Laughter at the Academy Page 26

  If I was lucky, he’d accidentally kill himself, and all my troubles would end…but that might leave full vessels floating around the world outside, ready to be found by someone who didn’t know what they were holding. Open a vessel improperly and everything it contained would come flooding out. And there were many, many ways to open something that had been closed.

  I wanted to go after him. I wanted to demand the return of my property, and I wanted to make him pay. I glanced to the remaining unfinished dolls, assessing the materials I had, automatically counting off the materials I’d need. Forcibly, I pulled myself away from that line of thinking. Revenge was satisfying, but it was hard to explain, and I’d already been reminded that I couldn’t take him in a fair fight.

  Hands shaking, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed the number for the police. When the dispatcher came on the line, voice calm and professional, I began to tell her what had happened.

  I made it almost all the way through the explanation before I started to cry.

  That night was one of the worst I’d had since Father started getting bad. We’d both known what his lapses in memory meant, but we’d denied it for as long as possible, he because he wasn’t ready to go, me because I wasn’t ready to be alone. Every keeper of the Kingdom eventually develops cracks. It’s a natural consequence of being a vessel that’s been emptied too many times. There’s a reason we don’t use the same doll more than once for anything other than the most basic and malleable emotions. That was the reason I couldn’t make myself a new doll, one big enough to hold my shame and grief and feelings of violation. I’d emptied out my sorrow too recently. I was too fresh, scraped too raw, to do it again.

  The officers who came in answer to my call were perfectly polite. They took pictures of the empty spaces on my shelves and of the bruises on my face and stomach, and if they thought the number of dolls still in my apartment was funny, they had the grace not to laugh in front of me. Eventually, they left me with a card and a number to call if Clark came back, and the empty promise that they’d see what they could do about getting my stolen property back. One of them asked me, twice, about filing a restraining order. I refused both times.

  I didn’t sleep. All I could do was lie awake, staring at the ceiling and thinking about the dolls who had been entrusted to my care, now lost in the world with their deadly burdens of emotion. They were so fragile. Why did we make them so fragile?

  Because they had to mirror the fragility of the human heart, if they were to do the jobs that they were made for.

  When morning came I rolled out of bed and dressed without paying attention to whether my clothes matched or how well they went together. My face hurt too much for me to bother with makeup, so I left it as it was, bruises like smeared paint on the side of my jaw and around the socket of my left eye, and walked out the door with my head up and my thoughts full of nothing but vengeance.

  A shocked hush fell over the office when I walked through the door. I ignored the people who were staring at me, choosing instead to walk to my desk. Something white was trapped under the keyboard. I pulled it loose, only to gasp and drop it like it had scalded my fingers.

  Strawberry’s whisper of a dress fluttered to the floor, where it lay like an accusation. You failed us, it seemed to say. You didn’t protect. You didn’t keep. You are no guardian.

  I clapped my hand over my mouth, ignoring the pain it awoke in my jaw, and fought the urge to vomit. Bit by bit, my stomach unclenched. I bent, picked up the dress, and walked calmly down the hall to the door with Clark’s name on it. He had an office; I had a cubicle. He had a door with a nameplate; I had a piece of paper held up with thumbtacks. I should have known better than to let him buy me that first cup of coffee. Even if I didn’t have that much sense, I should have known better than to let him take me out for dinner even once. I was a fool.

  Foolishly, I raised my hand and knocked. Clark’s voice, smooth as butter, called, “Come in.”

  I went in.

  Clark was behind his desk, a broad piece of modern office place furniture that was almost as large as my work table at home, if not half as old or attractive. He looked…perfect. Every hair was in place, and his tailored suit hung exactly right on his broad, all-American shoulders. His eyes darted to the scrap of fabric in my hand, and he smiled. “I see you found my present.”

  “Where are my dolls, Clark?” I’d meant to be more subtle than that, to approach the question with a little more decorum. Father always tried to tell me you got more flies with honey than you did with vinegar, but he’d never been able to make the lesson stick, and the words burst out, hot with venom and betrayal. “You had no right to take them.”

  “And you had no right to call the police over a little lover’s spat, but you did, didn’t you?” The jovial façade dropped away, leaving the snake he’d always been staring out of his eyes. “I was going to give them back. As an apology, for losing my temper. I shouldn’t have hit you, and I know that. But then the cops showed up at my apartment saying you’d filed a domestic violence complaint against me. I’m sure you can see why I didn’t like that very much.”

  I stared at him. “I didn’t file a domestic violence complaint against you, Clark, because you’re not any part of my domestic life. I filed an assault charge. You didn’t just hit me. You beat me down. Where are my dolls?”

  His smile was a terrible thing. “I’m not a part of your domestic life. How would I know where your silly little toys ended up? As for your trumped-up charges, my lawyer will enjoy seeing yours in court. Now you might want to get out of my office before I tell HR that you’re harassing me.”

  Wordlessly, I held up Strawberry’s gown, daring him to say something that would deny that he was the one who’d left it on my desk.

  “What, that? I found it in my car, and thought you might want it back. You know how it is with grown women who play with dolls. They’re just like children. Leaving their toys everywhere.”

