Shutter Island

20

ALL THE DEAD and maybe-dead were getting their coats.

They were in a kitchen and the coats were on hooks and Teddy’s father took his old pea coat and shrugged his arms into it and then helped Dolores with hers and he said to Teddy, “You know what I’d like for Christmas?”

“No, Dad.”

“Bagpipes.”

And Teddy understood that he meant golf clubs and a golf bag.

“Just like Ike,” he said.

“Exactly,” his father said and handed Chuck his topcoat.

Chuck put it on. It was a nice coat. Prewar cashmere. Chuck’s scar was gone, but he still had those delicate, borrowed hands, and he held them in front of Teddy and wiggled the fingers.

“Did you go with that woman doctor?” Teddy said.

Chuck shook his head. “I’m far too overeducated. I went to the track.”

“Win?”

“Lost big.”

“Sorry.”

Chuck said, “Kiss your wife good-bye. On the cheek.”

Teddy leaned in past his mother and Tootie Vicelli smiling at him with a bloody mouth, and he kissed Dolores’s cheek and he said, “Baby, why you all wet?”

“I’m dry as a bone,” she said to Teddy’s father.

“If I was half my age,” Teddy’s father said, “I’d marry you, girl.”

They were all soaking wet, even his mother, even Chuck. Their coats dripped all over the floor.

Chuck handed him three logs and said, “For the fire.”

“Thanks.” Teddy took the logs and then forgot where he’d put them.

Dolores scratched her stomach and said, “Fucking rabbits. What good are they?”

Laeddis and Rachel Solando walked into the room. They weren’t wearing coats. They weren’t wearing anything at all, and Laeddis passed a bottle of rye over Teddy’s mother’s head and then took Dolores in his arms and Teddy would have been jealous, but Rachel dropped to her knees in front of him and unzipped Teddy’s trousers and took him in her mouth, and Chuck and his father and Tootie Vicelli and his mother all gave him a wave as they took their leave and Laeddis and Dolores stumbled back together into the bedroom and Teddy could hear them in there on the bed, fumbling with their clothes, breathing hoarsely, and it all seemed kind of perfect, kind of wonderful, as he lifted Dolores off her knees and could hear Rachel and Laeddis in there fucking like mad, and he kissed his wife, and placed a hand over the hole in her belly, and she said, “Thank you,” and he slid into her from behind, pushing the logs off the kitchen counter, and the warden and his men helped themselves to the rye Laeddis had brought and the warden winked his approval of Teddy’s fucking technique and raised his glass to him and said to his men:

“That’s one well-hung white nigger. You see him, you shoot first. You hear me? You don’t give it a second thought. This man gets off the island, we are all summarily fucked, gentlemen.”

Teddy threw his coat off his chest and crawled to the edge of the cave.

The warden and his men were up on the ridge above him. The sun was up. Seagulls shrieked.

Teddy looked at his watch: 8 A.M.

“You do not take chances,” the warden said. “This man is combat-trained, combat-tested, and combat-hardened. He has the Purple Heart and the Oak Leaf with Clusters. He killed two men in Sicily with his bare hands.”

That information was in his personnel file, Teddy knew. But how the fuck did they get his personnel file?

“He is adept with the knife and very adept at hand-to-hand combat. Do not get in close with this man. You get the chance, you put him down like a two-legged dog.”

Teddy found himself smiling in spite of his situation. How many other times had the warden’s men been subjected to two-legged-dog comparisons?

Three guards came down the side of the smaller cliff face on ropes and Teddy moved away from the ledge and watched them work their way down to the beach. A few minutes later, they climbed back up and Teddy heard one of them say, “He’s not down there, sir.”

He listened for a while as they searched up near the promontory and the road and then they moved off and Teddy waited a full hour before he left the cave, waiting to hear if anyone was taking up the rear, and giving the search party enough time so that he wouldn’t bump into them.

It was twenty past nine by the time he reached the road and he followed it back toward the west, trying to maintain a fast pace but still listen for men moving either ahead or behind him.

Trey had been right in his weather prediction. It was hot as hell and Teddy removed his jacket and folded it over his arm. He loosened his tie enough to pull it over his head and placed it in his pocket. His mouth was as dry as rock salt, and his eyes itched from the sweat.

He saw Chuck again in his dream, putting on his coat, and the image stabbed him deeper than the one of Laeddis fondling Dolores. Until Rachel and Laeddis had shown up, everyone in that dream was dead. Except for Chuck. But he’d taken his coat from the same set of hooks and followed them out the door. Teddy hated what that symbolized. If they’d gotten to Chuck on the promontory, they’d probably been dragging him away while Teddy climbed his way back out of the field. And whoever had sneaked up on him must have been very good at his job because Chuck hadn’t even gotten off a scream.

How powerful did you have to be to make not one but two U.S. marshals vanish?

Supremely powerful.

And if the plan was for Teddy to be driven insane, then it couldn’t have been the same for Chuck. Nobody would believe two marshals had lost their minds in the same four-day span. So Chuck would have had to meet with an accident. In the hurricane probably. In fact, if they were really smart—and it seemed they were—then maybe Chuck’s death would be represented as the event that had tipped Teddy past the point of no return.

There was an undeniable symmetry to the idea.

But if Teddy didn’t make it off this island, the Field Office would never accept the story, no matter how logical, without sending other marshals out here to see for themselves.

And what would they find?

Teddy looked down at the tremors in his wrists and thumbs. They were getting worse. And his brain felt no fresher for a night’s sleep. He felt foggy, thick-tongued. If by the time the field office got men out here, the drugs had taken over, they’d probably find Teddy drooling into his bathrobe, defecating where he sat. And the Ashecliffe version of the truth would be validated.

He heard the ferry blow its horn and came up on a rise in time to see it finish its turn in the harbor and begin to steam backward toward the dock. He picked up his pace, and ten minutes later he could see the back of Cawley’s Tudor through the woods.

He turned off the road into the woods, and he heard men unloading the ferry, the thump of boxes tossed to the dock, the clang of metal dollies, footfalls on wooden planks. He reached the final stand of trees and saw several orderlies down on the dock, and the two ferry pilots leaning back against the stern, and he saw guards, lots of guards, rifle butts resting on hips, bodies turned toward the woods, eyes scanning the trees and the grounds that led up to Ashecliffe.

When the orderlies had finished unloading the cargo, the pulled their dollies with them back up the dock, but the guards remained, and Teddy knew that their only job this morning was to make damn sure he didn’t reach that boat.

He crept back through the woods and came out by Cawley’s house. He could hear men upstairs in the house, saw one out on the roof where it pitched, his back to Teddy. He found the car in the carport on the western side of the house. A ’47 Buick Roadmaster. Maroon with white leather interior. Waxed and shiny the day after a hurricane. A beloved vehicle.

Teddy opened the driver’s door and he could smell the leather, as if it were a day old. He opened the glove compartment and found several packs of matches, and he took them all.

He pulled his tie from his pocket, found a small stone on the ground, and knotted the narrow end of the tie around it. He lifted the license plate and unscrewed the gas tank cap, and then he threaded the tie and the stone down the pipe and into the tank until all that hung out of the pipe was the fat, floral front of the tie, as if it hung from a man’s neck.

Teddy remembered Dolores giving him this tie, draping it across his eyes, sitting in his lap.

“I’m sorry, honey,” he whispered. “I love it because you gave it to me. But truth is, it is one ugly fucking tie.”

And he smiled up at the sky in apology to her and used one match to light the entire book and then used the book to light the tie.

