Her hand touched the sheet of the too-big bed. Remember him. But remembering burned. Adam. The night stretched in front of her, hours and hours of darkness.

Her hand closed around the bottle and she swallowed down her sorrow with another mouthful of red wine. Over and over again she drank, deep and long, until the liquid spilled down her chin and bloodied her nightshirt with grief.

9

Now

If the emporium was a place of shiny toys and birthday promises, in darkness it became somewhere else.

Birdie would lock the door behind the last customer and turn over the CLOSED sign before she turned on me.

“Clean the floors,” my adoptive mother would say, and I would hide away my homework before she tore it up. She’d done that more than once, when my response had not been quick enough, so I had learned to be clever, setting up a makeshift desk behind the doll’s houses and wooden baby carriages filled with alphabet blocks, knowing that by the time she had picked her way through to hand me a mop, my schoolbooks would be inside my bag.

The winter I was nine, when the air was so cold it hurt my chest and the night began when it was still afternoon, she flipped over the sign and tipped a bottle of lye across the inside of my wrist.

An accident, she said. “You clumsy boo.” But I knew what it was. My punishment. Because I’d been too slow to answer her. I would not—could not—stop screaming so she went back to the flat and left me on my own, locked inside the shop.

I lay on the stone flags, as I had done as a much younger child, the substance eating its way through my skin, fire spreading up my arm. I could not get up because even the tiniest movement fueled the flames.

In the shadows of the shop, the fumes irritating my lungs and making me cough, and racked with pain, the horrors of my imagination came to life.

The puppets with their strings swung back and forth on their hooks, pointing their wooden hands at me. The toy monkeys jeered, chattering and baring their teeth. Clockwork mice crawled across my fevered skin.

The dolls climbed down from their exalted position high up on the shelves. They pulled at my hair and clothes, their porcelain fingernails scratching at the rawness of the open wound, their pale, inquiring faces daubed with the plasma that leaked from my chemical burns.

When Birdie came back in the morning, I was unconscious, toys strewn across the shop floor. Through fear or pain, no one knew.

Three skin grafts, I needed, the replacement flesh harvested from my stomach. In front of the doctors, Birdie ruffled my hair and called me a silly boo. When she thought I was asleep, I overheard her telling a nurse how I’d climbed on a stool to reach the lye after she’d warned me not to play with it.