Dollmaker
By Samantha Bolf
There is always a room in the house that daughters cannot enter.
~
The door was painted blue, like midnight, and all of Laura’s dreams featured blood seeping out from under it.
She worked in a city far away from the home she’d once grown up in. Her therapist in the city said that her dream was the result of never being allowed into her father’s workshop, which was right across the hall from her reading nook in their basement. He said that she didn’t seem like the type to have much in the way of repressed trauma. Laura took that as a challenge, and spent the next week peeling apart her memories and digging her hands into them as though tearing apart a ripened orange. She found nothing except for a hazy, girl-like desire to have an older sister, one who could protect her and braid her hair when Mother got busy. When she returned to her therapist, defeated, he nodded and looked down at his notepad.
“Just as I suspected,” he said. “The lonely and prodigal daughter.”
Her therapist studied her through moon-shaped glasses, with thin frames made out of gold. They slid down his nose when he gestured emphatically or wrote something down with a particular flourish. He tapped the notepad with the back of his pen.
“A true classic,” he said.
The next week, Laura skipped therapy and grabbed the train back home to see her youngest brother graduate from high school. A few days into her visit, she watched her father die of a heart attack at their kitchen table instead.
~
Her father ran an architectural company when he was alive. His main job was designing and building prisons. It paid him well. Laura and her seven brothers lived in a large house with many rooms, so many that no one had to share with anyone else, and their mother watched them during the morning and at night and after school with a careful, quiet eye. In the basement, underneath the stairs, there was enough space for Laura to create a makeshift playroom. She stored costumes down there, in boxes on top of boxes, and piles of books that expanded and shrunk as she grew older and time floated by; bobbing on waves, sprinting down sidewalks.
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