CHAPTER 1
IN MY MEMORIES, MY EYES are always green.
As green as the dark and dangerous sea, my
grandfather used to say. Mermaid’s eyes, he called them. Eyes that changed, from the color of seaweed, to sea glass, to the green
of troubled water. Yet I was never troubled, when my eyes were green.
There are huge gaps of time, years,
when I don’t remember anything about my life. Still, I am quite convinced that my eyes were always green.
Even in my double memories, they are green. Even though I seem to remember being two people, they are green. It doesn’t matter if
I recall being a child with blond streaks in my braids, collecting shells with my grandfather at the stony edge of the sea, or if
I think I was a dark-haired child riding a new pony, under the watchful eye of my pretty mother. My eyes are always green.
These days the mirror tells me my eyes are not green. They are brown. As brown as leaves that die in the fall.
I’m writing down these words because I don’t know if tomorrow I will remember what I know today. I have too many memories. Like the
memory of my eyes. But I also have memory losses. Great chunks of time are missing. Frankly, I’m terrified of losing more pieces of
myself, no matter how small.
“Green eyes are a false memory, Tennyson,” according to Dr. Embry. “You never
had green eyes.”
His words interrupted my mental rambling. His specialty is memory loss and recovery. And
apparently—me. Giles Embry is the head of “the Campus,” the facility where I am lodged. He is both a scientist and a medical doctor.
He studies disorders of the brain.
It seems I possess one of those pesky disordered brains. But why would
I have false memories? How could they have taken root?
The first time I saw a stranger with brown eyes staring
back at me in the mirror, I shrieked. It was the wrong reaction. Dr. Embry took away all the mirrors for a week. I learned not to
react. I learned to stop flinching at the unfamiliar eyes reflected there.
But my eyes are not all that’s
changed. Something happened to my hair.
When did it become so dark, so brown, so short? I often reach for
my hair, my blond hair, to braid it, to put it up, to brush it. My locks barely reach below my ears. Someone cut it. I don’t know
why.
When I steel myself to look in the mirror, my facial features are similar to the ones I remember, but
I can’t be positive, because of the brown eyes and the short dark hair. I try not to look into mirrors for very long anymore.
Men used to call me beautiful. Or did they? I suppose that could be a false memory too.
Dr. Embry tells me
certain memories have been implanted, changed, and distorted. Perhaps an aftereffect of the accident.
From
what he has told me, even if I could be sure of who I am, I could never trust my memory. Our memories are fluid. They change. We start
editing them as soon as they are completed. We make them better, more interesting. We lace things together so they make a story out
of the puzzle of our lives. We crave stories that have meaning.
But my memory is a hopeless liar and I am
broken into pieces.
When I’m awake, people call me Tennyson.
In my dreams, I hear
voices calling me Marissa.
It came from the home of my aunt and uncle and cousins. When they moved in, they discovered a dollhouse full of exquisite miniature furniture, abandoned in the crawlspace by the previous owners. It seemed like a very strange thing to leave behind. I was a teenager at the time, and the image stayed with me. It suggested so much to me: hidden spaces, secrets, discoveries, memories, a lost childhood. It became a key image in this story.
Over the years I've tried other titles, softer, harder, edgier or more “thrillery,” but it's the title that stuck. When it came time for The Cover, I didn’t want anything frilly or soft, or the Addams Family dollhouse. Perhaps I could get away without a dollhouse, or with the mere suggestion of one? But no--no matter what I tried, this cover needed a dollhouse. In a crawlspace! Not only that, this dollhouse had to suggest the "real" house in the story.
My cover designer for Dollhouse is the talented Robert Williams, who edits my manuscripts, designs my books, and webmasters my website. He's also my husband and partner in Lethal Black Dress Press, our publishing endeavor, and he designed the covers for The Children Didn’t See Anything and The Last Goodbye of Harris Turner. We already had a dark, creepy crawlspace in our own house, so all we needed was just the right dollhouse. No problem! Right?
Sigh. Stock photos of generic dollhouses didn't work for us. Neither did eBay. Our best find on Craigslist was too big to fit in our car, which the dollhouse owner proceeded to insult. (“Is that your ONLY car?!”) Only one option left: Build the !#$!%!&! dollhouse ourselves! It tested our patience, our dining room table, and the very fiber of our beings for three solid weeks, leaving in its wake sawdust, paint smears, hot glue glop, and frayed nerves.
But that was just the beginning. Donning hardhats and grabbing our new dollhouse, and our lights, cameras, dolls, and tripods, we crawled into our gloomy crawlspace to set the scene. We dressed and lit the dollhouse, got ourselves covered in cobwebs, and took hundreds of photos amid the dirt and dust. Then all Bob had to do was to choose the one best frame out of 498 (or so), perform a little digital image magic, and match the right dollhouse image to the right composition, fonts, layout, and color palette to create just the right look for the book: Cool but hot, shadowy but eye-popping, gloomy yet glowing, as if lit from within. No problem.
