The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken (essential books to read .txt) 📗

lied to you, you know that. But she will lie and she’ll steal. It’s not her. It’s the disease. It’s out of her control. Your job is to love her. You have pills in the house? She’ll steal them, and once she’s stolen drugs she’ll steal the next thing. That’s what I’ve learned. Once your kid has done the first thing he’d never do there’s nothing he won’t do. Sorry. This is the truth. Sweet Georgia. I’m sorry. I just love that girl, we all do. Sometimes I think the mistake I made was I was too easy on him, and then I remember what he was like when he came back from Cullen—sorry, Idaho, the place we sent him—and then I think that was the mistake, that’s what we couldn’t come back from. I never wanted to send him there. It was Loren. He hit me once. Orly, I mean, Orly hit me. I don’t think he ever remembered that he did that. In the ear. Thought he’d take it right off my head. You see this place? There’s a group of kids? Goes all the way back. I’ve missed you, Thea. I’m sorry this is what’s taken for you to call me. Nobody called me. Nobody. No, nobody. I had a kid everybody loved, and then he died, and where did that love go? Into outer space. Into other people’s kids. I hope you know, Thea, that I will love you forever.”

You could think a grackle was somebody you’d lost, or wronged, or owed a favor to, come back to settle accounts.

If Georgia, for instance, had not survived, Thea would have looked for evidence of her persistence everywhere. She would have kept everything, the board game called Life, the board game called Sorry!, the board game called Monopoly: Georgia’s existence. Chinese checkers, and wept over the missing marbles, the empty dimples in the metal board.

“You,” she might have said to a particular grackle. “Georgia. Is it?”

When Georgia got out of rehab, Thea took her to all her childhood favorite places: the ice cream parlor decorated like a nineteenth-century brothel, the mall skating rink, the walk-through heart at the science museum. Inside, you could hear it beat.

“Oh God,” said Georgia in a voice of terror, touching the heart’s wall. A ventricle hung over her head. “They should fill it with blood for the full effect.”

“With cholesterol,” said Thea. “Or heartbreak.”

“With cocaine,” said Georgia, then, “Do you think it beats all night long?”

“Yes,” said Thea, but of course it was some man’s job to turn it off at night, and on again in the morning. She pictured a mad scientist’s horseshoe-shaped switch with a rubber handle on a wall.

Ka-thump, ka-thump. We gotta get out of here, she thought. Not the heart but the city. She’d already found the job in Austin when Georgia announced that, with money from her father, she would leave the country to clear her head. To do what you want out of my sight, thought Thea, who had assumed that Georgia would follow her to Texas, and Thea would never again have to drive around the neighborhoods of Georgia’s disappearance, remembering she might be in there and she might be dead. That whole terrible night with Florence. But they’d both been wrong about Georgia.

Thea got rid of her house and everything in it. Burn the city to the ground, find the inflammable heart like a poet’s in the ashes, wrap it in a handkerchief, bury it in a mausoleum beneath a mile of marble.

Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.

The word meant nothing. They should replace it with another.

In the junk-shop back room, the woman scaled an outcropping of stacked record albums, covers scuffed to show the shape of the discs inside. Nearby was a box of thick seventy-eights, grackle black and grackle brilliant. Thea thought the cliff might come down. But the woman was goat-footed; she got to the top and came back down and handed over the doll.

Georgia, aged eight, had not just wanted Baby Alive: she had thought it would make the difference. What difference? The only one. Maybe it would have. It was hard to tell, ever, what would make it: the walk-through heart, the indulgent mother, the mean one. They’d driven into a ditch, then away. They’d kept on going. They’d used up every bit of luck they had, making their getaway. Thea never spoke to Florence again, though Orly was still dead, would be dead forever.

And who’s to say that’s the order things happened in; was it only her junk-shop memory that had arranged them so? Maybe Orly had nothing to do with Georgia, child of divorce, always so uneasy in her body, made to take dance lessons because her mother wished her otherwise, and maybe it was Georgia who’d first pulled a plastic bag out of her pocket and waved it at Orly, Georgia who even now was vowing to raise her child differently: the baby would sleep in their bed, would have two mothers, two actual mothers, who planned to bend the world for their child instead of the easy other way around.

The doll was diaperless, and played with, and autographed: KITTY on its bicep. Its hair, like many an old lady’s, had gone mauve with age.

“She’s written on,” said Thea, looking for a way out.

“Ballpoint.” The woman spit on the tip of her finger and rubbed the K of Kitty away.

“Does it work?”

“Needs a battery, honey,” the woman said, to the doll instead of Thea. She reached into her jeans pockets. “D or C,” she mused, “D or C: D.”

The doll had a hatch in her back, and the woman loaded a battery, flipped a switch, and turned the doll over.

The baby suckled at nothing. The woman lifted it to Thea, who put out her arms as though the baby were real. She took its churning weight. Instinctively she put her hand on