And then he ran like hell.

He was halfway through the woods when the car exploded. He heard men yell and he looked back, and through the trees he could see the flames vaulting upward in balls, and then there was a set of smaller explosions, like firecrackers, as the windows blew out.

He reached the edge of the woods and he balled up his suit coat and placed it under a few rocks. He saw the guards and the ferrymen running up the path toward Cawley’s house, and he knew if he was going to do this, he had to do it right now, no time to second-guess the idea, and that was good because if he gave any thought at all to what he was about to do, he’d never do it.

He came out of the woods and ran along the shore, and just before he reached the dock and would’ve left himself exposed to anyone running back to the ferry, he cut hard to his left and ran into the water.

Jesus, it was ice. Teddy had hoped the heat of the day might have warmed it up a bit, but the cold tore up through his body like electric current and punched the air out of his chest. But Teddy kept plowing forward, trying not to think about what was in that water with him—eels and jellyfish and crabs and sharks too, maybe. Seemed ridiculous but Teddy knew that sharks attacked humans, on average, in three feet of water, and that’s about where he was now, the water at his waist and getting higher, and Teddy heard shouts coming from up by Cawley’s house, and he ignored the sledgehammer strokes of his heart and dove under the water.

He saw the girl from his dreams, floating just below him, her eyes open and resigned.

He shook his head and she vanished and he could see the keel ahead of him, a thick black stripe that undulated in the green water, and he swam to it and got his hands on it. He moved along it to the front and came around the other side, and forced himself to come up out of the water slowly, just his head. He felt the sun on his face as he exhaled and then sucked in oxygen and tried to ignore a vision of his legs dangling down there in the depths, some creature swimming along and seeing them, wondering what they were, coming close for a sniff…

The ladder was where he remembered it. Right in front of him, and he got a hand on the third rung and hung there. He could hear the men running back to the dock now, hear their heavy footsteps on the planks, and then he heard the warden:

“Search that boat.”

“Sir, we were only gone—”

“You left your post, and now you wish to argue?”

“No, sir. Sorry, sir.”

The ladder dipped in his hand as several men placed their weight on the ferry, and Teddy heard them going through the boat, heard doors opening and furniture shifting.

Something slid between his thighs like a hand, and Teddy gritted his teeth and tightened his grip on the ladder and forced his mind to go completely blank because he did not want to imagine what it looked like. Whatever it was kept moving, and Teddy let out a breath.

“My car. He blew up my fucking car.” Cawley, sounding ragged and out of breath.

The warden said, “This has gone far enough, Doctor.”

“We agreed that it’s my decision to make.”

“If this man gets off the island—”

“He’s not going to get off the island.”

“I’m sure you didn’t think he was going to turn your buggy into an inferno, either. We have to break this operation down now and cut our losses.”

“I’ve worked too hard to throw in the towel.”

The warden’s voice rose. “If that man gets off this island, we’ll be destroyed.”

Cawley’s voice rose to match the warden’s. “He’s not going to get off the fucking island!”

Neither spoke for a full minute. Teddy could hear their weight shifting on the dock.

“Fine, Doctor. But that ferry stays. It does not leave this dock until that man is found.”

Teddy hung there, the cold finding his feet and burning them.

Cawley said, “They’ll want answers for that in Boston.”

Teddy closed his mouth before his teeth could chatter.

“Then give them answers. But that ferry stays.”

Something nudged the back of Teddy’s left leg.

“All right, Warden.”

Another nudge against his leg, and Teddy kicked back, heard the splash he made hit the air like a gunshot.

Footsteps on the stern.

“He’s not in there, sir. We checked everywhere.”

“So where did he go?” the warden said. “Anyone?”

“Shit!”

“Yes, Doctor?”

“He’s headed for the lighthouse.”

“That thought did occur to me.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“Take some men.”

“I said I’ll handle it. We’ve got men there.”

“Not enough.”

“I’ll handle it, I said.”

Teddy heard Cawley’s shoes bang their way back up the dock and get softer as they hit the sand.

“Lighthouse or no lighthouse,” the warden said to his men, “this boat goes nowhere. Get the engine keys from the pilot and bring them to me.”

HE SWAM MOST of the way there.

Dropped away from the ferry and swam toward shore until he was close enough to the sandy bottom to use it, clawing along until he’d gone far enough to raise his head from the water and risk a glance back. He’d covered a few hundred yards and he could see the guards forming a ring around the dock.

He slipped back under the water and continued clawing, unable to risk the splashing that freestyle or even doggie-paddling would cause, and after a while, he came to the bend in the shoreline and made his way around it and walked up onto the sand and sat in the sun and shook from the cold. He walked as much of the shore as he could before he ran into a set of outcroppings that pushed him back into the water and he tied his shoes together and hung them around his neck and went for another swim and envisioned his father’s bones somewhere on this same ocean floor and envisioned sharks and their fins and their great snapping tails and barracuda with rows of white teeth and he knew he was getting through this because he had to and the water had numbed him and he had no choice now but to do this and he might have to do it again in a couple of days when the Betsy Ross dropped its booty off the island’s southern tip, and he knew that the only way to conquer fear was to face it, he’d learned that in the war enough, but even so, if he could manage it, he would never, ever, get in the ocean again. He could feel it watching him and touching him. He could feel the age of it, more ancient than gods and prouder of its body count.

He saw the lighthouse at about one o’clock. He couldn’t be sure because his watch was back in his suit jacket, but the sun was in roughly the right place. He came ashore just below the bluff on which it stood and he lay against a rock and took the sun on his body until the shakes stopped and his skin grew less blue.

If Chuck was up there, no matter his condition, Teddy was bringing him out. Dead or alive, he wouldn’t leave him behind.

You’ll die then.

It was Dolores’s voice, and he knew she was right. If he had to wait two days for the arrival of the Betsy Ross, and he had anything but a fully alert, fully functional Chuck with him, they’d never make it. They’d be hunted down…

Teddy smiled.

…like two-legged dogs.

I can’t leave him, he told Dolores. Can’t do it. If I can’t find him, that’s one thing. But he’s my partner.

You only just met him.

Still my partner. If he’s in there, if they’re hurting him, holding him against his will, I have to bring him out.

Even if you die?

Even if I die.

Then I hope he’s not in there.

He came down off the rock and followed a path of sand and shells that curled around the sea grass, and it occurred to him that what Cawley had thought suicidal in him was not quite that. It was more a death wish. For years he couldn’t think of a good reason to live, true. But he also couldn’t think of a good reason to die, either. By his own hand? Even in his most desolate nights, that had seemed such a pathetic option. Embarrassing. Puny.

But to—

The guard was suddenly standing there, as surprised by Teddy’s appearance as Teddy was by his, the guard’s fly still open, the rifle slung behind his back. He started to reach for his fly first, then changed his mind, but by then Teddy had driven the heel of his hand into his Adam’s apple. He grabbed his throat, and Teddy dropped to a crouch and swung his leg into the back of the guard’s and the guard flipped over on his back and Teddy straightened up and kicked him hard in the right ear and the guard’s eyes rolled back in his head and his mouth flopped open.

Teddy bent down by him and slid the rifle strap off his shoulder and pulled the rifle out from under him. He could hear the guy breathing. So he hadn’t killed him.

And now he had a gun.

HE USED IT on the next guard, the one in front of the fence. He disarmed him, a kid, a baby, really, and the guard said, “You going to kill me?”

