“They’re the same letters.”
“No.”
“The names are anagrams for each other.”
Teddy said it again: “No.”
“No?” Cawley frowned and moved his hand across the line. “Those are the exact same letters. Look at them. Edward Daniels. Andrew Laeddis. Same letters. You’re gifted with code, even flirted with becoming a code breaker in the war, isn’t that right? Tell me that you don’t see the same thirteen letters when you look up at these two names.”
“No!” Teddy rammed the heels of his hands against his eyes, trying to clear them or blot out the light, he wasn’t sure.
“’No,’ as in they’re not the same letters? Or ’no,’ as in you don’t want them to be the same letters.”
“They can’t be.”
“They are. Open your eyes. Look at them.”
Teddy opened his eyes but continued to shake his head and the quivering letters canted from side to side.
Cawley slapped the next line with the back of his hand. “Try this, then. ’Dolores Chanal and Rachel Solando.’ Both thirteen letters. You want to tell me what they have in common?”
Teddy knew what he was seeing, but he also knew it wasn’t possible.
“No? Can’t grasp that one either?”
“It can’t be.”
“It is,” Cawley said. “The same letters again. Anagrams for each other. You came here for the truth? Here’s your truth, Andrew.”
“Teddy,” Teddy said.
Cawley stared down at him, his face once again filling with lies of empathy.
“Your name is Andrew Laeddis,” Cawley said. “The sixty-seventh patient at Ashecliffe Hospital? He’s you, Andrew.”
22
“BULLSHIT!”
Teddy screamed it and the scream rocketed through his head.
“Your name is Andrew Laeddis,” Cawley repeated. “You were committed here by court order twenty-two months ago.”
Teddy threw his hand at that. “This is below even you guys.”
“Look at the evidence. Please, Andrew. You—”
“Don’t call me that.”
“—came here two years ago because you committed a terrible crime. One that society can’t forgive, but I can. Andrew, look at me.”
Teddy’s eyes rose from the hand Cawley had extended, up the arm and across the chest and into Cawley’s face, the man’s eyes brimming now with that false compassion, that imitation of decency.
“My name is Edward Daniels.”
“No.” Cawley shook his head with an air of weary defeat. “Your name is Andrew Laeddis. You did a terrible thing, and you can’t forgive yourself, no matter what, so you playact. You’ve created a dense, complex narrative structure in which you are the hero, Andrew. You convince yourself you’re still a U.S. marshal and you’re here on a case. And you’ve uncovered a conspiracy, which means that anything we tell you to the contrary plays into your fantasy that we’re conspiring against you. And maybe we could let that go, let you live in your fantasy world. I’d like that. If you were harmless, I’d like that a lot. But you’re violent, you’re very violent. And because of your military and law enforcement training, you’re too good at it. You’re the most dangerous patient we have here. We can’t contain you. It’s been decided—look at me.”
Teddy looked up, saw Cawley half stretching across the table, his eyes pleading.
“It’s been decided that if we can’t bring you back to sanity—now, right now—permanent measures will be taken to ensure you never hurt anyone again. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
For a moment—not even a full moment, a tenth of a moment—Teddy almost believed him.
Then Teddy smiled.
“It’s a nice act you’ve got going, Doc. Who’s the bad cop—Sheehan?” He glanced back at the door. “He’s about due, I’d say.”
“Look at me,” Cawley said. “Look into my eyes.”
Teddy did. They were red and swimming from lack of sleep. And more. What was it? Teddy held Cawley’s gaze, studied those eyes. And then it came to him—if he didn’t know otherwise, he’d swear Cawley was suffering from a broken heart.
“Listen,” Cawley said, “I’m all you’ve got. I’m all you’ve ever had. I’ve been hearing this fantasy for two years now. I know every detail, every wrinkle—the codes, the missing partner, the storm, the woman in the cave, the evil experiments in the lighthouse. I know about Noyce and the fictitious Senator Hurly. I know you dream of Dolores all the time and her belly leaks and she’s soaking with water. I know about the logs.”
