“Don’t hate him for this, Laura,” Stuart pleaded. “Please try to understand. He thought what was he was doing was right and necessary. Even the government supported it. His paycheck came from the CIA. It was laundered a bit along the way, but he knew the government was delighted with what he was doing and would do whatever it took to keep word about the research from getting out.”
Laura rubbed her arms through her sweater. She felt unclean. The thought of Ray touching her was loathsome.
“After a while, though, Ray began to realize that Peter Palmiento had his own set of psychiatric problems,” Stuart continued. “As Palmiento grew more paranoid, he was afraid that Sarah Tolley and a few others who worked at Saint Margaret’s might blow his cover, and he felt justified in taking whatever steps he thought were necessary to prevent that from happening. He knew he could get to Sarah through threats to her daughter. Ray felt torn then. He talked to me about it. He was still convinced the experiments were absolutely essential, but he was upset by Palmiento’s craziness.”
“He warned Sarah to protect Janie,” Laura said. “To protect me.”
“He probably did. I don’t know that for a fact. I do know that the disagreement between Ray and Palmiento grew until it turned into a physical fight, and Ray got shot. After that, Ray was able to get him committed to a different psychiatric institution as a patient. Ray was still dedicated to the research, though, and he was hoping the experiments would continue, but the government would no longer provide support, financial or otherwise, and Ray had to let it go.”
“Sarah was there when they fought,” Laura said. “She hit Palmiento’s arm when he fired the shot. Otherwise, he might have killed Ray.”
Stuart looked surprised. “I didn’t know that,” he said. He took a long drink of his lemonade, draining the glass. Laura didn’t bother to offer him more. She wanted him to get on with his story.
“He had no job then, after the research folded,” Stuart said. “No way to pay for school, so he had to drop out for a while. He worked in some menswear store for a few years to make money to go back. But while he was out of school, his attitude toward the government changed. Vietnam happened. I watched him lose faith in what we were doing over there. He started to feel like he’d been duped, by the government, by Palmiento and by himself. He really got depressed then. I remember him talking to me, literally crying about all the patients he’d help to torture. That was the word he used. He tried to block the past from his mind and pretend it never happened, and psychology all of a sudden left a bad taste in his mouth. He felt so ashamed of what he’d done at Saint Margaret’s. When he went back to school, he majored in sociology. That’s when he took up working with the mentally ill who’d been kicked out of institutions and left to fend for themselves on the street.”
Laura stared into the woods. She wanted to feel sympathy for Ray, to understand and forgive what he’d done. The tenor of the times had been radically different in the fifties. The fear of the Communist threat, real or imagined, had been pervasive and oppressive. She remembered Sarah telling her about Donny, the little boy in the train crash who had feared being destroyed by “the bomb.” Yet human beings had still been human beings back then. Every person who spent a month in the isolation box suffered as much as she would now if forced to exist in those conditions. The patients who wore those helmets, desperately hoping the treatment would help them feel better, were every bit as trusting, fragile and vulnerable as she would be.
“The one thing he couldn’t let go of from those days at Saint Margaret’s was Sarah Tolley,” Stuart said. “He thought they’d put her through too much. They…I don’t remember what they did to her husband, but—”
“They drugged him and shocked him and flew him to Nevada, where they gave him a new identity.” Laura heard the bitterness in her voice. She was not ready to forgive. “They—Ray included—told Sarah they’d lobotomized him.”
Stuart winced. “Well, after that, I guess they threatened to harm her daughter. You. Until Sarah got scared enough to give you away. You know all this, huh?”
Laura nodded. “But what I don’t understand is how Ray ended up married to me. It couldn’t have been a coincidence.”
“No, of course it wasn’t.” Stuart set his empty glass down on the coffee table. “It tormented him that he didn’t know what Sarah had done with you. He didn’t know if you were safe or not. So he tried to find you. For years and years, he looked for you with no luck. He gave up, finally. But then, many years later, you discovered the comet. Your fifth, I think. The big one.”
