Talking to William // l.p [discontinued]

Chapter Ten - Even a Boy Doll Has to Make a Girl Doll Sigh

Ten – Even a Boy Doll Has to Make a Girl Doll Sigh

Sometimes I stay up really late, until I am just exhausted enough that I can fall into my bed and sink into an immediate slumber. Because sometimes I can’t stand lying in a bed in a dark room, alone with just my thoughts for so many hours and hours.

***

They’re allowing me to walk around the hospital now. It’s not that interesting, but it’s nice being able to use my legs again.
Actually, anything’s nice after being confined to a hospital bed for the past few days.

I met a little bald girl on one of my walks. She has terminal cancer. Or at least, that’s what I think the nurse said. The girl, Luella, couldn’t have been more than six.

We’ve met up the past couple of days, hiding away in one of the radiographer’s old office. Although I use the term “hiding” loosely. I had to ask the man to let us use his old office and promise not to let anyone move into it or disrupt the blanket fortress we had created.

I think little Luella likes pretending that we’re hiding from her doctors and nurses though, so I’ll keep asking the radiographer until the novelty wears off.

The last time we were hiding, I had given Lou one of my Barbies, having haphazardly cut all the hair off, and stitching together, with help from my nurse June, a makeshift hospital gown. Instead of blue eyes, I had coloured them in brown, similar to Luella’s. Or so I like to think.

Upon presenting the doll to the little girl, she had broken out into an ecstatic squeal, of a pitch that only the young can produce, and wrenched the bald doll from my hands, sighing blithely while I explained that not all princesses needed hair to be beautiful.

When I scurried into our hiding spot, pushing a hospital sheet aside gently, I found Lou sitting cross-legged with her hands behind her back, a cheeky grin gracing her features.

“What are you hiding, Lulu?” I whisper to her, as she had created a no loud speaking rule while we hid in our cubby house.

Her grin broadened, and she whipped out her hands to shove something into my face, making me go cross-eyed trying to focus on it. Pushing her arms down slightly, I was able to gently pull it from her outstretched hands and examine it without getting a headache.

Turning the male doll over in my hands I took in his hair; held back with a glittery pink clip, his body; wrapped in a piece of paper sticky taped together to create a crinkly hospital gown, and finally his face; a little crescent moon under his left eye, a bit too neat to have been drawn by the six year old girl sitting excitedly in front of me.

I laugh at her excitement, and at the doll.

“Did you draw the moon, Lou?” I ask quietly, pointing at the doll’s face. Luella shakes her head.

“No, Caroline did it for me. I told her how you wanted a tattoo like that. Do you like him? He’s your prince, Dia. Your true love.” She exclaims proudly, her gap-toothed smile never once leaving her face.

I chuckle, and stroke the doll’s arm softly.

“What should we name him, then?” She pretends to think, before clapping her hands together, bouncing up and down.

“Will, let’s call him Will! Like your boyfriend.” She teases, dragging out the o, the way a little kid will.

Reflexively, my hand reaches down and I tap a finger against my pocket, making sure my phone was still there.

“Will it is then.” I say, moving out of the fortress, then reaching in for Luella’s hand. Upon pulling her out, I secure her little hand in my own and proceed to walk with her back to the children’s ward, my other hand wrapped loosely around the middle of the Will doll, paper gown crinkling every now and then.

***

I could pretend that he could bend, but I’m bound to be sad when he is unclad. A smooth plastic chest doesn’t make up for the rest; even a boy doll has to make a girl doll sigh.