  He sounded so smug, so sure of himself, that it was all I could do not to walk around the desk and snatch his eyes from his head. I kept my nails long and sharp, to make it easier to position delicate doll eyelashes and reach miniscule screws. I could have had his eye sockets bare and bleeding in a matter of seconds.

  I balled my hands into fists. I was my father’s daughter. I was the keeper of the Kingdom and the maker of the keys, and I would not debase myself with this man’s blood.

  “This isn’t over,” I said.

  Clark smiled at me. “Actually, I’m pretty sure it is,” he said. “Bye, now.”

  There was nothing else that I could do, and so I turned, Strawberry’s dress still clutched in my hand like a talisman against the darkness that was rushing in on me, and I walked away.

  The rest of the day crept by like it wanted me to suffer. My eyes drifted to Strawberry’s dress every few seconds until I finally picked it up and shoved it into my purse, hoping that out of sight would equal out of mind. It didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, but it made enough of a difference that I was able to complete my assigned work and sneak out the door fifteen minutes early. Thanks to Clark, I had lost track of fourteen filled vessels. I needed to find them, and that meant I needed help. There was only one place to go for that.

  My father.

  The Shady Pines Nursing Home was as nice a place to die as money could buy, with all the amenities a man who barely remembered himself from hour to hour could want. I had made sure of that. If I was going to keep him alive past the point when he was ready to go, I wasn’t going to make him suffer.

  Part of what that money paid for was an understanding staff. When I presented myself at the front desk an hour after visiting hours had ended, a long white box in my hands and a light layer of foundation over the bruises on my face, they didn’t ask any questions; they looked at me and saw a dutiful daughter who had experienced something bad, and needed her father.

  “He’s having one of his good days, Miss Collodi,” said the aide who walked me thro
ugh the well-lit, pleasantly decorated halls toward my father’s room. “You picked an excellent time to visit.”

  I could tell he meant well from the look on his face—curious about my bruises but eager not to offend. So I just smiled, and nodded, and said, “I’m glad to hear that.”

  We stopped when we reached the door of Father’s room. The aide rapped his knuckles gently against the doorframe, calling, “Mr. Collodi? May we come in?”

  “I told you, the dollhouse won’t be ready for another three days,” shouted my father, sounding exactly like he had throughout my childhood: aggravated by the stupidity of the world around him, but trying to improve it however he could. “Go away, and come back when it’s done.”

  I put a hand on the aide’s shoulder. “I can handle it from here,” I said. The aide looked uncertain, but he nodded and walked away, leaving me alone with the open doorway. I hefted the box in my hands, checking the weight of its precious burden—so few left, and no way to make more—before taking a deep breath and stepping into my father’s room.

  Antonio Collodi had been a large man in his youth, and that size was still with him: broad shoulders and a back that hadn’t started to stoop, despite the deep lines that seamed his face and the undeniable white of his hair. The muscle that used to make him look like a cross between a man and a bear was gone, withered to skeleton thinness; his clothes hung on him like a shroud. He was standing near the window, hands curled like he was working on an invisible dollhouse. I stopped to admire the workmanship that had gone into him. I must have made some small sound, because he turned and froze, eyes fixing on my face.

  “I’m your daughter,” I said, before he could start flinging accusations. He usually mistook me for Pandora—a natural misunderstanding, since I looked exactly like she did in the painting that we had been passing down, generation to generation, since the beginning. He didn’t like being visited by dead people. He said it was an abomination, and a violation of our compact with the Kingdom of the Cold, which some called “Hades,” where the dead were meant to stay forever. “Daddy, I need your help. Can you help me?”

  “My daughter?” He kept staring at me, dawning anger melting into amazement. “You’re beautiful. What did I make you from?”

  “Bone and skin and pine and ice,” I said, walking to his bed and putting down the long white box. I rested a hand on its lid. “Pain and sorrow and promises and joy. You pried me open and called me a princess among doors, and then you poured everything you had into me, and kept pouring until my eyes were open.” I remembered that day: waking on my father’s workbench, naked and surrounded by bone shavings, my teeth tender and too large in my little girl’s mouth, my face stiff from the smile it had been painted wearing.

  My family has guarded the trick to calling life out of the Kingdom for centuries, since Pandora brought it to us and said she was too tired to keep the compact any longer. No one you didn’t make with your own two hands can be trusted. That’s the true lesson of the Kingdom, and what I should have remembered when Clark smiled his perfect smile and offered me his perfect hands. But my father made me too well, and when he bid me to become a woman, a woman I became. If I’d stayed a doll of bone and pine, Clark would have had no power over me.

  “Yes, that’s how you make a daughter,” said my father, following me across the room. “Is that why I’m so empty?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I should be in pieces by the road by now.”

  “I still need you.” I took my hand off the box and opened the lid, revealing a blue-eyed boy doll. He was dressed in trousers and a vest a hundred years out of date, and his face was painted in a way that subtly implied he had a secret. I undid the ribbons holding him in place and gingerly picked him up. He weighed more than he should have for his size, and my hands shook as I held him out toward my father. “There are five of these in the world. That’s why you can’t go. If you break this one, there will only be four, and you’ll be one step closer to entering the Kingdom.”

