It’s a glass jar in the form of a girl with pigtails. Like Alison herself. And it’s filled with candy. Red candies. Daddy shows Alison how to open the jar. The glass girl’s head twists off.
Mommy comes out to the back steps of the porch and waves. “Hey, you two.” Mommy wears her blue apron. Mommy is beautiful. She is so blonde her hair looks silver in the sunlight. She wears it in a bun on the back of her head. Alison calls back, as she always does, “Daddy’s home!” (as if Mommy can’t see that for herself). And he brought me a present.” (As if Mommy couldn’t guess.) They love Alison so much. Mommy calls out, “Just one of those before supper, Alison!”
“Just one,” Daddy repeats to Alison, and she nods obediently. Daddy picks up his briefcase and walks across the lawn as if he has forgotten that he has Dolly in one hand. Alison runs after him and tugs Dolly away from him. Privilege revoked. She hugs Dolly and the glass girl against her breast and watches Daddy give Mommy a big hug. They love each other, a whole lot. Alison watches them and smiles. But then she looks up from the porch, way way up, to the third floor of the big white house and he’s up there in one of the rooms looking out the window. Alison can’t smile any more. She takes a deep breath. Big Boy is home. The day is spoiled.
(“Why haven’t you said anything to Daddy and Mommy about Big Boy?” Lorraine asks, after an unusually long, glum silence on Alison’s part. Sometimes Alison isn’t willing to talk about Big Boy. Today she shifts Dolly from the crook of one arm to another, picks at a flaking lower lip while she slides down until almost horizontal in the big leather chair in Lorraine ’s office. Staring at her feet straight out in front of her. Her shoes are red slip-on Keds sneakers. “Because they’d be scared,” Alison says finally.) After dinner. After her bath. Mommy undoes Alison’s pigtails and brushes her hair smooth down over her shoulders while Alison reads to both of them from her storybook. Daddy comes upstairs to Alison’s room with cookies and milk. Then it’s lights out and time for sleep. Mommy forgets and shuts the bedroom door all the way. Alison calls her back. The door is left open a few inches. Mommy and Daddy go down the hall to their own bedroom. Alison lies awake with Dolly on her breast and waits for Big Boy.
(“How long has Big Boy been in the house?” Lorraine asks. Alison fidgets. “A long time. It’s his house.” Lorraine nods. “You mean Big Boy was there before you and Daddy and Mommy moved in.” Alison mimics Lorraine ’s sage nod. She fiddles with her box of crayons. The lid remains closed. Alison hasn’t drawn anything today. Not in the mood. “Only nobody knew about him,” Lorraine says. “So does that mean he hides during the day?” Alison nods again. She opens the Crayola box and pulls an orange crayon half out and looks at it with one eye squinched shut. “Do you know where?” Lorraine continues. Now Alison shrugs. “Oh, in the walls.” “So he lives in the walls.” “Yes,” Alison says, turning around so that she is on her knees in the big leather chair with her back to Lorraine. Well-traveled Dolly continues to stare at Lorraine with a single button eye. The other eye is missing. Dolly has yellow yarn curls around a sewn-on face.) Tell me a story, Big Boy says. It’s always the first thing he says to Alison on those nights when he comes out of the walls. The second thing is, Or I’II go down the hall to their room and hurt them.
Alison holds herself rigid beneath the covers so that he can’t see her shudder. She looks at his shadow on the section of wall between the windows with the shades half pulled down on the tree of night and stars so bright beyond the hill where the big white house is. She doesn’t look at Big Boy’s face very often, even when he comes to stand at the foot of her bed, lean against one of the bedposts with folded arms. One hand tucked into an armpit, the other, the hand with the missing finger, on his elbow. Big Boy’s hair is dark, short, mussed-looking. He’s only fifteen, but already he has a man’s shoulders and strength.
Alison clears her throat.
There was a beautiful butterfly, Alison begins, a thrum of desperation in her heart, who — who lived in a glass jar shaped like a little Dutch girl with pigtails.
(Bluefield detective sergeant Ed Lewinski says to Lorraine, over coffee in the cafeteria of the children’s hospital, “I did a global on the street name ‘Big Boy’. Nothing turned up. No wants, no arrest record, juvenile or adult.” Lorraine sips her coffee. “What about the missing finger? That’s an interesting detail, even for an imaginative six-year-old.” But Lewinski shakes his head. He’s having a doughnut with his coffee. The doughnut’s stale. After two bites he shoves the plate away. “Maybe that wasn’t just the kid’s imagination, Doc. She could’ve seen someone on staff here at the Med who has a missing finger. That could be a traumatic thing, for a kid who may have been traumatized already.” “May have been?” Lorraine says with a wry smile. “Traumatized? Oh, yes, deeply. Alison is quite a challenge, Ed.” Lewinski nods sympathetically. “Three months, but nobody’s come forward. Kids get abandoned all the time; we have to assume that’s what happened to Alison.” Lorraine doesn’t disagree. “How long before Family Services takes over?” he asks. Lorraine says firmly, “She’s not emotionally prepared to go into a foster home. Alison shows no willingness to interact with other children here. Abandonment can crush a child. In Alison’s case her psychic refuge, her protection, is a vivid imagination. Betrayed by her real mother and/or father, she’s blanked them from her mind and created new ones — parents who adore her and never, never, would do such a terrible thing to her.” Lewinski thinks this over. “I understand her need to invent new parents. But what’s all this about ‘Big Boy’? How does he fit into her, what d’ya call it, psychological schematic?” Lorraine checks her watch, says, “Let you know when I know, Ed. I have a couple of ideas I want to explore.” They walk out of the cafeteria together. “Do something different with your hair this weekend, Doc?” “I cut it. Two weeks ago. Some detective you are.” Lewinski has a fair face that blushes easily. “Seeing our girl this afternoon? Sorry I couldn’t turn up ‘Big Boy’ for real; might’ve been some help to you. Bad for Alison, but a break for us cops.” Lorraine, already on her way to the elevators, turns and stares at him. Lewinski laughs. “I mean, Bluefield doesn’t need another teenage Strangler, no matter what his name is.”) Three a.m.
The low drone of a siren in the night. Alison wakes up on her back, looking at the flush of ambulance light on the ceiling of the small room. Dolly in the crook of a thin arm. Alison knowing instantly that she’s in the Wrong Place, where they keep the crazy children. She must get back to the White House on the Hill, to her beautiful room with wallpaper and the white cases filled with dolls and books that Daddy made for her in his workshop. But something bad has happened. Out There. On a lonely street. With trees to hide behind, shadows. The red light swirling on her ceiling, a crackle of radio voices too distant to be understood distracts her; she can’t leave the Wrong Place.
Alison trembles.
And becomes aware of someone standing in a corner opposite the iron bed in this bleak room that smells like medicines, stale peepee.
Oh no.
“Wake you up?” Big Boy says.
“What are you doing h-here? You’re never s’posed to be here.”
“Tell me about it,” Big Boy says; and he moves a couple of steps, to where the light from the single window with its chickenwire glass and shabby shade bathes his face in a hellfire glow. “But if you’re here, then I have to be here, don’t I?”