All Dolled Up!

Charlie

"Hmm? With what?"

I walked up towards the kitchen and opened a window, with her trailing behind me. With some struggle, I opened up the window. "Could you... stick your head outside the window?"

"Huh? Why would you want me to do that? What would that even accomplish?" she asked.

"I just... wanted to see something," I told her.

"I, I might lose my balance if I get up there," she said. So, she was willing to do it, but that was her only qualm about it?

"Don't worry, I'll catch you if you fall," I said.

"You didn't catch me last time!"

"Ah, I'm sorry about that, I hadn't been expecting, but I will this time, I promise."

After a bit more coaxing, she agreed, and rather awkwardly got onto the kitchen counter and stuck her head outside the window. "Okay... what was this supposed to do exactly?"

"Huh, could stick out more of your head?" I asked her. She obliged, but only by a little.

"Is this some sort of weird joke?" she asked.

"No," I told her. "Last time, you fell when you were completely outside the house, so I wanted to see if you could put a part of yourself outside the house if you wanted. It looks like you can, so long as part of you is inside the house." It was weird how the things surrounding her and her condition worked, but I was just trying to figure out more about it.

"So I'm sort of a lab hamster for you?"

"No, I wanted to know more about how it worked... maybe then we'd be able to find out who did it?" I offered her an explanation, and she calmed down somewhat after that.

To my surprise, rather than climb down, she instead leapt into my arms and asked me to set her down.

I was a bit shocked - but thankfully she didn't seem to weigh much more when she was active than when she was a lifeless doll. I knew she had a pulse, but did she have actual bones and muscles? Her arms felt hard enough, but she seemed to be too light and too weak to have a full musculoskeletal system. But then again, how did she move at all? Again, I would've loved to be able to put her under an X-ray or CT machine - too bad that you can't get one of those through mail order.

She climbed out of my arms, and blushed lightly as she said, "Pardon me, I just get a bit nervous around heights."

"Even that small of a height?" I asked her. The kitchen counter was barely two feet off the ground - though I could see how, for someone like her, that might be pretty high.

She nodded. "Is that all?"

"Actually, I had something else I wanted to give you," I told her. I went to my room, where I found it and went back to hand it to her. "'The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes'," I read the title on the cover. "I heard you were a big fan, and I didn't know if you'd read all of his stories, so I got this for you."

"Oh," she said, eyes lighting up. The book was a bit worn, but that was because I had bought it slightly used. It was still perfectly serviceable, however.

I didn't know the exact timeline of the stories, but I was pretty sure that she would have missed at least some of them given the timeline. "Alright, I have to head out for work," I said, realizing I had lingered for far too long.

"...one last thing," she said. "Could you... leave flowers on May's gravestone for me? She liked lilies."

"I... I'll see if I can do it over the weekend," I told her as I left.

Charlie

Work was much better now that most of my stress was gone. And there was even something enjoyable about it, to not have to worry about anything other than storing boxes. To not have to worry about a patient crashing overnight. To not have to worry about forgetting a tiny detail that would cause you to lose your license. To not having to run to a code when it was your turn to do so. To not be asked questions which you did not know the answer to, or that you could not answer.

Yes, this was a lot better, and also much better than sitting at home for weeks on end like I had done previously.

I even started to talk to my coworkers a bit more, and I think seeing as I was no longer an irritable mess they responded far more positively as well.

Stuart started showing me pictures of his daughter again.

"Whoa- she looks just like you!" a voice piped up.

"Yeah, well, that's how genetics works, isn't it?"

That actually got me thinking about something.

"Hey- Charlie, George's having a big cookout on Fourth of July, are you in?"

"Ah, I would guys, really, I would," I said. It actually did seem like fun. "But my folks always have something, so I'm going to their place instead - but I'll try to show up some other time."

"Alright then, kiddo," George said.

The weekend was approaching now, and I intended to fully utilize my time off. I didn't know if this next plan of mine would work, but there was only one way to figure out.

"You're not dressed up today," she said, coming down the stairs.

"Yeah, these two nights I'm off work," I told her. "And, I even got you something else."

"Oh?" she said, as I ripped open a small box. She frowned as she examined it. "What... what is it?"

"It's a DNA ancestry testing kit," I told her.

"What's... dee and eggs?" she asked, pronouncing it completely wrong.

I nearly dropped what I was holding at that question. I had met many people who were health illiterate, including a gentlemen who wanted the doctor to take a look at his ovaries because his sister had once had ovarian torsion and he too, was having severe stomach pain. But I had never heard of someone who did not know what DNA was - one of the greatest discoveries of the last century! To think that someone didn't know that DNA was the basis for genetic inheritance... it was almost as odd as well... someone not knowing that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Come to think of it, I wasn't entirely sure that she even understood what cells were. And did she know that mitochondria are their powerhouses?

"What's with that face?"

"Ah, nothing," I said, realizing that I would have to try to walk her through this. "Well, DNA, is a discovery made a few decades back that controls how inheritance..." I began talking through it, though I didn't think I did a very good job at explaining it, though she nodded along appropriately.

Did she really understand what I was saying though? There was no way for me to be sure of that other than to ask her to repeat back what I was telling her, and I thought that it would be better to just explain what the kit did.

"So, what we do is take a sample of your DNA, and then run it through a database," I explained to her. "And then we can see if you have any living family around." It was one major thing for her to know that everyone she had ever known was dead, and though I had looked through things over the web, I couldn't find any living relatives of her. With this though, there was a shot at it.

"...even if you find them, what good will it do?" she asked.

"I uh, just thought that maybe you'd want to know if there were still relatives of yours around," I told her.

"Fine, but then what? They can't visit me, and I don't want them seeing me like this," she said. "And what if it makes trouble for you? What if they suddenly have a legal claim to this house and they try to evict you? What then?"

"Oh... yeah... I didn't think of that..." I said. "But, what if there is someone you'd want to meet? What if May had a granddaughter somewhere?"

"That person would still not want anything to do with me," she said. "And what could I do? What would watching them from afar do for me?"

"I just thought that maybe you'd want to see some of your family."

"I do- I loved my family. But my family were my family because we lived together in this house. I still treasure the memories I have with them. But even if you found more blood relatives of mine, all they would be are more blood relatives... they wouldn't be family. Not in the true sense of the word."

"I see..."

"If you want to do it anyway, fine by me," she said. "I'll do it, but I don't expect anything to come of it. How do we send this sample? It won't hurt, will it?"

"Just a swab of your cheek," I said. She cooperated, and I packed it up, ready to drop it off. Come to think of it, she was right though- this could backfire, but I wasn't too worried about that. I didn't even know if it would work - did her saliva still have DNA in it? She had a pulse, but at the same time, she didn't when she turned back into a doll.