The Doll Garden

Twenty-Two

My therapist's office was a small white box with two chairs. One was her computer chair. The other chair was orange, stiff, and uncomfortable. Meant for patients. I hadn't sat in this chair since I left for college; our sessions had moved from in-person to over the phone at that point. She was licensed in three different states, so it worked.

Lina surveyed me from across the room from head to toe. Her jet-black, curly hair was a bush on her head, drooping over her dark brown skin, glowing around her eyes. "What else?" she asked and crossed her legs. My teeth nibbled on the inside of my cheeks.

I couldn't stop staring down at the tips of my fingers as I recalled the events that followed after Candace's death. Little by little, Lina had said. We'd been doing this for the past three months now since that night occurred; sessions on and off the phone with her as I bounced back and forth between New York and Rhode Island, getting shit situated.

I sighed. "I remember the gun going off three times. Candace was dead. Mirabelle shot her."

Lina nodded. "And where did you say Mirabelle was all that time?"

My mind traveled back to that night yet again. The details were still strong in my head.

I remembered Mirabelle and I sitting in the emergency room. Manuel and Isaiah were in the next two rooms over, conscious, but recovering from a hit to the back of the head. We all had been rushed to the nearest local hospital in town. I'd received several stitches, and there was still scarring along the side of my neck to prove the damage Candace had done.

"I was on my way back to the study when I saw Candace walking down the stairs with a box in her hands. It looked like she was packing up all of the porcelain dolls," Mirabelle had said to me while sitting beside my bed. She didn't have a bruise or a scratch on her body.

"She said she was packing up to leave for the night..." I had responded to her. I'd been staring up at the ceiling, my body limp on the flat hospital bed beneath me. My head had also been propped back against the pillow.

"For the night? Seemed more like forever. Anyway, that's not why I went downstairs. I heard a faint knocking. It sounded like someone was banging on a wall or a door somewhere down there, on the other side of the mansion."

"That's how you found Manny and Isaiah tied up in one of the downstairs closets?"

"Yeah. I knew it wasn't Candace banging because I'd just seen her. Then, I remembered Daddy"—Mirabelle cleared her throat, correcting herself—"he was stabbed. So, I didn't approach her."

"Then you heard the commotion between me and Candace?"

She nodded and said, "I got there just in time."

Mirabelle's voice drifted out of my head, and I found myself in Lina's office again, focusing on the present. Lina's eyes were still surveying me. Still waiting for me to answer her question.

"She was downstairs," I said. "The police showed up afterwards. And we were all taken to the emergency room where my..." I paused.

For a moment, I'd forgotten he was there. Just for a moment. He'd been the first one rushed to the hospital. They'd carried him out on a stretcher and slipped him into the back of an ambulance that had gotten there a few minutes before ours did.

I continued, numb to my own words, "My dad died less than an hour later. Candace pierced his vital organs when she stabbed him. He suffered from internal bleeding. I ... I always ... recall that night. I can't forget. I think Candace and my father were way too in over their heads.

"Sometimes, I wonder what if? What if Mirabelle hadn't saved me? What if our mothers had never crossed paths with them? They might have lived longer. But then, I'd never have been born. I told myself I wouldn't shed another tear for him. But I cried when he died."