Estrella House Publishing

Nikoline Kaiser

After the car-wreck that Anthony insist happened because the other driver was texting while going over the speed-limit and Ellie is sure happened because Anthony had been drinking too much at poetry-night before getting behind the wheel, she decides that she needs a re-do of her life.

Ellie thinks, in the broken recesses of her mind (not as broken as her leg, but close enough), that Anthony is expecting her to come back to him at some point. He broke his nose against the airbag and has whiplash, but he can walk around and leave Ellie behind in the hospital-bed when she tells him it’s over. He’s just given her a long speech about facing death and how much he loves her, and how he sees now that he needs to do something good with his life, and that’s why he’s going with his sister to Florida to pick up plastic and waste. Ellie tunes him out at some point, not entirely because she means to, but mainly because she has a headache, the tension in her neck and shoulders ever-present since one car collided with the other at too many miles per hour. He reaches out to hold her hand at some point. She pulls away.

“I want to break up,” she says, and he cries and then later tells everyone that it was mutual, that they both needed a do-over. She doesn’t correct him or anyone else. Truth be told she’d wanted to break up with him for a while, but her mood had kept waxing and waning, a moon-tide of what-if’s and regret and the fondness build up over three years together. This gives her an easy excuse. It is clean. Anthony can mull over it and decide that he will never drink and drive again, because that was the reason his girlfriend left him. She is probably not doing any of his future partner’s any favors, but Ellie isn’t responsible for the whole world.

When she is discharged from the hospital her mom picks her up and drives home so slowly, so carefully that Ellie thinks they might be going backwards. She is too tired to say anything, only grateful when they’re at home. She almost slips on her crutches. She puts weight on her leg by accident. She makes it to the couch, teeth gritted in pain and lets her mom fuss and bring her painkillers.

“Eight weeks,” says Ellie, already feeling every minute of the time creeping by slower than her mom’s car. “Maybe more.”

“Well, your uncle Tom had his cast off after only six weeks.”

“I think his was cracked, not broken. Incomplete fracture.” Hers had broken through the skin. She still remembered waking up in the car to the shrill of ambulance sirens, staring at the vibrant red against the white bone.

Her mom gives her a Look. The Look is usually accompanied by at least a hint, at most (and most often) a small lecture about how she has wasted her talents dropping out of medical school. This time, because Ellie has an open fracture and a recently broken heart (so her mom thinks), she says nothing. It stays at the Look.

“I’ll make you something to eat. A sandwich?”

“I’d like just a cup of tea I think.”

“You need to eat something.”

“Sandwich is fine.”

Her mom, because for all her worrying and lecturing, she is still her mom, leans down and presses a kiss against Ellie’s forehead, which is damp and too-warm from pain and strain. “I’ll make the Jasmine tea you like.”

A minute later, from the kitchen, she says: “We need to keep you still while you heal. Maybe you could pick up knitting again, or drawing. You used to love drawing as a child.” She is, undoubtedly, looking at the uneven lines on paper still hanging on the fridge. The one most prominently displayed was one Ellie had made at age five, the first gift she ever gave to her mom aside from rocks found in the yard.

“Mommy, for you!”

“That’s lovely, dear. Is it our house?”

Ellie is not sure if she can remember the feeling of incredulity from that time or if it has just been described to her so many times that the memory feels real. “Mom. It’s a horse.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, mom. I’m sure.”

The car crash does not haunt her nightmares; only her dreams. Flashing lights. The crunching sound of metal slamming into metal. Ellie wakes not with a pounding heart but with a sense of foreboding. She always remembers the dreams, though in vague images. It is a memory, after all. In her dream, Anthony is not always there. Sometimes she is driving, though she’s never driven a car in her life. Sometimes she’s in the other car, telling the faceless driver to put his phone down and focus on the road. Sometimes, she is the one who asks him to check the messages constantly ringing in and annoying her.

