The Laughterhouse

by Paul Cleave

  Another child.

  I’m not even sure where the idea has come from. It’s not something I’ve even thought about. Another child. No, no way. I’ve seen what happen to children in this world. There’s no way I’m going to bring another one into it.

  Still. .

  I’m getting ahead of myself. First we have to get through the sorrow. Any thoughts of the future have to be put on hold until I’ve explained the present. Sitting her down and telling her about Emily, holding my wife in my arms as she cries at our loss, the painful days ahead turning into painful weeks and months, taking her to the cemetery to show her our daughter’s grave. I shake my head.

  The waitress’s shirt in Froggie’s Diner summed it up perfectly.

  Yet the smile is still there, fixed on my face, and I keep my foot on the accelerator and God it feels good, it feels so good to be racing to a destination that isn’t the scene of death and despair.

  When I get to the nursing home there is still a police car out front, a leftover from the previous night, an officer inside it on watch. There is an ambulance there too, and a late model BMW next to it. The lights on the ambulance are flashing and I’m not sure why that would be.

  I park next to the BMW. Forster is standing by the back of the ambulance. He’s a guy in his mid-fifties with dark brown hair and designer glasses, his tie is loose and his sleeves are rolled up, and he looks like the kind of guy who plays a doctor on TV. The ambulance doors are closed, there’s an internal light going, and still I have the smile on my face.

  “What’s the story with that?” I ask, pointing my thumb at it.

  “Let’s go inside,” he tells me.

  I shake my head. “I’ll go inside and see Bridget in a second,” I say, “but how about you tell me about the ambulance?”

  “Theo. .”

  I shake my head. “She’s awake, Doctor. She’s awake and she’s fine.”

  “Please, let’s go inside.”

  “No. Not until you tell me she’s okay. Not until you tell me the ambulance isn’t here for her,” I say, and the smile, that stupid fucking smile is still on my face. I’m keeping it there, and as long as it stays my wife is going to be okay. The ambulance starts to roll forward.

  “Theo. .”

  “Damn it,” I say, and I push past him and put my hand on the handle of the back door.

  “Theo, don’t,” he says, reaching for my shoulder, but I do.

  I open the ambulance door and that smile is finally gone. Bridget is lying in there with an oxygen mask on her face and two men crouched over her. The driver brings it to a stop.

  “What the fuck,” one of them says as I try to step inside. “Get the hell out of here.”

  “Theo,” Forster says, this time reaching me and pulling me back.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Get him out of here,” one of the paramedics says, while the other one is pressing on the bag to provide oxygen to my wife.

  “What. .” I say, and it’s all I can say. Bridget’s eyes roll toward me, her blue eyes wide open, they stare at me and lock onto me for the first time in three years. Her right hand reaches a little toward me. She knows who I am. She can see me and she knows who I am and I reach out toward her, and she looks at me and through me and into me, and she’s in the process of dying and I stand in the back of the ambulance with Forster dragging me back and the driver slowly starting to roll forward again.

  “Get out,” the paramedic says, and this time he reaches up and shoves me in the chest. I fall into Forster and we both tip into the driveway and land heavily against it, Forster breaking most of my fall, but not enough of it to stop the headache waking back up. The ambulance door closes and it pulls away. It races down the driveway out of sight, and when it’s out on the road the sirens start wailing.

  “I’m sorry,” Forster says.

  “Tell me,” I say, rubbing the side of my head, only the words don’t come out that way. They come out all beaten up and slurred.

  “What?”

  “I thaid thell me.”

  “Are you okay?”

  I rub at my head and I squeeze my eyes closed, and in the darkness there are some fading fireworks. I focus on the words. “I’m thine,” I say. Then I try again, focusing on each word. “I’m fine. Tell me about Bridget,” I say as the fireworks start to fade.

  “You’re not fine. Did you just knock your head?”

  “Goddamn it, Doctor, just tell me!”

  “Your wife,” he says, “Bridget, as you know, she came out of her coma forty-five minutes ago. She didn’t say anything,” he says, and his head is moving slowly from side to side, a slow shake of his head, a slow bad-news-is-coming shake. “She came to and she walked into the corridor. The nurse who found her thought it was another one of her walks, but then Bridget grabbed her shoulders and tried to speak but couldn’t make any noise. She was highly agitated.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “I was called and by the time I got here she had been calmed. She was sitting down drinking water. She was looking around, she didn’t understand what-”

  “Just tell me, is she okay?”

  “She didn’t know what was happening, but she was alert. We told her who she was and that she had been in an accident, and she began to get upset. We thought we were going to have to sedate her.”

  “Goddamn it, Doctor, is she okay?” I ask, and I can feel the bile at the back of my throat, and if he says no, if he says she’s going to die, then he better run, he better run like the devil is after him.

  He stands up and brushes off the back of his pants. He reaches down and takes my hand and pulls me up.