  We were supposed to be at peace there. We were supposed to be the real boys and girls we had been crafted to resemble. I didn’t know if that was true…but I knew that the humans lived for the promise of Heaven with much less proof of its existence than we had of the Kingdom.

  Pandora and Carlo Collodi had been real people, flesh and blood people. Pandora had carried a vase like a broken heart, meant to contain all the dangers of the world, both sweet and bitter. She had been tired from her wandering, from years on years of struggling to recapture the evils she had accidentally released. Carlo Collodi…

  He had wanted a daughter. Of such necessity are many strange bargains born.

  Father took the doll. I didn’t look away. This was on me; this was my fault, because I was doing this to him. I could have crafted my child as soon as it became clear that the vessel of Father’s thoughts had cracked. I could have set him free, and no one would have called it murder, because I wouldn’t have laid a finger on him. I was the one who wasn’t willing to let him go.

  “Oh, my brave boy,” he murmured, cradling the doll in his hands. “Your name was Marcus, wasn’t it? Yes, Marcus, and you were a vessel for my anger. The world was so infuriating back then…” He raised the doll, pressing his lips against the cold porcelain forehead.

  It felt like the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees, the doorway to the Kingdom of the Cold swinging open and locking in place as all that Father had poured into that blue-eyed boy came surging out again, filling him. He stayed that way for almost a minute, lips pressed to porcelain, drinking himself back in one sip at a time. The chill remained in the air as Father lowered the doll, and the eyes he turned in my direction were sharp and clever, filled with the wisdom of two hundred years of making dolls to hold every imaginable emotion.

  “Marian, why am I still here?” he asked. All traces of confusion were gone. The sad, broken vessel was no longer with me, and I rejoiced, even as I fought not to weep.

  The dolls he had filled before he had broken grew fewer with every visit, and his lucidity faded faster. I was running out of chances to call my father back to me. “Four dolls remain, Father,” I said, rising and sketching a quick curtsey, even though I was wearing trousers. “Until they’re used up, you can’t finish breaking.”

  “Then use them. Stop wasting them on me. I command you.”

  “I can’t.” I straightened. “I would if I could. I love you, and I know my duty. But the world has changed since you were its doll maker, and I can’t do this without you. I need to be able to ask my questions, and have someone to answer them.”

  He frowned. “Have you made a child yet?”

  “Not yet. I can’t.” Once I made myself a child—made it from bone and skin and pine and ice, like my father had made me, like his father had made him—my own cracks would begin to show, and the essence of what made me would begin leaking free. A vessel can only be emptied so many times. The creation of a child was the greatest emptying of all. “I’m not ready. But Father, that isn’t why I came. I need your help.”

  “Help? Help with what?”

  I took a deep breath. This was going to be the difficult part. “There was a man at my office…”

  I spilled the whole sordid story out between us, drop by terrible drop. The smiles, the flirtation, the dates for coffee that turned into dates for dinner that turned, finally, into Clark deciding he had the right to start dictating my life. From there, it was a short progression to him knocking me to the floor and stealing my dolls.

  Father listened without a word, letting his precious moments of lucidity trickle away like sand. When I was done, he inclined his head and said, “You have been foolish, my Marian. But you’re young as long as I’m in this world—children are always young when set against their parents—and I can’t fault you for being a young fool. I was foolish too, when I had a father to look after me.” He held out his empty doll. I took it. What else could I have done? He was my father, and he wanted
me to have it. “You know what you need to do.”

  “I don’t want to,” I said weakly—and wasn’t that why I’d come to him? To find another way, a better way, a human way, one that didn’t end with someone broken and bleeding in the street?

  But sometimes there isn’t any other way. Sometimes all there can be is vengeance. “You have to,” he said gently.

  I sighed. “I know.” The empty doll was light as a feather, nothing but a harmless husk. I could sell it to a dealer I knew for a few hundred dollars, and watch them turn around and sell it to someone else for a few thousand. It didn’t matter who profited, or how much. All that mattered was that this shattered little piece of my father’s soul would no longer be in my keeping. One more doorway, permanently closed.

  “Now come, sit with me.” My father sat down on the edge of his bed, gesturing for me to return to my previous place. “I don’t have long before the cracks begin to show again, and I would know what you’ve been doing with your life.”

  “All right,” I said, and sat, settling the empty doll back into his box. Father reached for my hands. I let him take them. We sat together, both smiling, and I spoke until the understanding faded from his eyes, and he was gone again.

  There are always consequences when you spend your life standing on the border of the Kingdom of the Cold.

  I spent the night at my work table, a rainbow of paints in front of me and Charity the bat-girl’s delicate face looking blindly up at the ceiling as I applied the intricate details of her makeup, one stroke at a time. She’d been waiting for the chance to be complete for months, but I’d passed her by time and again to focus on newer projects. I’d always wondered why. It’s not like me to leave a doll languishing for so long. Now I knew: Charity had a purpose, and until the time for that purpose arrived, I couldn’t have finished her if I’d tried.