Breaking the Silence

by Diane Chamberlain

  “I think Ray was right, though,” Stuart said. “You have a habit of getting obsessed with your projects, and it looks like you’ve gotten yourself obsessed with this Sarah woman, just as he’d been afraid you would. That’s why he killed himself.”

  “Oh, Stuart, there were many reasons why he killed himself.” She felt torn between anger and guilt.

  “You can’t deny that your father’s request precipitated it,” Stuart said.

  “I don’t know what precipitated it.”

  Dylan leaned forward and rested his hand on her arm, the gesture at once comforting and electrifying. “Don’t do that to her,” he said to Stuart. “Even if Laura’s visit to Sarah was the trigger, Ray’s suicide was not her fault. Don’t pin that on her.”

  Tears welled up in Laura’s eyes, more at Dylan’s defense than Stuart’s accusation.

  “I don’t mean to say it’s Laura’s fault,” Stuart backpedaled.

  “That’s what it sounded like,” Dylan said.

  “Enough, you two.” She tried to smile. “It’s in the past. And in a few weeks I’ve got to sit next to Oprah and tell her all about Ray. So can we get back to work, please?”

  Dylan let go of her arm and sat back in his chair, unsmiling. He was so damned good-looking, even wearing that sober, ready-to-fight expression on his face. Laura felt sorry for Stuart. He was coming to his brother’s home to see his brother’s wife and daughter, and here this good-looking and considerably younger interloper was criticizing him. Yet, he’d certainly asked for it.

  Stuart pretended to interview her, and although she felt awkward having Dylan present as she sang Ray’s praises, she soon found herself caught up in the nobility of her late husband’s life and the sadness that his death came too soon, before the publication of the book that had been his passion for so many years. She talked about the employment programs he’d created to find jobs for the homeless, the one-on-one work he’d done with mentally ill street people, teaching them how to get food and groom themselves. She described the food and clothing drives and the training of volunteers to work in the shelters. And she talked about the programs Ray would set up for the homeless each Christmas, leaving out the fact that, two Christmases ago, he’d collected truckloads of gifts for homeless children and forgotten to get a single thing for Emma.

  She sank back into her chair when Stuart announced he had no more questions. “You’ll knock ’em dead on Oprah,” he said.

  Dylan set his empty coffee cup on the end table. “Sounds like Ray was some kind of guy,” he said.

  “He was,” Laura agreed.

  “Are you feeling more confident?” Stuart asked her.

  “Definitely.” She truly did.

  “Well.” Dylan stood up. “I need to hit the road.”

  “Take a brownie for the trip.” Laura pointed to the few remaining brownies on the plate, and Dylan picked up one of them and wrapped it in a napkin.

  “Nice meeting you, Stuart,” he said.

  “And you.” Stuart got to his feet.

  Laura walked Dylan onto the front porch, where he turned to her, the polite facade gone from his features.

  “Don’t listen to him, okay?” he said. “He obviously worshiped his brother and needs to make some sense of his death. But it doesn’t do any good to assign blame.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad you were here.”

  He smiled and ran his hand down her arm. “Why don’t you say good-night to ol’ Stu there and tuck yourself into bed with that folder of goodies.”

  “I will. Thanks.” She stood on the porch and watched him drive away, and she was still standing there long after the sound of the van was replaced by the buzz of cicadas.

  She did as Dylan had suggested and took the folder to bed with her. It was filled with newspaper and magazine articles from the seventies, when the magnitude of the mind control experiments finally came to light. There had been a congressional hearing in 1977 to uncover the depth of the abuses on unwitting subjects. The hearing led to legislation designed to protect patients through drug regulation and the requirement of informed consent.

