Chyna put her cuffed hands under Ariel’s chin and lifted her head. The girl didn’t try to pull away, didn’t flinch, but was revealed when her veil of hair slid away from her face. Although they were eye-to-eye, Ariel stared through Chyna, as if all in this world were transparent, and in her eyes was a chilling bleakness, as if the landscape of her other world was lifeless, daunting.
“We have to go. Before he comes home.”
Bright-eyed and attentive, perhaps the dolls listened. Ariel apparently did not.
With both hands, Chyna enfolded one of the girl’s fists. The bones were sharp and the skin was cold, clenched as fiercely as if she had been suspended from rocks at a precipice.
Chyna tried to pry the fingers apart. The sculpted digits of a marble fist would have been hardly more resistant.
Finally Chyna lifted the hand and kissed it more tenderly than she had ever kissed anyone before, more tenderly than she had ever been kissed, and she said softly, “I want to help you. I need to help you, honey. If I can’t leave here with you, there’s no point in my leaving at all.”
Ariel didn’t respond.
“Please let me help you.” Softer still: “Please.”
Chyna kissed the hand once more, and at last she felt the girl’s fingers stir. They opened partway, cold and stiff, but would not relax entirely, as hooked and rigid as a skeleton’s fingers in which the joints had calcified.
Ariel’s desire to reach out for help, tempered by her paralyzing fear of commitment, was achingly familiar to Chyna. It struck in her a chord of sympathy and pity for this girl, for all lost girls, and her throat tightened so severely that for a moment she was unable to swallow or breathe.
Then she slipped one cuffed hand into Ariel’s and the other over it, got up from the footstool, and said, “Come on, child. Come with me. Out of here.”
Though Ariel’s face remained as expressionless as an egg, though she continued to look through Chyna with the otherworldly detachment of a novitiate in the thrall of a holy visitation, her head spinning with visions, she got up from the armchair. After taking only two steps toward the door, however, she stopped and would not go farther in spite of Chyna’s pleas. The girl might be able to envision an imaginary world in which she could find a fragile peace, a Wild Wood of her own, but perhaps she was no longer able to imagine that this world extended beyond the walls of her cell and, failing to visualize it, could not cross the threshold into it.
Chyna released Ariel’s hand. She selected a doll—a bisque charmer with golden ringlets and painted green eyes, wearing a white eyelet pinafore over a blue dress. She pressed it against the girl’s breast and encouraged her to embrace it. She wasn’t sure why the collection was here, but perhaps Ariel liked the dolls, in which case she might come along more readily if given one for comfort.
Initially, Ariel was unresponsive, standing with one hand still fisted at her side and the other like a half-open crab claw. Then, without shifting her gaze from faraway things, she took the doll in both hands, gripping it by the legs. Like the shadow of a bird in flight, a fierce expression crossed her face and was gone before it could be clearly read. She turned, swung the doll as if it were a sledgehammer, and smashed its head into the top of the dinette table, shattering the unglazed-china face.
Startled, Chyna said, “Honey, no,” and gripped the girl by the shoulder.
Ariel wrenched away from Chyna and slammed the doll into the table again, harder than before, and Chyna stepped backward, not in fear but in respect of the girl’s fury. And fury it was, a righteous anger, not merely an autistic spasm, in spite of the fact that she remained expressionless.
She pounded the doll against the table repeatedly, until its smashed head broke and spun across the room and bounced off a wall, until both its arms cracked and fell away, until it was ruined beyond repair. Then she dropped it and stood trembling, arms hanging at her sides. She was still staring into the Elsewhere and was no more with Chyna than she had ever been.