Authors: MT Dahl
Hollow Dolls, The (40 page)
But Melanie, Nigreda, where are you? This is just a dream. It will
all disappear and they’d be together and realize the truth. Surely, it was the
Man-Rabbit. Another lesson of his. For her to learn about love with Winnie. The
touch of the tablet brought Mel back. She looked at Kutha.
“Will you behave on the trip home, no bullshit?” said Kutha.”
Melanie looked at her like she wasn’t real.
That was her last moment of hope. She looked in Kutha’s eyes and
nodded. She was Melanie. She felt her pony touch her neck. She clutched Kutha’s
hand.
“Please,” cried Melanie.
Kutha lit the screen back up. She poured another drink, then paced
around.
Melanie leaned into screen watching Winnie as she smiled away and
talked to Kim Li. Winnie’s face spun toward the camera. Freckles. The corners
on her mouth. Her popcorn nose. Melanie painted a smile. Then the screen seemed
to blur and fade away. It was her own eyes, letting go. Letting go of Winnie.
Tears came.
Cara was right. Sometimes you don’t have a choice.
“Slave,” murmured Melanie.
Kutha picked up the iPad and turned to pack it away in her purse.
Under the table Mel fingered the blade out of the bone handle with
the wolf on it. She felt the edge with her thumb, her eyes completely out of
focus now.
“Bye Win,” she whispered. “Sorry.”
Vertical against her wrist.
She pressed down hard this time.
~*~
Editor’s
Note: Winnie had written an epilogue ahead of time in Guangdong and she
insisted it be in its proper place on this page. You know how Winnie gets that
look. But Mel over-ruled her.
Winnie
is still the dark princess though.
And
one tricky bitch.
Winnie is
the trickster
with the
charred raven
feathers...
42
Kutha turned back to Melanie after she put the iPad away. She saw
the blood globs under the chair, then caught Mel as she was about to fall from
the stool. Kutha had dealt with enough emergency wounds in her day. Acting
quickly she grabbed the dishtowels and tied a them tight directly on the wound
and higher as a tourniquet. She dialled and held Melanie close.
“Melanie!” she cried. Kutha had tears now, streaming onto her
blouse.
As Kutha held her, Melanie’s hand lifted up delirious then and
back down again stamping blood prints onto Kutha’s five hundred dollar grey silk
skirt.
“Why, why? You silly fool. I love you to bits. We all do!”
After the call, Kutha held Mel’s limp body as it teetered on the
stool.
“Hurry Hattie. Please hurry!”
43
“Melanie, you have been such a bad girl,” said Lilly. “I’ve had everyone
out looking for you.”
“Sorry mum.” She was back in London now. Patched up and
embarrassed as hell. Mel had designed all sorts of intricate awful things to do
to Lilly on the plane flight back. Lilly had pulled her apart from Winnie which
was punishable by death. She’d lied to her all these years, not telling her she
was really a slave...So many awful things had burned inside her on the flight.
But once she was back at work, Lilly was still ‘mum’. There was
something in Lilly, a governance that Mel never understood. Whatever evil Mel had
in mind vanished the moment they were back together. In a way it was like Lilly
was
her mother, at least the only one she’d ever really known who cared
for her.
“Why is it so wrong for me to be with Winnie?”
“She can’t have you Melanie. It’s simple. You’re mine. You always
have been and always will be.”
“What about when you...You know?”
“When I die, Kutha will be in charge and then it will be up to
her.”
“So is it just about ownership? Possession of the slave girl?”
“No Melanie. It’s more than that.” Lilly’s face looked stressed.
She was holding back something. Mel watched Lilly carefully as she stood from
her desk and walked around the office. She was trying to decide on something.
Pacing. Mel had seen her do that plenty. It reminded her of herself doing the
very same thing when she was stressed.
Lilly picked up a family photo.
“Twenty years ago I had another daughter Melanie. She was taken
from me.”
Oh, no wonder. She had been the replacement all this time. Melanie
looked at the frame in Lilly’s hands thinking Lilly’s other daughter must look like
her, so Lilly could use her as a convenient pretend daughter. It made sense
that’s why Lilly was so possessive of her all these years.
Lilly seemed in a trance. Mel said, “How did she die?”
Lilly showed the framed photo to Mel.
“I’ve seen this already,” said Mel. She’d expected to see a photo
of a girl her own age.
“My blessings in this life have been Alejandra rest her soul, Kutha,
Cara and Phillip.”
Lilly slid the back off of the frame and took out a second photo
hidden behind.
“Now there are only three,” said Lilly. “Kutha, Cara, and this
little one. There she is,” said Lilly. She handed the picture to Mel. It was of
a little baby girl being held on a rocking horse. She was still only two at
most.
“Where is she? What happened to her?”
Lilly touched Melanie’s cheek.
“She’s here, right now,” said Lilly.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s you on that rocking horse Melanie. Alejandra stole this from
Marlene’s paltry little box of photos she’d had of you.”
“What? But Marlene is my mother!” cried Mel.
“She adopted you Melanie. Informally. You were born out of
wedlock. My father threatened he would kill you with his bare hands the
following day—the day after you were born. I had no choice. It was twenty years
ago in Russia. Times were different.”
Mel’s mouth hung open in shock.
“I found someone to bring you to Canada. I... Melanie, it all
happened very quickly and within a matter of hours you were gone and I had no
idea where.” Lilly voice was shaking, her face flush. She sat back down.
“What about Walter?”
“He was an unfortunate man. In the wrong place at the wrong time.
