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Elias takes care of her possessions.
She always has. When she was a girl with a roomful of dolls she would only dress in shades of black (mother called Elias’s bedroom her “little funeral home”; she couldn’t ever bear to look, even when Elias tugged at her sleeve to show her) she woke early every morning to brush their hair, dust their shelves, arrange the skirts of their dresses just-so. Daddy always bought her a shiny-eyed new doll for her birthday, for Christmas, for Easter sometimes, up until she turned thirteen and overnight was meant to be an adult with adult interests. Overnight she was meant to be a mother, despite the boozy-hot sting of that word, the way it surely made daddy angry the way he said it. Your mother… All venom and vomit and cold, irregular touches.
Daddy never let Elias have a dog—because it would be loud, it would smell, it would need to be fed and walked, it would give mother migraines—so Elias only ever had the dolls to project her love onto.
And so she longs for glassy-eyed girls with pink, supple mouths that don’t resist her tongue, or her fingers, or whatever else she wants to force inside. She loves it when a pretty, long-limbed woman has too many drinks and holds herself up on Elias’s arm, pushes the whole weight of herself against her, blinks too fast and her docile cow-eyes are swimming and Elias can swallow her tears like the candy she never ate in adolescence (trying to stay doll-pretty as if her fingers weren’t made to crush porcelain).
Daddy never let Elias have a dog, even though she would have been so good to it, cared for it so well. Now she has the best of both worlds. Of all possible worlds, she knows.
Elias is lucky—and feels it strongest when Jon rests with her head in Elias’s lap, brain and body and breath slowed by honey-sweet sedatives and the comfort of oxytocin-bonded proximity. Elias twists her fingers in Jon’s hair and Jon barely makes a sound, just air against Elias’s thigh. She can turn Jon’s head this way and that, gentle, kiss her without her body going rigid and her mouth jangling with excuses about how she’s tired, or anxious, or not in the mood.
Dolls don’t have moods that turn sour when they’re played with. Dolls are quiet, and soft, and clean.
Jon has so many shiny, pretty doll eyes that go hazy and unfocused when she’s drunk or in a chemical stupor, or both, like now (a little too much wine with dinner, flowing sweet and easy over the barbiturates she’d taken with her tea), and Elias kisses each one oh-so delicately as she rests Jon back against the couch.
When her lips brush a fluttering eye on the inside of Jon’s wrist, Jon says, Elias, like her name alone will stop her, and Elias tells her, Shh. She tells her, Good girls don’t need to speak. She tells her, You look so beautiful like this.
Elias takes good care of her possessions.
She remembers—a recollection from a body that both was and wasn’t hers—Peter Lukas when he was young and waifish and ephemeral, before she brought the earth to him, made him coarse and foul and perfect. Elias knows what creatures like him need (a firm hand, the seal of leather on soft skin, to binge and purge on love until it loses its meaning). Just as she knows what creatures like Jon need best—to be wooed, to be held, to have every broken part filled in with praise. Peter had to be taught how to please Elias; Jon is eager to learn.
All the more eager when her blood is pumping synthetic euphoria into her flushed cheeks, and Elias is kissing her breastbone where another eye peers out from the hollow of Jon’s throat, and Elias’s hands are under her skirt, traveling ghost-light over the ocular trails along her thighs. The eyes are everywhere Elias has touched her, has marked her, special places with meanings just for them. A semiotic map of how much Elias loves her doll-girl, her impossible angel.
Jon moves weakly under Elias’s touch, breathes hard, like she’s feverish—but she doesn’t push Elias away. Dolls don’t have a will of their own to exert upon the world. They’re inert, waiting to be animated by someone else’s touch.
Elias loves to touch her possessions. To know they’re really hers. Her hands, her fingers, were made for breaking things. Her world is full of objects to break. It’s her reward for always being stronger than the fragile bone-mothers and hollow fathers who never wanted to look, never wanted to touch her. Her reward for grasping an ancient monster and pulling it close to her heart.
Jon looks up at her and every eye is wet and dripping fear and love.
And every eye belongs to Elias.