The Motion of Puppets(84)

“I should have gone in right away. Maybe I could have saved him. One or the other.”

“Not your fault,” the nurse said. “You mustn’t blame yourself.”

“They had taken so long, you see. I fell asleep in the car, we’d been driving around all day, and it was two in the morning. They said to wait two hours, but I couldn’t stay awake. I should have knocked on the farmhouse and fetched those two kids. Demanded that they unlock the doors. Or gone into the barn myself.”

“You were tired. The hour was late. What finally woke you up?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. My memory is shot. It could be that I saw her, I think so. There was a light on in the barn streaming out through a hole in the wall by the silo, and a rope hanging down nearly to the ground. That’s when the puppet appeared.”

The nurse did not judge him but squeezed his hand and brushed the hair out of his eyes.

“A silhouette, really, but it could have been, I think it was one of them. But then I must have been dreaming. I closed my eyes and fell back asleep until the fist beat against the car window.”

“That’s when you first saw the girl?”

“Unless she and the puppet are one and the same. But how can that be? She was a real girl, as real as you are.”

“You need to rest,” the nurse said. “I’ll get you something to help you sleep.”

“No, wait. There was no puppet. They’re not alive. She was a runaway.…”

The girl banged on the glass, pleading for his help. Straw-colored hair, a simple dress but no shoes, no coat on that frozen night. Instinct took over, the chance to be a hero. He rolled down the window and saw the panic in her eyes, the clouds of condensation with every word. “Help me,” she said. “They’re after me. We’ve got to run.”

“Who is after you?”

“The Original must have found them out. Help me.”

“Who is the Original?”

“He will not let me go.”

“Get in the car,” Mitchell had said, and she walked stiff legged to the other side and bent awkwardly into the passenger seat.

She looked over her shoulder at the barn, light streaming through a hole in the wall near the silo. And then she turned to face him, terror in her eyes. “They will kill us. Go, go now.”

He started the engine, turned on the lights, and drove away recklessly down that lonesome road. The girl was hysterical at first, alternating between tears and laughter, at then she started to shiver, her teeth chattering, so he turned on the heat and she was fascinated by the blowing air. Intensely curious about the car, as if she was seeing one for the first time. She seemed to regard him with that same disbelief. Mitchell asked her name, but she said she did not remember, only that she had to get away, far away.

“They will kill him,” she said. “And then come to unmake us.”

Mitchell sobbed and looked into the nurse’s accepting eyes. “I should have stopped the car right then, turned around, seen to my friends. But the only thing that seemed to matter was that poor woman’s safety.”

“She was scared and traumatized. You did the right thing in bringing her to the hospital.” The nurse laid a hand against his chest until he fell asleep.

On that snowy afternoon in Theo’s office, he felt the remembered weight of that hand over his heart and wondered anew what leads some to love and others to miss it altogether. The runaway girl snuck out of the hospital before dawn without a trace, her name an alias, her destination unknown.

One of the policemen told him so. It had taken hours to convince them that his friends had gone missing in the night, but they finally agreed to accompany him back to the farm the following morning to take a look around, ask a few questions.

An older man answered the door, and one of the policemen introduced himself and Dr. Mitchell and explained the reason for their visit. When they shook hands, Mitchell felt the tensile strength in his grip, the rough calluses in his palm. The fellow spoke with a Quebecois accent and seemed put out by the intrusion on his privacy. “You mean to say that your friends actually broke into the barn to see the puppets? Whatever for? You can come by anytime and have a look around for yourself.”

“Did you notice anything unusual last night?” the policeman asked. “Any signs of disturbance?”

A booming bark came from the back of the house. “Tais-toi! Quiet! That dog, he sees and hears everything,” the Québec man said. “If your friends were here, he would have howled his fool head off.”

The policeman looked anxiously around the edge of the door for the dog. “And you were here all alone last night?”

“My wife, just the two of us. She is out shopping at the moment.”

Mitchell asked, “Not a blond-haired boy and a tall redheaded girl?”

“Ah, we have some help in the summer, but we are closed for the season. I can show you around if you like, but it is dead as can be.”

The man fetched his coat, and they walked toward the puppet museum. He asked Mitchell, “So, you are a doctor?”

“A Ph.D. in the classics. I teach Latin and Greek.”

“The great myths,” the Quebecois said. “I have a treat in store for you.”

They went into the barn and turned left, past the stalls, and went room by room with the quiet and uncanny dolls, neat and undiminished. Some looked as if they had been positioned and forgotten about for years. Dust covered their paper heads and gathered in the seams and wrinkles of their painted faces and hands. He led them past exhibits from children’s shows, Japanese bunraku, and fairy tales to a short flight of stairs into the barn’s great loft. Puppets crowded every available space, standing shoulder to shoulder and arranged to the rafters, great giant effigies intermixed with tiny marionettes. The puppeteer led Mitchell to the wall adjoining the silo where two new boards had been nailed in place next to the weathered gray wood.