  But back in the fifties, few safeguards had existed. Although mind control research involving psychiatric patients had been illegal in the United States, there had been no such restrictions in Canada, and the United States government had funded research on patients at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. Dr. Peter Palmiento desperately wanted to be involved in this research, but since he practiced in the United States, he could not get official sanction from the government to do so. Nevertheless, some government officials were so obsessed with discovering the secrets of mind control that Palmiento was able to get their covert support for his research. He considered himself a groundbreaking pioneer in the field, but the articles described him as a “rogue physician” who eventually wound up a psychiatric patient himself. That outcome made Laura chuckle. Sarah had diagnosed him correctly in her first meeting with him. Palmiento died in 1968, the articles said. Laura could find no mention of his intern.

  She was tired by the time she reached the last article in the folder. It had been written in 1977 and appeared in a Lake Tahoe paper, and she read through it, quickly at first, then again, more slowly. The style of writing was strangely familiar. She looked at the byline. John Solomon. Solomon obviously had an ongoing column in the paper, complete with his picture. Laura held the picture closer to her night table light. It couldn’t be, she thought. Her mind was playing tricks on her. John Solomon bore a striking resemblance to the man in the framed photograph of Joe Tolley in Sarah’s apartment. But that was impossible, and Laura’s memory of that photograph was sketchy at best. Also, Solomon’s report on the mind control experiments was completely objective, with no indication of any personal involvement.

  Still, Laura set the article on her night table, and when she finally fell asleep, the picture of the author haunted her dreams.

  37

  “YOU PUT THIS GIRL ON THE STAIRS,” EMMA COMMANDED Sarah, handing her the girl doll. Sarah obeyed, starting to make the small plastic figure walk up the steps inside the dollhouse.

  “No, not yet, Sarah!” Emma said quickly. Then a bit more gently, “Not quite yet. I have to get the man doll.” Rising to her knees, she reached past the dollhouse for the box of figures.

  “She’s a pip,” Heather whispered to Laura. They were watching from behind the two-way mirror.

  “Don’t I know it,” Laura said. “I don’t care what she says. I just love hearing her voice.”

  It was a little after one o’clock. It had been a long morning. She and Stuart had taken Emma fishing from the pier on the far side of the lake. Emma had been nervous about getting too close to the edge of the pier, but she seemed to enjoy herself despite the fact that none of them caught a fish large enough to keep.

  As they were walking back to the house from the pier, with Emma running ahead and out of earshot, Stuart asked Laura if she’d been seeing Dylan before Ray’s death.

  Laura looked at him in openmouthed shock, her anger quickly rising. “What? What the hell are you implying?”

  “Well, it just seems like the two of you are pretty close for having just reconnected a month or so ago.”

  “You are so out of line, Stuart.” Laura’s cheeks burned. “I got in touch with him when Emma’s therapist suggested it, not before. That was in July. He didn’t even know who I was, for heaven’s sake.”

  Stuart kicked a stone off the path. “So he fell in love with you that quickly, huh?”

  “Fell in love?” She laughed. “He’s Emma’s dad, Stu. That’s it.”

  “Maybe. But the way he looked at you and was so quick to defend you against me…I’d say there’s something more there.”

  “If there is, I certainly don’t know about it,” she said.

  Stuart left after lunch, and although he’d been an immense help in planning her presentation for the talk shows, she was happy to see him go. His unfounded accusations and his
idolatry of Ray were more than she could take.

  She’d changed Emma into clean clothes and then driven with her to Sarah’s apartment, where she’d spotted the old photograph of Joe Tolley on the end table.

  “Sarah, is there a chance I could borrow this picture?” she asked. “Just overnight?” How could she explain why she wanted it without confusing her or giving her false hope? “I saw a picture in an old newspaper, and I wanted to compare—”

  “Of course, dear,” Sarah said absently as she walked past her into the kitchenette. She opened the door to her refrigerator and stood in front of it, studying the pitcher of iced tea, the orange on the top shelf. Laura saw a puzzled expression come over her face.

  “What am I looking for?” Sarah asked. Shaking her head, she shut the refrigerator door.