“Jesus, kid, no,” Teddy said and snapped the butt of the rifle into the kid’s temple.

THERE WAS A small bunkhouse inside the fence perimeter, and Teddy checked that first, found a few cots and girlie magazines, a pot of old coffee, a couple of guard uniforms hanging from a hook on the door.

He went back out and crossed to the lighthouse and used the rifle to push open the door and found nothing on the first floor but a dank cement room, empty of anything but mold on the walls, and a spiral staircase made from the same stone as the walls.

He followed that up to a second room, as empty as the first, and he knew there had to be a basement here, something large, maybe connected to the rest of the hospital by those corridors, because so far, this was nothing but, well, a lighthouse.

He heard a scraping sound above him and he went back out to the stairs and followed them up another flight and came to a heavy iron door, and he pressed the tip of the rifle barrel to it and felt it give a bit.

He heard that scraping sound again and he could smell cigarette smoke and hear the ocean and feel the wind up here, and he knew that if the warden had been smart enough to place guards on the other side of this door, then Teddy was dead as soon as he pushed it open.

Run, baby.

Can’t.

Why not?

Because it all comes to this.

What does?

All of it. Everything.

I don’t see how it—

You. Me. Laeddis. Chuck. Noyce, that poor fucking kid. It all comes to this. Either it stops now. Or I stop now.

It was his hands. Chuck’s hands. Don’t you see?

No. What?

His hands, Teddy. They didn’t fit him.

Teddy knew what she meant. He knew something about Chuck’s hands was important, but not so important he could waste any more time in this stairwell thinking about it.

I’ve got to go through this door now, honey.

Okay. Be careful.

Teddy crouched to the left of the door. He held the rifle butt against his left rib cage and placed his right hand on the floor for balance and then he kicked out with his left foot and the door swung wide and he dropped to his knee in the swinging of it and placed the rifle to his shoulder and sighted down the barrel.

At Cawley.

Sitting behind a table, his back to a small window square, the ocean spread blue and silver behind him, the smell of it filling the room, the breeze fingering the hair on the sides of his head.

Cawley didn’t look startled. He didn’t look scared. He tapped his cigarette against the side of the ashtray in front of him and said to Teddy:

“Why you all wet, baby?”

21

THE WALLS BEHIND Cawley were covered in pink bedsheets, their corners fastened by wrinkled strips of tape. On the table in front of him were several folders, a military-issue field radio, Teddy’s notebook, Laeddis’s intake form, and Teddy’s suit jacket. Propped on the seat of a chair in the corner was a reel-to-reel tape recorder, the reels moving, a small microphone sitting on top and pointing out at the room. Directly in front of Cawley was a black, leather-bound notebook. He scribbled something in it and said, “Take a seat.”

“What did you say?”

“I said take a seat.”

“Before that?”

“You know exactly what I said.”

Teddy brought the rifle down from his shoulder but kept it pointed at Cawley and entered the room.

Cawley went back to scribbling. “It’s empty.”

“What?”

“The rifle. It doesn’t have any bullets in it. Given all your experience with firearms, how could you fail to notice that?”

Teddy pulled back the breech and checked the chamber. It was empty. Just to be sure, he pointed at the wall to his left and fired, but got nothing for his effort but the dry click of the hammer.

“Just put it in the corner,” Cawley said.

Teddy lay the rifle on the floor and pulled the chair out from the table but didn’t sit in it.

“What’s under the sheets?”

“We’ll get to that. Sit down. Take a load off. Here.” Cawley reached down to the floor, came back up with a heavy towel and tossed it across the table to Teddy. “Dry yourself off a bit. You’ll catch cold.”

Teddy dried his hair and then stripped off his shirt. He balled it up and tossed it in the corner and dried his upper body. When he finished, he took his jacket from the table.

“You mind?”

Cawley looked up. “No, no. Help yourself.”

Teddy put the jacket on and sat in the chair.

Cawley wrote a bit more, the pen scratching the paper. “How badly did you hurt the guards?”

“Not too,” Teddy said.

Cawley nodded and dropped his pen to the notebook and took the field radio and worked the crank to give it juice. He lifted the phone receiver out of its pouch and flicked the transmit switch and spoke into the phone. “Yeah, he’s here. Have Dr. Sheehan take a look at your men before you send him up.”

He hung up the phone.

“The elusive Dr. Sheehan,” Teddy said.

Cawley moved his eyebrows up and down.

“Let me guess—he arrived on the morning ferry.”

Cawley shook his head. “He’s been on the island the whole time.”

“Hiding in plain sight,” Teddy said.

Cawley held out his hands and gave a small shrug.

“He’s a brilliant psychiatrist. Young, but full of promise. This was our plan, his and mine.”

Teddy felt a throb in his neck just below his left ear. “How’s it working out for you so far?”

Cawley lifted a page of his notebook, glanced at the one underneath, then let it drop from his fingers. “Not so well. I’d had higher hopes.”

He looked across at Teddy and Teddy could see in his face what he’d seen in the stairwell the second morning and in the staff meeting just before the storm, and it didn’t fit with the rest of the man’s profile, didn’t fit with this island, this lighthouse, this terrible game they were playing.

Compassion.

If Teddy didn’t know any better, he’d swear that’s what it was.

Teddy looked away from Cawley’s face, looked around at the small room, those sheets on the walls. “So this is it?”

“This is it,” Cawley agreed. “This is the lighthouse. The Holy Grail. The great truth you’ve been seeking. Is it everything you hoped for and more?”

“I haven’t seen the basement.”

“There is no basement. It’s a lighthouse.”

Teddy looked at his notebook lying on the table between them.

Cawley said, “Your case notes, yes. We found them with your jacket in the woods near my house. You blew up my car.”

Teddy shrugged. “Sorry.”

“I loved that car.”

“I did get that feeling, yeah.”

“I stood in that showroom in the spring of ’forty-seven and I remember thinking as I picked it out, Well, John, that box is checked off. You won’t have to shop for another car for fifteen years at least.” He sighed. “I so enjoyed checking off that box.”

Teddy held up his hands. “Again, my apologies.”

Cawley shook his head. “Did you think for one second that we’d let you get to that ferry? Even if you’d blown up the whole island as a diversion, what did you think would happen?”

Teddy shrugged.

“You’re one man,” Cawley said, “and the only job anyone had this morning was to keep you off that ferry. I just don’t understand your logic there.”

Teddy said, “It was the only way off. I had to try.”

Cawley stared at him in confusion and then muttered, “Christ, I loved that car,” and looked down at his own lap.

Teddy said, “You got any water?”

Cawley considered the request for a while and then turned his chair to reveal a pitcher and two glasses on the windowsill behind him. He poured each of them a glass and handed Teddy’s across the table.

Teddy drained the entire glass in one long swallow.

“Dry mouth, huh?” Cawley said. “Settled in your tongue like an itch you can’t scratch no matter how much you drink?” He slid the pitcher across the table and watched as Teddy refilled his glass. “Tremors in your hands. Those are getting pretty bad. How’s your headache?”

And as he said it, Teddy felt a hot wire of pain behind his left eye that extended out to his temple and then went north over his scalp and south down his jaw.

“Not bad,” he said.

“It’ll get worse.”

Teddy drank some more water. “I’m sure. That woman doctor told me as much.”

Cawley sat back with a smile and tapped his pen on his notebook. “Who’s this now?”

“Didn’t get her name,” Teddy said, “but she used to work with you.”

“Oh. And she told you what exactly?”

