The Dollhouse (5 page)

He leaned in close. “Kiss me.”

She did so, a fast touch of the lips. He let go of her hand only to encircle her with both arms and smash his mouth into hers. She pushed away with her palms, hating the doughy feel of his chest and the rancid taste of his tongue.

“Stop!” She tried to cry out, but he muffled her with his mouth. His hands clutched at her body, her breasts and between her legs. If she didn't do something, he'd be on top of her and she'd be pinned beneath his weight.

Too late. He pulled her down off the rock. She lay on her back, panting, and he kneeled up and began undoing his belt. She only had one chance.

The dirt was gritty beneath her hands, loose. She grabbed two handfuls and flung it into Walter's face. He cried out, and she bent her knees
and kicked hard with both feet into his groin. He flew backward, rolling on his back with his hands cupping himself. At first he didn't make a sound, until a high-pitched cry turned into a bellow.

There was no time to search for Stella's shoes. Darby turned and ran, screaming out Stella's name. She followed the road until it curved back out of the park, where there was light and people and safety. Her umbrella dress was torn and dirty. Stella was still in the park, possibly in danger, but Darby couldn't go back in and look for her. As she ran to the hotel, she looked for a policeman or a police car in vain.

“You've missed curfew.” Mrs. Eustis sat in one of the lobby chairs, a clipboard in her hands. “And you're a mess. Not a good way to begin your stay here at the Barbizon, Miss McLaughlin.”

“I was with Stella, we were . . .”

“You were what?”

If she told her what she and Stella had done, they'd both be in trouble. And she couldn't do that to her only friend.

“We got separated. I'm sorry, I got lost.”

“Stella came back fifteen minutes ago. You should have stayed closer to her and you wouldn't be in trouble now.”

Stella was back already? “Yes, ma'am.”

In the elevator, the same girl was working the gates and the lever. “You okay? You look like you had a tough night.” She had shiny dark hair and a Spanish accent. Her brown eyes scanned Darby's face.

“I'm fine.” Darby tried to wipe her nose with her fingers, as a dam of tears threatened to break through any moment.

“Use my handkerchief,” offered the girl.

“Thanks. I'll get it back to you.”

A couple of girls dressed in bathrobes and curlers stared when Darby emerged from the elevator.

Stella popped out of her room, toothbrush in her hand, and paused for a split second before coming forward.

“Where did you go?” Darby whimpered, detesting the weakness in her voice. “How did you get back so fast?”

“We didn't see you when we came down from the rock. And I couldn't find my shoes anywhere in the dark. Where did
you
go?”

“That boy—Walter—attacked me in the park. I missed curfew.”

Before Stella could reply, Candy emerged from the bathroom and scrutinized Darby closely. “How did she do?”

Darby blinked with confusion. “What do you mean? How did I do what?”

“Walter, right? Did he try to get up your skirt? He tried the same thing on one of the other girls last week.”

Darby turned to Stella, looking for clarification.

Stella raised a pale hand to her neck. “I didn't know any of this. You've got to believe me.”

Candy piped up. “He's an ass. But he's my cousin, so you better not say anything.”

“I don't understand.” Darby balled up the handkerchief in her fist. “Why would you set him up with me on purpose? He tried to hurt me.”

“My, my, so dramatic,” Candy tsked. “He didn't hurt you at all. You're standing here talking to me, right? So he got a little randy and tore your dress. It wasn't all that great to begin with.”

Darby began to weep. She knew she should hold it in, return to her room, but the sobs came fast, wrenching sounds that erupted from her very core. She dropped her chin to her chest and wrapped her arms about herself, totally alone. The girls stared and Stella took one hesitating step toward her, and then backed quickly into her room.

She was a failure. The letter to Mother was ruined, as was her favorite dress that was really an ugly dress. Tomorrow first thing, she'd pack up and leave for Ohio. This was what happened when you tried to live a larger life.

A voice boomed down the hallway. “That's enough. Leave her alone!”

Darby looked up as the elevator girl stormed toward them. She must've watched the entire scene.

“Come with me.” She took Darby by the arm and spit on the floor, her saliva just missing Candy's furry slippers.

Shocked, Darby allowed the elevator girl to lead her away as Candy yelled down the hall at them. “You'll have to clean that up, Esme, you guttersnipe.”

The girl yelled something back in Spanish that Darby couldn't understand.

Not that it mattered. New York City had beaten her down already. She hadn't even lasted two days.

New York City, 2016

T
he WordMerge office was housed in a seedy block in the mid-Thirties, far west of Broadway, next to a McDonald's and a gas station that primarily served taxi drivers. Rose had walked over from her Lexington subway stop in an effort to clear her head, but ended up feeling damp and sweaty in the morning heat. Her mind whirled with what she would say to Griff next, what she should have said last night. So many unspoken possibilities. She clung to the idea that she could change his mind with the right sentence, the right phrase.

“Pitch meeting in my office in ten minutes,” Tyler announced as he whizzed past the editors' desks.

After he slammed the door shut to his office, Rose moaned out loud. “Anyone have anything juicy?” she asked no one in particular.