Most of all, she wakes up feeling empty. She opens her eyes at the early hours of dawn and goes through questions in her mind. Is she traumatized? Is she missing Anthony? Regretting their parting? She finds only a no in her head, but though she knows this, she cannot go back to sleep. She lies awake listening to the bird’s waking, singing and gets out of bed when she hears her mom rustling around.

It is a week and two half-knitted kitchen towels later that the sun comes out shining. Ellie grabs her crutches as soon as her mom leaves for work and settles herself out on the grass. The fresh air eases her headache, the warmth helps with the pain and aches. Nothing can quell the restlessness for long though, and she is fiddling with her hands and her good leg, digging up chunks of dirt and grass, when she looks up and spots him across the street.

He is in the thrift store that opened just a couple of months back. The large storefront window shows old hookahs, stacks of dusty books, a large teddy-bear with one drooping ear and a heart in it’s hands saying I luv u. Today he is there as well. His eyes are very blue, so blue she can see them clearly even from across the road, and he is wearing a faded black suit, collar open, clearly missing a tie that must have been forgotten or left behind somewhere. Before she can think too much about it, Ellie grabs her crutches in grass-stained hands and makes her way across the road to the shop.

The woman, pensioner and volunteer, who minds the shop on Thursday, Fridays and the Saturday of the even weeks, opens the door wider for her so she can get through without knocking down the open-sign or anything else. She smiles in the way of grandmothers everywhere, as if they are squinting at you in both wonder and bewilderment at your existence.

“What can I do for you today?”

Ellie does not think she has ever been in the shop before. It has always felt strange, to make business in a place that can look so directly into where you live. As if she might get the teddy bear or a book, and the shop itself will spot, through the windows, how she dog-ears the pages or lets the bear sit alone, unloved, gathering dust. But today Ellie does not want to hesitate.

“How much for the puppet? The one in the window.”

“It’s creepy,” her mom says.

“His name is Henry.”

“That makes it creepier.”

Ellie moves him across the floor. One of the strings was broken, but the lady in the shop attached an elastic band to it. Up close he had not been as beautiful as when the sunlight had hit his spot in the window, but Ellie does not mind the fading paint of his face, the missing heel of one little dress-shoe. The lady in the shop had said: “He didn’t come with a name, but I call him Henry.” And he looked like a Henry, so Ellie kept it.

“You’re really going to learn?”

“There’s some videos online. And it’s something to do with my hands while my leg heals.”

Her mom sighs. “I thought you were knitting again.”

Ellie doesn’t know how to explain that knitting occupies her hands but not her brain, and that there’s only so much X-Files she can watch before she goes crazy. She can’t explain that with her hands busy, her brain feels so idle she’s scared it might burst. She does not think her mom will understand how, with Henry, trying to move and twist her wrists and fingers so he moves, walks, dances across the floor, her whole being is engaged. Time no longer crawls, it runs. She watches Henry as she finally lifts his arm in a wave that looks effortless, looks real, and a whole day has passed. A waste of time, her mom calls it. Ellie can’t remember ever feeling happier.

Progress with Henry, much like with her leg, is slow. There is a check-up at her doctors (Henry not allowed to come along, as per mom’s orders) and they frown and poke and prod, and two more weeks is added. Ellie wants to scream. Her mom tries to engage her in conversation on the ride home, but Ellie remains silent. As soon as she is back in the living-room, she picks up Henry from his spot on the couch and makes him walk across the carpeted floor. His steps are jittery. One leg seems to be dragging after the other. It is the first time Ellie has felt anger at the puppet. She wants, for a brief, alarming moment, to throw him across the room. He looks up at her with his beautiful blue eyes, and she doesn’t. Instead she pulls him up to sit on her knee, as she’s done so many times before. She is assessing the damage. Her nail catches against the paint under one eye, scraps off another layer of wood-skin. She sighs. She is only vaguely aware of her mom standing behind her.

