Teddy said, “I’m an officer of the law, Doctor. Whatever you think you saw in there, you didn’t.”
Cawley held up a hand. “Fine. As you say.”
“As I say,” Teddy said.
He sat back and smoked and considered Teddy and smoked some more and Teddy could hear the storm outside, could feel the press of it against the walls, feel it pushing through gaps under the roof, and Cawley remained silent and watchful, and Teddy finally said:
“She died in a fire. I miss her like you…If I was underwater, I wouldn’t miss oxygen that much.” He raised his eyebrows at Cawley. “Satisfied?”
Cawley leaned forward and handed Teddy a cigarette and lit it for him. “I loved a woman once in France,” he said. “Don’t tell my wife, okay?”
“Sure.”
“I loved this woman the way you love…well, nothing,” he said, a note of surprise in his voice. “You can’t compare that kind of love to anything, can you?”
Teddy shook his head.
“It’s its own unique gift.” Cawley’s eyes followed the smoke from his cigarette, his gaze gone out of the room, over the ocean.
“What were you doing in France?”
He smiled, shook a playful finger at Teddy.
“Ah,” Teddy said.
“Anyway, this woman was coming to meet me one night. She’s hurrying, I guess. It’s a rainy night in Paris. She trips. That’s it.”
“She what?”
“She tripped.”
“And?” Teddy stared at him.
“And nothing. She tripped. She fell forward. She hit her head. She died. You believe that? In a war. All the ways you’d think a person could die. She tripped.”
Teddy could see the pain in his face, even after all these years, the stunned disbelief at being the butt of a cosmic joke.
“Sometimes,” Cawley said quietly, “I make it a whole three hours without thinking of her. Sometimes I go whole weeks without remembering her smell, that look she’d give me when she knew we’d find time to be alone on a given night, her hair—the way she played with it when she was reading. Sometimes…” Cawley stubbed out his cigarette. “Wherever her soul went—if there was a portal, say, under her body and it opened up as she died and that’s where she went? I’d go back to Paris tomorrow if I knew that portal would open, and I’d climb in after her.”
Teddy said, “What was her name?”
“Marie,” Cawley said, and the saying of it took something from him.
Teddy took a draw on the cigarette, let the smoke drift lazily back out of his mouth.
“Dolores,” he said, “she tossed in her sleep a lot, and her hand, seven times out of ten, I’m not kidding, would flop right into my face. Over my mouth and nose. Just whack and there it was. I’d remove it, you know? Sometimes pretty roughly. I’m having a nice sleep and, bang, now I’m awake. Thanks, honey. Sometimes, though, I’d leave it there. Kiss it, smell it, what have you. Breathe her in. If I could have that hand back over my face, Doc? I’d sell the world.”
The walls rumbled, the night shook with wind.
Cawley watched Teddy the way you’d watch children on a busy street corner. “I’m pretty good at what I do, Marshal. I’m an egotist, I admit. My IQ is off the charts, and ever since I was a boy, I could read people. Better than anyone. I say what I’m about to say meaning no offense, but have you considered that you’re suicidal?”
“Well,” Teddy said, “I’m glad you didn’t mean to offend me.”
“But have you considered it?”
“Yeah,” Teddy said. “It’s why I don’t drink anymore, Doctor.”
“Because you know that—”
“—I’d have eaten my gun a long time ago, if I did.”
Cawley nodded. “At least you’re not deluding yourself.”
“Yeah,” Teddy said, “at least I got that going for me.”
“When you leave here,” Cawley said, “I can give you some names. Damn good doctors. They could help you.”
Teddy shook his head. “U.S. marshals don’t go to head doctors. Sorry. But if it ever leaked, I’d be pensioned out.”
“Okay, okay. Fair enough. But, Marshal?”
Teddy looked up at him.