“God, no.” Jenna, who sat in the cubicle next to her, rubbed her eyes. “I bet you do, though. You're the queen of pitch meetings. I just wish some of your glitter would rub off on me.”

In fact, Tyler shot down as many of Rose's ideas as anyone else's. But by now she knew there was no point in correcting Jenna.

The rest of the office, all ten of them, were bright young things. She'd figured, when she'd arrived three months ago, that she'd be treated like anyone else, but of course her notoriety had preceded her. The other
reporters often turned to her for advice, and three asked her to be their mentor her very first day. Which was ridiculous since all of them were more capable than she was. Maybe not in writing skills, but they were faster and far more adaptable in an environment that valued speed and flexibility.

When Rose worked in television, there'd been a sense of camaraderie, as the producers and editors worked through the night on a story and chugged coffee outside the editing suites. WordMerge exuded an entirely different energy. The two girls who sat on either side of her wore earphones most of the day, nodding in time to the beat, like sunflowers bobbing in the wind.

Tyler emerged once again. “Turns out I have a call with the Coast in ten minutes. My office, let's go.”

Being pushed around by a grizzled news producer was one thing, but having a baby-faced neophyte do it was harder to take. She joined the others and trooped into his small office. He preferred having meetings here, versus the large conference room down the hall that they shared with an app design company. The employees squeezed into corners, perched on the windowsill, and several leaned against the walls. Rose snagged one of the few chairs.

“As you know, we're here to save journalism, one story at a time.”

She hated when he started out with this speech. It was so forced and saccharine. Better to save the rah-rah for potential investors.

“I want to hear the best you've got. But keep in mind: Right now, we need stories that will go viral, stories that fly, even if they don't have the same substance we'd want in other circumstances.”

“Wait, I'm confused.” Rose should keep her mouth shut. But she couldn't help herself. “You've always said you wanted quality reporting most of all. If you want viral, we might as well do cat videos, right?”

Tyler was happy to confess that he'd earned a master's in journalism from Stanford on a whim, as a way to kill time until his trust fund matured. But in his preferred version of the story, he was a changed person by the time he graduated, inspired to save a dying profession from itself.
WordMerge, he promised, was the answer, offering old-school reporting in a form that would appeal to modern readers. The guy was a complete prick and endlessly self-impressed, but his pitch was a winner—he had wooed Rose and many others with passion and tenacity. And yet the boy wonder was on edge these days, worried. How much of his investment had he blown through already?

No one spoke for a few tense beats.

“No, Rose. No cat videos. I'm talking about a piece about a soldier with PTSD who overcomes it with the help of his gluten-free diet. Or something about the Peruvian tea everyone's drinking in order to find a higher plane of consciousness. It's becoming clear that we need to marry news and entertainment to get ourselves off the ground.”

The other staffers murmured their approval.

Rose tapped her pen on her notebook. The others all carried iPads. She might as well have brought an inkwell and feather. “Look, I'm all for originality. But I thought we were staying away from trendy pieces.”

“We were, last week. But I need to increase page views. I'm meeting with some potential backers and I want to show them we have the click-throughs to grow into a major news hub. Any ideas?”

Jenna piped up. “How about two investment bankers fighting for custody of their pet iguana?”

“Iguanas aren't photogenic. Neither are investment bankers, for that matter. Next.”

“Or I could do something on the influx of young Mexican immigrants. We're talking kids, crossing the border alone.”

“I like that. Find me a kid who crossed because they wanted to be on reality TV. Something with a twist.”

“Are you kidding?” Rose leaned forward. “That's impossible, and strange.”

“I'm not saying that exactly. I mean something along those lines. You know what I mean, right, Jenna?”

Jenna nodded.

“What do you have for me, Rose?”

Normally, she'd have a dozen possibilities at her fingertips, but she was so addled from lack of sleep, nothing clicked in.

Tyler sat back in his chair and began orbiting, as they all liked to call it, using a small white rubber ball suspended by a thin string from the white ceiling tiles above his desk. When he got irritated, he'd fling it in wide circles around the room, catching it as it flew by him, then sending it back around. Anyone close by was forced to weave and duck to avoid getting hit.

“Have you ever heard of the Barbizon Hotel for Women?”

Every female intern and editor nodded. Rose smiled. Sylvia Plath hadn't died in vain.

“What about it?” Tyler asked.

“Back in the day, it was the place to stay if you were a single girl in New York City. Turns out there are a dozen or so older women who still live there—they were grandfathered in after it went condo. I could do a story about what their lives are like now.”

“I'm sorry, but why does
our
audience care about a bunch of old ladies?” Tyler swung the ball so violently, Rose was worried it would break free of its tether.

He had a point. Why should WordMerge readers care about relics from another century who still wore white gloves to walk their dogs?

Because she recognized a kernel of her own life in theirs, and so would other women. The pitch came to her in a flash. “There's one with a terrible scar down her face. She was stabbed by a maid in the 1950s, apparently. The maid then fell to her death from the terrace. I could talk to her, use her tragedy to draw readers into the story.”