“Don’t you think it should get fixed up?”

Ellie had, at first, thought the worn appearance part of the charm, but the more she neglects it, the worse it gets. Henry is starting to look less worn and more mournful. In decay.

“I’m not sure how. It looks complicated.” Special paint and treatment for the wood. What if she fixes his shoe and he walks uneven? What if she gets him a new tie that only highlights how frayed his suit is?

Her mom sighs, deep and long. And then, like she is making a great sacrifice (because she is a good mom), she says: “I’ve been looking up some places. There’s one that’s a four-hour drive away but I can take a weekend off and we can go there.”

Ellie blinks. Turns around to stare at her mother. Her hand, cradling the back of Henry’s head, automatically moves so he is staring as well.

“Really?”

“Yes, they have a workshop that makes dolls.”

“Puppets.”

“Yours might have even been made there. It’s called Kemp’s or something.” She gives Ellie the Look. “It’ll be expensive though, and I’m not paying. But I’ll take you there.”

Kemp’s School of Puppetry is situated at the heart of town, in a building melting into an ally. Ellie and her mom walk past the place twice before finally realizing the low door to the right of them has a paint-stained sign saying Kemp’s – Opening hours: 09:00-16:00. Closed on Mondays. They both feel embarrassed at wandering around like headless chickens for half an hour. It’s almost three thirty. Ellie walks inside, ducking, but keeping her balance with the crutches. She is getting better at it. 

There is an old-fashioned bell over the door, and it rings clearly through dust-filled hallways. Everything inside seems compressed, the whole building made in a time when people were smaller. Or maybe, Ellie thinks, maybe it is a building made for puppets.

There is no-one in the hallway, but a sign saying Workshop and the sound of light hammering leads them forward and to the left. The workshop is large, with several tall and slim tables lined up, an old-fashioned chalkboard and rows and rows of tools hanging on the wall. None of them look electric, all of them look as old as the building. At one table stands a young woman – Ellie estimates her to be no more than two or three years older than her – leaned over what looks like a dollhouse, short black hair falling into her eyes. She is tall and lean, tan only because she was born this way, carrying the sallow pallor of someone who spends most of their time indoors. Even hunched slightly, her shoulders look broad. When she rights herself, she looks right at Ellie.

“Ellie and Henry?”

“That’s us.”

“Let me see the damage. I’m Daniela.”

Her mom walks forward with the box they’d put Henry in. She places it gently – gentle because she knows that’s what her daughter wants – on the table. “That’s a nice name,” she says, coughing a little from all the dust. The floor is littered with wood-chips and pulp. The window is open, but the heat is still oppressive in here. Ellie moves forward. One crutch bumps against the table. Daniela watches it with a careful eye.

“What happened?”

“Car accident. Everyone lived.”

“Good.” Only then does she turn to the box and opens it. Henry is placed in there lying down, on his back, the marionette controller under his head like a pillow, the strings carefully folded so they won’t tangle too bad. Daniela reaches down and pulls him up.

“Marionette. From the sixties.”

“You can tell just like that?”

Daniela smiles, just one corner of her mouth lifting a little bit. Self-satisfied. Proud. Ellie stupidly thinks she looks handsome like that. “It’s my job.” She takes off one shoe, the one not damaged. “And – yeah, here it is. Year. Designation. I think that’s the mark from a workshop in Switzerland.”

Ellie peers a little closer, careful not to lose her balance. Her hip presses against the table. 1967. Henry is a grandpa.

“Mind if I open another window?” asks her mom.

“That’s fine.” Daniela does not take her eyes away from Henry. The sounds of people outside come in through the window, intruding. A child crying, shoes hitting against the pavement. Ellie wants to tell her mom to close it again. Instead she says to Daniela:

“Have you been doing this long?”

“About ten years. Wood-work, I mean. My ex used to run this place.”

Ellie asks: “Used to?”

