I hope you’ve got it too, Teddy thought. Whatever this is.
“Yeah,” Sheehan said (and Teddy had to remind himself not to think of him as Chuck), “I was keeping you safe. My disappearance was, yes, part of your fantasy. But you were supposed to see Laeddis’s intake form on the road, not down the cliff. I dropped it off the promontory by mistake. Just pulling it out of my back pocket, and it blew away. I went down after it, because I knew if I didn’t, you would. And I froze. Right under the lip. Twenty minutes later, you drop down right in front of me. I mean, a foot away. I almost reached out and grabbed you.”
Cawley cleared his throat. “We almost called it off when we saw you were going to go down that cliff. Maybe we should have.”
“Called it off.” Teddy suppressed a giggle into his fist.
“Yes,” Cawley said. “Called it off. This was a pageant, Andrew. A—”
“My name’s Teddy.”
“—play. You wrote it. We helped you stage it. But the play wouldn’t work without an ending, and the ending was always your reaching this lighthouse.”
“Convenient,” Teddy said and looked around at the walls.
“You’ve been telling this story to us for almost two years now. How you came here to find a missing patient and stumbled onto our Third Reich-inspired surgical experiments, Soviet-inspired brainwashing. How the patient Rachel Solando had killed her children in much the same way your wife killed yours. How just when you got close, your partner—and don’t you love the name you gave him? Chuck Aule. I mean, Jesus, say it a couple of times fast. It’s just another of your jokes, Andrew—your partner was taken and you were left to fend for yourself, but we got to you. We drugged you. And you were committed before you could get the story back to your imaginary Senator Hurly. You want the names of the current senators from the state of New Hampshire, Andrew? I have them here.”
“You faked all this?” Teddy said.
“Yes.”
Teddy laughed. He laughed as hard as he’d laughed since before Dolores had died. He laughed and heard the boom of it, and the echoes of it curled back into themselves and joined the stream still coming from his mouth, and it roiled above him and soaped the walls and mushroomed out into the surf.
“How do you fake a hurricane?” he said and slapped the table. “Tell me that, Doctor.”
“You can’t fake a hurricane,” Cawley said.
“No,” Teddy said, “you can’t.” And he slapped the table again.
Cawley looked at his hand, then up into his eyes. “But you can predict one from time to time, Andrew. Particularly on an island.”
Teddy shook his head, felt a grin still plastered to his face, even as the warmth of it died, even as it probably appeared silly and weak. “You guys never give up.”
“A storm was essential to your fantasy,” Cawley said. “We waited for one.”
Teddy said, “Lies.”
“Lies? Explain the anagrams. Explain how the children in those pictures—children you’ve never seen if they belonged to Rachel Solando—are the same children in your dreams. Explain, Andrew, how I knew to say to you when you walked through this door, ’Why you all wet, baby?’ Do you think I’m a mind reader?”
“No,” Teddy said. “I think I was wet.”
For a moment, Cawley looked like his head was going to shoot off his neck. He took a long breath, folded his hands together, and leaned into the table. “Your gun was filled with water. Your codes? They’re showing, Andrew. You’re playing jokes on yourself. Look at the one in your notebook. The last one. Look at it. Nine letters. Three lines. Should be a piece of cake to break. Look at it.”
Teddy looked down at the page:
13(M)-21(U)-25(Y)-18(R)-1(A)-5(E)-8(H)-15(O)-9(I)
“We’re running out of time,” Lester Sheehan said. “Please understand, it’s all changing. Psychiatry. It’s had its own war going on for some time, and we’re losing.”
M-U-Y-R-A-E-H-O-I
“Yeah?” Teddy said absently. “And who’s ’we’?”
Cawley said, “Men who believe that the way to the mind is not by way of ice picks through the brain or large dosages of dangerous medicine but through an honest reckoning of the self.”
“An honest reckoning of the self,” Teddy repeated. “Gee, that’s good.”
