Lie Still by Julia Heaberlin

Author:Julia Heaberlin [Heaberlin, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Suspense
ISBN: 9780345527042
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2013-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

I was seven years old the first time I realized that I was capable of a deliberate, immoral act.

It was a little thing, I suppose, but then it’s the little things that turn the dial of our character slowly, a notch at a time, one way, then the other, until we reach the point in young adulthood where the dial is firmly stuck in place and it takes a lot of torque to coax it along again.

My mother didn’t believe much in the value of Barbies as role models for little girls, so the only one I owned was an old Skipper doll that I’d bought for fifty cents at a garage sale. I’d painted her bald spot with a brown marker.

The lady behind the card table threw in a pitiful wardrobe of a pink-flowered bikini. One inch of fabric, maybe. And a strapless wedding dress with a ripped hem and most of the beads missing. All a girl needs if she’s planning to live out her days with her lover on a desert isle.

But my friend Robin across the street owned an elite collection, so many Barbies and Barbie cousins that twenty of them served as mere decorations on a high, unreachable shelf that her father had nailed around the room. The plastic women were trapped inside their boxes, fake-smiling behind the cellophane. More well-loved Barbies were tossed in a large plastic bin in her closet or forgotten under the bed, arms and legs in unnatural positions, in embarrassing stages of undress.

Robin was fanatic about the accessories, using a tall plastic fishing tackle box with tiny drawers to store sun hats and veils, necklaces and hosiery, and the tiny, tiny shoes. My favorites were a pair of white heels with a minuscule white feathery puff on top, held down by a rhinestone that I imagined was a piece of a star.

Those shoes were stored in the third row, fifth drawer across. My fingers itched to see how they’d look with Skipper’s pitiful wedding dress. I wanted them. And one day, when Robin slipped away to the bathroom, I opened the drawer. She wouldn’t even miss them, I reasoned. It wasn’t fair.

I did hesitate. For a few seconds, I stared at them in my small, sweaty palm, wondering if I could do this, thinking how disappointed my mother would be if she found out.

“Those are pretty, aren’t they?” The voice wasn’t angry but it was adult and knowing. Robin’s mother.

“Yes.” Heat rushed into my face.

“Are you ready to put them back?”

“Yes.” My heart knocked against my chest as she opened the drawer and I carefully dropped them in.

She never accused me of anything, never told my mother, or even Robin as far as I knew. She saved me from myself, giving me the benefit of the doubt even though she was certain of my guilt. I loved her for it.

At my parents’ wake, three days after the crash, I told Robin’s mother that I’d never forgotten that moment, an early lesson about kindness and trust as a powerful teacher.

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