(“Grandpa talked to me . . .”)
“Oh . . . yeah?” I whispered back, my throat constricted.
“He told me to name him that.” She kept whispering.
I could do nothing but stare at the thing. From outside, as if on cue, we could hear Victor barking, and then he stopped.
“Is Terby alive, Daddy?”
(Go ahead, look at the scab on your palm. It had gone for the wrong hand, Bret. It was aiming for the hand with the gun in it, but it bit the wrong hand.)
“Why?” I asked hesitantly. “Do you think he is?” My voice was quavering.
She held the doll up to her ear and listened carefully to it and then she looked back up at me.
“He says he knows who you are.”
This forced me to speak up quickly. “Terby’s not real, honey. It’s not a real pet. It’s not alive.” I was intensely aware that I was still glaring at the thing, shaking my head slowly back and forth as if consoling myself.
Sarah held the doll up to her ear once again as if it asked her to.
I restrained myself from grabbing it away from her (I could smell its rotten scent) as she sat up to listen more carefully to what the doll was telling her. And then she nodded and looked back up at me.
“Terby says not in a human way but”—and now she giggled—“in a Terby way.”
She clutched the thing, rocking back and forth, delighted.
I said nothing and looked to Robby for help, but he was lost in the video game or pretending to be, and over the sounds of gunfire and groans I could hear Marta’s car pulling out of the driveway.
“Terby knows things,” Sarah whispered.
I kept swallowing. “What . . . things?”
“Everything he wants to know,” she said simply.
“Honey, it’s time for you to go to sleep,” I said, and then, looking over at Robby, “And I want you to turn that off and go to bed too, Robby. It’s late.”
“You don’t need to worry about me getting enough sleep,” he muttered.
“But it’s my job to worry,” I said.
He turned away from the television and glared at me. “About who?”
“Well,” I said in a tender voice. “About you, bud.”
He muttered something else and turned back to the TV screen.
I had heard what he said. And even though I did not want him to repeat it, I couldn’t help myself.
“What did you say, Rob?”
And then he repeated it without difficulty or shame.
“You’re not my father so don’t boss me around.”
“What are you . . . talking about?”
“I said”—and now he spoke very clearly, his back still to me—“you’re not my father, Bret.”
I was so weakened by this admission—something resentful that had been building up for a long time—and the entire day leading up to it that I was rendered silent. I was exhausted. I carefully stood up from the bed when Jayne entered the room and Sarah shouted out “Mommy!” and instead of saying, I am your father, Robby, and I always have been and I always will be I simply floated out of his realm, letting their mother replace me.
I walked down the hallway, the wall sconces flickering as I passed, and went into the master bedroom, closing the door behind me, and then I leaned against it, and for one brief, awful moment I had no idea who I was or where I was living or how I had ended up on Elsinore Lane, and I checked my jacket pocket for the Xanax that was always there and swallowed two, and then, very carefully and with great purpose, began undressing. I pulled a robe over the boxer shorts and T-shirt I was wearing and then I stepped into my bathroom and closed the door and started to weep about what Robby had said to me. After about thirty minutes passed and I came out of the bathroom, I simply said to Jayne, who was standing in front of a full-length mirror inspecting her thighs (cellulite paranoia), “I’m sleeping in here tonight.” She made no response. Rosa had already folded down the sheets and Jayne, wearing a T-shirt and white panties, slipped into bed and hid herself under the covers. I stood in the middle of the vast room, letting the Xanax wash through my system until I felt calm enough to say, “I want Sarah to get rid of that thing.”
Jayne reached for a script that lay on the nightstand and ignored me.
“I want her to get rid of that doll.”
“What?” she asked irritably. “What are you talking about now?”
“There’s something . . . unwholesome about that thing,” I said.
“What are you overreacting to now?” She flipped the script open and stared at it intently. It occurred to me that I couldn’t remember what day she was leaving for Toronto this week.
“She thinks it’s real or something.” My slacks were lying on my side of the bed, and I moved toward them and picked them up and draped them delicately on a wooden hanger—wanting Jayne to notice how careful and deliberate my movements were.
“Sarah’s fine” was all Jayne said when I walked out of the closet.
“But we were told that she doesn’t hold hands with the other kids at school.”
Her jaw tightened.
“I think she needs to be . . . tested again.” I paused. “I think we need to accept that.”
“Why? Just because she has good taste? Because she’s not the kind of kid who cares about winning Miss Popularity? Because judging by what a mistake it was sending the kids to that horrible school—well, good for her, and by the way . . .”—and now Jayne looked up from the script (its title was Fatal Rush)—“why are you suddenly so concerned?”
I realized that what the teachers had told Jayne that night had offended her deeply, beyond what I had even imagined. Either Jayne did not want to believe the truth about her children—that there were problems not even the meds could alter—or she could not accept that they were damaged in some way related to her behavior and the stress in the household. I wanted to connect with Jayne, but really, all I could think about were the awful drawings Sarah had made of the black doll swooping down on the house, and the things that I knew it was capable of.
“Well, it’s a peer culture, Jayne,” I said as gently as possible. “And that’s—”
“She’s just at an awkward age,” Jayne said, her eyes refocused on the script. And then: “She was tested again, and she attended group therapy for three months and the new meds seem to be working and the speech disability has minimized itself—in case you haven’t noticed.” Jayne turned a page in the script, but I could tell she wasn’t reading it.
“But you heard what the teachers were telling us.” I finally sat down on the bed. “They said she doesn’t know where her personal space ends and someone else’s begins and she can’t read facial expressions, and she’s nonresponsive when people are talking directly to her—”
“The ADD was ruled out, Bret,” Jayne said with barely contained fury.