  Although Laura was not at all certain Sarah had understood her request to borrow Joe’s picture, she slipped the framed photograph into her purse. She would compare it to the picture of John Solomon as soon as she got home.

  “She’s going for the gun again,” Heather said, nudging Laura back to the present. “She hasn’t done that for a while.”

  Emma had indeed picked up the child-size silver gun from the box on the other side of the room and returned to her seat at the table. She tried to hand the gun to Sarah.

  “Now, you take this gun, Sarah,” she said, “and you shoot the man in the head.”

  The muscles stiffened in Laura’s shoulders.

  “I don’t want that gun.” Sarah refused to take it.

  “You’ve got to,” Emma said.

  “No. I don’t like guns.”

  Emma tightened her lips in irritation. “I’ll do it then,” she said. Lifting the male doll in her left hand, she held the gun against his body. Laura leaned close to the mirror to try to make out what she was doing. Although the gun was nearly as large as the plastic figure, Emma seemed to be pretending the doll was holding it in his hand. She forced the doll’s arm to bend at an unnatural angle so that the gun was aimed at his head.

  “Bang!” Emma shouted. She threw the doll across the room, then sat still for a moment, staring at it.

  “You shot him,” Sarah said.

  “He shot himself,” Emma said in a somber voice. Then she turned to Sarah, speaking almost too quietly for Laura to hear. “If you talk too much, he’ll kill himself,” she said.

  A chill ran up Laura’s spine. She turned to Heather. “Does that mean…?” she whispered. “Do you think—”

  “Sh.” Heather touched Laura’s knee. “Let’s watch awhile longer.”

  After a few more minutes of observation, Laura moved into Heather’s office, while the therapist settled Sarah and Emma in the play area of the waiting room under Mrs. Quinn’s supervision. Laura couldn’t sit still. She paced around the small room, looking at Heather’s framed diplomas and certificates without really seeing them. When Heather finally came into the room, Laura nearly pounced on her.

  “She was always talking,” she said. “And Ray was always asking her to be quiet. He couldn’t concentrate with her around, he’d say. She could drive him crazy. He’d pay her to be quiet. ‘I’ll give you a quarter if you can be quiet for an hour.’ But he was never mean about it. Emma just thought it was a game.”

  Heather nodded. “Have a seat, Laura,” she said.

  Laura forced herself to sit down and drew in a deep breath. She was trembling.

  “If you knew that Emma’s chattering could get to Ray,” Heather said, “you can bet that Emma knew it, too.”

  “But…what does that have to do with him killing himself?”

  “Is it possible that Ray asked Emma to be quiet the day you went to see Sarah? And is it possible that she didn’t obey him?”

  “Very possible,” Laura said. “Very likely. But he wouldn’t kill himself over that.”

  “No, but Emma doesn’t know that. All she would know is that she disobeyed him and then he killed himself.”

  Laura pressed her hand to her mouth. “I never should have left her with him when he was so depressed.” How horrible that Emma was carrying that guilt around inside her. Laura knew firsthand how painful those feelings could be.

  “You couldn’t have known what he was going to do,” Heather said.

  “No, but still…” Laura’s voice trailed off. “So now what do we do?” she asked. “How do we help her?”

  “We let her play it out, over and over again if need be. I’ll be there with her, to correct her thinking. It will work, Laura.”

  “Can I just talk to her directly about it?”

  “She needs to work this through at her own speed,” Heather said. “She’ll set the pace for her recovery.”

  Laura could barely speak on the drive back to Sarah’s apartment, so it was very quiet inside the car. She walked Sarah into the retirement home and down the hall to her apartment, promising to take her for a walk the following day. Then she drove home with a child who was afraid to speak, afraid of the power in her words.

  She and Emma made dinner together and ate it while watching Beauty and the Beast, which had rapidly become Emma’s favorite video. But Laura could not concentrate on the story. Her tears were close to the surface. She kept her eyes on her daughter, trying to absorb the enormity of the guilt and shame she’d been suffering all these months.

