to be the doll and not Addie herself. There were no other strangenesses. She wanted to get rid of the doll. Often, she had thoughts of destroying it. But what would happen to her child? She had such fear for her safety. If she threw the doll in the ocean, would she wake the next day to find the doll back in her daughter’s bedroom and Addie missing? Would her child’s body later be pulled from the sea, a limp doll? So the mother was paralyzed into inaction, into a strange detente. The doll seemed to do no harm, so she let well enough alone. Many people, she told herself, live with a secret albatross.
One afternoon, in that seventh year of Addie’s, Priscilla heard the neighborhood children chanting, “Witch! Witch! Witch!” in the yard. When she threw her front door open, they were all pointing at Addie. Priscilla grabbed Addie by one arm and pulled her into the house’s safety, screaming at the other children as she hurried backwards into her home. She had actually said something horrible to the neighborhood children. Priscilla told them, these small children, that if they caused Addie any trouble she would tell their parents she saw them starting fires. Her brow burned with shame as she uttered the words. But she must protect her child. There had been three children taunting Addie. The word of an adult would outweigh the words of the children. Especially if the children were confessing nonsense. Especially if the children said that they saw a child falling from a treehouse suddenly turn into a doll falling from a treehouse.
Priscilla understood that Addie had merely done what anyone would do. Save herself. She looked at the doll’s strange smile. She couldn’t bring herself to thank the doll, but she almost did.
They had not bought the doll. It had been in the house when they moved in. It was presumed to be a housewarming gift from the rather mysterious previous owners. But one day, Jason had come down the ladder from the attic laughing and holding an old glass negative. He held it up to the light for Priscilla and Addie and there was the doll. She was posed in a baby’s high chair on the front lawn before their house, whose facade looked much the same now as it did a century ago. It was autumn in the photo. Addie laughed. But Priscilla felt a chill. When Jason suggested checking on the internet to find a firm that could print the photo, Priscilla vehemently opposed the idea. A shrine to the doll was the last thing she wanted.
And then Addie was abducted. In September. Two days after her family and friends celebrated her eighth birthday. And Priscilla and Jason lost their minds.
She had been walking two blocks to her best friend’s house. She had been going to Rachel’s. She must have made the trip there and back a hundred times. Mrs. Radic had seen the Mustang pull up on Addie but had called out to her too late. She had even seen the scrawny neckbeard throw the kicking child into the rear seat where she swore a woman had held her tight. At least, she thought it had been a woman. Long blonde hair. She couldn’t be sure. Mrs. Radic was ninety-two. Had she been younger, in her prime, she would have run right into the face of danger to save the child. She would have had better eyes to read the license. But the woman could barely walk. And her vision was shot. She was left with this additional, unmerited grief to take with her to the grave.
Priscilla prayed that it was indeed a woman her old neighbor had seen in the backseat of the Mustang. Because somehow it gave her more hope that Addie was still alive. Wouldn’t a woman look out for a girl? She had practically pleaded when she had asked police that question. The police said that she should have hope, but they also didn’t want to mislead her.
Priscilla spent far too many hours staring into the doll’s face. She would wake in the night and go to it. She stared her madness into the doll’s face. She began to whisper to the doll. “Why aren’t you there now?” “Why isn’t it you?” “Why are you stopping her coming home?” “They can’t harm you, you’re just a doll.” “You’re porcelain and cloth, you can’t feel pain.” “You must go now!” “Please!”
Then she would shake the doll and scream.
The doll’s painted smile never changed. Her violet eyes never stopped smiling their secret.
One night as Priscilla lay weeping in her sleep (Jason told her she did this often) a sort of silent earthquake happened. She had been sleeping downstairs, her phone on the coffee table beside her. Lately, Jason and her had come undone.They had begun to sleep apart. Jason was getting therapy. Priscilla was not. She hated the idea that the therapy was the beginning of an acceptance that Addie was gone forever. It had been two months or a thousand years or so since the abduction. She slept one hour most nights. She had never slept more than three hours and that one exceptional night she had completely overmedicated herself.
Priscilla was in that half-wakeful stage before awakening and suddenly saw the doll in her mind’s eye. She saw every particular feature of the doll in a new way. There was a life to the image. She spoke to the doll in her mind without words and when she came to full consciousness she was lying upstairs in her daughter’s bed. When she crept down the stairs, she saw that the doll was lying on the sofa where she had been sleeping. Had she been sleepwalking? She supposed it was possible with all the sleep-deprivation and the pills she had been taking. But she wondered.
Soon she was doing experiments with the doll. She was able to control the “migration” within a matter of weeks. Of course, she never showed Jason. She was very careful and practiced only when there was no chance of being observed. But she did undergo teleporation once when he was in the house, just to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating. He had been shocked to see her downstairs when he had just left her upstairs a few seconds before. She assured him he had been mistaken and, of course, his mind convinced him he had erred. Because, seriously, who would consider the alternative.
This gift made her feel closer to her daughter. She felt somehow it might be a backdoor to reach Addie. Because Addie must still exist. She must.
Addie’s body was found in June. The police had been diligent as they had promised they would be. The child had been buried in a shallow grave in the killer’s backyard. He was a day laborer living in a house his abused wife’s parents had rented for the couple to get the druggies out of their own basement, where they had lived and fought brutally every day for nearly five years. David Svetic had a long list of previous criminal charges and was a registered sex offender. It came as no surprise that virtually everyone in his life claimed to have no idea about that.
When the police attempted to take Jason into custody at his place of residence, shots were exchanged. David took two bullets in the return fire and was in the I.C.U. under police guard.
Jason had moved out. It no longer mattered. It was all over now.
When the police saw Priscilla approaching Svetic’s guarded room in the I.C.U., they figured she must be in shock. They refused her admission and begged her to return home for her own well-being. She promised she would if the young officer would do one favor for her. She wanted him to put her daughter’s doll in the room with the killer. The officer on duty refused at first, knew his superiors would tell him that it was in no way permitted, but Officer Eric was young and soft-hearted. He figured it was a form of strange therapy for Priscilla and a way of shaming the killer, so he relented. What harm could it do anybody and the poor woman would leave. He could even take the doll with him when his shift ended. He placed the doll on a table across the room from the unconscious murderer. Priscilla thanked him. asked if he had children. He nodded and looked deeply into her eyes. She smiled a sad little smile and almost cried but said then, “Love them.” And she left.
It wasn’t that officer but the next one on duty who found himself in the deep shit.
No one could understand how an unconscious inmate behind that guarded door, in that windowless room, could end up stabbed to death. The video camera showed no one entering the hallway, which was the only means of access to the room. The video camera inside the inmate’s room malfunctioned or was sabotaged just before the attack. The young police guard was grilled for hours and later voluntarily took a polygraph test, which he passed. The case remains unsolved and is much discussed on the sketchier true crime websites, the ones with endless talk of conspiracies.
The doll was returned to the grieving mother, who was also questioned and released.
Because the relevant video showed her leaving the hallway, then leaving the hospital itself, and was unequivocal proof of her innocence.
She died two years later, of a cancer she neglected to treat, if the terrible truth is to be told. She died in hospice care, in the house where her child had lived for eight years. She died in her daughter’s bedroom. The day before she died, she did the “doll trick” for her kindest hospice worker. Just to remind the young woman that the world is still full of little miracles. “Little useless miracles,” she had said, and smiled strangely. A skeleton’s smile.
And then she took the doll with her, had it placed in the coffin. Not because she believed she would know the doll was beside her. But if someone dug her up in a thousand years, this would be the easiest way to tell the story, the one that would never go away, the only story that mattered.
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