“She told me the neuroleptics took four days to build up workable levels in the bloodstream. She predicted the dry mouth, the headaches, the shakes.”

“Smart woman.”

“Yup.”

“It’s not from neuroleptics.”

“No?”

“No.”

“What’s it from, then?”

“Withdrawal,” Cawley said.

“Withdrawal from what?”

Another smile and then Cawley’s gaze grew distant, and he flipped open Teddy’s notebook to the last page he’d written, pushed it across the table to him.

“That’s your handwriting, correct?”

Teddy glanced down at it. “Yeah.”

“The final code?”

“Well, it’s code.”

“But you didn’t break it.”

“I didn’t have the chance. Things got a bit hectic in case you didn’t notice.”

“Sure, sure.” Cawley tapped the page. “Care to break it now?”

Teddy looked down at the nine numbers and letters:

He could feel the wire poking the back of his eye.

“I’m not really feeling my best at the moment.”

“But it’s simple,” Cawley said. “Nine letters.”

“Let’s give my head a chance to stop throbbing.”

“Fine.”

“Withdrawal from what?” Teddy said. “What did you give me?”

Cawley cracked his knuckles and leaned back into his chair with a shuddering yawn. “Chlorpromazine. It has its downsides. Many, I’m afraid. I’m not too fond of it. I’d hoped to start you on imipramine before this latest series of incidents, but I don’t think that will happen now.” He leaned forward. “Normally, I’m not a big fan of pharmacology, but in your case, I definitely see the need for it.”

“Imipramine?”

“Some people call it Tofranil.”

Teddy smiled. “And chlorpro…”

“…mazine.” Cawley nodded. “Chlorpromazine. That’s what you’re on now. What you’re withdrawing from. The same thing we’ve been giving you for the last two years.”

Teddy said, “The last what?”

“Two years.”

Teddy chuckled. “Look, I know you guys are powerful. You don’t have to oversell your case, though.”

“I’m not overselling anything.”

“You’ve been drugging me for two years?”

“I prefer the term ‘medicating.’”

“And, what, you had a guy working in the U.S. marshals’ office? Guy’s job was to spike my joe every morning? Or maybe, wait, he worked for the newsstand where I buy my cup of coffee on the way in. That would be better. So for two years, you’ve had someone in Boston, slipping me drugs.”

“Not Boston,” Cawley said quietly. “Here.”

“Here?”

He nodded. “Here. You’ve been here for two years. A patient of this institution.”

Teddy could hear the tide coming in now, angry, hurling itself against the base of the bluff. He clasped his hands together to quiet the tremors and tried to ignore the pulsing behind his eye, growing hotter and more insistent.

“I’m a U.S. marshal,” Teddy said.

“Were a U.S. marshal,” Cawley said.

“Am,” Teddy said. “I am a federal marshal with the United States government. I left Boston on Monday morning, September the twenty-second, 1954.”

“Really?” Cawley said. “Tell me how you got to the ferry. Did you drive? Where did you park?”

“I took the subway.”

“The subway doesn’t go out that far.”

“Transferred to a bus.”

“Why didn’t you drive?”

“Car’s in the shop.”

“Oh. And Sunday, what is your recollection of Sunday? Can you tell me what you did? Can you honestly tell me anything about your day before you woke up in the bathroom of the ferry?”

Teddy could. Well, he would have been able to, but the fucking wire in his head was digging through the back of his eye and into his sinus passages.

All right. Remember. Tell him what you did Sunday. You came home from work. You went to your apartment on Buttonwood. No, no. Not Buttonwood. Buttonwood burned to the ground when Laeddis lit it on fire. No, no. Where do you live? Jesus. He could see the place. Right, right. The place on…the place on…Castlemont. That’s it. Castlemont Avenue. By the water.

Okay, okay. Relax. You came back to the place on Castlemont and you ate dinner and drank some milk and went to bed. Right? Right.

Cawley said, “What about this? Did you get a chance to look at this?”

He pushed Laeddis’s intake form across the table.

“No.”

“No?” He whistled. “You came here for it. If you got that piece of paper back to Senator Hurly—proof of a sixty-seventh patient we claim to have no record of—you could have blown the lid off this place.”

“True.”

“Hell yes, true. And you couldn’t find time in the last twenty-four hours to give it a glance?”

“Again, things were a bit—”

“Hectic, yes. I understand. Well, take a look at it now.”

Teddy glanced down at it, saw the pertinent name, age, date of intake info for Laeddis. In the comments section, he read:

Patient is highly intelligent and highly delusional. Known proclivity for violence. Extremely agitated. Shows no remorse for his crime because his denial is such that no crime ever took place. Patient has erected a series of highly developed and highly fantastical narratives which preclude, at this time, his facing the truth of his actions.

The signature below read Dr. L. Sheehan.

Teddy said, “Sounds about right.”

“About right?”

Teddy nodded.

“In regards to whom?”

“Laeddis.”

Cawley stood. He walked over to the wall and pulled down one of the sheets.

Four names were written there in block letters six inches high:

Teddy waited, but Cawley seemed to be waiting too, neither of them saying a word for a full minute.

Eventually Teddy said, “You have a point, I’m guessing.”

“Look at the names.”

“I see them.”

“Your name, Patient Sixty-seven’s name, the missing patient’s name, and your wife’s name.”

“Uh-huh. I’m not blind.”

“There’s your rule of four,” Cawley said.

“How so?” Teddy rubbed his temple hard, trying to massage that wire out of there.

“Well, you’re the genius with code. You tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“What do the names Edward Daniels and Andrew Laeddis have in common?”

Teddy looked at his own name and Laeddis’s for a moment. “They both have thirteen letters.”

“Yes, they do,” Cawley said. “Yes, they do. Anything else?”

Teddy stared and stared. “Nope.”

“Oh, come on.” Cawley removed his lab coat, placed it over the back of a chair.

Teddy tried to concentrate, already tiring of this parlor game.

“Take your time.”

Teddy stared at the letters until their edges grew soft.

“Anything?” Cawley said.

“No. I can’t see anything. Just thirteen letters.”

Cawley whacked the names with the back of his hand. “Come on!”

Teddy shook his head and felt nauseated. The letters jumped.

“Concentrate.”

“I am concentrating.”

“What do these letters have in common?” Cawley said.

“I don’t…There are thirteen of them. Thirteen.”

“What else?”

Teddy peered at the letters until they blurred. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing,” Teddy said. “What do you want me to say? I can’t tell you what I don’t know. I can’t—”

Cawley shouted it: “They’re the same letters!”

Teddy hunched forward, tried to get the letters to stop quivering. “What?”

“They’re the same letters.”

“No.”

“The names are anagrams for each other.”

Teddy said it again: “No.”

“No?” Cawley frowned and moved his hand across the line. “Those are the exact same letters. Look at them. Edward Daniels. Andrew Laeddis. Same letters. You’re gifted with code, even flirted with becoming a code breaker in the war, isn’t that right? Tell me that you don’t see the same thirteen letters when you look up at these two names.”

“No!” Teddy rammed the heels of his hands against his eyes, trying to clear them or blot out the light, he wasn’t sure.

“’No,’ as in they’re not the same letters? Or ‘no,’ as in you don’t want them to be the same letters.”

“They can’t be.”

“They are. Open your eyes. Look at them.”

Teddy opened his eyes but continued to shake his head and the quivering letters canted from side to side.

Cawley slapped the next line with the back of his hand. “Try this, then. ‘Dolores Chanal and Rachel Solando.’ Both thirteen letters. You want to tell me what they have in common?”

