Breaking the Silence

by Diane Chamberlain

  “Then today’s the perfect day for you to be thinking about him,” she said.

  “Right.” Sarah walked toward the sofa. “So, I’ll tell you what happened to Joe. To the love of my life.”

  Sarah, 1959

  Sarah waited for changes to occur at Saint Margaret’s as a result of her call to the board of psychiatry, but as far as she could tell, her concerns had been ignored. Things continued as they had, with patients slipping into the shocked and drugged stupors that resulted from so much of Dr. Palmiento’s treatment. All of his approaches had one thing in common: they were attempts to wipe the patient’s mental slate clean. Whether he used drugs or shock treatment or isolation or the tapes, Palmiento was trying to rid people of their pasts. In the process, he was ridding them of their souls.

  Sarah grew increasingly distressed by what she perceived as the deterioration of her patients. At times, she doubted her own sanity. At staff meetings, Dr. P. presented cases illustrating supposed progress in a patient, and Sarah would wonder what was wrong with her that his definition of progress and her own seemed so diametrically opposed.

  One night, Sarah had another frightening nightmare. She was not in the isolation room this time, but rather had been drugged and was lying, paralyzed, in the slumber room. She was wearing a helmet, and Gilbert was pushing the portable electroshock treatment machine toward her. She awakened with a scream.

  Joe pulled her into his arms, and she felt like a fool. Here she was, an adult woman with a year-old child, waking up like a baby herself more nights than not.

  “I have a plan,” Joe said, once she had calmed down.

  “What do you mean, ‘a plan’?” She leaned back to look at his face, but it was too dark to see his expression.

  “I’m going to get myself admitted to Saint Margaret’s,” he said. “I’ll find out firsthand what’s going on there. Then I’ll report it in the Post.”

  Sarah sat up with a gasp. “You will do no such thing!” she said.

  “I think it’s a great idea,” Joe said. “I’ll check in under an assumed name. No one will know I’m your husband. They’ll think I’m just another patient. I’ll get to see exactly how they treat someone.”

  “Joe, this will never work,” Sarah said sternly. “They’ll medicate you, for heaven’s sake. Within a day you won’t remember your own name.”

  “They’ll give me the medication, and I’ll spit it out after they leave the room, all right?”

  “And what will you do if they take you for shock treatments?”

  “You’ll be around to make sure nothing terrible happens to me.”

  “Joe, this is crazy!” She tried to laugh, hoping he was joking, but she knew her husband entirely too well. He’d never met a challenge he didn’t like. “You don’t understand,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to be with you every minute. You might not even be assigned to me. And I don’t have as much power there as you seem to think.”

  “What’s happened to your spirit of adventure, Sarah?” He sounded serious.

  Was she being stodgy about this? Was she turning into a cautious old lady?

  “Look.” He sat up and held both her hands on his knee. “I’ll keep my wits about me,” he said. “I can take care of myself, and someone has to find out and expose what’s really going on there, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe, but not you.”

  “I’m going to do it.”

  “I’ll quit working there, Joe. If that’s what you want.”

  “Too late. My mind’s made up.” Always the risk-taker and ever the journalist. Sarah knew there would be no fighting him.

  “Mrs. Gale will have to watch Janie in the mornings while I’m there.” He’d apparently been planning this for a while. “I’ll miss that time with her. The dad-and-daughter time.”

  “Joe, I can’t believe you would—”

  “So tell me what symptoms I should have,” he said. “How do I stand the best chance of getting to wear one of those nifty helmets?”

  The idea was frightening, and yet it might work. The benefits of uncovering what was going on at Saint Margaret’s might be worth the risk. But she would have to keep a very careful eye on him.

  Feigning the severe depressive symptoms Sarah coached him to adopt, Joe signed himself into the hospital under a fictitious name, Frederick Hamilton. Sarah was afraid to tell even Colleen about Joe’s plan, not wanting to put her friend in a difficult position, so no one at the hospital knew that Joe was not a genuine patient. That was the way he wanted it.

