Breaking the Silence

by Diane Chamberlain

  There was no response on Dr. P.’s end of the line, and she had the feeling he was trying to prolong her suffering.

  “I know this means the end of my job,” she said. “I understand that. But right now, I just want to get my husband home.” Her voice cracked on the last word, and she drew in a long breath.

  “Do you really think a ‘very sane man’ would check himself into a mental institution?” Dr. P. asked her.

  “A reporter would. Someone who really wanted to find out—”

  “And what exactly did your husband find out?”

  “Well, just a little of what it’s like to be a patient. I mean, he experienced LSD. And now I guess ECT.” She pinched the phone wire with her fingers, fighting her tears. “So I think that’s enough. I’d like to come get him now.”

  Palmiento made her endure another moment of silence. “I know this is hard to hear, Mrs. Tolley,” he said finally, in that fatherly tone that now grated on her, “but I believe your husband, out of his love for you, has been trying to protect you. He didn’t want you to know how unhappy he was in his current life. He suffers from a true, clinical and quite severe depression, dear. His signing into the hospital was indeed a ruse, but you were the victim, not us. He didn’t know how to tell you that he really wanted to be here. That he really needed treatment.”

  “That just isn’t true!” Sarah said. “I know my husband. He’s one of the happiest, most contented people I’ve ever—”

  “He kept it all inside, Sarah,” Dr. P. said kindly. “You’ve known patients like that, haven’t you? It takes the medication and other treatment to help them open up.”

  “I’m coming to get him.”

  “He doesn’t want to go,” Palmiento said. “He signed himself in, and he signed the form allowing us to provide whatever treatment we deem best in his case. You know those forms, don’t you, Sarah?”

  She did. The form gave blanket approval for any and all treatment deemed appropriate by the staff. “But he…but this was…he’s not really a patient!”

  “Perhaps you could use a few sessions with a therapist yourself, Sarah. You need to accept—”

  “You’re mad!” she said.

  There was another pause on his end of the line. Then he spoke in a clipped tone. “And you, of course, are fired.” He hung up, and Sarah clutched the phone in her hand, shivering from nausea and fear. As she tried to stand, dizziness washed over her and she leaned against the arm of the sofa. She had to get to Joe. They knew who he was. They would want to know if he’d learned anything more momentous than what it felt like to be on LSD. They might torture him to get him to talk. She thought of the isolation box. She would not put anything past them.

  Her stomach would not let her leave the house until late that afternoon. She drove to the hospital, feeling as though she’d been hollowed out, left with barely enough strength to sit upright. She took the stairs up to ward three and walked as quickly as she was able to Joe’s room. There was another patient in Joe’s bed, and she turned from the doorway in a panic.

  “Where’s Mr. Hamilton?” she asked the nearest nurse.

  “He left this morning,” the woman said.

  “Left to go where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The slumber room?” Sarah asked. “The isolation room?”

  “No,” the woman said. “He left the hospital.”

  They discharged him! Her call to Palmiento had some impact after all. But if he’d gotten out that morning, why hadn’t he come home? He could be at his office, she thought. It would be just like him to rush immediately into work. Although…Colleen said he’d had shock treatment. He wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere on his own after that. Her heart began to race again; her head felt light. Would they have put him out on the street in that condition? She walked down the hall to Dr. Palmiento’s office, running her hands against the wall for support.

  “Come in,” Palmiento said after she knocked. He stood up and reached for her shoulder, but she shrugged his hand away. “Please sit, Mrs. Tolley. We need to have a talk.”

  “Where is my husband?” She made no move to sit.

  Dr. P. remained standing but leaned back against his desk, his arms folded across his chest. “I reevaluated him after our talk this morning,” he said. “His depression was so deep and intractable. I knew there was only one thing we could do.”

  Sarah froze. “Where is he?” she asked, praying that her suspicion was not correct.

  “The lobotomy went well,” Dr. P. said.

