Neither Ruby nor I owned guns, so we improvised. I brought over a baseball
bat I’d found in my storage room, along with a Bundt cake I’d baked the day
before. We went through the Marwick house together, locking and bolting the
doors and making sure the latches on the windows were secure. We closed
the blinds and turned off the lights to make it appear as if no one were home,
then Ruby and I brewed two cups of tea and climbed the stairs to get to her
workroom.
The house felt wholly different at night. The shadows were thick over the
walls and ceilings, and every creak and groan sounded magnified. The
watercolour paintings, all slightly lopsided or twisted, appeared increasingly
baleful in the dark.
Ruby seemed to have gained confidence in her days of living in the
Marwick house alone. Instead of following me, she led the way down the
hallway. She moved with assurance, and I wondered what it must have been
like pacing the halls alone so many evenings in a row.
The workroom was changed since I’d last seen it. Ruby had fixed
temporary shelves along the walls, and they all held dolls in various states of
being redesigned. Some were still in their original forms—large eyes, garish
makeup, and too-long lashes. Others had been stripped of their
embellishments. They sat, their faces still holding the ridges and valleys that
a face should, but with no eyes or mouths. I tried not to stare at them, even
though it felt as if they were staring blindly at me.
A couple of completed dolls waited on the shelf beside Ruby’s desk.
Their smiles were warm, their new eyes bright and shining, and their hairbraided or cut and tied into ponytails.
“You’ve been busy.” Uncertain where to put my cup, I held it in my
hands as I sat in the spare seat beside the desk.
“Got to pay the bills.” Ruby laughed then sobered. “Especially now. The
dolls sell quickly. I can’t keep up with demand, so I’ve just been pouring
myself into this work every waking hour.”
I looked over her desk. Half-made outfits were scattered along one side,
and a palette with semi-dried paint lay on the other. A recommissioned
Barbie rested in the centre of the table, her whites and irises painted in,
without pupils, lids, or eyebrows yet. “Did you want to keep working? I have
a book in my bag. I don’t mind having a quiet evening.”
“Are you sure?” Ruby glanced at the dolls. “It would be a huge help. I
mean, if Sandeep’s found me, I want to complete as much work as quickly as
possible.”
“Sure.” I pulled my novel out of my bag, but I only pretended to read. I
was more interested in watching Ruby paint.
She worked steadily but with pin-perfect precision. I could tell she’d been
doing it for a while. A dab of black went into the centre of each iris to create
a pupil. Then dark brown created the eyelids and a little fold above the eyes.
She then changed paintbrushes, squeezed out new paint, and worked on the
eyebrows, layering different colours to create a natural-looking brow. Finally,
once the pupil was mostly dry, she used a toothpick to add a tiny spot of
white to each eye, making it sparkle.
I hadn’t expected the work to be so fiddly or so difficult. I knew there
was no way I could get the dolls’ faces as tidy as Ruby did. “You must have
been a painter before,” I said.
She saw me watching, and her ears turned pink. “Yes. My mother taught
me. She wanted me to make a living from it. I suppose, in some ways, I am.
I put away the book and leaned forward to indicate I was listening. Ruby
placed the repainted doll onto a shelf and took up one without a face. She was
silent for a moment as she stared at the horribly blank mask, then she
squeezed out new tan and red paint to mix a shade for the doll’s lips.
“He was amazing at first. Charming and sweet and so devoted to me. I
thought he was perfect. Literally a prince charming out of a storybook.” She
laughed. “I should have realised he was too good to be true. But he was ableto keep up that act for so long, and I was smitten with him, and it seemed like
a smart idea to move in with him and share the cost of rent and utilities.
“Then he started to control what I did and when. It was such a subtle
change that I didn’t notice it happening. ‘Do you really want to go out with
your friends when we could watch a movie together?’ or ‘Don’t get a haircut.
I like your hair long.’ ‘You embarrass yourself when you drink too much, so
maybe you shouldn’t go to the club anymore.’”