Teddy knew what he was seeing, but he also knew it wasn’t possible.

“No? Can’t grasp that one either?”

“It can’t be.”

“It is,” Cawley said. “The same letters again. Anagrams for each other. You came here for the truth? Here’s your truth, Andrew.”

“Teddy,” Teddy said.

Cawley stared down at him, his face once again filling with lies of empathy.

“Your name is Andrew Laeddis,” Cawley said. “The sixty-seventh patient at Ashecliffe Hospital? He’s you, Andrew.”

22

“BULLSHIT!”

Teddy screamed it and the scream rocketed through his head.

“Your name is Andrew Laeddis,” Cawley repeated. “You were committed here by court order twenty-two months ago.”

Teddy threw his hand at that. “This is below even you guys.”

“Look at the evidence. Please, Andrew. You—”

“Don’t call me that.”

“—came here two years ago because you committed a terrible crime. One that society can’t forgive, but I can. Andrew, look at me.”

Teddy’s eyes rose from the hand Cawley had extended, up the arm and across the chest and into Cawley’s face, the man’s eyes brimming now with that false compassion, that imitation of decency.

“My name is Edward Daniels.”

“No.” Cawley shook his head with an air of weary defeat. “Your name is Andrew Laeddis. You did a terrible thing, and you can’t forgive yourself, no matter what, so you playact. You’ve created a dense, complex narrative structure in which you are the hero, Andrew. You convince yourself you’re still a U.S. marshal and you’re here on a case. And you’ve uncovered a conspiracy, which means that anything we tell you to the contrary plays into your fantasy that we’re conspiring against you. And maybe we could let that go, let you live in your fantasy world. I’d like that. If you were harmless, I’d like that a lot. But you’re violent, you’re very violent. And because of your military and law enforcement training, you’re too good at it. You’re the most dangerous patient we have here. We can’t contain you. It’s been decided—look at me.”

Teddy looked up, saw Cawley half stretching across the table, his eyes pleading.

“It’s been decided that if we can’t bring you back to sanity—now, right now—permanent measures will be taken to ensure you never hurt anyone again. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

For a moment—not even a full moment, a tenth of a moment—Teddy almost believed him.

Then Teddy smiled.

“It’s a nice act you’ve got going, Doc. Who’s the bad cop—Sheehan?” He glanced back at the door. “He’s about due, I’d say.”

“Look at me,” Cawley said. “Look into my eyes.”

Teddy did. They were red and swimming from lack of sleep. And more. What was it? Teddy held Cawley’s gaze, studied those eyes. And then it came to him—if he didn’t know otherwise, he’d swear Cawley was suffering from a broken heart.

“Listen,” Cawley said, “I’m all you’ve got. I’m all you’ve ever had. I’ve been hearing this fantasy for two years now. I know every detail, every wrinkle—the codes, the missing partner, the storm, the woman in the cave, the evil experiments in the lighthouse. I know about Noyce and the fictitious Senator Hurly. I know you dream of Dolores all the time and her belly leaks and she’s soaking with water. I know about the logs.”

“You’re full of shit,” Teddy said.

“How would I know?”

Teddy ticked off the evidence on his trembling fingers:

“I’ve been eating your food, drinking your coffee, smoking your cigarettes. Hell, I took three ‘aspirin’ from you the morning I arrived. Then you drugged me the other night. You were sitting there when I woke up. I haven’t been the same since. That’s where all this started. That night, after my migraine. What’d you give me?”

Cawley leaned back. He grimaced as if he were swallowing acid and looked off at the window.

“I’m running out of time,” he whispered.

“What’s that?”

“Time,” he said softly. “I was given four days. I’m almost out.”

“So let me go. I’ll go back to Boston, file a complaint with the marshals’ office, but don’t worry—with all your powerful friends I’m sure it won’t amount to much.”

Cawley said, “No, Andrew. I’m almost out of friends. I’ve been fighting a battle here for eight years and the scales have tipped in the other side’s favor. I’m going to lose. Lose my position, lose my funding. I swore before the entire board of overseers that I could construct the most extravagant role-playing experiment psychiatry has ever seen and it would save you. It would bring you back. But if I was wrong?” His eyes widened and he pushed his hand up into his chin, as if he were trying to pop his jaw back into place. He dropped the hand, looked across the table at Teddy. “Don’t you understand, Andrew? If you fail, I fail. If I fail, it’s all over.”

“Gee,” Teddy said, “that’s too bad.”

Outside, some gulls cawed. Teddy could smell the salt and the sun and the damp, briny sand.

Cawley said, “Let’s try this another way—do you think it’s a coincidence that Rachel Solando, a figment of your own imagination by the way, would have the same letters in her name as your dead wife and the same history of killing her children?”

Teddy stood and the shakes rocked his arms from the shoulders on down. “My wife did not kill her kids. We never had kids.”

“You never had kids?” Cawley walked over to the wall.

“We never had kids, you stupid fuck.”

“Oh, okay.” Cawley pulled down another sheet.

On the wall behind it—a crime-scene diagram, photographs of a lake, photographs of three dead children. And then the names, written in the same tall block letters:

Teddy dropped his eyes and stared at his hands; they jumped as if they were no longer attached to him. If he could step on them, he would.

“Your children, Andrew. Are you going to stand there and deny they ever lived? Are you?”

Teddy pointed across the room at him with his jerking hand. “Those are Rachel Solando’s children. That is the crime-scene diagram of Rachel Solando’s lake house.”

“That’s your house. You went there because the doctors suggested it for your wife. You remember? After she accidentally set your previous apartment on fire? Get her out of the city, they said, give her a more bucolic setting. Maybe she’d get better.”

“She wasn’t ill.”

“She was insane, Andrew.”

“Stop fucking calling me that. She was not insane.”

“Your wife was clinically depressed. She was diagnosed as manic-depressive. She was—”

“She was not,” Teddy said.

“She was suicidal. She hurt the children. You refused to see it. You thought she was weak. You told yourself sanity was a choice, and all she had to do was remember her responsibilities. To you. To the children. You drank, and your drinking got worse. You floated into your own shell. You stayed away from home. You ignored all the signs. You ignored what the teachers told you, the parish priest, her own family.”

“My wife was not insane!”

“And why? Because you were embarrassed.”

“My wife was not—”

“The only reason she ever saw a psychiatrist was because she tried to commit suicide and ended up in the hospital. Even you couldn’t control that. And they told you she was a danger to herself. They told you—”

“We never saw any psychiatrists!”

“—she was a danger to the children. You were warned time and time again.”

“We never had children. We talked about it, but she couldn’t get pregnant.”

Christ! His head felt like someone was beating glass into it with a rolling pin.

“Come over here,” Cawley said. “Really. Come up close and look at the names on these crime-scene photos. You’ll be interested to know—”

“You can fake those. You can make up your own.”

“You dream. You dream all the time. You can’t stop dreaming, Andrew. You’ve told me about them. Have you had any lately with the two boys and the little girl? Huh? Has the little girl taken you to your headstone? You’re ‘a bad sailor,’ Andrew. You know what that means? It means you’re a bad father. You didn’t navigate for them, Andrew. You didn’t save them. You want to talk about the logs? Huh? Come over here and look at them. Tell me they’re not the children from your dreams.”

“Bullshit.”

“Then look. Come here and look.”