  Sarah laughed, the sound tinny and unnatural. “Is this some sort of joke?”

  He pursed his lips and looked at her with his false sympathy. “I know this must be very hard to understand,” he said. “Why, just a few days ago you thought you had a hale and hearty husband. He’d kept his distress so very well hidden. But believe me, he’s much better off now. No more of that terrible psychic pain.”

  “I don’t believe you at all,” she stood up. “Where is my husband?”

  He handed her Frederick Hamilton’s chart, and she opened it slowly, studying Dr. Palmiento’s notes. Severe and intractable depression. Suicidal ideation. And the final note. Lobotomy performed 1:00 p.m., May 7, ’59. Patient tolerated procedure well.

  Closing the folder slowly, she lowered herself into the chair. “Where is he?” she asked, her voice quieter now, less insistent.

  “We transferred him for custodial care. Surely you know you can’t care for him at home now.”

  “Where to? To an asylum? A home?”

  “Right now, it’s best for you not to know,” Dr. P. said. “You’re far too distraught. You—”

  She was up from the chair and across the room in an instant, her arms raised for battle, and Dr. P. held up his hands to thwart her attack. Speaking to her in the gentle, patronizing voice she loathed, he grasped her wrists. Wrenching free, she spit at him, then turned on her heel and ran out of his office as fast as her weakened legs could carry her.

  Once in her car, she sat behind the wheel, struggling to catch her breath. She would find Joe. She had to. Yet she knew she had lost her husband to his foolhardy scheme. Even if she found him, Joe probably would not know who she was.

  “Where was he?” Laura asked. She had moved next to Sarah on the sofa, taking the older woman’s hand when she began to cry near the end of her story.

  “I don’t know.” Sarah blotted her eyes with the tissue Laura had handed her. “I never found him, although I looked and looked. And I never saw him again.”

  “My God.” It seemed impossible, and once again, Laura wondered if the story might be an elaborate figment of Sarah’s imagination. It had been too rich with detail, though. The events hung together too well to be so easily discounted.

  “What did you do?” Laura asked. “Did you call the police or—”

  Sarah suddenly stood up, putting an end to Laura’s questions with a wave of her hand.

  “No more.” She shook her hands as if trying to rid them of a sticky substance. “Don’t you have a movie? Let’s watch it now.”

  Laura looked at her watch. “I’m sorry, Sarah, but I have to get home. I can leave the movie with you,” she said, even though leaving the movie would make it woefully overdue. But Sarah seemed in desperate need of something to take her mind off the past.

  Sarah looked uncertain for a moment. “All right,” she said finally. “Will you put it in the…thing for me?”

  “The VCR? Sure.” Laura readied the movie in the VCR, then gave Sarah a hug. “I’ll see you next week,” she said.

  On the drive back to Lake Ashton, Laura could think only of Sarah’s torturous memories about Joe and the evil aura surrounding Saint Margaret’s. It wasn’t until she was halfway home that she remembered the cryptic notes of warning she’d received in the mail. Maybe the writer of those notes was not trying to keep Sarah isolated and lonely. Maybe they were simply trying to protect her from a past too painful to remember.

  29
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br />   HE WAS GOING TO SLEEP WITH BETHANY TONIGHT. IT HAD BEEN a long time, and he’d been thinking about it all day.

  Except…Bethany was not in a great mood. She’d been quiet at the restaurant, and even quieter since they’d returned to his cabin. Sitting next to him on the sofa, she sipped the decaf he’d made her and stared blankly at his aquarium, not saying a word.

  He put his arm around her. “I feel like I’m with Emma tonight,” he said, “having to guess what you’re thinking.” He touched her temple lightly with his fingers. “What’s going on in that head of yours?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  A loaded response. Whatever was bothering her, he had to deal with it before they went to bed. Sleeping with Bethany when she was annoyed was never a good idea. Whatever was disturbing her would come out immediately after they’d made love, and he’d be up all night trying to make amends.

