Paul Cleave - The Laughterhouse

“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?”