Laura frowned. “How did that help him? My picture was all over the place, true, but he couldn’t possibly have recognized me. Or my name.”
“No, but he did recognize this.” He reached out and touched the pendant at Laura’s throat. “You had it on in all the pictures and TV interviews. He knew it must have been made from the pin Sarah always wore. It was one of a kind, he said. He did a little detective work and found out your age and was pretty sure you were Janie. Then he finagled a way to meet you and—”
“He came up to me in the cafeteria at Hopkins and asked if he could share my table,” Laura remembered.
“Well, he knew after talking to you for a while that you were the one—the little girl he’d hunted down and threatened through her mother so long ago.”
“I remember all those questions he asked me,” Laura said. “I thought he was simply curious. A rare sort of man to take that much interest in someone.”
“He cared about you, Laura. Maybe in the beginning it was because of how he’d changed your life, how he thought he might have hurt you. But I know you two became close friends, and I believe that friendship was completely genuine. When you got pregnant, he didn’t think twice before asking you to marry him.”
“Out of guilt, it sounds like,” Laura said. She felt sick.
“I’d prefer to think it was out of love,” Stuart said.
Laura didn’t respond. She looked toward the lake, the autumn leaves blurring in her vision.
“Ray panicked when your father asked you to look after Sarah Tolley,” Stuart said. “He was afraid you’d learn about his past. He didn’t want to face that past himself, can you understand that? That’s why he killed himself. It had nothing to do with how hard you worked, or his being rejected by publishers. It was Ray’s shame and self-loathing that killed him. He never forgave himself for what he did at Saint Margaret’s.”
“He should have told me,” she said, although she knew her reaction to his past would have been less than charitable.
“I never wanted you to find out, either,” Stuart said. “More important, I don’t want the rest of the world to know. It would destroy the acclaim and respect Ray’s finally going to receive for his book.”
“You did it,” she said, staring at her brother-in-law. “You sent those letters warning me to stay away from Sarah.”
“Yes, I did,” he admitted. “Coward’s way of dealing with the problem, I suppose.”
“That was my mother you wanted to keep me from, Stuart,” she said angrily. “My mother.” Both Stuart and Ray had toyed with her, trying to control her actions to serve their own needs.
“I know,” Stuart said. “But you didn’t have a clue who she was. You could have lived your entire life without knowing, and would that have been such a big deal? I still wish you’d heeded those letters.”
Laura thought of Sarah, sitting alone in her apartment with her dwindling memories and her picture of Joe.
“I’m so glad I didn’t,” she said.
47
“SHE’S READY FOR A NAP,” DYLAN SAID.
Laura watched her daughter drag herself into the kitchen, dirt on her knees and elbows and one cheek. “And a bath,” she said. “You run upstairs, Emma. I’ll be up in a second.” She managed to smile at Dylan. “Thanks for taking her,” she said. “Stuart’s lying down. Can you stay for a while? I can tell you what he said.” Her head ached with resentment and rage
, and she longed to talk it out. She felt used. Her marriage had not been based on a deep romantic love; that she had always accepted. But it had not even been based on friendship. Marrying her had been a convenient way for Ray to assuage his guilt.
“I can’t, Laura.” Dylan looked at his watch. “I have to get ready for tonight’s flight. I’ll come back afterward, though, if that’s all right.”
“Okay,” she said, thinking that Stuart would be around then; it would be hard to talk. The disappointment must have shown on her face.
“You’re upset.” Dylan walked toward her, checking his watch again. “I can stay for—”
“No,” she said, knowing he was already running late. “We’ll talk tonight.”
He gave her a quick kiss. “What time is Emma’s appointment with Heather?”
Laura froze. “I completely forgot about it,” she said. “It’s at two-thirty, and I told Heather I’d bring Sarah with us. Maybe I should cancel, with all that’s going on.”
“I think you should go, if you’re at all up to it,” Dylan said. “Little pitchers have big ears. Maybe it would help Emma to be able to unload verbally on Sarah.”
