The Laughterhouse (8 page)

He starts the car and follows.

The trip is a short one. The numbers on his odometer don’t even get warmed up. Half a block to the east and the car pulls into an alleyway. The lights switch off and nobody climbs out. The alleyway is so dark there is no room for any shadows, and the car and the people inside it are lost. He parks opposite and tightens his grip on the steering wheel and breathes hard and fast and his head spins and his hands—especially his right one—begin to ache. He lowers his forehead onto the steering wheel. He wants to head-butt it to make himself hurt. He takes deep breaths to try and calm the urge to vomit. The inside of the windshield starts to fog up. He wipes at it with his sleeve.
He opens his mouth and closes it around the top of the steering wheel and bites into it. He wants to scream.

He picks up the knife. Sure, there are people around, not many—another hooker half a block back, a few people driving past, another couple walking the street—but he could probably walk right over to that car and spill a lot of blood before anybody called the police.

He puts the knife back down. It’d be stupid. He can’t afford to get arrested when he’s not even halfway done. There are teeth marks in the steering wheel. He stares out the windshield at a huge billboard overlooking the car. It’s for a travel agency, there are pictures of islands and water and people laughing and it’s the life he wants. He focuses on the billboard, staring at all the things he can never have. It only makes him angrier.

The car starts to back out of the alleyway and stops. The passenger door opens and the interior light comes on and Ariel climbs out. She closes the door without looking back and heads back toward the intersection. The car’s headlights flick on and it goes the opposite way. Ariel reaches into her handbag and comes out with another cigarette, fiddling around with a lighter as she walks. He can still see the car she climbed out of, it’s parked up at a set of lights.

He follows it.

He can’t help it. He looks at his watch. It’s ten-forty. This is going to throw him off schedule, but he still has all night. He should just carry on with the plan and come back and see Ariel later on tonight, try and time it for when she’s finished work.

It’s what he should do.

Only he doesn’t.

The scenery changes. They leave town and enter the suburbs. Some are nicer than others. He grits his teeth as he drives. They drive for ten minutes, finally pulling into a suburb full of middle-class homes, the streets empty, streetlights cutting circles of light into the darkness. The car slows. It pulls into a driveway. The automatic door begins to open. This is the kind
of neighborhood you can’t hang around in for too long in a beaten-up car with a knife in your hand and not have somebody call the police.

Best make it quick.

He brings the car to a stop and brings the knife out from under the seat.

Make sure you don’t kill anybody.

Schroder’s words are rattling around in my mind as I leave the retirement home. He makes it sound like it’s become an occupational hazard for me.

The sky is dark with clouds and the night is lit up by the city and the life running through it. I head to the nursing home where my wife lives. I step through the main doors and into the foyer, warm colors and warm air enveloping me. It’s eleven o’clock and the nurse behind the reception desk smiles and asks how I’m doing. I tell her I’m doing okay. Visiting hours ended three hours ago, but the nurses know me well enough to let me in most hours unless I’m getting in the way.

I make my way to my wife’s room, looking for her nurse along the way, always hopeful that one of these days she’ll be there to greet me at the door with some good news. As it stands the news is always the same as the day before—which is no news. My wife’s condition doesn’t change and never will. When she isn’t sleeping, she stares straight ahead, enough synapses in her
brain to make her chew when she’s being fed but not enough for her eyes to focus on anything, not enough firing synapses for her to smile at me and hold my hand, the vegetative state a permanent one barring a miracle or an advancement in technology, both of which I pray for.

I don’t see Nurse Hamilton anywhere, and I head straight to Bridget’s room. She’s asleep. There is a soft bedside table light and the curtains are closed.

A year ago I’d have brought flowers for Bridget, but a year ago I could afford them. Between the medical bills and my own bills, as it stands I’m only a few months away from losing my house. I don’t tell any of this to Bridget. If somehow she could understand I wouldn’t want her to worry. The drunk driver who put my wife into this condition should have been responsible for paying all the medical costs, but that’s not the way things work in this world. He never took responsibility, not until I took him into the middle of nowhere with a shovel and a gun and made him beg for a forgiveness I couldn’t give him. I pull up the chair next to Bridget and take hold of her hand and spend thirty minutes with her.

