"You came with two," her father said. He held it out to her, and she took it, and it weighed nothing at all. "A yellow one and a blue one. You wouldn't let anybody touch them for about a year. You slept with one in each hand. The blue one we lost at Lake Pueblo, the summer you were six. You dropped her off the dock at the marina and she sank before I could get my shoe off. You cried for two days. You said she'd go live with the fish and be their princess, and then you said, no, she'd be lonely, and cried again." He sat down on the arm of the sofa beside her mother. "This one you kept. You named her. You always called her by the same name, from the first night. We thought it was a TV thing. Some cartoon."
"What did I call her?"
"Mama," her father said.
The den was very quiet. Somewhere in the kitchen the oven timer went off, a long electronic whine, and nobody moved to stop it.
"Not Mommy," her mother said. "Not Mom. You called me Mommy, from about the second month. But her you always called Mama. Like she was a different person." Her mother's voice went very soft. "We knew what it meant, Cass. We just didn't know what to do about it."
Cassia looked down at the doll with its one arm and its pink-dotted crown and its felted yellow hair, and she remembered nothing. That was the worst of it. She waited for something to come back, a smell, a voice, a garage, a gas tank under her legs, and nothing came. Whatever she had been before she was four lived somewhere she could not get to, in a room with the door painted over.
But the hum was there. The October hum. Louder than it had ever been.
"I'm going to take these," she said. "The letter and the book. And her."
"Of course," her father said.
"I'm not coming to dinner tomorrow."
Her mother made a small sound and pressed her lips together and nodded.
"I don't know when I'm coming," Cassia said. "I'm not... I'm not saying never. I'm saying I don't know. You had ten years to figure out what you felt about this, and I've had eight hours, and I need to not be in a room with you while I do it." She stood. She put the doll in the pocket of her Highline fleece, head up, so it could see out, which was a thing she had not done with a doll since she was seven and did now without thinking. "Turn off the timer, Mom. Your layers are burning."
Her mother did not move. Her father got up and went into the kitchen and turned it off, and Cassia heard him open the oven and say, very quietly, to no one, "No, they're fine. They're fine." And then she let herself out the front door into the dark.