“If you keep steering your current course, it’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes. Yes, I do. I specialize in grief trauma and survivor’s guilt. I suffer from the same, so I specialize in the same. I saw you look into Rachel Solando’s eyes a few hours ago and I saw a man who wants to die. Your boss, the agent in charge at the field office? He told me you’re the most decorated man he has. Said you came back from the war with enough medals to fill a chest. True?”
Teddy shrugged.
“Said you were in the Ardennes and part of the liberating force at Dachau.”
Another shrug.
“And then your wife is killed? How much violence, Marshal, do you think a man can carry before it breaks him?”
Teddy said, “Don’t know, Doc. Kind of wondering, myself.”
Cawley leaned across the space between them and clapped Teddy on the knee. “Take those names from me before you leave. Okay? I’d like to be sitting here five years from now, Marshal, and know you’re still in the world.”
Teddy looked down at the hand on his knee. Looked up at Cawley.
“I would too,” he said softly.
13
HE MET BACK up with Chuck in the basement of the men’s dormitory, where they’d assembled cots for everyone while they rode out the storm. To get here, Teddy had come through a series of underground corridors that connected all the buildings in the compound. He’d been led by an orderly named Ben, a hulking mountain of jiggling white flesh, through four locked gates and three manned checkpoints, and from down here you couldn’t even tell the world stormed above. The corridors were long and gray and dimly lit, and Teddy wasn’t all that fond of how similar they were to the corridor in his dream. Not nearly as long, not filled with sudden banks of darkness, but ball-bearing gray and cold just the same.
He felt embarrassed to see Chuck. He’d never had a migraine attack that severe in public before, and it filled him with shame to remember vomiting on the floor. How helpless he’d been, like a baby, needing to be lifted from the chair.
But as Chuck called, “Hey, boss!” from the other side of the room, it surprised him to realize what a relief it was to be reunited with him. He’d asked to go on this investigation alone and been declined. At the time, it had pissed him off, but now, after two days in this place, after the mausoleum and Rachel’s breath in his mouth and those fucking dreams, he had to admit he was glad not to be alone on this.
They shook hands and he remembered what Chuck had said to him in the dream—“I’m never getting off this island”—and Teddy felt a sparrow’s ghost pass through the center of his chest and flap its wings.
“How you doing, boss?” Chuck clapped his shoulder.
Teddy gave him a sheepish grin. “I’m better. A little shaky, but all in all, okay.”
“Fuck,” Chuck said, lowering his voice and stepping away from two orderlies smoking cigarettes against a support column. “You had me scared, boss. I thought you were having a heart attack or a stroke or something.”
“Just a migraine.”
“Just,” Chuck said. He lowered his voice even further and they walked to the beige cement wall on the south side of the room, away from the other men. “I thought you were faking it at first, you know, like you had some plan to get to the files or something.”
“I wish I was that smart.”
He looked in Teddy’s eyes, his own glimmering, pushing forward. “It got me thinking, though.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did.”
“What’d you do?”
“I told Cawley I’d sit with you. And I did. And after a while, he got a call and he left the office.”
“You went after his files?”
Chuck nodded.
“What did you find?”
Chuck’s face dropped. “Well, not much actually. I couldn’t get into the file cabinets. He had some locks I’ve never seen before. And I’ve picked a lot of locks. I could’ve picked these, but I would have left marks. You know?”
Teddy nodded. “You did the right thing.”
“Yeah, well…” Chuck nodded at a passing orderly and Teddy had the surreal sensation that they’d been transported into an old Cagney movie, cons on the yard plotting their escape. “I did get into his desk.”
“You what?”
Chuck said, “Crazy, huh? You can slap my wrist later.”
“Slap your wrist? Give you a medal.”
“No medal. I didn’t find much, boss. Just his calendar. Here’s the thing, though—yesterday, today, tomorrow, and the next day were all blocked off, you know? He bordered them in black.”
“The hurricane,” Teddy said. “He’d heard it was coming.”
Chuck shook his head. “He wrote across the four boxes. You know what I mean? Like you’d write ’Vacation on Cape Cod.’ Following me?”
Teddy said, “Sure.”