“You drug me, you kill my partner, you say he never existed. You’re going to lock me up here because I know what you’re doing. I know about the experiments. I know what you’re giving schizophrenics, your liberal use of lobotomies, your utter disregard for the Nuremberg Code. I am fucking onto you, Doctor.”

“You are?” Cawley leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “Please, educate me. You’ve had the run of the place the last four days. You’ve gained access to every corner of this facility. Where are the Nazi doctors? Where are the satanic ORs?”

He walked back over to the table and consulted his notes for a moment:

“Do you still believe we’re brainwashing patients, Andrew? Implementing some decades-long experiment to create—what did you call them once? Oh, here it is—ghost soldiers? Assassins?” He chuckled. “I mean, I have to give you credit, Andrew—even in these days of rampant paranoia, your fantasies take the cake.”

Teddy pointed a quaking finger at him. “You are an experimental hospital with radical approaches—”

“Yes, we are.”

“You take only the most violent patients.”

“Correct again. With a caveat—the most violent and the most delusional.”

“And you…”

“We what?”

“You experiment.”

“Yes!” Cawley clapped his hands and took a quick bow. “Guilty as charged.”

“Surgically.”

Cawley held up a finger. “Ah, no. Sorry. We do not experiment with surgery. It is used as a last resort, and that last resort is employed always over my most vocal protests. I’m one man, however, and even I can’t change decades of accepted practices overnight.”

“You’re lying.”

Cawley sighed. “Show me one piece of evidence that your theory can hold water. Just one.”

Teddy said nothing.

“And to all the evidence that I’ve presented, you have refused to respond.”

“That’s because it’s not evidence at all. It’s fabricated.”

Cawley pressed his hands together and raised them to his lips as if in prayer.

“Let me off this island,” Teddy said. “As a federally appointed officer of the law, I demand that you let me leave.”

Cawley closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, they were clearer and harder. “Okay, okay. You got me, Marshal. Here, I’ll make it easy on you.”

He pulled a soft leather briefcase off the floor and undid the buckles and opened it and tossed Teddy’s gun onto the table.

“That’s your gun, right?”

Teddy stared at it.

“Those are your initials engraved on the handle, correct?”

Teddy peered at it, sweat in his eyes.

“Yes or no, Marshal? Is that your gun?”

He could see the dent in the barrel from the day when Phillip Stacks took a shot at him and hit the gun instead and Stacks ended up shot from the ricochet of his own bullet. He could see the initials E.D. engraved on the handle, a gift from the field office after he ended up shooting it out with Breck in Maine. And there, on the underside of the trigger guard, the metal was scraped and worn away a bit from when he’d dropped the gun during a foot chase in St. Louis in the winter of ’49.

“Is that your gun?”

“Yeah.”

“Pick it up, Marshal. Make sure it’s loaded.”

Teddy looked at the gun, looked back at Cawley.

“Go ahead, Marshal. Pick it up.”

Teddy lifted the gun off the table and it shook in his hand.

“Is it loaded?” Cawley asked.

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“I can feel the weight.”

Cawley nodded. “Then blast away. Because that’s the only way you’re ever getting off this island.”

Teddy tried to steady his arm with his other hand, but that was shaking too. He took several breaths, exhaling them slowly, sighting down the barrel through the sweat in his eyes and the tremors in his body, and he could see Cawley at the other end of the gun sights, two feet away at most, but he was listing up and down and side to side as if they both stood on a boat in the high seas.

“You have five seconds, Marshal.”

Cawley lifted the phone out of the radio pack and cranked the handle, and Teddy watched him place the phone to his mouth.

“Three seconds now. Pull that trigger or you spend your dying days on this island.”

Teddy could feel the weight of the gun. Even with the shakes, he had a chance if he took it now. Killed Cawley, killed whoever was waiting outside.

Cawley said, “Warden, you can send him up.”

And Teddy’s vision cleared and his shakes reduced themselves to small vibrations and he looked down the barrel as Cawley put the phone back in the pack.

Cawley got a curious look on his face, as if only now did it occur to him that Teddy might have the faculties left to pull this off.

And Cawley held up a hand.

He said, “Okay, okay.”

And Teddy shot him dead center in the chest.

Then he raised his hands a half an inch and shot Cawley in the face.

With water.

Cawley frowned. Then he blinked several times. He took a handkerchief from his pocket.

The door opened behind Teddy, and he spun in his chair and took aim as a man entered the room.

“Don’t shoot,” Chuck said. “I forgot to wear my raincoat.”

23

CAWLEY WIPED HIS face with the handkerchief and took his seat again and Chuck came around the table to Cawley’s side and Teddy turned the gun in his palm and stared down at it.

He looked across the table as Chuck took his seat, and Teddy noticed he was wearing a lab coat.

“I thought you were dead,” Teddy said.

“Nope,” Chuck said.

It was suddenly hard to get words out. He felt the inclination to stutter, just as the woman doctor had predicted. “I…I…was…I was willing to die to bring you out of here. I…” He dropped the gun to the table, and he felt all strength drain from his body. He fell into his chair, unable to go on.

“I’m genuinely sorry about that,” Chuck said. “Dr. Cawley and I agonized over that for weeks before we put this into play. I never wanted to leave you feeling betrayed or cause you undue anguish. You have to believe me. But we were certain we had no alternative.”

“There’s a bit of a clock ticking on this one,” Cawley said. “This was our last-ditch effort to bring you back, Andrew. A radical idea, even for this place, but I’d hoped it would work.”

Teddy wiped at the sweat in his eyes, ended up smearing it there. He looked through the blur at Chuck.

“Who are you?” he said.

Chuck stretched a hand across the table. “Dr. Lester Sheehan,” he said.

Teddy left the hand hanging in the air and Sheehan eventually withdrew it.

“So,” Teddy said and sucked wet air through his nostrils, “you let me go on about how we needed to find Sheehan when you…you were Sheehan.”

Sheehan nodded.

“Called me ‘boss.’ Told me jokes. Kept me entertained. Kept a watch on me at all times, is that right, Lester?”

He looked across the table at him, and Sheehan tried to hold his eyes, but he failed and dropped his gaze to his tie and flapped it against his chest. “I had to keep an eye on you, make sure you were safe.”

“Safe,” Teddy said. “So that made everything okay. Moral.”

Sheehan dropped his tie. “We’ve known each other for two years, Andrew.”

“That’s not my name.”

“Two years. I’ve been your primary psychiatrist. Two years. Look at me. Don’t you even recognize me?”

Teddy used the cuff of his suit jacket to wipe the sweat from his eyes, and this time they cleared, and he looked across the table at Chuck. Good ol’ Chuck with his awkwardness around firearms and those hands that didn’t fit his job description because they weren’t the hands of a cop. They were the hands of a doctor.

“You were my friend,” Teddy said. “I trusted you. I told you about my wife. I talked to you about my father. I climbed down a fucking cliff looking for you. Were you watching me then? Keeping me safe then? You were my friend, Chuck. Oh, I’m sorry. Lester.”

Lester lit a cigarette and Teddy was pleased to see that his hands shook too. Not much. Not nearly as bad as Teddy’s and the tremors stopped as soon as he got the cigarette lit and tossed the match in an ashtray. But still…

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:

“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.”

“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 interpretation 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:

“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.

He walked back in the house at eleven in the morning, grateful that it was a weekday and the boys were in school, and he could feel the road in his bones and a crushing desire for his own pillow. He walked into the house and called out to Dolores as he poured himself a double scotch and she came in from the backyard and said, “There wasn’t enough.”

