The Laughterhouse (18 page)

“You know the police are looking for us,” Melanie tells him. “The police can track people. They do it all the time.”

“On TV they do,” he tells her, “but this isn’t TV.”

“No, not just on TV,” she says. “We had this girl at school and she ran away. The police found her within a day. And there was another girl who—”

“Melanie,” he says, “I don’t want to hear you talking anymore, okay? And I don’t want to hurt you, I really don’t, but you’re making me feel as though I want to.”

He leads her back inside. She goes over to her father the same way Katy did earlier and wraps her arms around him. Caleb leans against the wall drinking orange juice staring at them. He remembers his own daughter holding him that way.

“That’s enough,” he says, and unlike Katy she lets go right away. “Octavia needs her diaper changed.”

“Yeah? So why don’t you do it?”

“Because I’m telling you to. Your sister can help.”

They lay Octavia down on the blanket. Katy starts humming. He doesn’t recognize the tune, but from the sound of it he guesses it’s her own tune, something she’s making up as she goes along. The doctor is crying. It’s pathetic.

“What’s it like having no control?” he asks, but of course Stanton can’t answer. The girls all look over at him but say nothing.

“Not much of a man, are you,” Caleb says.

Stanton looks directly at him. He muffles more of the
fuck you
s and struggles against the ties, but really, what does he expect to happen?

“We’re done,” Melanie says.

Katy stops humming and starts singing. “A, b, c, d, g, f, g . . . g, f, g,” she says, over and over.

He realizes she has a beautiful singing voice, but he’s not in the mood for it. “Stop that,” he says, but she gets louder. “I said stop that.”

“She can’t,” Melanie says. “When she gets really sad she starts doing that.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s sad, weren’t you listening? She didn’t used to do it.”

“A, b, c, g, c, g . . .”

“Why did she start?”

“She started when Mom left.”

“G, f, g,” Katy says.

“And when was that?” he asks.

“Why should I tell you?” she asks, handing Katy’s teddy bear to Octavia. Octavia smiles and grabs it tight. Katy stares on, still singing, her sweet voice echoing through the room.

“Because I asked nicely. If you like, I can ask not so nicely.”

“Six months ago. She’s a bitch.”

“What?”

“She’s a bitch. A fucking bitch.”

“Whoa, slow down,” he says, showing her his palm. “Don’t use that kind of language.”

“Why not? You use it.”

“But I’m an adult.”

She shrugs. “Doesn’t change the fact my mom is a bitch who walked out on us. A fucking bitch. That’s what Dad says when he doesn’t think we can hear him.”

More sounds from Stanton. More struggling. Maybe he should knock him out again.

“Sounds tough,” he says to Melanie.

“Tough? No, what’s tough is you. You’re a tough guy, right? You must be since you’re keeping my dad tied up and walking around with a knife. Bet your mom and dad would be proud.”

Octavia pulls away and starts tracing her finger back and forth across the floor. He’s thinking he may have to gag Katy. It’s distracting. Gag Katy and knock Stanton out—his to-do list is building up. He points toward the bag and looks at Melanie. “Help yourself,” he says, “and feed your family too. They’re going to need their strength. And no more swearing.”

“So I can take off Dad’s gag?”

He nods. Katy is still singing, and there are tears on her face and a long string of snot hanging like a spider web between her nose and her hand. She wipes it over her top as Melanie walks over to her father and slowly pulls the duct tape from his mouth, the front of which has drips of dried blood on it.

“Don’t you fucking hurt them,” Stanton says, then spits a wad of mucus onto the floor.

“You swore,” Katy says.

“Don’t hurt them,” he says, then he looks at his girls. “It’s going to be okay,” he says, changing his tone. Melanie hugs him again.

It’s obvious he wants to hug her too but can’t. She holds him tight and his next words of assurance toward them is muffled against her shoulder. She steps back, and Katy carries Octavia over so they can hug too, and it’s such a sweet moment in which Caleb imagines different scenarios, all of them involving the knife that is still owed a lot of blood. The good news is that Katy stops singing. Both Melanie and the doctor are trying to look strong, and both of them fall short. Katy is the only one who’s really showing her emotions. Octavia is too young to have any emotion other than
I’m happy
or
I just shit myself.