Trey Washington ambled on over to them, a ratty stogie in his mouth, his head and clothes drenched with rain. “Ya’ll getting clandestine over here, Marshals?”
“You bet,” Chuck said.
“You been out there?” Teddy said.
“Oh, yeah. Brutal now, Marshals. We were sandbagging the whole compound, boarding up all the windows. Shit. Motherfuckers falling all over themselves out there.” Trey relit his cigar with a Zippo and turned to Teddy. “You okay, Marshal? Word around the campfire was you had some sort of attack.”
“What sort of attack?”
“Oh, now, you’d be here all night, you tried to get every version of the story.”
Teddy smiled. “I get migraines. Bad ones.”
“Had an aunt used to get ’em something awful. Lock herself up in a bedroom, shut off the light, pull the shades, you wouldn’t see her for twenty-four hours.”
“She’s got my sympathy.”
Trey puffed his cigar. “Well, she long dead and all now, but I’ll pass it upstairs in my prayers tonight. She was a mean woman anyway, headache or not. Used to beat me and my brother with a hickory stick. Sometimes for nothing. I’d say, ’Auntie, what I do?’ She say, ’I don’t know, but you thinking about doing something terrible.’ What you do with a woman like that?”
He truly seemed to be waiting for an answer, so Chuck said, “Run faster.”
Trey let out a low “Heh, heh, heh” around his cigar. “Ain’t that the truth. Yes, sir.” He sighed. “I’m gone go dry off. We’ll see you later.”
“See you.”
The room was filling up with men coming in from the storm, shaking the moisture off black slickers and black forest ranger hats, coughing, smoking, passing around the not-so-secret flasks.
Teddy and Chuck leaned against the beige wall and spoke in flat tones while facing the room.
“So the words on the calendar…”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t say ’Vacation on Cape Cod.’”
“Nope.”
“What’d they say?”
“’Patient sixty-seven.’”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“That’s enough, though, huh?”
“Oh, yeah. I’d say so.”
HE COULDN’T SLEEP. He listened to the men snore and huff and inhale and exhale, some with faint whistles, and he heard some talk in their sleep, heard one say, “You shoulda told me. That’s all. Just said the words…” Heard another say, “I got popcorn in my throat.” Some kicked the sheets and some rolled over and back again and some rose long enough to slap their pillows before dropping back to the mattresses. After a while, the noise achieved a kind of comfortable rhythm that reminded Teddy of a muffled hymn.
The outside was muffled too, but Teddy could hear the storm scrabble along the ground and thump against the foundation, and he wished there were windows down here, if only so he could see the flash of it, the weird light it must be painting on the sky.
He thought of what Cawley had said to him.
It’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when.
Was he suicidal?
He supposed he was. He couldn’t remember a day since Dolores’s death when he hadn’t thought of joining her, and it sometimes went further than that. Sometimes he felt as if continuing to live was an act of cowardice. What was the point of buying groceries, of filling the Chrysler tank, of shaving, putting on socks, standing in yet another line, picking a tie, ironing a shirt, washing his face, combing his hair, cashing a check, renewing his license, reading the paper, taking a piss, eating—alone, always alone—going to a movie, buying a record, paying bills, shaving again, washing again, sleeping again, waking up again…
…if none of it brought him closer to her?
He knew he was supposed to move on. Recover. Put it behind him. His few stray friends and few stray relatives had said as much, and he knew that if he were on the outside looking in, he would tell that other Teddy to buck up and suck in your gut and get on with the rest of your life.
But to do that, he’d have to find a way to put Dolores on a shelf, to allow her to gather dust in the hope that enough dust would accumulate to soften his memory of her. Mute her image. Until one day she’d be less a person who had lived and more the dream of one.