“He injured his hands too much to keep doing it.” Daniela looks at her, and though her eyes are living and brown and slim were Henry’s are blue and wide and only living wood, Ellie cannot help but compare the two and find them the same.

“I’m sorry.”

“It happens.”

“Hazard of the job?” She looks at Daniela’s hands, at her slender fingers and the many callouses and scars that litter them. They don’t look strong; they don’t look delicate. They look like fine-tuned instruments made to put things together and pull them apart again. She’s taken out a notepad, ready to write down Henry’s condition, the necessary treatments. She answers her:

“No. Car crash.”

They end up staying far past four o’clock. Daniela closes the door and as evening falls around them, Ellie’s mom volunteers to go hunt for dinner. Ellie thinks she just wants to get out of here; she’s been sneezing for the past ten minutes. She stays away long enough that Ellie’s leg and arms grow tired from holding herself up. She has just gathered the courage to ask for a chair when Daniela says:

“You must be tired. Wait here.”

She comes back with a plush, green chair that looks as old as Henry. It is surprisingly comfortable. Ellie leans her crutches against the edge of the armrest and leans back. Daniela finds a low stool for her to prop her leg up on.

“Thanks.”

“No matter.”

Daniela is not talkative, but Ellie does not find the silence awkward. It seems to float around them just like the dust, a part of the room as much as the tools are.

Daniela plucks at the rubber band still holding one string up. Ellie feels suddenly embarrassed.

“The lady at the store did that. It was broken.”

“All of the strings need changing. More of them should have broken by now.” It is a simple observation, but it feels almost like praise. Like Ellie has been doing something right, untrained as she is. She feels heat on her face.

“I don’t really know what I’m doing. With this, I mean. I just picked him up. I saw him in the store.”

“You couldn’t leave him,” Daniela said, and the complete understanding settles on Ellie’s shoulders like a warm blanket, soft and inviting.

“Did that happen to you too?”

Daniela looks up. She gently places Henry back on the table and leaves. Ellie bites her lip and tries to be patient. She can hear rustling in one of the other rooms, the sound carried through the long hallway. Daniela comes back with two puppets – marionettes – both slightly smaller than Henry. Sisters, Ellie thinks, looking at the blonde curls and orange dress of one, the black hair in braids and blue dress of the others. 

“I made them. Helena is older.” She gently lifts the blonde one. Then, the other: “This is Kara.”

“Hello,” Ellie says to the two of them and Daniela smiles, a real smile this time.

Repairs for Henry would take longer, so Ellie agreed to leaving him at the workshop. When they drive back home it is closing in on midnight.

“Thank you,” she tells her mom. “You didn’t have to do all this.”

“Well, that damned doll’s made you happier than I’ve seen since you were a little child.” She stops at a red light, on a deserted road in the middle of nowhere. After two heartbeats of waiting, she hits the gas again, looking only a little guilty. “Did you and Daniela decide on a price?”

“There isn’t one.”

A frown. A twitching of the face – the start of the Look. “What do you mean?”

“She’s going to teach me. I want to do what she does. I’m going to work there.”

Her mom’s mouth drops open.

“That’s…”

“It’s what I want.”

“It’s so different from what you did before.”

Ellie shrugs. “I want to. You keep telling me I can’t stay at home forever.”

Ellie looks away.

Her mom cannot – and also will not – take the long drive on a weekday, so Ellie has to take the train. She packed an old backpack of Anthony’s that he hadn’t come back for. She hobbled along, exhaustion already creeping in. She slept the entire ride, almost missing her stop. It was a five minute-walk from the station to the workshop. It took almost twenty minutes with the crutches.

Daniela is sitting outside in another old, plush chair, like the one she’d fetched for her. A low wooden table next to the chair holds a coffee-pot and Helena, sitting primly leaned against the wall, her hands folded in her lap. Ellie notices for the first time that her nails are painted blue, the same shade as her sister’s dress.