Three lines, Cawley had said. Three letters per line probably.
“Listen to me,” Sheehan said. “If we fail here, we’ve lost. Not just with you. Right now, the balance of power is in the hands of the surgeons, but that’s going to change fast. The pharmacists will take over, and it won’t be any less barbaric. It’ll just seem so. The same zombiefication and warehousing that are going on now will continue under a more publicly palatable veneer. Here, in this place, it comes down to you, Andrew.”
“My name is Teddy. Teddy Daniels.”
Teddy guessed the first line was probably “you.”
“Naehring’s got an OR reserved in your name, Andrew.”
Teddy looked up from the page.
Cawley nodded. “We had four days on this. If we fail, you go into surgery.”
“Surgery for what?”
Cawley looked at Sheehan. Sheehan studied his cigarette.
“Surgery for what?” Teddy repeated.
Cawley opened his mouth to speak, but Sheehan cut him off, his voice worn:
“A transorbital lobotomy.”
Teddy blinked at that and looked back at his page, found the second word: “are.”
“Just like Noyce,” he said. “I suppose you’ll tell me he’s not here, either.”
“He’s here,” Cawley said. “And a lot of the story you told Dr. Sheehan about him is true, Andrew. But he never came back to Boston. You never met him in a jail. He’s been here since August of ’fifty. He did get to the point where he transferred out of Ward C and was trusted enough to live in Ward A. But then you assaulted him.”
Teddy looked up from the final three letters. “I what?”
“You assaulted him. Two weeks ago. Damn near killed him.”
“Why would I do that?”
Cawley looked over at Sheehan.
“Because he called you Laeddis,” Sheehan said.
“No, he didn’t. I saw him yesterday and he—”
“He what?”
“He didn’t call me Laeddis, that’s for damn sure.”
“No?” Cawley flipped open his notebook. “I have the transcript of your conversation. I have the tapes back in my office, but for now let’s go with the transcripts. Tell me if this sounds familiar.” He adjusted his glasses, head bent to the page. “I’m quoting here—’This is about you. And, Laeddis, this is all it’s ever been about. I was incidental. I was a way in.’”
Teddy shook his head. “He’s not calling me Laeddis. You switched the emphasis. He was saying this is about you—meaning me—and Laeddis.”
Cawley chuckled. “You really are something.”
Teddy smiled. “I was thinking the same thing about you.”
Cawley looked down at the transcript. “How about this—Do you remember asking Noyce what happened to his face?”
“Sure. I asked him who was responsible.”
“Your exact words were ’Who did this?’ That sound right?”
Teddy nodded.
“And Noyce replied—again I’m quoting here—’You did this.’”
Teddy said, “Right, but…”
Cawley considered him as if he were considering an insect under glass. “Yes?”
“He was speaking like…”
“I’m listening.”
Teddy was having trouble getting words to connect into strings, to follow in line like boxcars.
“He was saying”—he spoke slowly, deliberately—“that my failure to keep him from getting transported back here led, in an indirect way, to his getting beaten up. He wasn’t saying I beat him.”
“He said, You did this.”
Teddy shrugged. “He did, but we differ on the interpretati
on of what that means.”
Cawley turned a page. “How about this, then? Noyce speaking again—’They knew. Don’t you get it? Everything you were up to. Your whole plan. This is a game. A handsomely mounted stage play. All this is for you.’”
Teddy sat back. “All these patients, all these people I’ve supposedly known for two years, and none of them said a word to me while I was performing my, um, masquerade the last four days?”
Cawley closed the notebook. “They’re used to it. You’ve been flashing that plastic badge for a year now. At first I thought it was a worthy test—give it to you and see how you’d react. But you ran with it in a way I never could have calculated. Go on. Open your wallet. Tell me if it’s plastic or not, Andrew.”
“Let me finish the code.”
“You’re almost done. Three letters to go. Want help, Andrew?”
