The Motion of Puppets(38)
“How is it that you are alive like us?”
Marmee lifted one eyebrow and leered at her.
Kay continued, “Do I know you? You look familiar.…”
“You mean to say you don’t recognize your old friend? Oh, the Quatre Mains would be so happy to know how readily and easily you’ve been fooled.” She laughed and hunched her shoulders and rocked on her heels. “Are you sure you can’t guess?”
“Something about you reminds me of the one we called the Hag.”
“That’s it!” Marmee touched the tip of a knitting needle to the side of her wooden nose. “First try, good for you. Isn’t it wonderful? Aren’t I marvelous? They took off my old head and gave me a new one. Freshened up the stuffing and patched me right well. I feel forty years younger.”
Kay wanted to reach out to touch her, see if she was real, but a tremor ran along her arm from fingers to shoulder. A bubble grew inside where her stomach used to be, and she felt dizzy enough to sit. “How could it be? You are still you? Not someone else, for you sure look different.”
“Looks aren’t everything, chick. There’s such a thing as essence. What’s inside you. I’ve been all kinds of puppets over the years. Once I played a bawdy in a honky-tonk show, and once I was a rod puppet on a well-known TV show for children. But things change. As long as you hold on to your essence, you have everything.”
“But you were taken away with the Judges. What about the Judges? What about their essence?”
Drawn in by their conversation, the other puppets eavesdropped, curious but quiet. Marmee looked about the circle and confronted the question.
“They were unmade. You’ll find what’s left of them in a box of spare parts. The stuffing back in Québec. Maybe it was the Original’s idea, or maybe it was a whim of the Quatre Mains. He saw no need for them any longer, so…” She clapped the dust from her hands and wiped them clean.
“You mean they are gone? For good?”
“For good, for ill, for what you will. But, yes, they are kaput. No more.”
The others seemed unfazed, accepting the finality of her pronouncement quite readily. Drifting away in twos and threes, they talked quietly among themselves. Nix cracked a joke that made Mr. Firkin laugh and then chide him with a warning of “too soon.” Puppets changing shape, disappearing altogether. Kay’s notions of order were disturbed, so she found a dark corner in which to hide and contemplate and take exception to just who ruled the world.
*
Theo spent a rainy Saturday archiving all the photographs of Kay he could find. From a fat album, he scanned in their wedding photographs and then dragged a few dozen images from the social media sites she haunted. He reached into the cloud and ran off prints until the color ink faded to sketches. He plucked another hundred off an old digital camera he had forgotten about, and from his phone, he downloaded a batch from Québec, the latest, the last. Some that she had taken he had never seen, and he searched for some clues, but there was nothing. Any image from that night was locked in her phone, wherever that might be, wherever she might be. He saved what could be found to the hard drive and then made two separate backups on his portables to leave nothing to chance.
A thousand faces. A thousand memories.
They had met through friends of a mutual friend at a rooftop party in Manhattan. Kay was with a man who worked in marketing. Theo had shown up alone and was having a miserable time until he met Kay on a corner of the roof overlooking the Flatiron Building. The summer humidity dampened everyone, and she had taken off her light jacket and stood in a sleeveless blouse and skirt, her bare legs and arms alluring. With a swizzle stick, she stabbed at the lemon in her melting drink. She smote him with a smile. They were the last to leave the party.
Reaching for another tissue, he wiped his wet face and blew his nose. He was surprised at how quickly he could be torn apart. The photographs were safely preserved, at least, but they only recorded a part of her story. Kay’s mother had the other pieces to the mosaic. On their trips to Vermont, she had shown him all the scrapbooks—baby’s first steps, school days, the gymnastic meets all duly memorialized by newspaper clippings and faded ribbons pressed between the leaves.
“I’m sure Theo doesn’t want to look through all that stuff,” Kay had said. “Don’t subject him to that torture, Mother.”
“But I do, I really do,” he said. “I want to know what you were like before we met.”
Dolores flashed a triumphant smile. “Now you see, Kay. I know him better than you do. Come sit by me.…”
How long had it been since he had spoken with his mother-in-law? Two months? Their conversations had been a chore and a heartache, her questions filled with recriminations over Kay’s disappearance. At first, her tone had been accusatory, looking for signs of his culpability, but in time he thought he had convinced her of his baffled grief. When he returned to the city to begin the school year, Theo tried to reassure her, despite the lack of any news. “How could you give up?” she had asked. “Why aren’t you staying in Québec to keep looking for her?” He explained that he could not quit his job. Their savings had been slowly draining away, and while the college might have considered a leave of absence, the truth was he needed the distraction of the classroom. And his translation. Thank God for Muybridge.