  He tried to think back to when her sullen mood had started, and the answer came to him quickly: she’d been upset from the moment she’d arrived at his cabin, her overnight bag slung over her shoulder, and found him on the phone with Laura.

  Emma and her friend, Cory, were pretending their Barbies worked at an aquarium, Laura had told him, and the entire bookshelf had been converted into doll-size offices in the aquarium building.

  Then she told him about her disturbing visit to Sarah that afternoon, something unbelievable about Sarah’s husband pretending to be a psychiatric patient and getting himself lobotomized in the process.

  That’s when Bethany showed up, loudly announcing her arrival, and Dylan had cringed at her timing. Laura must think he had a constant string of women parading through his house.

  “I’m interrupting again,” Laura had said. He hadn’t bothered denying it this time. He told her they could talk again tomorrow and thanked her for calling.

  “Who’s that?” Bethany had asked when he got off the phone.

  “Laura.” He told her about the Barbies and the aquarium and the bookshelf, while Bethany stared at him as if he’d gone mad.

  “I can’t believe you’re talking about Barbie dolls,” she said. Then she kissed him and poured him a glass of wine, but there was a stiffness in her movements that let him know she was not pleased. Was that what was still bugging her now, hours later?

  He gave her shoulders a squeeze. “I know something’s bothering you,” he said. “It’s not ‘nothing.’ Tell me what’s going on.”

  Bethany leaned forward to set her mug on the coffee table, then turned toward him, escaping his arm in the process. “Do you know how many times you said the name ‘Emma’ tonight?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “A few, I guess.”

  “Thirty-four,” Bethany said. “And I only started counting at the restaurant.”

  “You counted? What was the point in—”

  “And how about ‘Laura’?” Bethany didn’t wait for him to answer. “Twenty-three.”

  Twenty-three? “Come on, Beth—”

  “You say you’re not interested in Emma’s mother, but you sure talked about her enough,” she said.” And guess how many times you said the name ‘Bethany’?”

  He knew he was not going to win this game, no matter what he answered. “I don’t know,” he said, giving up.

  “Twice, Dylan. Twice.” There was anger in her eyes. “And now you expect me to stay overnight, don’t you?”

  “I thought you wanted to,” he said. “You brought your—”

  She stood up. “Forget it! I’m not staying.” She marched toward the kitchen where she’d left her overnight bag.

  “If it bothered you so much when I talked about Emma, why didn’t you just say so?” he asked, angry now himself as he followed her into the kitchen. “Were you too busy counting? Too busy trying to trip me up somehow?”

  Pulling the strap of the bag over her shoulder, she headed for the door. “Good old Bethany,” she said. “She’s always there whenever you need her. You can dump all your problems on her, and she listens with sympathy. And she’ll sleep with you, too! What a pal! Well, I’m sick of being your pal, Dylan.” She let the screen door slam behind her as she left the house.

  Dazed, Dylan stared after her. What the hell had just happened? One minute they were sipping coffee and cuddling on the sofa, the next minute she’d blown sky-high. It had been building in her all night, obviously. Building in her while he’d blathered on about Emma.

  He called her half an hour later, when he knew she’d be home, but she refused to talk to him.

  “Don’t call me, okay?” she said. “Don’t call until you’ve figured out what you want.” There was a pause, and he knew she was crying. “I love you, Dylan,” she said. “I know you don’t feel the same way, and I can’t wait any longer for you. And…I guess I’d better tell you that I’m going to sleep with…someone else. For all I know, you’re never going to get over this fixation.”

  Hanging up the phone, he lay back on the sofa. The aquarium was the only light in the room, and he watched one of the fish glide smoothly from one end of the tank to the other. He remembered telling Emma that he watched the fish when he was upset or sad. Well, he was both those things now.

  He wanted to see the aquarium building Emma had created in the bookshelf. He wanted to watch her play with it. Had she named her fish? How would he ever know? Those names would stay locked in her head forever. No, not forever. Just until she was ready to start talking again.