“You’re full of shit,” Teddy said.
“How would I know?”
Teddy ticked off the evidence on his trembling fingers:
“I’ve been eating your food, drinking your coffee, smoking your cigarettes. Hell, I took three ’aspirin’ from you the morning I arrived. Then you drugged me the other night. You were sitting there when I woke up. I haven’t been the same since. That’s where all this started. That night, after my migraine. What’d you give me?”
Cawley leaned back. He grimaced as if he were swallowing acid and looked off at the window.
“I’m running out of time,” he whispered.
“What’s that?”
“Time,” he said softly. “I was given four days. I’m almost out.”
“So let me go. I’ll go back to Boston, file a complaint with the marshals’ office, but don’t worry—with all your powerful friends I’m sure it won’t amount to much.”
Cawley said, “No, Andrew. I’m almost out of friends. I’ve been fighting a battle here for eight years and the scales have tipped in the other side’s favor. I’m going to lose. Lose my position, lose my funding. I swore before the entire board of overseers that I could construct the most extravagant role-playing experiment psychiatry has ever seen and it would save you. It would bring you back. But if I was wrong?” His eyes widened and he pushed his hand up into his chin, as if he were trying to pop his jaw back into place. He dropped the hand, looked across the table at Teddy. “Don’t you understand, Andrew? If you fail, I fail. If I fail, it’s all over.”
“Gee,” Teddy said, “that’s too bad.”
Outside, some gulls cawed. Teddy could smell the salt and the sun and the damp, briny sand.
Cawley said, “Let’s try this another way—do you think it’s a coincidence that Rachel Solando, a figment of your own imagination by the way, would have the same letters in her name as your dead wife and the same history of killing her children?”
Teddy stood and the shakes rocked his arms from the shoulders on down. “My wife did not kill her kids. We never had kids.”
“You never had kids?” Cawley walked over to the wall.
“We never had kids, you stupid fuck.”
“Oh, okay.” Cawley pulled down another sheet.
On the wall behind it—a crime-scene diagram, photographs of a lake, photographs of three dead children. And then the names, written in the same tall block letters:
EDWARD LAEDDIS
DANIEL LAEDDIS
RACHEL LAEDDIS
Teddy dropped his eyes and stared at his hands; they jumped as if they were no longer attached to him. If he could step on them, he would.
“Your children, Andrew. Are you going to stand there and deny they ever lived? Are you?”
Teddy pointed across the room at him with his jerking hand. “Those are Rachel Solando’s children. That is the crime-scene diagram of Rachel Solando’s lake house.”
“That’s your house. You went there because the doctors suggested it for your wife. You remember? After she accidentally set your previous apartment on fire? Get her out of the city, they said, give her a more bucolic setting. Maybe she’d get better.”
“She wasn’t ill.”
“She was insane, Andrew.”
“Stop fucking calling me that. She was not insane.”
“Your wife was clinically depressed. She was diagnosed as manic-depressive.
She was—”
“She was not,” Teddy said.
“She was suicidal. She hurt the children. You refused to see it. You thought she was weak. You told yourself sanity was a choice, and all she had to do was remember her responsibilities. To you. To the children. You drank, and your drinking got worse. You floated into your own shell. You stayed away from home. You ignored all the signs. You ignored what the teachers told you, the parish priest, her own family.”
“My wife was not insane!”
“And why? Because you were embarrassed.”
“My wife was not—”
“The only reason she ever saw a psychiatrist was because she tried to commit suicide and ended up in the hospital. Even you couldn’t control that. And they told you she was a danger to herself. They told you—”
“We never saw any psychiatrists!”
“—she was a danger to the children. You were warned time and time again.”
“We never had children. We talked about it, but she couldn’t get pregnant.”
Christ! His head felt like someone was beating glass into it with a rolling pin.
“Come over here,” Cawley said. “Really. Come up close and look at the names on these crime-scene photos. You’ll be interested to know—”
“You can fake those. You can make up your own.”