When I leave I’m hit by a tiredness that makes me aware I’ve been working since five in the morning, when I was driving around hotels looking for Lucy Saunders. And I’m not just tired either—because the thing keeping me from falling asleep and hitting a lamppost is the hunger pains, a hunger so strong it feels like it’s developed claws and is digging its way out from my stomach. So maybe it is a good thing I’m going home now, because I get to concede to the pain and pull into a drive-through at a fast-food restaurant. There’s a line of cars ahead of me and I keep myself entertained by trying to stay awake. Eventually I get to order something, and the guy who passes me my food looks like he keeps himself entertained by trying to eat every burger that isn’t sold by day’s end. I drive to a park and sit in the dark as one day ends and another begins. Mine is the only car around. My midnight snack is in pieces before I
even get to take a bite, the burger also having absorbed some of the flavor of the small cardboard box. I get through it pretty quick along with the drink—ten bucks well spent because I feel more awake. I sit in the car and think about the two dead men, both retired, certainly a connection between them. These two might be the only victims or there may be more. Future victims, retirees maybe, the same thing linking them to an event in their past. The dots are there, but not clear enough to start connecting.

I leave the park as another car arrives. It comes straight at me with its lights off. I swerve out of the way and almost hit a tree. Maybe it’s another PI coming here to eat a burger or a couple of kids wanting to fool around.

I head back out into the wet streets, and as often happens to me at this time of night, I start thinking about my wife, and about my daughter, and I can feel my mood darkening. Sometimes, even three years after the accident now, I just start to cry. I don’t feel tired anymore, I don’t feel hungry—sometimes like this I don’t really feel anything. I wipe a finger at my eyes before they start leaking, and suddenly I’m compelled to go and see my little girl, to make sure she’s safe. I drive to the cemetery and park by the church next to another car. I make the trek toward my daughter’s grave in the misty rain, thinking about the two dead men and wondering what, or more accurately
who,
it was they had in common.

Caleb’s wife won’t appreciate the flowers. She hated him in the end, had to, otherwise she never would have left him. She acted like it was all his fault, everything, their dead daughter, all that blood he spilled at the slaughterhouse. He just couldn’t help himself, couldn’t she see that? It was his job to protect his family, it was his job as a father, as a husband, and as a man. If he couldn’t do that, then it was his job to make people pay. It’s basic genetics. So there are flowers for her and flowers for his children and God how he misses them, how he would do things differently if he could, how he’d make them safe.

Fifteen years—his son would have been fourteen, his daughter twenty-five. A multitude of possibilities—he could have been a grandfather, his daughter could have been a doctor or an artist, his son a straight-A student in school with dreams of playing in a band. With them dying so young, those possibilities remain timeless, endless.

The cemetery is cold and wet and his feet sink a little into the soft lawn as he stands motionless by the graves. Three
graves in total, one of them empty and waiting for him. Then he can lie next to his children, murdered fifteen years ago, his wife murdered too by a bunch of people who didn’t care enough to make a difference. They were ignorant and lazy and stupid.

His wife hated him for what he did. The coroner said she took over fifty pills. That’s a statistic he has to carry with him, one that shows how desperate she was to leave him. He was no use to her back then. He was in jail when she died, he’d gone there without a trial, having confessed to the police and to the courts, asking for leniency—after all he couldn’t control himself. Only he wasn’t given any. Instead he was given fifteen years and a week into that sentence his parents came to tell him his wife and unborn son were dead.

His parents. He misses them. Each of them died because of illnesses that are easy to get the more years you see after seventy. They used to come and see him in jail. For the first ten years it was every week without fail. Then age crept up on them and they’d miss a week here or there, then a few weeks in a row. He wasn’t there for them when they died. Wasn’t there to keep his wife alive. His family has died around him and all he can do for them now is check off names. The first time he even saw his wife’s and daughter’s graves was the day he came out of jail. He had to ask the priest at the adjoining church for directions.