“Teddy.”
Cawley shook his head. “Andrew. Andrew Laeddis.”
“Teddy.”
Cawley watched him arrange the letters on the page.
“What’s it say?”
Teddy laughed.
“Tell us.”
Teddy shook his head.
“No, please, share it with us.”
Teddy said, “You did this. You left those codes. You created the name Rachel Solando using my wife’s name. This is all you.”
Cawley spoke slowly, precisely. “What does the last code say?”
Teddy turned the notebook so they could see it:
YOU
ARE
HIM
“Satisfied?” Teddy said.
Cawley stood. He looked exhausted. Stretched to the end of his rope. He spoke with an air of desolation Teddy hadn’t heard before.
“We hoped. We hoped we could save you. We stuck our reputations on the line. And now word will get out that we allowed a patient to playact his grandest delusion and all we got for it were a few injured guards and a burned car. I have no problem with the professional humiliation.” He stared out the small window square. “Maybe I’ve outgrown this place. Or it’s outgrown me. But someday, Marshal, and it’s not far off, we’ll medicate human experience right out of the human experience. Do you understand that?”
Teddy gave him nothing. “Not really.”
“I expect you wouldn’t.” Cawley nodded and folded his arms across his chest, and the room was silent for a few moments except for the breeze and the ocean’s crash. “You’re a decorated soldier with extreme hand-to-hand combat training. Since you’ve been here, you’ve injured eight guards, not including the two today, four patients, and five orderlies. Dr. Sheehan and I have fought for you as long and as hard as we’ve been able. But most of the clinical staff and the entire penal staff is demanding we show results or else we incapacitate you.”
He came off the window ledge and leaned across the table and fixed Teddy in his sad, dark gaze. “This was our last gasp, Andrew. If you don’t accept who you are and what you did, if you don’t make an effort to swim toward sanity, we can’t save you.”
He held out his hand to Teddy.
“Take it,” he said, and his voice was hoarse. “Please. Andrew? Help me save you.”
Teddy shook the hand. He shook it firmly. He gave Cawley his most forthright grip, his most forthright gaze. He smiled.
He said, “Stop calling me Andrew.”
24
THEY LED HIM to Ward C in shackles.
Once inside, they took him down into the basement where the men yelled to him from their cells. They promised to hurt him. They promised to rape him. One swore he’d truss him up like a sow and eat his toes one by one.
While he remained manacled, a guard stood on either side of him while a nurse entered the cell and injected something into his arm.
She had strawberry hair and smelled of soap and Teddy caught a whiff of her breath as she leaned in to deliver the shot, and he knew her.
“You pretended to be Rachel,” he said.
She said, “Hold him.”
The guards gripped his shoulders, straightened his arms.
“It was you. With dye in your hair. You’re Rachel.”
She said, “Don’t flinch,” and sank the needle into his arm.
He caught her eye. “You’re an excellent actress. I mean, you really had me, all that stuff about your dear, dead Jim. Very convincing, Rachel.”
She dropped her eyes from his.
“I’m Emily,” she said and pulled the needle out. “You sleep now.”
“Please,” Teddy said.
She paused at the cell door and looked back at him.
“It was you,” he said.
The nod didn’t come from her chin. It came from her eyes, a tiny, downward flick of them, and then she gave him a smile so bereft he wanted to kiss her hair.
“Good night,” she said.
He never felt the guards remove the manacles, never heard them leave. The sounds from the other cells died and the air closest to his face turned amber and he felt as if he were lying on his back in the center of a wet cloud and his feet and hands had turned to sponge.
And he dreamed.
And in his dreams he and Dolores lived in a house by a lake.
Because they’d had to leave the city.
Because the city was mean and violent.
Because she’d lit their apartment on Buttonwood on fire.
Trying to rid it of ghosts.
He dreamed of their love as steel, impervious to fire or rain or the beating of hammers.