  She managed to help Emma with her bath and put her to bed before finally allowing herself to cry. Only after she had some control over the tears did she call Dylan.

  “Something important happened at Emma’s therapy session today,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?” Dylan asked. “You sound upset.”

  She thought her voice had sounded neutral, but he’d picked up the anxiety behind her words. “I’m all right,” she said, fresh tears contradicting her words. It took her a minute to find her voice again. “It just shook me up.”

  “Would you like me to come over?”

  Yes. “It’s a long way—”

  “I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Do you need anything? Anything I can pick up for you?”

  “No. Just…I’m glad you’re coming,” she said.

  She hung up and waited for him in the darkened living room, relief mingling with her pain. She was not alone in this.

  He arrived in less than the promised thirty minutes, and she had the door open for him by the time he was on her front porch.

  “What’s going on?” he asked as he stepped inside.

  “I think we figured out why Emma stopped talking,” she said.

  “Really? What do you mean?”

  She sat down, and he joined her on the sofa, where she explained about Emma’s session with Sarah and how she’d made the doll shoot himself. “She said, ‘If you talk too much, he’ll kill himself.’”

  Dylan flinched as if he himself had been shot. “Is that why she thinks Ray killed himself?” he asked. “Because she talked too much?”

  Laura nodded. “I think so. He was always telling her to be quiet. He probably told her to be quiet that day, and she is, or at least she used to be, incapable of being quiet for more than a minute or two. He probably got frustrated with her and let her know it, and then, the next thing she knew, he’d shot himself.”

  “Did you explain to her that her talking had nothing to do with it?” he asked.

  “Heather thinks it’s better to let her act it out in play again, while she’s there to steer Emma straight in her thinking. She says we need to let her go through this at her own pace.” She began to cry again. “Can you imagine what this has been like for her? How afraid she must be that if she talks she might cause someone to die?”

  Dylan moved closer to her on the sofa, putting his arms around her, and she let herself sink into his embrace. “I know,” he said, his breath warm on her neck. “But she’s strong, Laura. She’s tough. She’s got your intelligence and my orneriness.” He was rubbing her back, and Laura did not want to let go of him.

  “I know she’s strong,” she sa
id. “I’m just sad that she ever had to go through this. That I didn’t protect her somehow.”

  “Sh, that’s hogwash,” he said. He continued to hold her although her tears had stopped. She was the one to finally pull away.

  “It helps having you care about her,” she said. “I’d feel so alone otherwise.”

  “I care about both of you, Laura,” he said. Abruptly, he moved to the end of the sofa, as though he’d stung himself with those words. “So,” he said, in an awkward change of topic, “did you get a chance to look through that folder of articles?”

  She struggled to shift gears. “Yes,” she said. “Oh! I nearly forgot. Stay right here.”

  She went upstairs to her bedroom to get the article written by John Solomon, but her mind remained back on the sofa with Dylan. He had not meant to say he cared about her. Was that because it was a lie, or because he didn’t want to share those feelings with her? She remembered Stuart’s assertion that Dylan was in love with her. A big leap, she chastised herself, from caring to loving.

  Downstairs, she handed the article to Dylan, then pulled the framed photograph of Joe Tolley from her purse.

  “When I saw this article last night, I thought this guy resembled the picture of Joe Tolley I’d seen in Sarah’s apartment. Even before I saw the picture, though, I thought I recognized the writing style. I’d read about twenty of his—Tolley’s—articles in the library the other day. So, today I borrowed the picture from Sarah to compare them. I want to see how they look side by side.” She switched on the light and sat next to Dylan, holding the framed picture close to the article.

  “That’s the same guy,” Dylan said.

  “Do you think so?”

  “Definitely. Look at the eyebrows. And the way his mouth slants to one side.”

  He was right. Although John Solomon had less hair, much of it gray, his eyebrows were identical to Joe Tolley’s.

  “He has the same earlobes,” she said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But how can they possibly be the same man?”