“You made it. You look tired.” Daniela got up, not to help her (she wouldn’t have accepted), but to lean in through the door and pull the other chair outside. “Sit down. Do you want some coffee?”

“Yes, please.” She lets her help with the backpack. She’s getting adept at moving with the crutches, and she often finds herself thinking of it like the marionette controller, like the strings, and like the puppet, too. Her mom still thinks it looks unnatural, but Ellie knows it’s not; it’s just another way of moving.

“You mind drinking from the same mug?”

“No.” The thought sends a thrill through her, and there’s another when Daniela pours and hands Ellie the cup. She takes her time to savor it, feeling both wrong and delighted at the illusion that she can taste her lips, that they’re almost kissing. When had she turned into a silly schoolgirl, a young teenager with a crush? When the cars hit each other, she thinks, and rattled her brain.

“I meant to do the dishes yesterday, but inspiration hit for a project.” It’s an apology, but there is a hint of searching in Daniela’s voice. For what? Ellie takes a moment to look.

“What project?”

Her eyes are alight, eager to share. Ellie wonders if this is what Daniela looked like when she first started, when she realized that the puppet in the workshop was something hers. “A client, these smaller dolls – they fit with the house I was making when you first got here.”

She is struck by how much Daniela is talking now. She doesn’t know how much is due to the shyness of a first meeting, how much is general mood. The fresh air and sunlight. Her company. She leans back and lets Daniela’s voice roll over her.

The work is hard and she gets more splinters than success. She ends up staying a week, having only packed for three days. Daniela lives above the workshop, living-room, two bedrooms, bathroom, small kitchen. Ellie can’t get upstairs, so Daniela puts a mattress in the office downstairs. The office has several old circus-posters, a wide desk with two laptops and a book-case. The room smells of wires and warm dust from laptop-fans, but it’s the cleanest room she’s yet seen in the building. Ellie already likes it.

Daniela makes vegetable curry for dinner, and Ellie sits on an old bar-stool and dries the dishes after. Her fingers sting and ache; two are covered in band-aids after Daniela had pulled large splinters free. Ellie was proud she had not cried – in any case, the pain was nothing compared to her leg.

“How is it healing up?” Daniela hands her a plate.

“Fine, you’re good with pincers.”

“Good. I meant the leg.”

“Oh. It’s fine. On Monday it’s five weeks and I can get the cast off.”

Daniela hums. Ellie thinks of the books on anatomy she’d seen in the office – now her bedroom.

“Did you want to become a doctor?”

“No. Puppets are simpler. Joints, legs, arms. A head. The strings to move them.”

Again that wonderful feeling of swimming in the same waters. Of walking in the same forest, while everyone else was jogging by the road. “I feel the same way. I went to Medical school. Lasted two semesters.”

“It’ll serve you well with this job.”

She looked down at her hands. “I don’t feel good at it.”

“It will come.”

Despite herself, she believes her. Daniela serves her coffee, in her own mug this time, and while they drink she brings Henry into the kitchen, shows her what she’s gotten done. Explains what still needs doing.

Ellie can’t sleep that first night. It’s because of the coffee, because of the new place, because of the clown staring down at her from one of the posters. She can’t really toss and turn with her leg, but she’s busy doing it mentally. She’s awake to hear the footsteps, someone coming down the stairs. Daniela, awake..

She lies with bated breath as Daniela moves past the office, further down the hall. She can hear a humming, low and melodic. She thinks Daniela is singing to the puppets, to Henry and Helena and Kara. To the little family, meant for their dollhouse, as soon as it is ready. She falls asleep.

Ellie is very aware that her mom is worried about how much time she’s spending at the workshop, but she isn’t expecting her to bring Anthony into it.