“It’s always harder on the ones left behind,” Father Jacob had said.

“You couldn’t be more right,” Caleb had answered.

The cemetery could double as a maze. There are trees and hedges cordoning off sections of graves, plots cut off by archways and stone pathways. The church is hidden from the cemetery behind a horseshoe ring of trees, only the very top visible over them, though more becoming visible as autumn takes away the foliage. He looks at the gravestones and wonders how many people out here have similar stories to his own and comes to the conclusion none of them do.

“I’m sorry,” he tells his wife, and he truly is, and if he could
take it all back, he would. There’s a cool wind whipping rain off the grass and from the trees into him and he begins to shiver.

“I really am,” he repeats, and he doesn’t know what else to say. She can’t hear him. Coming here was pointless, really. The dead can’t talk, they can’t listen, they can’t hear, not in this state anyway. But he does have a message for them—one he can’t give them after he dies. For what he’s done, when all of this is over he won’t be able to join them. He knows he’ll be going somewhere different from them. He has to tell them how sorry he is. And he wants them to know he can’t make up for it, but he can hurt those who let it happen. Including himself.

And he must admit, he wants them to forgive him. They won’t—he knows that—and it’s painful when the psychics toy with that emotion.

“I just wish that . . .” he says, but no other words come. There are many things he wishes for.

He walks away from the grave, his shoes soaking up more water, the maze slowing him down, his body heavy with thoughts of the past as he trudges through wet grass and gardens on his way back to the parking lot.

I’m not alone when I get back to my car from seeing my daughter’s grave. There’s a guy sitting in the car I parked next to, trying hard to get his car started. The engine isn’t quite turning over but he keeps giving it a go. He looks up at me and there’s not much light coming from the street and none coming from the church, so it’s hard to get a good look at him, but what I can see doesn’t look good. There are scars on his face, and his nose looks like it’s been broken several times. He sees me looking and there’s nothing I can do except offer to help, whereas what I’d rather do is get into my car and get the hell out of here. Then I figure for this guy to be out here at this time of night he’s suffering a loss, maybe a similar loss to my own.

“You need a hand?” I ask him.

“I don’t know much about cars,” he tells me, climbing out of it. He must be around fifty, with a thick head of gray hair that is flattened down.

“Nor do I,” I admit, “but I’ve got a set of jumper cables that might do the trick.”

I open the trunk of my car and fish out the cables. We pop the hoods and attach our respective ends. I think if there was a competition to see who had the worse car, we’d both win. I start my car and my engine barely turns over, and for a second I think we could both be stranded here, but then it catches and I put my foot on the accelerator a few times.

I walk around my car while the other guy climbs into his. It takes a couple of tries, but then his engine starts. He guns it a few times, then climbs out and from the light of the cars I can get a better look at him. He looks like he’s been beaten up, not recently, but a long time ago, and many times too. We unhook the cable and I wrap it up and throw it into the trunk.

“I appreciate it,” he says.

“No problem,” I say, and instinct kicks in, and next thing I know I’m offering him my hand.

He looks at it for a few seconds. He seems unsure what to do, and I’m starting to feel like an idiot, but then he reaches out and shakes it. I shake his back, and he winces a little.

I quickly let go. “Sorry,” I tell him.

“Not your fault,” he says, massaging his fingers. “Just an old injury.”

“Well, don’t be surprised if you have to return the favor in the next day or two,” I say, looking at my car.

“I’m not even sure the car is going to last another day or two,” he answers.

The moment is over, and it’s nice to have met a stranger who wasn’t a jerk and who, at this time of night, wasn’t trying to steal my wallet. We both acknowledge the moment and climb into our cars. He gives a small wave as he drives away, then I’m back on the street, feeling good about helping somebody.