  Sarah was a wreck the day he checked in. She knew he was down the hall, being evaluated in Dr. Palmiento’s office, and she had no idea which ward he’d be assigned to. He would only come to her ward if he were deemed sick enough, and she couldn’t imagine Joe being able to pull off that convincing a charade. But he must have managed to do so, because at two o’clock, he arrived on ward three. He walked past her in the corridor, his slender frame flanked by two bulky orderlies. He winked at her as he walked by, and one of the orderlies whispered to her, “Watch out for him, Mrs. Tolley. Fancies himself a ladies’ man.” Sarah nearly laughed with relief at knowing her husband would be nearby.

  Once alone with him in his room, she found Joe animated, delighted to be in the midst of an adventure. “I fabricated a terrible life for myself,” he said. “That Dr. Palmiento ate it up. I’m a better actor than I ever imagined.”

  “Sh,” Sarah said, fluffing his pillow for him. “Don’t get smug. You have a few rough days ahead of you.”

  “Told you this would work, though. I’ve got you for my nurse.” He gripped her wrist and tried to pull her toward him for a kiss.

  “We can’t,” she said, although she was laughing. “We’ve got to keep up the ruse. I don’t know what would happen if they figured out who you are.” The thought made her shudder.

  For two days, Sarah slipped the medication prescribed for Frederick Hamilton into the pocket of her uniform. On a few occasions, when another nurse or Dr. P. was around, Joe would simply pretend to take the pills, turning them over to Sarah when the coast was clear. Sarah instructed him to act sleepy and unaware of what was going on around him, and he did so, although he was actually quite alert. He was a good actor, though. Good enough to fool Dr. Palmiento and Gilbert when they came to examine him one morning. Joe feigned a deep sleep, and that afternoon, he excitedly told Sarah that he’d overheard a conversation between the two men that definitely had not been meant for his ears.

  “What did they say?” she asked.

  “I don’t remember verbatim. I’m afraid to keep notes here, so I have to store it in my head. But the gist of their conversation was that they’re involved in some sort of experimentation with personality restructuring.”

  “I know that,” Sarah said. “They’re trying to rid people of their maladaptive—”

  “No, it’s more than that,” Joe said. “Bigger than that. They’re trying to develop mind control techniques. You know, like the Russians use.”

  “Mind control! You are crazy.”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but that’s what they were talking about. Making someone do what they want him to do, against his will. They were discussing a man in the slumber room and how they were brainwashing him. That’s the word they used. Brainwashing. They were excited about it. ‘It’s working.’ That’s what they said. And then one of them, Dr. P., I’m quite sure, though my eyes were closed, said something about it being a first step toward mind control.”

  Stunned, Sarah sat on the edge of Joe’s bed and risked taking his hand. “I just thought they were trying out new, and not very beneficial, techniques to help psychiatric patients,” she said. “But I always did have a sense that the patients here were simply being used as guinea pigs.”

  “They are,” Joe said. “Doesn’t everything you’ve witnessed here fit the definition of experimentation? Treatment methods you’ve never seen anywhere else?”

  “But…they’re doing research,” she said lame
ly.

  “This goes beyond any sort of research I’ve ever heard of,” Joe said. “This is completely unethical.”

  “Okay, now you’ve figured it out,” Sarah said. “Now check yourself out of here, while you still can.”

  “I’ve only just begun, Sarah,” he said. “I don’t have anywhere near enough to go on.”

  She looked down at their interlocked hands. “I’m tired of sleeping without you,” she said.

  “Me, too,” he acknowledged. “And I miss Janie more than I can say. It must be awful for the genuine patients to be in here so long without seeing their families.”

  “Well.” She stood up, afraid that if she sat there with him any longer she would start crying. “Get what you need and get out of here, before you turn into a genuine patient yourself,” she said.

  The following day, Dr. P. held a therapy session with Joe, and he was obviously unhappy with the results.

  “I was hoping the oral medication would be enough to get him to open up,” he told Sarah. “But he’s more repressed than I anticipated. We’ll use LSD injections for a few days. Give him the first tonight.”