“Hi,” he says, appearing on their lawn two weeks before Ellie is due to have her cast removed, and one day after she’s come home from her third visit to Kemp’s. She’s sitting with her mom on uncomfortable plastic chairs, drinking tea and eating overpriced cupcakes from the little bakery down the street.

“Um,” Ellie says.

“I’m so sorry, I forgot to mention,” says her mom, who only ever forgets things when it’s convenient for her. “I invited Anthony! I ran into him at the grocery store the other day and he mentioned being worried about you and I just thought it would be good if you could see each other, you know, after everything that’s happened.”

Her mom rarely rambles like this. Ellie can feel another headache coming in. Anthony gets a chair – he knows where they are – and sits down, graciously accepting a cupcake and the tea poured into the extra cup her mom ‘accidentally’ brought outside.

“You look good,” Anthony tells her.

“I look tired.” She hasn’t slept, doesn’t sleep well in her room. Not since Henry went to the workshop. When she’s there, she sleeps like a dream, unless Daniela’s made too-strong coffee again. She still sleeps like a dream – it just takes longer to get there. They don’t open the shop until nine anyway, and they rarely have customers. She wakes up and she is at work. Most of what they do at Kemp’s is commissions. Personal projects. The night before she left the last time, Daniela gently held her hand while she held a paintbrush, and she guided Ellie in re-doing the paint of Henry’s cheeks, adding a little bit of red, making him boyish and young again. She’d felt the touch like a brand on the back of her palm ever since.

“Your mom told me you’ve gone into – puppetry?” The way he says it, she already feels bad. Guilty. Ashamed. Then angry that she should feel like that.

“One of the oldest professions in the world.”

He laughs, stilted. “I suppose so.”

She thinks of Daniela’s fingers, wrapped around the handle of the coffee-pot. Ellie had watched her restore a small dining-set for the dollhouse, and they had talked about favorite foods. When she said tomato soup, Daniela had made it for her the next day, despite the unbearable heat of the summer. Her shirt had been stained with small spots of red, of orange.

“It’s fun.” She forces herself to think of something, a normal reason to care this much. “It’s really intricate. Like anatomy at Med school, but less complicated and less you know, life or death.”

Anthony smiles, softens up a little. “That makes sense. It does sound interesting.” He had once said that to a guy going on about the praying mantis, just to be polite. “But it’s not really a field that there’s a lot of money in, is there?”

Even without the way his eyes flicker to her moms, she would have known what was going on. Oh god, Ellie thinks. This is an intervention.

“You earning a lot of money on your poetry lately?” she asks. Her mom spills coffee on the grass. Anthony goes a little gray around the edges. On the inside, Ellie crows in delight.

It doesn’t stop there. Her dad calls. Her dad who, when Ellie was five – roughly about a week before she painted a tragically misunderstood horse for her mother – went out to get cigarettes and didn’t come back. For seventeen years. He even had the indecency to quit smoking in the interim. Ellie cares little about him, and a little more about her step-sisters who she sees twice a year, once for each of their birthdays. It is laughable that her mom thought going to him would sway Ellie.

“You know, you don’t really know that much about this Daniel,” he says over the phone, after half an hour of talking around the subject. “He could be anyone. He could be a criminal.”

“It’s Daniela. She’s not a criminal, dad.” They’d smoked weed one starry night and a lot of the puppets in the workshop were from people’s trash. She didn’t think that counted.

“I’m sure she’s nice and all, but just be careful. You never know.”

“Yeah, dad. You never know.”

She tells Daniela about the phone call on her next visit. “They sound very protective,” is her comment on the whole thing.

“It’s gotten worse as I got older. I mean, my mom took care of me when I was little of course, but I was always a resilient kid and now it’s like the fact that I can face a lot as an adult means I’m broken somehow. Like I should be having a breakdown every other Wednesday like everyone else.”

“Everyone is doing that?”

“Maybe not everyone.” She stares down at the wood-chips she’s made, the main evidence of her work for the past few hours. Daniela had set her to work making Matryoshka dolls, telling her the design and aesthetic didn’t matter, so long as she made three to five women who fit in each other. “What about your parents?”