Marlene had been with him and she used his name Willow on the birth record to
divert attention from Peter.”
“So that means Cara really is my sister—my half sister?”
“Yes she is. As was Alejandra too.”
Mel put her head down on the desk. Alejandra. Alejandra. The name
passed through her body like a ghost. She saw her face, eyes bulging with the
gag in her mouth and felt the intensity Alejandra’s being inside her all over
again. It was all terribly wrong. Mel was banging her fist softly on the table
with her head buried in her arms. “No, no, no...” She mumbled it over and over.
Lilly pulled her chair closer and stroked Melanie’s hair. “I was
too ashamed to tell you,” she said. “I’d lost you beyond my control. I searched
for you for so many years. Alejandra was the one who tracked you down.”
Finally Mel lifted her head. She stood and paced around the office
and taking an Abby from her pocket, she swallowed it dry.
“What about Phillip and the girls? The slaves? I thought I was a
slave sold to Phillip by Peter?”
“Cara had a pretty good idea about Phillip’s slave network but she
was afraid of her uncle. He threatened to turn you over to father and you being
back in London he could easily have done so if anyone exposed his slave
operations. We had to look the other way for your sake. Melanie. If Phillip
told father, he would have had you gone—vanished. If he ever found out about
the slaves, all of us would have suffered some terrible fate.”
“And Jack?”
“CIA man Jack? He thought you were a slave, that’s all. In the
beginning he was Evan Piedmont and working for father. I had him sent away,”
said Lilly.
“He told me it was you who sent Peter down to Greece after me.”
“That was not true Melanie. Jack never knew that Alejandra fabricated
the entire lie about you being a slave bought from Peter. Of course she paid
Peter to do her bidding, but it was never anything to do with you being a
slave. She told us to keep the lie going so that way father would never suspect
you had returned. We could pretend you were just one of the girls. So I agreed.
It was a perfect thing for you to become a dancer. Then Alejandra
developed a meanness over the years. Something very dark. She began to resent you.
I don’t know why. She was the one who sent Peter to Greece.
Alejandra used Peter to control you from the moment she found you
in Vancouver. She controlled you there for years before I even knew she’d found
you. Then Peter brought you back when she told him to. When you were fourteen.
That was when Alejandra told me she’d found you in Canada. Before that, I knew
nothing. The day you ran away from home to come work at Club Lick. It was the
happiest day of my life.”
Mel paced the room as the Abby began to take effect. She wanted
to run again, to be with Winnie. She’d known instinctively that Peter was too
much of a simpleton to commandeer all of it himself. She’d lost Alejandra. It
was too much to even register in her conscious mind. She was in shock.
“I tried keeping Alejandra away from you, my dear. She was my
daughter too. Always so jealous of you. That you even existed. I did the best I
could.”
~*~
Cara, Mel, and Lilly sat out in the club talking. It was for real
now. They were all there and they all knew everything. Mel looked more grown up
than she ever had. Cara more beautiful. Lilly more happy.
“I’m so glad you told me mum. You know I can’t love you. Not the
way Cara does, but I do. I mean, I’ve learned to love, in my way.”
Mel touched her heart and her mum’s and said, “You have my heart.”
“Me too,” said Lilly.
As the music played, they drank their drinks and Cara leaned
against her sister. She whispered to Mel about her real father. He was an
American military man that Lilly had met in Amsterdam. It was a short affair and
when Lilly returned home, she discovered she was pregnant.
“My father,” said Cara. “Same thing. Different city. Different
country!”
“But I have another sister. I met her in Vancouver.”
“Who?”
“Talia is her name. I know she is my sister because Jack knew her.
Her still knows her through the CIA.”
“Your real father must have had another one, maybe he married
someone in the CIA. How old?”
“That’s just it, she was near my age.”
“Some guys spread their seed wide and far love.”
Cara held Mel. “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t know my
father either. I may have a sister or two floating around.”
“But...” Mel was about to tell what happened with Talia. That
they’d held each other just as Cara was holding her now. And what had happened
at Horus Hall behind the curtain. She’d fallen in love. They kissed. But she
couldn’t tell Cara any of that. It seemed unreal now. Mel couldn’t stop
thinking about finding Talia.
Cara nudged Mel’s chin as if to say ‘chin up’ and they both looked
at Lilly and smiled. It was all in the family now.
“So who is he mum, my real father?” said Mel.
Lilly shrugged. “Two ships.” She sipped her drink and looked into
the crowd glassy-eyed. It was all she would offer.
Mel had to process so much that she spent the rest of the night looking
around the club as people socialized and danced. She watched the people around
her own table like they were outside of her fishbowl. She was only thinking of
one thing inside herself. It was them against the world. It always had been.
She waited for another drink before she could ask her. Then
another. And she finally knew she had to just say it, get the words out.
She whispered into Lilly’s ear quickly, “I have to go see her mum,
I have to or I’ll die.”
She said it with such resolution that Lilly was shaken visibly.
She took her daughter’s hand and looked at the wound that was still healing on
her wrist. It made her want to cry, to let all her own years of hurt and
struggle flow, but she held it back. “I know,” said Lilly. “But I can’t lose
you.” Her voice trembled.
“I promise mum! You’ll never lose me, ever. Ever again. I promise.
Please!!”
Lilly just rubbed her fingers on Melanie’s hands and remained
silent.
Hattie came and joined the table. They drank way too much and Mel
begged Lilly all night to allow Winnie to come back to London. She pleaded and
pleaded and promised to never run off again.