  Sarah didn’t dare protest. Why should she bother? There was no way she was giving Joe an injection of LSD.

  Joe eyed the syringe when she brought it to his room that evening. “Does that go in my vein or my hip or where?” he asked.

  “Neither,” Sarah said. “Ordinarily I’d inject it into your upper arm, but in your case, my dear, it’s going into your mattress.” Removing the cap from the syringe, she planted the needle in the side of his mattress and pressed the plunger.

  Joe watched in fascination. “So how am I supposed to react to this stuff?” he asked.

  “Any way you like,” she said, capping the syringe again. “I’ve seen it all. You can climb the walls or cry like a baby or hallucinate. Take your pick.” She heard the irritation in her voice and hoped he knew it was her fear speaking. “Please give this up, Joe,” she pleaded. “It’s getting too dangerous. Every time I see Dr. P. in here with you, I panic. He gives LSD injections himself sometimes. It was just luck that he asked me to do it today. And a few of the nurses are out sick with a stomach virus and I have a triple load of patients. I may not be able to—”

  “Maybe I should take it for real, once.” Joe wasn’t even listening to her. “Otherwise, how do I know what the patients are actually feeling?”

  “Don’t even talk that way, Joseph Tolley.”

  “How long does it last? I mean how long do I keep up the act?”

  “It varies,” she said. “Four or five hours, usually. Sometimes longer. Some people never really seem to come back from the experience.” She tossed in that last detail as a warning as she left his room.

  The distant sound of retching greeted her in the corridor, and she knew one more of the patients had contracted the virus that was sweeping the unit. She prayed Joe wouldn’t get it. That was all she needed.

  In the morning, she found her husband in the throes of his act, and it appeared he had elected to take the hallucination route. He was on his bed, huddled in the corner, and there was a frighteningly real look of paranoia in his eyes.

  “You make a good psychiatric patient, Joe,” she said.

  Joe closed his eyes. He was trembling, and she knew that something wasn’t right. Checking his chart, she scanned the notes quickly, and found exactly what she feared: Dr. Palmiento had been in to see Joe the night before. Pleased with the effects of the LSD, he’d given him yet another injection.

  “Oh, Joe, you let him do it!” She sat on his bed, reaching out to touch her frightened husband’s cheek. “You mustn’t let him do it again,” she said. “Do you hear me?”

  Joe nodded, squeezing his eyes shut again. His hands were wrapped tightly across his chest, and he shivered against the wall. Sarah pulled the blanket out from the foot of his bed and wrapped it around his shoulders.

  Had Joe fought the injection, she wondered, or had he accepted it in the name of his investigation? It didn’t matter now. What did matter was that he was suffering, and it was time for her to get him out of there. She would wait until the drug had done its worst, since he would be impossible to move while he was like this, and then she would sneak him out. She had the keys to the locked doors. Frederick Hamilton would disappear, and because his name and identity were pure fiction, no one would be able to track him down.

  Once she had Joe’s escape mapped out in her mind, Sarah relaxed a bit. Dr. P. ordered her to give Joe another injection that evening, an order she had no intention of following. She kept a careful eye on Joe the entire day, and when he seemed to be growing rational once again, told him her plan.

  “I’ve called Mrs. Gale,” she said, putting the syringe filled with LSD on his bedside table. “She’ll watch Janie until seven. So once the day shift has left, you and I can go down the back stairs and get you out of here.”

  “I’m not leaving,” Joe said. “Now I know what that drug—what was it?”

  “LSD.” That he had already forgotten the name of the drug worried her.

  “Now I know what it does to people. And it ain’t fun. I was…” He shuddered. “Everything was purple. Everything. Purple and soft. I was truly afraid I was stuck there, in that purple, soft world. But now I’m back and I’m all right, and it’s time to try out the tape room. Or the slumber room. Or whatever it’s—”

  “No, Joe.” Sarah tried to keep her voice low, but was unable to control her fear and mounting anger. “You can’t stay here. Look what happened when I was away last night? It’s too dangerous.”

  “I survived, didn’t I?”

  “Joe, please. No story is this important.”