Daniela is fixing the bathroom of the dollhouse. There are spots and flecks of whites on her fingers from painting the tiles. “Disappointed they don’t have a lawyer for a daughter. Accepting of what I’m doing now.”

“That’s good.”

“Took a while. Now they’re happy. I’m happy. Helena and Kara are happy.” She looks over at Henry’s spot, a shelf close to where the sisters sit when they’re in the workshop. Henry is leaning slightly against a book about Grimaldi.

“And Henry?”

“Henry’s getting happier and happier,” she says, and Ellie believes her.

It still doesn’t stop there. Ellie takes Henry home when Daniela is finished with him, because she has some vague notion that Henry would like to see his old home before she moves him to the new one. It’s been decided, after all – she’s moving to Kemp’s, taking the second bedroom upstairs as soon as her leg is healed. Daniela is paying her an assistant-fee and it’s more than she expected. Ellie has been actually earning it, not just apprenticing but organizing files and commissions, going through e-mails left unanswered for months. Daniela is absent-minded about anything that isn’t the workshop or coffee-making.

Her mom is home when she arrives, which is a bad sign because she should be at work. She’s been cleaning the kitchen, scrubbing the counter-tops until they gleam and her hands are red. Ellie thinks of Daniela’s hands, the reddening of skin from where she’d gotten a splinter last night.

“Didn’t think you’d be home.” She moves carefully to take off her backpack and set it on a chair. Henry is strapped to it carefully, partly because he couldn’t fit in there with her other things and partly because she wanted him to see the journey they went on, like he hadn’t been able to the first time.

“I took the day off. I wanted to clean and to spend the day with you. It’s been so long since we’ve had proper time together, don’t you think?”

Ellie does not think her mom absent or unloving, not at all, but their time together has always been acts of duty; making food, cleaning up, hanging up the laundry. When she was younger there were many moments of Ellie’s homework spread out across the dining table while her mom pulled an armchair closer to the TV, the sound turned down so Ellie could concentrate. Ellie doesn’t think those moments count as proper time together the way other parents might define them, but she doesn’t think they don’t count either.

“Sure. Anything you wanted to do?”

Her mom’s smile seems forced. “I thought we could talk.”

There is no Look, but perhaps the smile is a Smile: Ellie feels a foreboding in the pit of her stomach.

“About?”

“Your new… hobby.”

She frowns. “Mom, it’s not a hobby. It’s actually the opposite, I’m getting paid.”

“But it seems… strange, doesn’t it? Being so obsessed.”

“Obsessed? Mom, I’ve found something I’m passionate about and I have the chance to pursue it. What’s wrong with that?”

Her mom puts the dishes in the sink with a clank. “I just think it’s weird.”

It still does not stop. Ellie comes home, cast off, feeling wobbly still on two legs that feel as different as night and day. She is thinking of a newborn giraffe and how much they have in common, when she walks inside the house and sees the mess.

Her first thought is that she is home early. That they had meant for this to be over and done with before she came home. But there he is, caught red-handed, Anthony with Henry’s hand cradled in his hands, her mother with the old foam stuffing on her fingers, stuck and staining like blood.

“What the hell,” Ellie says, too shocked to get angry right away. He is just a puppet, but there is a hollow gleam in Henry’s eyes, the faintest flicker. He is holding on by a thread. Literally.

“We’re trying to help,” Anthony says. “You can’t see how far your obsession has gone.”

Yesterday, Ellie got her first customer. An elderly woman had a very old porcelain-doll, all Victorian hairstyle and clothing. The features had faded with the years, graying and cracking in some places. The dress was fading, and one shoe had gone missing. The elderly woman wanted it all fixed, paint and stitching, dyed and braided. Ellie did not think she was ready, but Daniela had said right away, “my partner can do that” and the swoop in Ellie’s stomach had been more than dread, more than excitement, more than joy. Daniela had promised to help, but it was Ellie’s commission.