He stopped the ball in mid-flight and looked at her with interest. “How bad's the scar?”

“Um, I'm not sure. She always wears a veil.”

“Get her to show her face, get photos, video, and we'll do something about the tragedy. We'll revisit it, and then find something that's happened today to set against it. Find that model who got slashed in the eighties. We can compare and contrast.”

A truly ghastly idea. But Rose knew better than to say so. “I'll see what I can do.”

“Excellent. And bring in Jason for visuals.”

“Jason?”

“Freelance video guy. He'll be able to guide you so you don't get all mushy on me. Let's go, who's next?”

Rose sat back, annoyed. At least he'd finally stopped flinging that ball. And she'd gotten the green light.

After Tyler gave his usual, annoying dismissal (“Back to your cubes, warriors!”), Rose went downstairs and picked up a cup of coffee from the lobby store. She headed outside, south down Tenth Avenue, and checked her phone. Nothing from Griff, not a text, not a voice message. The morning roar of the traffic was deafening, so she turned east onto a quieter cross street and dialed.

“Rose.”

She was surprised he'd picked up, after the way she'd stormed out last night, spending a few hours with Maddy at the bar before returning to a Griff-less apartment. She had to give him kudos for facing the music.

“Griff, we have to talk.” Everything she said was preprogrammed, the litany of sentences passed on through time when one person rejected another.

“I know, and we will. I am so sorry about this.”

“Why do you have to go back? I had no idea; you didn't give me any warning you were unhappy.”

He sighed. “It's not like that. I realized it's not about my happiness. I am happy, happier, with you. But until the girls are more stable, I can't leave them. We think Miranda has a serious illness.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's very possible she has bipolar disorder. We're trying to find out more.”

“I'm sorry.” She couldn't argue with him. Sicknesses of the mind were just as terrible as those of the body, no different from cancer. Like her
father, spiraling out of control, getting worse every day. “What are you going to do?”

“We're finding a treatment center for her. It's complicated, and that's why I have to be around right now.”

“Do you think, once the crisis has passed, you might come back? That we could pick up where we leave off?”

“Perhaps. If you want that. I don't know if you'd want that by then.”

“Neither do I.”

Of course she would. Why kid herself? She'd invested three years in their relationship, and letting go wasn't easy.

“God, Rose, this is torture. I know I keep saying this, but I'm so sorry to do this to you.”

His voice was heavy, sad. If only he'd confided in her, told her what was happening. She knew Miranda was difficult, but assumed it was typical teen drama. A passing my-parents-ruined-my-life-by-getting-divorced kind of thing.

“I just wish you'd said something sooner. I might have helped.”

“It's not for you to fix. It's for me and Connie.”

Rose checked her watch. She should be getting back. “Can we keep on talking?”

“Of course. I'm going to Albany with the mayor for a few days. We'll talk when I get back.”

Back in her cubicle twenty minutes later, Rose's phone rang. Maddy calling for an update. She whispered a quick rehash of her conversation with Griff.

“You're out of your mind.” Maddy was never one to hold back. “You need to be getting angry, not acting like an understanding suck-up.”

That hurt. “I'm not sucking up.” Rose ducked her head down, hoping for a smidgen of privacy. “He's going through something awful, just like me and my dad. If I'm calm and reasonable about the situation, he might come to his senses later.”

“Do you really want a man like that?”

“What, one who cares for his children? Yes, in fact, I do.”

“Plenty of men get divorced and care for their children without having to go back to their ex-wives. It's more than that. He's giving you the sympathetic version because he knows you'll fall for it.”

If she were Maddy, she'd toss Griff off the nearest cliff, but his actions weren't so cut-and-dried in Rose's mind. Griff was a man with a sick child, desperate to make her better.

A sharp pain seared along her scalp, the beginnings of a bad headache. Maddy had a point, Griff had a point. She didn't know what to think.

“I'm not prepared to blow it all up yet. And I don't think he is, either.” She rubbed her temples with her thumb and ring finger. “Please, Maddy, I need your support. Neither of us has kids, so we can't really know what's going on in his head.”

“Touché. I have enough stress from my sweet baby stepmonsters, never mind dealing with genetic offspring. But promise me you won't wait around for him for too long. You deserve better.”

Rose promised and hung up, then lost herself in the research for the Barbizon story, a welcome distraction from her troubles.

The apartment was as desolate as ever when Rose finally made it home. Griff's suits, the ones he wore every day, were missing from the closet, his sock and underwear drawers empty and left half-open.

She flung herself on the bed, hoping for a good cry, but when no tears came, she got up and sat by the window. Would it be better if she tossed the rest of his suits out onto the street below?

No. She needed to bide her time, let him return to Connie and see how awful it was, then allow him back with certain provisions. They had to get married, buy furniture, see a counselor. She mentally checked off a list one by one. If only she'd hired an interior designer to furnish the damn apartment in one fell swoop. Perhaps if he'd felt more settled, or even financially invested, he'd have stuck around. At the very least, then she'd have a nice place to stay, for a while. Instead of this tomb.