Paul Cleave - The Laughterhouse

The mother-there’s no choice there. He has to get to her. And driving around with the doctor and two daughters in his car is only tempting fate. The doctor will only stay quiet for so long.

He needs somebody who can help him. He can’t drive to Whitby’s mother’s house. He can’t try the pizza trick again. His neighbor from way back when would have called the cops. There is nobody in this world he can turn to.

Katy is sitting up in the seat behind him. She still isn’t saying anything. She tightens her mouth to prove just how quiet she’s being.

“Put your seat belt on,” he tells her.

He expects her to ask why. Instead she does as he asks.

“Are you cold?”

She nods. He turns on the heater and points the vents toward the back of the car.

It may not be true that there is nobody in the world who will help him. There is one other woman. He wanted to go and visit her. He wanted to see if she was doing okay, but he never did. He felt if he visited her, all he would be doing was picking at the scabs of her life and reopening old wounds.

She is his only chance.

He uses his phone to look up her address.

There’s a media circus outside the department and I have to drive through it on my way to see Ariel Chancellor’s parents. I’m using my own car again because all the others are in use. I drive out the gates and through the barrage of questions and bright lights, fighting the temptation to find out how well reporters work as speed bumps. It’s after ten o’clock, town is lit up from streetlights and nightclubs, the alcohol in the city starting to flow. More boy-racers will fill the streets as the hours tick by, teenagers with nowhere better to be or nothing better to do, all of them slaves to the current fashion of drinking as much as they can as quickly as they can. A few of them are already throwing bottles from their cars, arcing them out over the street into the path of pedestrians or oncoming cars. I have to slow down a few times to avoid hitting clusters of drunk people staggering out into the road.

I head home and spend five minutes cleaning up a little from my run in with the dog. I ball up my pants and throw them into the trash. I put on a fresh pair and am about to head out the door when my cell rings. It’s Dr. Forster.

“You missed the appointment,” he says with his smooth-talking voice. Forster is the kind of guy who makes you feel like you’re his friend when he’s talking to you. He has the kind of voice that would probably make cute woodland creatures follow him around if he sang.

“I know.”

“I’ve seen you on the news. You’re working again?”

“Trying to.”

“You’re working on this Caleb Cole thing?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s awful,” he says. “How can a man do all of that?” I’m not so sure he’s really after an answer so I don’t give him one, and he carries on. “I saw your wife,” he tells me.

“And?”

“And I looked her over. I spent an hour with her. Physically, she’s in great health. The nurses are doing a great job of exercising her. They’re taking care of her.”

“I know,” I say. “But did you notice anything?”

“I’ve made an appointment for her to be brought into the hospital,” he says. “I can see her in three weeks.”

“You’ve noticed something, haven’t you,” I say, trying to keep the excitement from taking over.

“She’s responsive to flashing light,” he says. “Nurse Hamilton said last night she stood at the window and stared at the police lights. She said nurses through the night kept finding her there until they ended up sedating her.”

I didn’t know she had kept going back to the window. My heart is starting to race. “And?” I say, knowing there’s more. Or at least hoping.

“And this morning, at the pond, I think it’s likely she was looking at the sun reflecting off the ripples caused by the breeze. More flickering light. So I ran a penlight past her eyes. She was unresponsive. But when I tried the test a few minutes later her eyes followed the light.”

“She’s never done that before.”

“No.”

I sit down. “So that’s good, right?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “With brain injuries, there’s always a lot going on. Or a lot that’s not going on. You can’t just get in there and take a look. Sometimes the brain rewires itself, other times it just atrophies. In three weeks hopefully we’ll know more.”

The word hopefully is as unappealing as the time frame. “Three weeks? Why not tomorrow?”

“Because Bridget isn’t my only patient, Theodore. If there are any changes, Nurse Hamilton will let me know. It’s very important you don’t read anything more into this than what happened-her optic nerves had an automatic response and her eyes followed the light. I repeated the test five more times while I was there over the hour, and failed to get the same result.”

“But the tests-”

“The tests will happen in three weeks. And then we’ll know more.”

“So there’s a chance that-”

“Theo, there’s always a chance. Miracles happen every day. But that’s what they are-miracles. I’ll send you the details of her appointment.”

When he hangs up I head outside, knowing the next three weeks are going to go slower than the four months I spent in jail.

It’s a ten-minute drive to the Chancellors’ house and the streets are mostly empty, a few people are out for walks holding hands, they’re bundled up in jackets, sometimes a dog or two on a leash with them. It’s only a matter of time now before the decreasing temperatures mean thicker jackets and shorter walks. I like the way dogs look at everything as if they’re seeing it for the first time, the excitement at a tree, a lamppost, at a stick being thrown.

“We haven’t seen our daughter in two years,” Harvey Chancellor says, looking at my badge. “I’m almost too scared to ask what Ariel’s done.”

“Nothing,” I tell him. It’s getting cold on the doorstep and he doesn’t invite me in. It’s a single-storey house with a bird feeder in the middle of the front lawn. There are three cats sitting beneath it and no birds. “But she may be able to help us find somebody.”

“Who? Caleb Cole? He’s the man everybody is looking for, and if you’re here then you must know we used to know him. But not anymore. We can’t help you.”

“Can I come in? There may be something you can tell us that might help find Ariel or Caleb.”

He slowly nods. He has thick gray hair that bounces when he does, something that other men his age must be jealous of. “Okay.”

The house is warm and there’s lots of modern lighting and showroom colors, and when I sit down in the living room all I want to do is put my feet up and take a nap, just a quick one, maybe only six or seven hours. Mr. Chancellor sits opposite me, and his wife comes and joins him. Both Chancellors are in their late fifties and are dressed ten years beyond their age, with Mrs. Chancellor wearing a dressing gown that covers every inch of skin from the neck down and looks like it would make a great job of cleaning the car. Her hair is brown with a few streaks of gray running through it, and she has a hair clip in the side of it that looks heavy enough to damage her neck. She offers to get me a coffee and I tell her it would be great. Giving up coffee almost lasted half a day. I figure that’s pretty good. There are pictures of Ariel on the walls, but none of them are the same woman I saw this morning. These are pictures of another Ariel, a daughter from a different life. The living room is hot, there’s a heat pump blasting warm air. There’s a crime show on TV. The forensics leads are well-rounded people, finding hairs in one scene with microscopes, then kicking down doors in another. The TV is on mute so for the time being they have to arrest their suspect in silence.