  “She suffered a seizure,” he says. “Before I could even start to look her over, she started convulsing. We couldn’t get her to stop. We got an ambulance and then she went into cardiac arrest. They’re helping her, and every second. .” He stops talking. “It’s serious,” he says.

  “You were going to say every second counts,” I tell him.

  “Theo. .”

  “You’re telling me I just cost my wife twenty seconds.”

  “Don’t look at it that way.”

  “I should have been here earlier,” I tell him, thinking of Cole, of Jonas, thinking that this city owes me a favor, hell, a hundred favors. “Fucking hell, I should have been here!”

  “There was no way of knowing it was going to happen, Theo, and even if you had been here, the same thing would have-”

  “And all I managed to do was delay the ambulance.”

  “Theo, you can’t have known. . ”

  His words fade out as I race back to my car, each heavy step echoing in my skull. I feel like I’m going to throw up again.

  I drive to the hospital hitting speeds I’ve never hit before. People pull out of the way. The headache comes and goes like waves smashing against a cliff, each wave a little less powerful than its predecessor but still damn strong. When I get there I park by the main doors and run into the emergency room. I push my way ahead of two other people at the counter who bitch at me, and I flash my badge at the nurse behind it and I demand that she buzz me through the security doors between the waiting room and the operating rooms. She does. I go through and a doctor approaches me and tells me to calm down, then asks what the problem is. I tell him. He tells me to follow him, and I do, and he leads me to the same waiting room I was in yesterday with Schroder when we were talking to Mrs. Hayward. This time I’m the only one in there. I pace the room a few times, sit down for half a minute, then pace the room some more. Over the years people have gotten the best news and the worst news in this room. Their lives have changed. After five minutes I head into the corridor. I pace it up and down, looking at other people in different stages of pain. I stare at a young woman on a gurney whose eyes are open and blank, there is vomit down the side of her face and on her neck, a tube hanging out of her mouth that’s been disconnected, a nurse pulling a sheet up over her face.

  “What happened to her?” I ask.


  The nurse turns toward me, and I show her my badge.

  “Overdose,” she says. “By the time she got in here there wasn’t much we could do. It’s sad,” she says, “it’s always sad.”

  I start pacing the corridor again and haven’t gotten much further before Dr. Forster finds me. There are cuts and grazes in his palms from where he broke our fall.

  “Theo,” he says, and he’s puffing slightly as if he’s been running around looking for me. “I’ve spoken to the doctors,” he says. “Bridget’s blood pressure has plummeted and her heartbeat is erratic, but they are in the process of stabilizing her vitals,” he says.

  “What the fuck does that even mean?” I ask.

  “It means her body is crashing and they’re trying to save her.”

  “Why? I don’t get it-she was awake, wasn’t she?”

  He shakes his head. “She was, and now she isn’t. I don’t know why. We’ll know more when she stabilizes and we can look her over.”

  “But she’ll be okay, right? And when this is over, she’ll be okay again? She’ll be normal?”

  “I–I don’t know.”

  “I want to see her.”

  “You can’t. They’re working on her. There’s nothing you can do here,” he says.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I know,” he says. “I’ll keep you updated.”

  He leaves me alone. I grab my cell phone and see I’ve missed two calls from Schroder. I never even heard it ring. I call him back.

  “How is she?” Schroder asks.

  I start to tell him, and I have to sit to get through it all because my legs are ready to collapse. He listens without interrupting me, and then at the end he tells me he’s sorry.

  “What’s happening with Jones?” I ask him.

  “Are you going to be okay?” he asks.

  It’s a dumb question but one he had to ask, and I give him the response he needs to hear. “I’ll be okay. And Jonas?”

  “I don’t know. I was given a lift home. I’m out of the loop,” he says. “I had a call forwarded to me earlier from the hospital,” he says. “Apparently you’ve got a head injury you’re keeping to yourself. They were in the process of admitting you and you walked out. They want you back.”

  “As soon as this is over,” I tell him.

  “Theo-”

  “I promise,” I tell him.

  “It’s your brain,” he says. “Do what you want, and if you want to update the department before you die, call Detective Kent,” he says, and hangs up.

  I give Kent a call.

  “How’s your wife?” she asks.

  “She’s fine,” I tell her. “What happened with Jonas?”

  She pauses for a few seconds. “I’m thinking Jones must really be psychic,” she says, “because he already had his lawyer at the station waiting for us, which, unless his lawyer is psychic too, is pretty clever since we hadn’t let him make a call. Jones, according to the lawyer, has proven himself time and time again to be as he claims, a genuine psychic who wants nothing more than to help the community, and in his role as community helper, Jonas was trying to use his tremendous gift to save a young girl’s life. No man should be held accountable for attempting such a feat. And no, Jonas had no idea he was stumbling into an ambush.”

  “Wow, I guess we all should be thankful the world has Jonas Jones in it,” I say.

