Page 4 of Cracked Doll

Now I'm the only one left to be gasped at.

Tears slide down without my permission. I don't fight them tonight. Tonight, I never do.

And that's when I feel it again — the watching. Stronger this time. Close.

I know better than to look straight at the window. Instead I reach for the thin black veil I keep folded on the sill for exactly this purpose, and settle it over my face, a soft, safe blur between my eyes and the world, and only then do I look down.

A man. Standing across the street, utterly still while everyone else moves around him, looking directly up at my window like he's been standing there for some time already. I can't make out his face through the veil and the dark and the distance — only the shape of him, tall, coated in black, unmoving.

And a camera, lifted to his eye.

I don't wait to see if he takes the picture. I'm already moving, already slamming the window shut, already backing into the dark of my own room with my heart trying to beat its way straight out of my chest.

I don't remember falling asleep. I remember waking to noise.

Something breaking, downstairs. A man's voice, low and rough, cursing at nothing.

I know that sound the way I know my own pulse.

I go down barefoot, in my nightdress, careful on the stairs. Light spills from the kitchen, unsteady, candlelight rather than the electric bulb we can't always afford to run. My father stands in the middle of it, swaying, his shirt half untucked, buttons done up wrong, a bottle hanging loose from one hand. A pot lies where he's thrown it, clattering still against the floor.

He's not an old man. He only looks like one, most nights.

"Papa," I say quietly, from the doorway.

He turns too fast, nearly loses his footing. "Where's my dinner," he growls — not a question, an accusation.

I point, wordless, to the covered plate I left for him hours ago. He rips the lid off and eats with his hands, barely bothering with the spoon beside it, food catching in his unkempt beard, and I stand very still and let him.

When he's done he drains the last of the bottle in one long pull and tries to stand — and goes down hard instead, catching the table edge on the way, cursing again as his knees hit the floor.

I rush to him despite everything. "Papa, are you all right—"

His hand closes around my wrist. Hard. Harder than it needs to be.

"Look at me," he says.

I go very still. "Papa—"

"Look. At. Me." His voice cracks up an octave, raw and furious and something else beneath it, something that sounds almost like grief wearing anger as a mask. "You never look at me. Do you know what that's like? To live with a girl who won't even look at her own father?"

"Please," I whisper. "You know why I can't—"

"I know exactly why." His grip tightens. His eyes, when I risk a glance at his face, are wet, wild, furious. "Because you're not supposed to be the one left. Because every time I look at you I see them — do you understand me? Every single time. Your face, their face, I can't tell where one ends and the other begins anymore, and God help me, I don't know if I'm looking at my daughter or two ghosts wearing her skin—"

He then laughs bitterly, cutting himself off. “And then you grew to look exactly like her. You turned into that woman and began to haunt me in a whole other way? Trying to make me feel guilty about what happened to her?”

I have no idea who he is talking about this time.

"Papa, stop—"

"Look at me!" It's a scream now, raw enough to hurt his own throat, and his other hand comes up to grip my chin, forcing my face up, up, toward his —

And I look.

I don't mean to. I don't decide to. His grip is too strong and my body too tired to fight it, and for one unbearable second I am staring straight into my father's eyes — brown, bloodshot, swimming with drink and grief — and there, small and pale and unmistakable in the dark wet center of them: my own face. My own eyes. Staring back at me from inside the one person who should never, ever have to see them there.

"You've got her eyes. Not Cordelia's. Not Rosalind's. Hers.”