They say, Get over her, you have to get over her, but get over to what? To this fucking life? How am I going to get you out of my mind? It hasn’t worked so far, so how am I supposed to do that? How am I supposed to let you go, that’s all I’m asking. I want to hold you again, smell you, and, yes too, I just want you to fade. To please, please fade…
He wished he’d never taken those pills. He was wide awake at three in the morning. Wide awake and hearing her voice, the dusk in it, the faint Boston accent that didn’t reveal itself on the a and r, so much as the e and r so that Dolores loved him in a whispered foreva and eva. He smiled in the dark, hearing her, seeing her teeth, her eyelashes, the lazy carnal appetite in her Sunday-morning glances.
That night he’d met her at the Cocoanut Grove. The band playing a big, brassy set and the air gone silver with smoke and everyone dressed to the nines—sailors and soldiers in their best dress whites, dress blues, dress grays, civilian men in explosive floral ties and double-breasted suits with handkerchief triangles pressed smartly into the pockets, sharp-brimmed fedoras propped on the tables, and the women, the women were everywhere. They danced even as they walked to the powder room. They danced moving from table to table and they spun on their toes as they lit cigarettes and snapped open their compacts, glided to the bar and threw back their heads to laugh, and their hair was satin-shiny and caught the light when they moved.
Teddy was there with Frankie Gordon, another sergeant from Intel, and a few other guys, all of them shipping out in a week, but he dumped Frankie the moment he saw her, left him in midsentence and walked down to the dance floor, lost her for a minute in the throng between them, everyone pushing to the sides to make space for a sailor and a blonde in a white dress as the sailor spun her across his back and then shot her above his head in a twirl and caught her coming back down, dipped her toward the floor as the throng broke out in applause and then Teddy caught the flash of her violet dress again.
It was a beautiful dress and the color had been the first thing to catch his eye. But there were a lot of beautiful dresses there that night, too many to count, so it wasn’t the dress that held his attention but the way she wore it. Nervously. Self-consciously. Touching it with a hint of apprehension. Adjusting and readjusting it. Palms pressing down on the shoulder pads.
It was borrowed. Or rented. She’d never worn a dress like that before. It terrified her. So much so that she couldn’t be sure if men and women looked at her out of lust, envy, or pity.
She’d caught
Teddy watching as she fidgeted and pulled her thumb back out from the bra strap. She dropped her eyes, the color rushing up from her throat, and then looked back up and Teddy held her eyes and smiled and thought, I feel stupid in this getup too. Willing that thought across the floor. And maybe it worked, because she smiled back, less a flirtatious smile than a grateful one, and Teddy left Frankie Gordon right there and then, Frankie talking about feed stores in Iowa or something, and by the time he passed through the sweaty siege of dancers, he realized he had nothing to say to her. What was he going to say? Nice dress? Can I buy you a drink? You have beautiful eyes?
She said, “Lost?”
His turn to spin. He found himself looking down at her. She was a small woman, no more than five four in heels. Outrageously pretty. Not in a tidy way, like so many of the other women in there with perfect noses and hair and lips. There was something unkempt about her face, eyes maybe a bit too far apart, lips that were so wide they seemed messy on her small face, a chin that was uncertain.
“A bit,” he said.
“Well, what are you looking for?”
He said it before he could think to stop himself: “You.”
Her eyes widened and he noticed a flaw, a speckle of bronze, in the left iris, and he felt horror sweep through his body as he realized he’d blown it, come off as a Romeo, too smooth, too full of himself.
You.
Where the fuck did he come up with that one? What the fuck was he—?
“Well,” she said…
He wanted to run. He couldn’t bear to look at her another second.
“…at least you didn’t have to walk far.”
He felt a goofy grin break across his face, felt himself reflected in her eyes. A goof. An oaf. Too happy to breathe.
“No, miss, I guess I didn’t.”
“My God,” she said, leaning back to look at him, her martini glass pressed to her upper chest.
“What?”
“You’re as out of place here as I am, aren’t you, soldier?”
LEANING IN THE cab window as she sat in the back with her friend Linda Cox, Linda hunching forward to give the driver an address, and Teddy said, “Dolores.”
Shutter Island Page 15