“You dream. You dream all the time. You can’t stop dreaming, Andrew. You’ve told me about them. Have you had any lately with the two boys and the little girl? Huh? Has the little girl taken you to your headstone? You’re ’a bad sailor,’ Andrew. You know what that means? It means you’re a bad father. You didn’t navigate for them, Andrew. You didn’t save them. You want to talk about the logs? Huh? Come over here and look at them. Tell me they’re not the children from your dreams.”
“Bullshit.”
“Then look. Come here and look.”
“You drug me, you kill my partner, you say he never existed. You’re going to lock me up here because I know what you’re doing. I know about the experiments. I know what you’re giving schizophrenics, your liberal use of lobotomies, your utter disregard for the Nuremberg Code. I am fucking onto you, Doctor.”
“You are?” Cawley leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “Please, educate me. You’ve had the run of the place the last four days. You’ve gained access to every corner of this facility. Where are the Nazi doctors? Where are the satanic ORs?”
He walked back over to the table and consulted his notes for a moment:
“Do you still believe we’re brainwashing patients, Andrew? Implementing some decades-long experiment to create—what did you call them once? Oh, here it is—ghost soldiers? Assassins?” He chuckled. “I mean, I have to give you credit, Andrew—even in these days of rampant paranoia, your fantasies take the cake.”
Teddy pointed a quaking finger at him. “You are an experimental hospital with radical approaches—”
“Yes, we are.”
“You take only the most violent patients.”
“Correct again. With a caveat—the most violent and the most delusional.”
“And you…”
“We what?”
“You experiment.”
“Yes!” Cawley clapped his hands and took a quick bow. “Guilty as charged.”
“Surgically.”
Cawley held up a finger. “Ah, no. Sorry. We do not experiment with surgery. It is used as a last resort, and that last resort is employed always over my most vocal protests. I’m one man, however, and even I can’t change decades of accepted practices overnight.”
“You’re lying.”
Cawley sighed. “Show me one piece of evidence that your theory can hold water. Just one.”
Teddy said nothing.
“And to all the evidence that I’ve presented, you have refused to respond.”
“That’s because it’s not evidence at all. It’s fabricated.”
Cawley pressed his hands together and raised them to his lips as if in prayer.
“Let me off this island,” Teddy said. “As a federally appointed officer of the law, I demand that you let me leave.”
Cawley closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, they were clearer and harder. “Okay, okay. You got me, Marshal. Here, I’ll make it easy on you.”
He pulled a soft leather briefcase off the floor and undid the buckles and opened it and tossed Teddy’s gun onto the table.
“That’s your gun, right?”
Teddy stared at it.
“Those are your initials engraved on the handle, correct?”
Teddy peered at it, sweat in his eyes.
“Yes or no, Marshal? Is that your gun?”
He could see the dent in the barrel from the day when Phillip Stacks took a shot at him and hit the gun instead and Stacks ended up shot from the ricochet of his own bullet. He could see the initials E.D. engraved on the handle, a gift from the field office after he ended up shooting it out with Breck in Maine. And there, on the underside of the trigger guard, the metal was scraped and worn away a bit from when he’d dropped the gun during a foot chase in St. Louis in the winter of ’49.
“Is that your gun?”
“Yeah.”
“Pick it up, Marshal. Make sure it’s loaded.”
Teddy looked at the gun, looked back at Cawley.
“Go ahead, Marshal. Pick it up.”
Teddy lifted the gun off the table and it shook in his hand.
“Is it loaded?” Cawley asked.
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“I can feel the weight.”
Cawley nodded. “Then blast away. Because that’s the only way you’re ever getting off this island.”
Teddy tried to steady his arm with his other hand, but that was shaking too. He took several breaths, exhaling them slowly, sighting down the barrel through the sweat in his eyes and the tremors in his body, and he could see Cawley at the other end of the gun sights, two feet away at most, but he was listing up and down and side to side as if they both stood on a boat in the high seas.