He turned with his drink in hand and said, “What’s that, hon?” and noticed that she was wet, as if she’d just stepped from the shower, except she wore an old dark dress with a faded floral print. She was barefoot and the water dripped off her hair and dripped off her dress.

“Baby,” he said, “why you all wet?”

She said, “There wasn’t enough,” and placed a bottle down on the counter. “I’m still awake.”

And she walked back outside.

Teddy saw her walk toward the gazebo, taking long, meandering steps, swaying. And he put his drink down on the counter and picked up the bottle and saw that it was the laudanum the doctor had prescribed after her hospital stay. If Teddy had to go on a trip, he portioned out the number of teaspoonfuls he figured she’d need while he was gone, and added them to a small bottle in her medicine cabinet. Then he took this bottle and locked it up in the cellar.

There were six months of doses in this bottle and she’d drunk it dry.

He saw her stumble up the gazebo stairs, fall to her knees, and get back up again.

How had she managed to get to the bottle? That wasn’t any ordinary lock on the cellar cabinet. A strong man with bolt cutters couldn’t get that lock off. She couldn’t have picked it, and Teddy had the only key.

He watched her sit in the porch swing in the center of the gazebo and he looked at the bottle. He remembered standing right here the night he left, adding the teaspoons to the medicine cabinet bottle, having a belt or two of rye for himself, looking out at the lake, putting the smaller bottle in the medicine cabinet, going upstairs to say good-bye to the kids, coming back down as the phone rang, and he’d taken the call from the field office, grabbed his coat and his overnight bag and kissed Dolores at the door and headed to his car…

…and left the bigger bottle behind on the kitchen counter.

He went out through the screen door and crossed the lawn to the gazebo and walked up the steps and she watched him come, soaking wet, one leg dangling as she pushed the swing back and forth in a lazy tilt.

He said, “Honey, when did you drink all this?”

“This morning.” She stuck her tongue out at him and then gave him a dreamy smile and looked up at the curved ceiling. “Not enough, though. Can’t sleep. Just want to sleep. Too tired.”

He saw the logs floating in the lake behind her and he knew they weren’t logs, but he looked away, looked back at his wife.

“Why are you tired?”

She shrugged, flopping her hands out by her side. “Tired of all this. So tired. Just want to go home.”

“You are home.”

She pointed at the ceiling. “Home-home,” she said.

Teddy looked out at those logs again, turning gently in the water.

“Where’s Rachel?”

“School.”

“She’s too young for school, honey.”

“Not my school,” his wife said and showed him her teeth.

And Teddy screamed. He screamed so loudly that Dolores fell out of the swing and he jumped over her and jumped over the railing at the back of the gazebo and ran screaming, screaming no, screaming God, screaming please, screaming not my babies, screaming Jesus, screaming oh oh oh.

And he plunged into the water. He stumbled and fell forward on his face and went under and the water covered him like oil and he swam forward and forward and came up in the center of them. The three logs. His babies.

Edward and Daniel were facedown, but Rachel was on her back, her eyes open and looking up at the sky, her mother’s desolation imprinted in her pupils, her gaze searching the clouds.

He carried them out one by one and lay them on the shore. He was careful with them. He held them firmly but gently. He could feel their bones. He caressed their cheeks. He caressed their shoulders and their rib cages and their legs and their feet. He kissed them many times.

He dropped to his knees and vomited until his chest burned and his stomach was stripped.

He went back and crossed their arms over their chests, and he noticed that Daniel and Rachel had rope burns on their wrists, and he knew that Edward had been the first to die. The other two had waited, hearing it, knowing she’d be coming back for them.

He kissed each of his children again on both cheeks and their foreheads and he closed Rachel’s eyes.

Had they kicked in her arms as she carried them to the water? Had they screamed? Or had they gone soft and moaning, resigned to it?

He saw his wife in her violet dress the night he’d met her and saw the look in her face that first moment of seeing her, that look he’d fallen in love with. He’d thought it had just been the dress, her insecurity about wearing such a fine dress in a fine club. But that wasn’t it. It was terror, barely suppressed, and it was always there. It was terror of the outside—of trains, of bombs, of rattling streetcars and jackhammers and dark avenues and Russians and submarines and taverns filled with angry men, oceans filled with sharks, Asians carrying red books in one hand and rifles in the other.

She was afraid of all that and so much more, but what terrified her most was inside of her, an insect of unnatural intelligence who’d been living in her brain her entire life, playing with it, clicking across it, wrenching loose its cables on a whim.

Teddy left his children and sat on the gazebo floor for a long time, watching her sway, and the worst of it all was how much he loved her. If he could sacrifice his own mind to restore hers, he would. Sell his limbs? Fine. She had been all the love he’d ever known for so long. She had been what carried him through the war, through this awful world. He loved her more than his life, more than his soul.

But he’d failed her. Failed his children. Failed the lives they’d all built together because he’d refused to see Dolores, really see her, see that her insanity was not her fault, not something she could control, not some proof of moral weakness or lack of fortitude.

He’d refused to see it because if she actually were his true love, his immortal other self, then what did that say about his brain, his sanity, his moral weakness?

And so, he’d hidden from it, hidden from her. He’d left her alone, his one love, and let her mind consume itself.

He watched her sway. Oh, Christ, how he loved her.

Loved her (and it shamed him deeply), more than his sons.

But more than Rachel?

Maybe not. Maybe not.

He saw Rachel in her mother’s arms as her mother carried her to the water. Saw his daughter’s eyes go wide as she descended into the lake.

He looked at his wife, still seeing his daughter, and thought: You cruel, cruel, insane bitch.

Teddy sat on the floor of the gazebo and wept. He wasn’t sure for how long. He wept and he saw Dolores on the stoop as he brought her flowers and Dolores looking back over her shoulder at him on their honeymoon and Dolores in her violet dress and pregnant with Edward and removing one of her eyelashes from his cheek as she pulled away from his kiss and curled in his arms as she gave his hand a peck and laughing and smiling her Sunday-morning smiles and staring at him as the rest of her face broke around those big eyes and she looked so scared and so alone, always, always, some part of her, so alone…

He stood and his knees shook.

He took a seat beside his wife and she said, “You’re my good man.”

“No,” he said. “I’m not.”

“You are.” She took his hand. “You love me. I know that. I know you’re not perfect.”

What had they thought—Daniel and Rachel—when they woke to their mother tying rope around their wrists? As they looked into her eyes?

“Oh, Christ.”

“I do. But you’re mine. And you try.”

“Oh, baby,” he said, “please don’t say any more.”

And Edward. Edward would have run. She would have had to chase him through the house.

She was bright now, happy. She said, “Let’s put them in the kitchen.”

“What?”

She climbed atop him, straddled him, and hugged him to her damp body. “Let’s sit them at the table, Andrew.” She kissed his eyelids.

He held her to him, crushing her body against his, and he wept into her shoulder.

She said, “They’ll be our living dolls. We’ll dry them off.”

“What?” His voice muffled in his shoulder.

“We’ll change their clothes.” She whispered it in his ear.

He couldn’t see her in a box, a white rubber box with a small viewing window in the door.

“We’ll let them sleep in our bed tonight.”

“Please stop talking.”

“Just the one night.”

“Please.”

“And then tomorrow we can take them on a picnic.”

“If you ever loved me…” Teddy could see them lying on the shore.

“I always loved you, baby.”

“If you ever loved me, please stop talking,” Teddy said.

He wanted to go to his children, to bring them alive, to take them away from here, away from her.