He dreamed that Dolores was insane.
And his Rachel said to him one night when he was drunk, but not so drunk that he hadn’t managed to read her a bedtime story, his Rachel said, “Daddy?”
He said, “What, sweetie?”
“Mommy looks at me funny sometimes.”
“Funny how?”
“Just funny.”
“It makes you laugh?”
She shook her head.
“No?”
“No,” she said.
“Well, how’s she look at you, then?”
“Like I make her really sad.”
And he tucked her in and kissed her good night and nuzzled her neck with his nose and told her she didn’t make anyone sad. Wouldn’t, couldn’t. Ever.
ANOTHER NIGHT, HE came to bed and Dolores was rubbing the scars on her wrists and looking at him from the bed and she said, “When you go to the other place, part of you doesn’t come back.”
“What other place, honey?” He placed his watch on the bed-stand.
“And that part of you that does?” She bit her lip and looked like she was about to punch herself in the face with both fists. “Shouldn’t.”
SHE THOUGHT THE butcher on the corner was a spy. She said he smiled at her while blood dripped off his cleaver, and she was sure he knew Russian.
She said that sometimes she could feel that cleaver in her breasts.
LITTLE TEDDY SAID to him once when they were at Fenway Park, watching the ball game, “We could live here.”
“We do live here.”
“In the park, I mean.”
“What’s wrong with where we live?”
“Too much water.”
Teddy took a hit off his flask. He considered his son. He was a tall boy and strong, but he cried too quickly for a boy his age and he was easily spooked. That was the way kids were growing up these days, overprivileged and soft in a booming economy. Teddy wished that his mother were still alive so she could teach her grandkids you had to get hard, strong. The world didn’t give a shit. It didn’t bestow. It took.
Those lessons could come from a man, of course, but it was a woman who instilled them with permanence.
Dolores, though, filled their heads with dreams, fantasies, took them to the movies too much, the circus and carnivals.
He took another hit off his flask and said to his son, “Too much water. Anything else?”
“No, sir.”
HE WOULD SAY to her: “What’s wrong?
What don’t I do? What don’t I give you? How can I make you happy?”
And she’d say, “I’m happy.”
“No, you’re not. Tell me what I need to do. I’ll do it.”
“I’m fine.”
“You get so angry. And if you’re not angry, you’re too happy, bouncing off the walls.”
“Which is it?”
“It scares the kids, scares me. You’re not fine.”
“I am.”
“You’re sad all the time.”
“No,” she’d say. “That’s you.”
HE TALKED TO the priest and the priest made a visit or two. He talked to her sisters, and the older one, Delilah, came up from Virginia for a week once, and that seemed to help for a while.
They both avoided any suggestion of doctors. Doctors were for crazy people. Dolores wasn’t crazy. She was just tense.
Tense and sad.
TEDDY DREAMED SHE woke him up one night and told him to get his gun. The butcher was in their house, she said. Downstairs in the kitchen. Talking on their phone in Russian.
THAT NIGHT ON the sidewalk in front of the Cocoanut Grove, leaning into the taxi, his face an inch from hers…
He’d looked in and he thought:
I know you. I’ve known you my whole life. I’ve been waiting. Waiting for you to make an appearance. Waiting all these years.
I knew you in the womb.
It was simply that.
He didn’t feel the GI’s desperation to have sex with her before he shipped out because he knew, at that moment, that he’d be coming back from the war. He’d be coming back because the gods didn’t align the stars so you could meet the other half of your soul and then take her away from you.
He leaned into the car and told her this.
And he said, “Don’t worry. I’m coming back home.”
She touched his face with her finger. “Do that, won’t you?”
HE DREAMED HE came home to the house by the lake.
He’d been in Oklahoma. Spent two weeks chasing a guy from the South Boston docks to Tulsa with about ten stops in between, Teddy always half a step behind until he literally bumped into the guy as he was coming out of a gas station men’s room.