“I’m scared,” Katy tells him.

“It’s okay, honey, it really is,” he says, then coughs for a few seconds. “We’re going to be fine.”

Caleb says nothing. They can believe what they want—he’ll prove them all wrong soon enough.

The father looks past his daughters and over at Caleb, then tries to clear his throat again. “Listen, Caleb, I’ve been thinking about why you’ve been doing this, and I, I . . .” he says, but his throat blocks back up and he has to clear it again. “I understand why you hate me,” he says, and the look in his eyes says something else, his eyes are saying he’s thought about it, doesn’t understand what’s going on, and wants to kill Caleb. “I really do, and I can’t blame you for that, Caleb, I really can’t,” he says, his words almost running together. “You deserve to hate me, but not my children. You’ve made your point. For the love of God, leave them be.”

Caleb shakes his head. “No, Doctor, I haven’t made my point. I haven’t even started. And your kids, they are part of this, just like mine were.”

“No, no they’re not. Listen to me, they’re not responsible for what happened.”

“You’re responsible,” Caleb tells him. “My children are dead and so is my wife and I’ve spent fifteen years in jail getting the shit kicked out of me every day, and what have you been doing, huh? Buying a nice house, raising your kids, laughing and smiling and making a family and pissing off your wife and . . .”

“It wasn’t my fault what happened,” Stanton says, then can’t carry on as Melanie tips a glass of juice toward him. He gulps it down greedily. For the first time Caleb realizes how much Melanie looks like her father. Katy does too, but not Octavia. At one year old, Octavia doesn’t look like anything other than a generic baby. All babies look the same except when they’re your own.

“You killed my daughter.”

“No, no I didn’t,” he says, spluttering on the juice.

“Yes you did,” Caleb confirms. “You and the others.”

“I can see how you see it that way, Caleb, I really can, but that’s not how it was.”

“It’s exactly how it was. I want you to experience what I went through.”

“What?”

“The loss and the blame, I want you to live what I lived, and I want you to die how I died.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I think you know,” Caleb says, looking at the pain on Stanton’s face, looking at the awareness dawn on him. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to lose a child, let alone two of them?”

Katy moves over to Octavia and starts singing again. Melanie stays with her father, but suddenly she’s not looking as brave as she’s trying to be. Stanton is doing an even worse job now of trying to look strong. Octavia is drawing a circle on the dirt floor with her finger, looking confused as to why the circle keeps disappearing.

“I . . . I don’t understand,” Stanton says.

“I think you do,” Caleb says. “See, I lost two children, and if you were to lose two children at least you’d still have a spare.”

Stanton starts shaking his head. “No, no, you can’t. You can’t. Please, don’t hurt them.”

“You hurt me.”

“I’m—I’m sorry,” he says, his voice dry again. “I’m truly sorry.”

“What does he mean?” Melanie asks.

“He doesn’t mean anything,” Stanton answers, then, in a lower voice even though all his children can hear him, he says, “Caleb, you can’t do this.”

“You have a debt to pay, Doctor.”

“There’s no debt!” he shouts, spittle flying from his swollen lips.

“You say you’re sorry, but that’s only because you’re here
where my daughter died, and because you’re desperate. Were you sorry fifteen years ago? Were you sorry for taking our lives away? No, you weren’t, because if you were you would have come and seen me, you would have come to tell me how bad you felt.”

“Is this what you want? To be just like Whitby? Is that what your wife and children would want?”

“What they want is to be alive again.”

“You’re dishonoring them.”

“No, I’ve honored them. I’ve kept them alive in here,” he says, touching his head, “and in here,” he says, touching his heart. “I’m the only one who has. The rest of the world has moved on. You moved on. You’re still a doctor, you still treat people. If there was any guilt inside of you, you would have become somebody different, you’d have given up your job fifteen years ago when you saw what you had done. Instead you feel nothing, except now, because right now you feel remorse because I’m here to punish you. This is the moment in your life, Stanton, where being a bad person catches up with you. It’s the moment where you have to be accountable.”

“You’re wrong. I think about what happened to your family all the time. I use it to make people better. Please—”

“Melanie, go and sit over there with your sisters,” Caleb says.

“No. I’m not leaving my dad.”