  She gives a small soft laugh, the kind my wife used to give on the phone sometimes. “We should be, according to Jones and his lawyer. So we took a run at him for fifteen minutes and got nothing. That’s when Stevens came in and got us. Told me and Hutton to cut loose Jonas Jones, humanitarian slash psychic. Hutton pointed out that Jones cost us catching Cole, and Stevens pointed out we didn’t know that for a fact, that there was nothing more we could do, that we had every right to be pissed off but we needed to focus on finding Cole and not focus on pissing around with a guy who speaks to dead people.”

  “Listen, I found Ariel Chancellor,” I tell her.

  “What? Where?”

  “She’s here,” I tell her. “At the hospital.”

  “You’ve spoken to her?”

  “No. That’s more Jonas Jones’s domain now,” I say, and explain the overdose. When I close my eyes I can see the tube hanging out of her mouth, the vomit on her neck, I can see her the way she was in her flat this morning telling me about her life. She’ll die on those streets her father told me, and the timing of it all-she may have been dying when he said those very words. She’s certainly been dying since the day James Whitby chased two scared little girls through a park.

  “I’ll send somebody down to get the details,” she says. “Anything to do with Cole?” I shake my head even though she can’t see me. “You think she did it deliberately?”

  I keep my eyes closed, pinching the bridge of my nose at the same time. I keep watching Ariel in her flat, taking a drink, telling me she was living the dream. “Who knows,” I tell her. “So what’s the next step?”

  “Now we call it a day,” she says. “All we can do is fill the streets with as many patrol cars as we can. What else is there? Knock on every door in the city?”

  “Maybe you should call some of those psychics back that were calling Schroder.”

  “You think there’s a term for a collective of psychics?” she asks. “You know, like a herd of cows, a murder of crows?”

  “I’m sure there is,” I say, and I look for a one-liner, something clever, but my brain is too busy being clever by holding the headache at bay.

  She says nothing for a few seconds and I get the feeling she’s building up to something.

  “There a problem?”

  “The psychics,” she says. “The thing is we started calling them back, you know, just because we have to be doing something, right?”

  “Right. .”

  “Well, they weren’t ringing because they were having visions or speaking to the dead. They were ringing because they were all witnesses. Caleb Cole has been visiting them. He’s been trying to talk to his wife and daughter.”

  “Jesus,” I say, wincing at the information.

  “If we’d called them earlier. .” she says, but adds nothing.

  The problem is it was Schroder’s job to call them, or his job to have somebody else call them. The thing with psychics is that as soon as they call whoever is talking to them just switches off, they don’t hear what’s being said and barely make the effort to even take down a name and phone number. These people were probably saying they were seeing Caleb Cole and whoever was on the other end of the phone all thought they meant they were having “visions” of Caleb Cole. But no, that wasn’t it-they all wanted some credit, I remember Schroder saying that.

  “Is that something we can use?” I ask.

  “We’re contacting other psychics. We’re on it. And we’ll keep an eye on Jonas in case he’s a target. What do you think is going to happen to Schroder?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say, and right now I’m just way too tired to look that far into the future. Maybe she should ask Jonas Jones.

  “You think he’ll lose his job?” she asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I hope not,” she says.

  “I gotta go,” I tell her.

  “Listen,” she says, and in that moment she sounds like Schroder, good ol’ Schroder, who starts half of his sentences with either a look or a listen. “He wanted me to give you a message when you called. He said nobody was going to hold it against you if you didn’t show up here for a few days. He said with what you’ve done, Stevens is impressed. He’s not going to renege on his offer of letting you back on the force because you’re staying with your wife, and he doubts Stevens will hold it against you for lying earlier to protect him.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Detective.”

  “Rebecca,” she says. “And I’m glad your wife is okay. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  I pace the room a few more times until my sor
e leg suggests sitting is the way to go. I hold my head in my hands and stare down at the floor until my head suggests looking down isn’t the best of angles because it makes my brain feel like it’s pressing against the back of my eyes. On the other side of the door Bridget is fighting for her life. Or the doctors are fighting for it. A nurse comes by and offers me some coffee and I tell her that would be great, but she never shows up with it. After an hour a doctor walks out of the operating room. He walks toward me and I stand up and wobble for a few seconds in front of him, and in those seconds are a world of possibilities. This is the moment where my life changes, just like it has done for all the others who have stood here before me.

  “Your wife is fine,” he tells me, and everything is okay in the world. I almost hug him. I cry. And then I do hug him. He pats me on the back and pushes me away after a few seconds.

  “We’ve stabilized her,” he says. “We’ll have to keep her for a few days, and I know Dr. Forster will want to run some tests and try to figure out what happened.”

  “What did happen?” I ask.

  He gives a small shake of the head. “Honestly, we don’t know. All we know is that her vitals crashed and for a while there it was touch and go.”