“No cigs, Juanita.” I shrugged as I got Dani buckled into her car seat. I didn’t like her getting too close to any of the group house residents. I had no reason to think they were dangerous, but with people like that you might not know until it was too late. “We don’t smoke.” I nodded in Dani’s direction as if that explained everything Juanita needed to know.
Her hands dropped to her sides all of a sudden, as if her battery had run out. Then she groped in her pocket for something that turned out to be a piece of paper. It looked familiar. When she handed it to me I saw why. It was the note I’d left in the alley in case the lost doll’s owner came looking for it.
Juanita handed me my own note and wrapped her arms around herself, the gesture of someone cold or in need of comfort, and shook her head back and forth so hard it looked very likely she was doing her damaged brain more harm. “Babee. Doll. Man keys. Man keys!”
“We didn’t know it was your baby.”
“I’m a big girl!” Dani shouted from the backseat of our
“Not you, honey.” I hated myself a little every time I used the word “honey” with one of my children, especially when I was in the kind of mood I was in this morning. “She’s talking about her baby.”
“Baby DOLL.” The Ls of the last word hung in the cold air. Juanita gave me a big gummy smile that looked more anxious than happy. I saw now why she kept her arms wrapped around herself — she was shaking. “You get it back.” Her head bobbled forward and back, forward and back. “Keys. He need it.”
“All right,” I said. She was more nuts than I’d thought. I made a mental note to tell Dave to keep an extra-close eye on the kids when she was around. “Sure.”
“You get it, okay? Okay?” The arms were flailing again.
Dani made a noise that might have been a giggle and might have been something closer to fear. Kids always know when someone isn’t right.
“I’ll try.” I gave Dani’s car seat straps one more tug, even though I knew they were tight enough. She let out a howl of protest. “Sorry, honey. Mommy’s finished.” Juanita watched us pull away from the curb, her mouth forming the same words over and over.
That weekend I dug out the doll Dani had found. It was in even worse shape than Juanita. It had been loved hard, if you could call that kind of treatment love. Some people did. The doll’s head hung at an angle that would have killed a human baby, and if there were a Doll Social Services they’d want to know who’d tried to open up Baby’s belly with a screwdriver and where her missing leg had gotten to. I flipped the switch on her back — she was supposed to cry, probably, or say — but nothing happened. A piece of crap like that wasn’t worth wasting a couple of good batteries on. I had enough baby noise in my life already.
If Juanita wanted a baby, I thought, she could at least have one in decent shape. When Dave took the kids to the park for the usual Sunday afternoon run — “I’m going to run ’em like dogs,” he told me, “tire ’em out good” — I rummaged through the plastic bins of discarded toys in the basement. Sure enough, there was a baby doll in one of them, a chubby thing in a onesie with stains all down the front from Dani’s attempts to feed it pureed peas. Dani had moved on to other things — horses, Barbies, getting her little brother into trouble. The doll’s blue eyes looked a little crazy now, and it was a couple shades lighter than Juanita’s, but at least it had all its appendages.
I took it over to the group house — I’d never had cause to venture up those steps — and knocked hard enough to be heard over the TV that was always on. The day caregiver, one of a rotating 24/7 crew whose names I never learned, answered the door. He was a beat-up-looking guy in his fifties who wore the same shapeless clothes as his charges. If you spent enough time around people like that you couldn’t help picking up a few of their habits.
He looked ticked off when I told him what I wanted, but he shouted Juanita’s name into the dim interior of the house anyway. From one of the upstairs rooms I heard a radio playing salsa and wondered if it was WHFS, the indie radio station I’d listened to growing up. It had gone Latin a few months ago. I didn’t listen to the radio much anymore, but I missed that station. It was the soundtrack of my youth.
Juanita came down the stairs like a ghost. She grabbed the doll from my arms, held it out a little distance from her, and gazed into its crazy eyes as if she saw the very truth of heaven there.
“Nut job,” the caretaker said under his breath.
I thanked him anyway and left Juanita alone with Baby.
I had a bad dream that night, the kind that makes you wake yourself up just to stop it. But when I was fully awake I couldn’t remember what had scared me. I sat up in bed and listened — no noise at all from the children’s rooms. I listened for the teenagers but they had all gone home. It was almost 5 o’clock. A mockingbird sang his morning warm-ups in the park across the street. Dave breathed next to me, the intake and outtake of his breath regular as waves along a quiet beach. The only noise from the street was a bus that groaned its way to a halt at the four-way stop on our corner, then heaved itself into motion again and was gone.
The noise reminded me — trash day. The trucks would be coming through before it got much lighter, and as usual Dave had forgotten to put the can out the night before. I shrugged on my bathrobe and felt my way down the stairs to the back door.
I’d just pulled the can out from its spot next to the garage when I saw her. She lay face down in the little walkway that cut between the rental storage units across the alley. Someone had dragged her behind the chain-link fence to die.
She had on that ratty parka, the green of it dark where it had absorbed some of the blood. I couldn’t see where it all came from, just that there was a lot of it spread out around the body, dark and congealed into wrinkles like the skin on a cup of chocolate pudding.
“Mommy?” All of a sudden Dani was standing next to me, eyes full of sleep. I didn’t have time to stop her from seeing what lay there — I hadn’t heard her follow me out the door. She was pointing at an object half-covered by Juanita’s body. “Mommy, is that my doll’s leg?”
“Don’t tell them you gave it to her.” Dave sat at the kitchen table with a cup of black coffee between his large hands. He never drank his coffee black. That’s how I knew it was serious — as if a body in the alley hadn’t told me that already. “You’re asking for trouble.”
“Trouble is finding a woman shot dead in the alley behind my house.”
“They don’t have to know it came from you.” Family life had brought out the conservative, don’t-make-waves side of Dave. It wasn’t my favorite thing about him. “What possessed you, anyway? You hate those people.”
“I don’t hate them. I just worry about the kids.”
The cops were still out back doing whatever cops do when they have a murder scene on their hands. It only looked like they were standing around shooting the shit with cups of coffee in their hands. They’d sat me down at my own kitchen table and taken a statement, then gone over it again to make sure I had my story straight. There wasn’t much to tell, after all.
“Haven’t had a bag lady in a while,” one of them, a fat little guy whose belly kept trying to bust out of his uniform, said to his partner. I liked the partner — he’d kept himself trim and he had nice manners for a cop. “Little long in the tooth to be playing with dolls.”
“She wasn’t a bag lady,” I said. “She lived down the block.”