D Gillespie - The Toy Thief

“You,” I said bitterly. Of course he was responsible for all this. I rubbed my thumb across my gnarled, bandaged fingers and cursed him under my breath. I was about to stop the tape, wondering briefly where the cat must have dragged the doll off to, when I saw Memphis step further into view onscreen. His head tilted this way and that, and without warning, his back began to arch, fur standing straight up, ears folding neatly back against his head. He was staring at the back door, and after turning the volume up, I could hear his low, vibrating growl echoing in the empty room. Memphis could be temperamental. He was the type of cat that might decide to bite you after letting you pet him for half an hour. He wasn’t a bad cat exactly; he just liked to do things on his terms. Even if you were doing him a favor by stroking his back, he always seemed to think he was the one doing the favor. But despite his prickly nature, he wasn’t the type to growl at strangers or stare out the window, hissing at birds. To be honest, the outdoors didn’t really seem to exist for him, and that made the sight on the TV all the more strange.

All at once, the cat darted away with a hiss, gone from the screen for good, and before I could even begin to wonder why, I saw it. The glass door, as silent as a quiet breeze, began to inch open. I must have screamed when I saw it. Honestly, I don’t remember, but I heard Dad calling from the next room.

“You okay, Jack?”

“Fine,” perfectly calm. I was very, very good at turning my emotions on and off. Even at nine, I knew it. But as the tape played on, the last thing I felt was calm as I watched the door to our home opening like some kind of black mouth. There was a puff of breeze from outside that caught the thin drapes, then… a shadow.

There’s no other way to describe it. From the angle, I could just barely see the top of the door and a blank patch of white wall leading up toward the unseen ceiling. A smooth, dark shape seemed to melt up the wall, like liquid defying gravity. The thin line rolled up and out of sight in less than a second, disappearing out of view onto the ceiling somewhere above. I tried to wrap my brain around the layout of the room, tried to convince myself that all I was seeing was just the play of light from a passing car. Then a pair of thin, black fingers reached into frame from above, and just like that, the doll was gone.

I never pressured Dad much into talking about Mom, mainly because I knew he wasn’t a talker, but also because I knew how much it had to hurt, thinking about her, dwelling on the past. Even so, I learned a lot just from diving through the old pictures he kept in albums tucked away in the ancient, undusted cedar chest in the corner of the playroom. I found the albums the first time when I was about seven or so. There were five of them, mostly small and cheap plastic things that held dozens of moments locked in time, relics from before my mom and dad were married. There were beers in nearly every frame, and more often than not my dad had this sort of cross-eyed look that I couldn’t recognize yet as pure, ass-faced drunkenness. But he was always smiling, and so was Mom. You could feel the joy edging off the pages, out of the frames – the sort of joy that is exclusively reserved for young people in love.

Dad’s hair was longer, shaggy even, and he wore button-down shirts with his chest showing, the tiny patch of hair just starting to show. He was cute too. Not the sweaty, filthy guy who walked in every night with bags of garbage food. This was a young man, a handsome one, and I could see why my mother would have fallen in love with him. More than anything else, he looked like the kind of guy who carried the party around with him, a fella who always seemed to be humming a tune.

On the other hand, Mom was me, because of course she was. Add a couple years, some boobs, sun-kissed hair, and there I stood. It scared me, because I wondered if I too could be gone so quickly, my own life little more than a blink. Even so the pictures excited me a bit too, because she was so damn gorgeous. Her hair was pure Seventies: feathered and layered in a Farrah Fawcett style that might have been laughable on a plain Jane. On her, it was radiant, and my stomach fluttered a bit thinking that I might look like that one day.

Then there was the gigantic wedding album, all white, meticulously kept, and there they were, a few years on. Dad’s hair was shorter then, his face lined with a short cut of a beard. His eyes were straighter. Apparently he had laid off the beer, for the wedding at least, but he was no less happy. This was his day as much as hers. She was a pearl next to him, white and gorgeous, and the pair of them smiled, fed each other cake, kissed and kissed again. After that, there were a handful of honeymoon pictures, vacations in exotic places I had never seen, tan skin, fruity drinks, the whole nine yards.

And then… Andy.

An entire album. Smiling, cooing, laughing. In flipping through a handful of pages, I had seen my brother happier than I ever knew was possible, and I could only stare at them, wondering why he had grown so sour and cold. More than anything, I wondered with some bitterness why I hadn’t gotten a brother like that of my own.

Of course, the world looks very different as a grownup. I can’t believe it took me so long to notice it, but the pictures ended with Andy. When I realized this fact, I was furious, until I understood that it was my mother who had done all this. She was the one who brought out the camera and forced people to smile. She was the one who printed off the pictures, bought the albums, arranged them just so. It was sad really. It wasn’t just one life that ended when I was born. It was three.

I put the albums away in the back of my closet for years, but when I was about seventeen, long after everything had happened, I came across the pictures again and started flipping through them. I noticed things I hadn’t seen before. Little things really, but enough to tell a story if you cared to look close.

Like the picture someone snapped at a party where my mother stood chest to chest with a guy twice her size as my father pointed over her shoulder. I don’t know who took it, or even what exactly is happening, but it’s clear that an altercation is very close to breaking out, and she’s the one standing in the middle. Or the pictures of her knee-deep in a garden, sweat slick on her brow, my father behind the camera. I can tell where the spot is in our yard, and for as long as I’ve been alive, not a single thing has grown there.

There were others too. Andy on one hip, a bag of groceries on the other, her thin arms straining. Her on all fours, laying a rock walkway through the backyard, a path that is still barely visible to this day. I’d probably looked at those pictures dozens of times before the weight of them really hit me.

The moments. This was who my mother was. Tough. Brave. Hardworking. And, quite possibly the most important thing of all, not someone who was easily rattled.

Now that I’m nearly the age she was when Andy was born, there’s no question that I look just like her. But it wasn’t until I saw that doll disappear that I knew how alike we really were.

So many of the moments from my youth are lost in a haze, brief bits of memories that have changed, blended, or been created whole cloth by my mind. In other words, I don’t always trust my memory, because most moments aren’t memorable enough to move over to the long-term area, like a stamp in steel. With that said, I can vividly remember the few minutes after seeing that hand snatch Sallie’s toy away. Me sitting there, staring at the blank screen, trying my damnedest not to scream. Dad was milling around in the next room, Andy was hidden away out of sight somewhere, still stewing from the night before. Whatever this secret was, it seemed to be mine and mine alone.