  Bethany was right: he was consumed with his thoughts about his daughter.

  But what was this bit about Laura? he wondered. Had he really said her name twenty-three times?

  30

  LAURA RETURNED TO THE RETIREMENT HOME THE NEXT DAY. She’d slept poorly the night before, worried that she’d left Sarah alone with memories of her husband’s tragedy. One good thing about her preoccupation with Sarah: it prevented her from stewing over the fact that Dylan had a woman at his house again the night before.

  “Can we go for a walk?” Sarah asked as soon as she saw it was Laura at her door. “I have my shoes on.”

  “Of course.” Laura walked into the apartment, her gaze falling instantly to the photograph of young Joe Tolley on the end table. He looked different to her this morning. He wore a cockeyed grin and there was a sparkle in his eye. She could imagine him plotting that dangerous charade at Saint Margaret’s.

  “Did you enjoy the movie?” Laura asked.

  “Movie?” Sarah looked at her blankly.

  “The movie I left in your VCR yesterday.”

  “Oh.” Sarah glanced at the VCR. “I don’t think I watched it. I was thinking about Joe all day.”

  Laura extracted the movie from the machine and left it next to her purse on the kitchenette counter. She opened the apartment door for Sarah, and they walked into the hall.

  “You told me some disturbing things about Joe,” she said, wondering if it was cruel to probe Sarah’s memory further.

  Sarah only nodded.

  “And you said you never saw him again. Was that right?”

  Sarah let out a sigh. “Joseph Tolley was a kind, lovable, smart and adventurous man,” she said. “But in the end, he was a fool.”

  Sarah, 1959

  Minutes after learning about Joe’s fate from Dr. Palmiento, Sarah picked up Janie at Mrs. Gale’s. Her mind was reeling, and her stomach was still in turmoil from her bout of sickness that morning. She did not know what to do. She went through the motions of feeding Janie, playing with her a bit, tucking her into bed. Then she sat in her living room, staring out the window at the streetlight.

  Joe was gone—the Joe she had known, at any rate. The thought of that sharp mind and easygoing manner being quelled forever by such barbaric surgery was simply incomprehensible to her. Yet she had seen Dr. Palmiento perform surgery on other patients who did not seem to merit it. And he had probably figured out what Joe was up to. What better way to prevent Joe’s report from ever seeing the light of day than to destroy his mind?

  Yet
her mind was still clear, and she knew what Joe had learned. Palmiento was experimenting on his patients, he’d said. Something about mind control. Brainwashing. She would go to the authorities with what she knew. The police or the FBI. First thing in the morning, though, she would call the board of psychiatry again and tell them what had happened to Joe. Palmiento needed to be punished for what he’d done.

  She cried in bed the entire night, as if trying to get the tears out of the way. Once she started her fight, there would be no room for them.

  In the morning, she reached the president of the board. This time she identified herself. As she began reciting what had happened, he interrupted her.

  “I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” he said.

  In spite of all the weeping she’d done overnight, she was still crying as she spoke. Crying and raising her voice. She knew she must sound like a madwoman.

  “I was a nurse at Saint Margaret’s Psychiatric Hospital,” she said, getting her emotions under control. “I thought some strange things were going on there, so I reported them to you…to the board.”

  “What sort of ‘strange things’?” he asked.

  “Cruel and inhumane experiments,” she said. “Then my husband, who is a reporter for the Washington Post, checked himself in as a patient so that he could find out what was really going on there. When they—Dr. Palmiento and his intern, I don’t even know his real last name—when they found out what my husband was up to, they lobotomized him. And they won’t tell me where he is.”

  The president of the board did not respond right away. “This sounds rather far-fetched,” he said finally.

  “Please believe me! Send someone to look at his chart. Only it’s not under his real name. It’s under the name Frederick Hamilton.”

  “Peter Palmiento is one of the top psychiatrists in the country,” the man said.