  “I think this one is,” he said. “You were right, Sarah. Something’s going on here and someone’s got to find out what it is.”

  One of the other nurses called to Sarah from the hallway outside Joe’s door. Standing up, she looked at her husband.

  “I’ll be back around six,” she said. “And you’re going with me, Joe. This has gone far enough.”

  Joe grabbed the syringe from the bedside table, yanked off the cap, and rammed the needle into his thigh, straight through the hospital-issued pajamas. “I’m staying,” he said, and she knew she was not dealing with her ordinarily rational husband. She was dealing with a man on LSD.

  At six, he was far too loud and wild for her to take him down the back stairs without attracting attention. She would have to wait one more day. As she left Joe’s room, she nearly collided with Gilbert, who looked at her with what she could only label suspicion. Had he heard her trying to talk to her husband? She forced a smile.

  “Do you think he’s ready for the tapes?” Gilbert asked her.

  “Yes!” she said, with far too much enthusiasm. She never wanted anyone to be subjected to those helmets and their repetitive messages. But maybe the tapes would finally satisfy Joe’s investigative hunger and he would get out of there. And at least in the slumber room, she would know where he was at all times.

  “I’m not so sure,” Gilbert said, and she knew by the tone of his voice that he’d been testing her with his question.

  The next morning, Sarah awakened with the stomach virus that was devastating ward three. She dressed for work and had managed to take Janie next door to Mrs. Gale’s when the nausea struck with full force. She just made it back to her own home before the vomiting began.

  She had to get to Joe, she thought, filled with terror. The LSD would have worn off by this morning, and she had to prevent him from receiving any more drugs.

  But it was ten in the morning before she was able to drag herself out of the bathroom and into the living room to call the hospital. She reached Colleen on ward three.

  “Listen, Colleen,” she said. “Listen carefully. I’m sorry to put you in this position, but—”

  “What’s wrong?” There was immediate concern in Colleen’s voice.

  “Joe is there,” Sarah said. “He checked himself in as
a patient because he wants to do a story on what’s going on at the hospital.”

  “Are you kidding?” Colleen’s voice was soft, and Sarah knew she was not alone.

  “He’s the patient in room eleven. He’s under a fictitious name, Frederick Hamilton. I’ve been pretending to medicate him, but Dr. P. got some LSD into him. And I caught that stomach bug and can’t get over there.” The bile rose in her throat again and she swallowed hard. “Maybe I can get in by this afternoon, but I need you to check on him. Make sure he’s all right.”

  Colleen was quiet.

  “Colleen? Do you understand?”

  “Um…” Colleen was probably watching her words, not wanting to give anything away to whomever was listening to her part of the conversation. “Uh, I helped Dr. P. with that patient this morning,” she said. “In the electroshock room.”

  It took Sarah a moment to understand. “What are you saying? Colleen, you can’t mean—did Joe get ECT?”

  “Mr. Hamilton did, yes.”

  “Oh, my God.” Sarah leaned back against the wall, battling nausea. “Why couldn’t they just put him in the slumber room?” Remembering the suspicion in Gilbert’s face when she’d bumped into him in the hall the day before, she feared she knew the answer. ECT would be the quickest, surest way to scramble Joe’s memory of anything he’d learned as a patient in ward three. “I have to get off,” she said, hanging up the phone without waiting for a response from Colleen.

  She was sick three more times, impatiently retching in the bathroom when she needed to be back on the phone. She called the hospital and asked to be put through to Dr. Palmiento’s office, her mind racing as she tried to formulate what she would say. She was desperate enough to resort to the truth. At least, some of the truth.

  “Yes, Mrs. Tolley?” Palmiento’s voice was expectant.

  “Dr. Palmiento, a terrible mistake has happened,” she said. “The patient on ward three, Frederick Hamilton, is actually my husband, Joseph Tolley. He’s a reporter and he wanted to do a story on…what it’s like to be a psychiatric patient. I tried to talk him out of it, but I wasn’t able to. I’m sorry I deceived you. But he’s really a very sane man, and I want to check him out of there. Right away.”