“Obsession,” she says now, looking at them both. Her mother looks guilty. Anthony looks righteous. “I have an obsession.”

“You’re at the workshop all the time! For god’s sake, Ellie, you picked a doll over me.”

He’s a puppet, she thinks, but she doubts that’ll help any. “It’s a craft,” she says instead. She is expecting the anger to come barraging out of her any moment, but instead she finds she is just welling up with pity. “It’s a craft I’m training in and that I am going to work with. That I am going to enjoy. And I broke up with you before I even found Henry.”

“You’re even calling him by name!”

She rolls her eyes. “You know who seems obsessed? The two of you. All of you, really. If I’d started making jewelry and left pearls and strings everywhere and spent all my time with a goldsmith or whatever it’s called, would you think I’d gone crazy?”

“It does seem like a less secure career choice,” her mom says, but she has such doubt in her voice, on her face that Ellie knows she’s winning the argument on that front at least.

Ellie reaches out her hands. “Give him – give it to me.”

Anthony hugs Henry’s head as if he cares for him. “No.”

“You’re being childish.”

“I’m worried about you!”

“You shouldn’t be. I’m happy.” She goes for the killing blow. “Without you, I’m really happy.”

Anthony looks like she just sucker punched him, or like he got in another car crash. She feels guilty, but then she looks at Henry (his torso is on the ground, his legs hanging limply, one arm twisted out of the socket. An ambush).

“I’m going to burn it,” he says, threatens – it finally makes the anger rise in her, and Ellie is ready to march forward, to attack him, and maybe she is too attached to a puppet with no life, no soul aside from what she ascribes to him, but what’s it to Anthony? What’s it to anyone, that she is happy, that she is not hurting, that she’s breathing easier for the first time in what feels like forever?

But she doesn’t have to do anything. Her mom takes a step forward, foam falling from between her fingers. She grasps Henry’s head and frees it from Anthony’s grasp. He hadn’t seen the attack coming from within, and so he has no counter for it. Her mom walks over and deposits the head safely in Ellie’s hands.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and in that moment Ellie has already forgiven her, not just for this, but for all of it, her dear sweet mother who is too easily convinced by loud men and who never managed to see her daughter for who she really is. Who stuck around anyway.

“It’s okay,” Ellie tells her, because it really is. “I can fix it up again. I’ve learned how.”  

Daniela is painting the tiniest bathtub, it’s clawed feet flecked with gold as she works. Ellie has been watching her for the better part of an hour, forgetting her own work.

There are questions on the tip of her tongue. Do you think I am weird. Do you think this is weird. Do you think that, together or apart, we are the outcasts, the freaks?

She says none of it. Daniela looks up from her work. There is gold-paint on her nose. Ellie wants to taste it on her lips. The cast is off and she is free to move around, free to go where she pleases.

She leaves the workshop without a word, though all she wants to do is speak. She hears Daniela raise her head, feel her eyes following as she moves up the stairs. In the bedroom sit the puppets in a row. They look as if they are holding hands. Ellie’s leg aches, still sore and thin after those long weeks in the cast. She has physical therapy tomorrow. She is going to bring Henry along, for support.

The stairs creak under Daniela’s feet as she comes upstairs. She hovers in the doorway for a little while, then she walks to stand behind Ellie, right behind her. Ellie wonders if there is still gold on her nose. She does not turn around to look. “Are you alright?” Daniela asks. Ellie nods – she reaches out, touching the puppets, the sisters and Henry. Then she turns, meeting Daniela’s hands raised to meet her shoulders. She is pushed back on the bed and Daniela crawls on top of her, and there is that glint of gold, right before Ellie is being kissed. She imagines that the wooden necks of the puppets creak as they turn their heads to look at them.