He had a point, although the thought of getting her daughter and herself organized by two was overwhelming. “I’ll try,” she said. “Let me get her into the tub.”
“I’ll go along for the ride, if that’s all right with you,” Stuart said, when Laura told him about the appointment with Heather. “Her office is over by that strip mall in Leesburg, you said, right? The one with that super bookstore? I’ll spend my time in there while you’re at your appointment.”
Laura didn’t feel like having Stuart join them, but she could think of no civil way to discourage him from going. The tension between them was palpable but difficult to address with Emma around.
Stuart tried to talk to Emma in the car, and his nonstop, unanswered questions only served to increase Laura’s anxiety. She turned her focus to the meeting with Heather, trying to block out her brother-in-law’s voice.
So much had happened since the last therapy appointment. She should probably speak with Heather alone first while Sarah and Emma stayed in the waiting room. The therapist was in dire need of an update.
Laura parked in front of the retirement home and went inside to get Sarah.
“I’ll get my walking shoes,” Sarah said as soon as she opened her apartment door and found Laura in the hallway.
“You don’t need to, Sarah,” Laura said. “We’re going to Emma’s therapist with her today. Is that all right with you?”
A look of confusion erased Sarah’s smile. “If you say so.” She shrugged and looked around her living room.
“It’s right there.” Laura pointed to Sarah’s purse where it rested on the kitchenette counter.
“Oh, yes.” Sarah picked it up. “I’m ready.”
“Thanks for doing this,” Laura said as she walked with Sarah down the long corridor. “For going to Emma’s therapist with her. I know you’d rather be taking a walk. It means a lot to me.”
“We had bingo last night,” Sarah said.
“Oh. And did you win anything?”
“I don’t know. Oh, it wasn’t bingo. It was that other game.”
Laura didn’t ask what game she was talking about, too preoccupied to pursue the conversation.
They stepped outside into the fall sunshine. “My car’s right there,” Laura said, pointing. She opened the back door for Sarah, since Stuart had taken the front seat. “Sarah, this is my brother-in-law, Stuart,” she said, reaching across Sarah to find the other end of the seat belt. She fastened the seat belt and got in behind the wheel.
“So, what was the game you played last night?” she asked Sarah.
There was no answer.
“Sarah?”
Laura looked in her rearview mirror. Sarah’s gaze was riveted on Stuart’s profile. Glancing at Stuart herself, it suddenly occurred to her that Sarah might see a resemblance to Ray—to Gilbert—in his features. He and Ray had often been mistaken for twins as they were growing up. Still, Ray had been in his early twenties when he was at Saint Margaret’s, and Stuart was now close to sixty. A youthful sixty, though. He had not grown bulky and soft as Ray had. And he still had his hair.
“There’s the mall, Stu.” Laura pointed toward the strip of stores as she pulled into the parking lot of the therapy office. “Do you want to take the car?”
“No, I’ll walk.” Stuart got out of the car and stretched. “It’ll feel good.”
Sarah didn’t budge from the car once Laura had released her seat belt. Her gaze followed Stuart as he walked across the parking lot toward the mall.
“Where’s he going?” Sarah asked.
“He’s going to those stores over there,” Laura said. “And his name is Stuart,” she said again, in case Sarah did indeed have him confused with Ray. “He’s my brother-in-law.”
Sarah slowly got out of the car, then took Emma’s hand, something Laura had not seen her do before. Emma accepted the gesture without protest, and the three of them walked toward the office, Sarah turning her head to follow Stuart’s progress as he neared the strip of stores.
Emma was already playing with the waiting room’s toys by the time Heather appeared. Laura stood up. “I think I should see you first, today,” she said.
“All right,” Heather said. “Sarah and Emma? You two stay here in the play area and Mrs. Quinn will keep an eye on you.”
Sarah made no move toward the play area. She sat on the edge of her chair, and Laura eyed her worriedly as she walked past her on the way to Heather’s office. Sarah was not herself today.