“You have five seconds, Marshal.”
Cawley lifted the phone out of the radio pack and cranked the handle, and Teddy watched him place the phone to his mouth.
“Three seconds now. Pull that trigger or you spend your dying days on this island.”
Teddy could feel the weight of the gun. Even with the shakes, he had a chance if he took it now. Killed Cawley, killed whoever was waiting outside.
Cawley said, “Warden, you can send him up.”
And Teddy’s vision cleared and his shakes reduced themselves to small vibrations and he looked down the barrel as Cawley put the phone back in the pack.
Cawley got a curious look on his face, as if only now did it occur to him that Teddy might have the faculties left to pull this off.
And Cawley held up a hand.
He said, “Okay, okay.”
And Teddy shot him dead center in the chest.
Then he raised his hands a half an inch and shot Cawley in the face.
With water.
Cawley frowned. Then he blinked several times. He took a handkerchief from his pocket.
The door opened behind Teddy, and he spun in his chair and took aim as a man entered the room.
“Don’t shoot,” Chuck said. “I forgot to wear my raincoat.”
23
CAWLEY WIPED HIS face with the handkerchief and took his seat again and Chuck came around the table to Cawley’s side and Teddy turned the gun in his palm and stared down at it.
He looked across the table as Chuck took his seat, and Teddy noticed he was wearing a lab coat.
“I thought you were dead,” Teddy said.
“Nope,” Chuck said.
It was suddenly hard to get words out. He felt the inclination to stutter, just as the woman doctor had predicted. “I…I…was…I was willing to die to bring you out of here. I…” He dropped the gun to the table, and he felt all strength drain from his b
ody. He fell into his chair, unable to go on.
“I’m genuinely sorry about that,” Chuck said. “Dr. Cawley and I agonized over that for weeks before we put this into play. I never wanted to leave you feeling betrayed or cause you undue anguish. You have to believe me. But we were certain we had no alternative.”
“There’s a bit of a clock ticking on this one,” Cawley said. “This was our last-ditch effort to bring you back, Andrew. A radical idea, even for this place, but I’d hoped it would work.”
Teddy wiped at the sweat in his eyes, ended up smearing it there. He looked through the blur at Chuck.
“Who are you?” he said.
Chuck stretched a hand across the table. “Dr. Lester Sheehan,” he said.
Teddy left the hand hanging in the air and Sheehan eventually withdrew it.
“So,” Teddy said and sucked wet air through his nostrils, “you let me go on about how we needed to find Sheehan when you…you were Sheehan.”
Sheehan nodded.
“Called me ’boss.’ Told me jokes. Kept me entertained. Kept a watch on me at all times, is that right, Lester?”
He looked across the table at him, and Sheehan tried to hold his eyes, but he failed and dropped his gaze to his tie and flapped it against his chest. “I had to keep an eye on you, make sure you were safe.”
“Safe,” Teddy said. “So that made everything okay. Moral.”
Sheehan dropped his tie. “We’ve known each other for two years, Andrew.”
“That’s not my name.”
“Two years. I’ve been your primary psychiatrist. Two years. Look at me. Don’t you even recognize me?”
Teddy used the cuff of his suit jacket to wipe the sweat from his eyes, and this time they cleared, and he looked across the table at Chuck. Good ol’ Chuck with his awkwardness around firearms and those hands that didn’t fit his job description because they weren’t the hands of a cop. They were the hands of a doctor.
“You were my friend,” Teddy said. “I trusted you. I told you about my wife. I talked to you about my father. I climbed down a fucking cliff looking for you. Were you watching me then? Keeping me safe then? You were my friend, Chuck. Oh, I’m sorry. Lester.”
Lester lit a cigarette and Teddy was pleased to see that his hands shook too. Not much. Not nearly as bad as Teddy’s and the tremors stopped as soon as he got the cigarette lit and tossed the match in an ashtray. But still…
Shutter Island Page 25
