The Guest Room(83)

She sighed, half listening as the girls made fun of some of the Collectible Barbies. At the moment, it was the Twilight Barbies that were giving them the giggles. The Divergent Barbies. Carlisle. Edward. Tris.

Whatever happened to naming all the men Ken? Whatever happened to Skipper?

Near the Barbies was a wall of Monster High dolls, a group even more anorexic than the Barbies. The Monster High kids had emaciated stick-figure bodies and balloon-like, goth white heads that were dramatically out of proportion with their arms and legs. They had fashion model eyelashes and pouty red lips, miniskirts and high heels. Names at once ghoulish and suggestive. Honey Swamp. Draculaura. Catty Noir.

Beside them was a line called Fairy Tale High. The classics get slutty. The Little Mermaid in fishnets. Cinderella in leggings and a croptop. Alice in Wonderland in a blue-and-white-striped micro-dress that barely covered her ass.

“Emiko has those leggings,” her daughter was saying, as she pointed at Cinderella.

“I love them,” said Claudia. “I want a pair. They’re so hot.”

An expression came to her: You’re a doll. Translation? You’ve done me a solid. Thank you.

She’s a doll. Translation? She’s pretty. She’s compliant.

A doll. Synonyms? A babe. A chick. A sweetie.

Hours ago—museums ago—Richard had texted her that it was the girl he thought was named Sonja who he’d identified on the mortuary slab. The chemical blonde. She had not asked what next. What now. She had not asked whether this meant that the girl who had led him upstairs was still alive, or whether she was dead, too, and her body had simply not yet turned up. But it would. She had simply asked if he was okay. He’d texted he was.

Okay. She had no idea what that word meant in the context of a morgue.

“I like her dress,” Melissa was saying. She was pointing at Alice in Wonderland. Slut Alice in Wonderland.

“I like that outfit,” said Claudia, motioning at the vest that barely hid Belle’s breasts. Slut Belle’s breasts.

In all fairness, Kristin knew that once upon a time her Barbies had been pretty slutty. She had often undressed her Barbies and Kens, and allowed the dolls to go to town on each other. Spreading the girls’ legs as wide as she could. She’d been doing this while playing in the semidarkness underneath a robin’s-egg-blue blanket that she had draped across her parents’ dining room table.

Good Lord, it had only been two or three years ago that she and Richard had been laughing as the two of them polished off a bottle of wine at all the ways they had encouraged their daughter’s Barbies to perform unspeakable acts, while Melissa’s head was turned or she was searching for a particular Barbie gown in that Tucker Tote. It was how they kept their sanity, they had confessed to each other—yes, they both did it—as they sat on the floor with their girl and played with her dolls for hours.

All that had been changed by the condom. All that had been subsumed by the condom.

Here was the inescapable reality: ten years from now if she did not instantly make the synaptic leap to rubber when she thought Barbie, it would only be due to Alzheimer’s. Early-onset Alzheimer’s. Or, maybe, a traumatic brain injury. She looked around at the walls of the toy store, which were pink. She noted that the paisley swirls on the floor were pink. The lighting was a little pink. Sure, it was possible that a decade from now she might also think pink when she thought Barbie. She very likely might think plastic.

But first and forever? She was always going to think rubber.

She looked at her watch. They should probably continue on their way to Grand Central. They had to catch a train home.

…

Richard knew this was neither a vision nor a dream, and his first reaction was flight. He should continue right past his driveway. Instead of braking, he should hit the gas pedal and drive up the thin street off Pondfield Road. Drive around the block. Just take a moment and try and figure out what the hell the girl was thinking. But he didn’t. His brother might do that, but he wouldn’t. Instead he glided up his gently sloping driveway and came to a stop just before the garage doors.

The girl was sitting on the front stoop of his house, her chin resting on the knuckles of one hand, a cigarette dangling from the other. She was wearing a knit cap with the Giants’ logo—his team, a sign or a coincidence he couldn’t have said—and sunglasses, but he knew instantly it was her. He could see enough of her face. Her lips. Her posture. He recognized the leather jacket.

But he would have known it was her regardless of what she was wearing. It wouldn’t have taken a sixth sense. It took only a glimpse.

She didn’t move when he shut off the car engine and pulled the key from the ignition, but he could tell that she was watching him. He was watching her. She was wearing a miniskirt and boots, and he had one of those thoughts that was comically inappropriate in his mind, and caused his lips to quiver upward ever so slightly: What would the neighbors think? Hot girl in a miniskirt and boots, smoking a cigarette on my steps?

Well, never mind what they thought. They couldn’t possibly think less of him. He couldn’t possibly think less of himself.

Mostly, he realized, he was smiling because Alexandra was alive. That detective was wrong, all wrong. Thank God. (Had he murmured those two splendid words aloud in his seat? He thought he had.) Her decomposing body wasn’t about to wash ashore somewhere in Brooklyn or on Staten Island, or bump for hours against the stanchion of a Navy Yard dock before someone called 911 or fished it from the water. Nope. She had wound up…here. In Westchester. And she was, quite clearly, breathing. Not decapitated. Not drowned. He was so relieved that he was shivering ever so slightly when he climbed from the car. She didn’t stand until he had crossed the driveway and marched all the way up the slate walkway and front steps. When she finally did rise, she held her cigarette away from the two of them and bowed her head against his chest. He felt the wool cap against his neck and the earpiece to her sunglasses against his collarbone. He felt her whole body lean into him.