“It’s okay, Munchkin,” Stanton says, and his nickname for his daughter makes Caleb’s heart jump. On occasion he’d called his daughter the same thing. Munchkin. Pumpkin. Princess. Sometimes it’d be Princess Munchkin or Princess Pumpkin.

Melanie is starting to cry.

“Do what he says,” Stanton begs. “All three of you, go to the other side of the room.”

They do as he asks, Katy and Melanie carrying Octavia between them. Caleb moves in close, he crouches in front of the doctor. He lowers his voice. “It will be different for you, I promise,” he says.

“Please, please, don’t hurt my kids,” Stanton says, matching the volume of Caleb’s voice. “They haven’t done anything to you. I’ll do anything, anything, don’t hurt them.”

“What are their nicknames?” Caleb asks.

“What? Why?”

Why? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t need to know either, or at least he shouldn’t. But right now it’s important to him. “Tell me,” he says.

“Munchkin and Kitten,” he says. “Munchkin Mel and Katy Kitten.”

“And Octavia?”

“Huh?”

“Octavia.”

Stanton shakes his head. “She doesn’t have one.”

“Why?”

“Don’t hurt them,” Stanton says.

Caleb shakes his head. Fuck it. It’s time to move on. What does he care who is named what? “It’s too late for that.”

“No, no it’s not. There’s no reason why it’s too late. You haven’t hurt them yet, you don’t have to, you can do what you want with me, but you don’t have to hurt them. Please, I’m begging you.”

“Begging. My daughter begged for her life,” he says, knowing she would have. She would have begged and cried and called out for him and his wife. “We also used to call her Munchkin,” he says, and Stanton winces and Caleb knows why—suddenly it’s all become a lot more human to him. Suddenly Stanton’s imagining what it would be like to lose his own daughter. Well, he isn’t going to have to imagine for long. “I’m going to let you decide which one of your kids dies first,” Caleb says. “I never had that choice.” The sun is coming into the office, highlighting a beam of dust in the air. He knows the girls can’t hear him, because if they could they would be doing more than just crying, they’d be bawling their eyes out and screaming. “You’re going to be with them when they die,” Caleb says, carrying
on. “My daughter was all alone out here with the man that killed her,” he says, and he’s seen it play out in his mind a thousand times a day since it happened. It’s always there on repeat, an image he can’t shake, an image that has defined him. “He stabbed her and raped her in the middle of winter. It was thirty fucking degrees out here and that didn’t slow him down. Stabbed her over and over in her chest and her stomach. Before that he stripped her naked and pressed her tiny body against concrete as cold as ice, and during that time you were sitting in your warm office drinking coffee and offering bullshit advice while having no fucking idea at all about how people tick.”

“I . . .”

“You killed her, you fucker!” he yells, and now comes the sobbing from the children, and small brief screams too, and here comes his emotion, here it comes racing through him and if he doesn’t dial it back he’s going to ruin everything by gutting the doctor where he lies, and the doctor, well, he’s flinching at every word, as if they’re punches being thrown down on him. “You, you and your fucking skewed way of seeing the world, you and your arrogance, your vanity, you and all your importance because you just had to be the man, right? You had to be the fucking man who knew better! You only thought about your career, about making a name for yourself.”

Katy Kitten and Munchkin Mel are in full cry mode now as they clutch the teddy bear between them. They are low to the floor so they can clutch Octavia too. He looks at them, he sees the fear, but they don’t know what fear is—unless he undresses them and presses them into the floor they’ll never understand it.

He pulls himself back from losing control. He shakes his head and lowers his voice. “James Whitby, he couldn’t help himself. He was damaged goods, he was a bad guy, but it’s who he was. You say you were only doing your job, but that’s what the others were doing. You were doing more than that—it
was your word that Whitby could be helped. Your word that his lawyer argued to the judge. You were the one in that stand seventeen years ago who convinced those twelve people that James Whitby was a stand-up guy, that he . . .”

“I never said that!”

“No, and you never said we’d all be better off with him in jail. Instead you said he needed help, that medical help would help him. You said he could be cured and the jury and the judge, they believed that.”

“I . . . I am, I’m truly sorry, I’m . . . oh, Jesus, don’t hurt my kids.”