Dolores placed her hand on his gun.

He clamped his hand over hers.

“I need you to love me,” she said. “I need you to free me.”

She pulled at his gun, but he removed her hand. He looked in her eyes. They were so bright they hurt. They were not the eyes of a human. A dog maybe. A wolf, possibly.

After the war, after Dachau, he’d swore he would never kill again unless he had no choice. Unless the other man’s gun was already pointed at him. Only then.

He couldn’t take one more death. He couldn’t.

She tugged at his gun, her eyes growing even brighter, and he removed her hand again.

He looked out at the shore and saw them neatly lined up, shoulder to shoulder.

He pulled his gun free of its holster. He showed it to her.

She bit her lip, weeping, and nodded. She looked up at the roof of the gazebo. She said, “We’ll pretend they’re with us. We’ll give them baths, Andrew.”

And he placed the gun to her belly and his hand trembled and his lips trembled and he said, “I love you, Dolores.”

And even then, with his gun to her body, he was sure he couldn’t do it.

She looked down as if surprised that she was still there, that he was still below her. “I love you, too. I love you so much. I love you like—”

And he pulled the trigger. The sound of it came out of her eyes and air popped from her mouth, and she placed her hand over the hole and looked at him, her other hand gripping his hair.

And as it spilled out of her, he pulled her to him and she went soft against his body and he held her and held her and wept his terrible love into her faded dress.

HE SAT UP in the dark and smelled the cigarette smoke before he saw the coal and the coal flared as Sheehan took a drag on the cigarette and watched him.

He sat on the bed and wept. He couldn’t stop weeping. He said her name. He said:

“Rachel, Rachel, Rachel.”

And he saw her eyes watching the clouds and her hair floating out around her.

When the convulsions stopped, when the tears dried, Sheehan said, “Rachel who?”

“Rachel Laeddis,” he said.

“And you are?”

“Andrew,” he said. “My name is Andrew Laeddis.”

Sheehan turned on a small light and revealed Cawley and a guard on the other side of the bars. The guard had his back to them, but Cawley stared in, his hands on the bars.

“Why are you here?”

He took the handkerchief Sheehan offered and wiped his face.

“Why are you here?” Cawley repeated.

“Because I murdered my wife.”

“And why did you do that?”

“Because she murdered our children and she needed peace.”

“Are you a U.S. marshal?” Sheehan said.

“No. I was once. Not anymore.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Since May third, 1952.”

“Who was Rachel Laeddis?”

“My daughter. She was four.”

“Who is Rachel Solando?”

“She doesn’t exist. I made her up.”

“Why?” Cawley said.

Teddy shook his head.

“Why?” Cawley repeated.

“I don’t know, I don’t know…”

“Yes, you do, Andrew. Tell me why.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

Teddy grabbed his head and rocked in place. “Don’t make me say it. Please? Please, Doctor?”

Cawley gripped the bars. “I need to hear it, Andrew.”

He looked through the bars at him, and he wanted to lunge forward and bite his nose.

“Because,” he said and stopped. He cleared his throat, spit on the floor. “Because I can’t take knowing that I let my wife kill my babies. I ignored all the signs. I tried to wish it away. I killed them because I didn’t get her some help.”

“And?”

“And knowing that is too much. I can’t live with it.”

“But you have to. You realize that.”

He nodded. He pulled his knees to his chest.

Sheehan looked back over his shoulder at Cawley. Cawley stared in through the bars. He lit a cigarette. He watched Teddy steadily.

“Here’s my fear, Andrew. We’ve been here before. We had this exact same break nine months ago. And then you regressed. Rapidly.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I appreciate that,” Cawley said, “but I can’t use an apology right now. I need to know that you’ve accepted reality. None of us can afford another regression.”

Teddy looked at Cawley, this too-thin man with great pools of shadow under his eyes. This man who’d come to save him. This man who might be the only true friend he’d ever had.

He saw the sound of his gun in her eyes and he felt his sons’ wet wrists as he’d placed them on their chests and he saw his daughter’s hair as he stroked it off her face with his index finger.

“I won’t regress,” he said. “My name is Andrew Laeddis. I murdered my wife, Dolores, in the spring of ’fifty-two…”

25

THE SUN WAS in the room when he woke.

He sat up and looked toward the bars, but the bars weren’t there. Just a window, lower than it should have been until he realized he was up high, on the top bunk in the room he’d shared with Trey and Bibby.

It was empty. He hopped off the bunk and opened the closet and saw his clothes there, fresh from the laundry, and he put them on. He walked to the window and placed a foot up on the ledge to tie his shoe and looked out at the compound and saw patients and orderlies and guards in equal number, some milling in front of the hospital, others continuing the cleanup, some tending to what remained of the rosebushes along the foundation.

He considered his hands as he tied the second shoe. Rock steady. His vision was as clear as it had been when he was a child and his head as well.

He left the room and walked down the stairs and out into the compound and he passed Nurse Marino in the breezeway and she gave him a smile and said, “Morning.”

“Beautiful one,” he said.

“Gorgeous. I think that storm blew summer out for good.”

He leaned on the rail and looked at a sky the color of baby blue eyes and he could smell a freshness in the air that had been missing since June.

“Enjoy the day,” Nurse Marino said, and he watched her as she walked down the breezeway, felt it was maybe a sign of health that he enjoyed the sway of her hips.

He walked into the compound and passed some orderlies on their day off tossing a ball back and forth and they waved and said, “Good morning,” and he waved and said “Good morning” back.

He heard the sound of the ferry horn as it neared the dock, and he saw Cawley and the warden talking in the center of the lawn in front of the hospital and they nodded in acknowledgment and he nodded back.

He sat down on the corner of the hospital steps and looked out at all of it and felt as good as he’d felt in a long time.

“Here.”

He took the cigarette and put it in his mouth, leaned in toward the flame and smelled that gasoline stench of the Zippo before it was snapped closed.

“How we doing this morning?”

“Good. You?” He sucked the smoke back into his lungs.

“Can’t complain.”

He noticed Cawley and the warden watching them.

“We ever figure out what that book of the warden’s is?”

“Nope. Might go to the grave without knowing.”

“That’s a helluva shame.”

“Maybe there are some things we were put on this earth not to know. Look at it that way.”

“Interesting perspective.”

“Well, I try.”

He took another pull on the cigarette, noticed how sweet the tobacco tasted. It was richer, and it clung to the back of his throat.

“So what’s our next move?” he said.

“You tell me, boss.”

He smiled at Chuck. The two of them sitting in the morning sunlight, taking their ease, acting as if all was just fine with the world.

“Gotta find a way off this rock,” Teddy said. “Get our asses home.”

Chuck nodded. “I figured you’d say something like that.”

“Any ideas?”

Chuck said, “Give me a minute.”

Teddy nodded and leaned back against the stairs. He had a minute. Maybe even a few minutes. He watched Chuck raise his hand and shake his head at the same time and he saw Cawley nod in acknowledgment and then Cawley said something to the warden and they crossed the lawn toward Teddy with four orderlies falling into step behind them, one of the orderlies holding a white bundle, some sort of fabric, Teddy thinking he might have spied some metal on it as the orderly unrolled it and it caught the sun.

Teddy said, “I don’t know, Chuck. You think they’re onto us?”

“Nah.” Chuck tilted his head back, squinting a bit in the sun, and he smiled at Teddy. “We’re too smart for that.”

“Yeah,” Teddy said. “We are, aren’t we?”