In Heather’s office, Laura poured out all that had occurred over the last few days, while the therapist’s jaw fell lower and lower.
“You must be furious at Ray,” Heather said.
“Yes, I am.”
“Well, hooray, Laura. It’s about time.”
“I can forgive what he did at Saint Margaret’s, although it’s difficult. He was young. The political situation was very different. But I can’t forgive what he did to me. Keeping me from my mother. From ever learning the truth about myself.” Her fists were clenched in her lap. “He was dishonest and deceitful.” She suddenly thought of Dylan, of how he valued honesty, and a small current of joy rushed through her in spite of her anger.
There was a knock on Heather’s office door and Mrs. Quinn opened it partway. “Are Sarah and Emma in here with you?” she asked.
Laura’s heart threw an extra beat against her rib cage.
“No,” Heather said.
“They’re not in the waiting room, either,” the receptionist said. “I looked up from my desk, and they’d disappeared.”
Laura was out of her seat in an instant. She darted into the waiting room, which was empty except for a middle-aged man waiting for one of the other therapists. Sarah’s purse was on the seat of the chair in which she’d been sitting.
“Did you see where they went?” she asked the man. “A small child and an elderly woman?”
He looked confused by her terror. “There was no one here when I arrived,” he said.
“Try the restrooms,” Heather called to her from the hallway. “I’ll check the other offices.”
The restrooms were empty, and Laura felt a panic she’d experienced only once before, when she became separated from Emma in an outdoor market in Brazil. That time, she’d found Emma talking up a storm with a merchant who couldn’t understand a word of English.
She ran outside, calling for Sarah and Emma, but there was no answer and no sign of them. Standing in the parking lot, she turned helplessly in a circle, wondering which way they might have gone.
Heather came outside and stood next to her. “Let’s stay calm,” she said. “They’re most likely somewhere in the building. It’s four stories. They could have gotten on the elevator. We’ll search the building before we panic, all right?”
Laura didn’t budge. Her feet were fused to the su
rface of the parking lot.
“If they were outside,” Heather said, “don’t you think we could see them from here? An old woman and a small child? How fast could they possibly get away?”
Laura nodded, somewhat comforted by Heather’s rationale, although as she headed back into the building, she remembered the times she’d had trouble keeping up with Sarah on their walks.
She and Heather, Mrs. Quinn and the man in the waiting room combed the building, and Laura’s panic mounted with each door she opened to find strangers or an empty room. Finally, Heather called the police. And Laura called Dylan, her hand shaking as she dialed his number. He had a balloon flight this evening. He was probably out in his barn. But she was able to reach him, and he did not hesitate before telling her he was on his way.
The police arrived quickly. They were organized, methodical and conscientious, but they were not particularly reassuring. The expressions on their faces were grim.
“A mute five-year-old and an old woman with Alzheimer’s?” Laura overheard one of them say to another. “Good luck.”
One of the police officers told Laura to stay in the office in case Sarah and Emma returned, and she watched through the window as he and his fellow officers spread out into the neighborhood, the majority of them heading toward the mall.
Within a few minutes, Stuart entered the office and Laura told him that Sarah and Emma were missing.
“I think you reminded Sarah of Gilbert,” she said. “Of Ray.” She heard the accusation in her voice.
Stuart looked surprised. “I’m going to look for them,” he said, heading for the door.
“No,” Laura said firmly. “If it’s you who scared Sarah off, she’ll just run from you.”
With a sigh, Stuart sat down in the waiting room. He had that defeated look Ray had often worn. Laura was sick of seeing it.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
“I’m sorry, Laura,” Stuart said finally. “I’m sorry for everything. For keeping things from you. For trying to keep you from Sarah. I bought into Ray’s aspirations. He’d been so miserable when we were kids, and it always hurt me to see that. I wanted things to go well for him, finally. For him to be happy. I tried to protect him, at your expense. I’m sorry.”
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