Nearby, under the juniper, Leanne had buried the china teacups she collected so that no one would find them. She’d hung the wind chimes on the juniper branches, along with a collection of mismatched shoes she’d found, including a few pairs of little girls’ ballet slippers. The pleated pink leather had now turned gray.
Leanne saw Izzy looking. “Alma had a whole load of them down at the Post. They remind me of you. When you were little. Remember how you always wanted some?”
In a breeze, the leaves trembled silver like the tinsel Leanne draped around the mannequin at Christmas. Now the thing wore a witch’s hat, and a broomstick was tied to its wrist with a band.
“I don’t care about your shoes. Jody said she thought Cyrus was here.”
Leanne patted her blonde hair as if it were a 1950s society lady’s beehive. She opened a large book of fairy tales, the one she used to read to Izzy when she was a child, and set it in front of the doll. Handless maidens, eyeless princes, and decapitated heads singing in wells. Those tales frightened Izzy as much as Larry’s ghost stories.
She remembered one tale from another book about a fisherman who falls in love with a mermaid, and to be with her, he has to give up his human soul. After he visits a witch in red-soled shoes and dances with her before a laconic devil, the fisherman cuts away his own soul shadow with a knife. The soul travels around the world and brings back stories of jeweled and bloodied gods that impart great wisdom, and of lush palaces where courtiers wear cloaks embroidered with seed pearls and iridescent beetle wings.
The fisherman rejects the soul’s wisdom and riches for love. Then the soul offers him a girl who can dance with feet like white doves, and the fisherman is tempted. He leaves the mermaid, who can never dance on feet like doves, or any feet at all, and she dies. A priest buries them where no flowers grow but is proved wrong about souls and love when unknown flowers sprout on their single grave.
“Cyrus?” Leanne said. “Where’d he get to?”
Izzy forced herself to inhale, exhale a few times. “Where’s Dad?” she finally asked.
“Probably out drinking again. I have no idea.” Leanne stared out at the swirls of heat along the horizon. “Might be for the best.”
“What is? Dad—”
“That Cyrus isn’t coming back,” Leanne said.
Her snake-words dug their fangs in. This was why Izzy rarely came to visit. She stood and brushed dust off her jeans as if she were brushing the words away with it. “I have to go.”
Leanne raised the cracked teacup to her lips. It was too small, and she spilled some of the plain water she called tea down the front of her tie-dyed T-shirt. Then she tried to pour some water into the doll’s mouth, and the liquid dribbled down its chin. Izzy found herself thinking: At least Leanne hasn’t taken to hanging baby dolls in the juniper tree.