Shutter Island

ordinary?”

“She didn’t say a word. She’s a mouse. She just sat there. She killed her kids, you know. Three of them. You believe that? What kind of person does that sort of thing? Sick fucking people in this world, sirs, if you don’t mind me mentioning.”

“People have problems,” Chuck said. “Some are deeper than others. Sick, like you said. They need help.”

“They need gas,” Peter said.

“Excuse me?”

“Gas,” Peter said to Teddy. “Gas the retards. Gas the killers. Killed her own kids? Gas the bitch.”

They sat silent, Peter glowing as if he’d illuminated the world for them. After a while, he patted the table and stood.

“Good to meet you, gents. I’ll be getting back.”

Teddy used a pencil to doodle on the file cover, and Peter stopped, looked back at him.

“Peter,” Teddy said.

“Yeah?”

“I—”

“Could you stop that?”

Teddy scratched his initials into the cardboard in long, slow strokes. “I was wondering if—”

“Could you please, please…?”

Teddy looked up, still pulling the pencil down the file cover. “Which?”

“—stop that?”

“What?” Teddy looked at him, looked down at the file. He lifted the pencil, cocked an eyebrow.

“Yes. Please. That.”

Teddy dropped the pencil on the cover. “Better?”

“Thank you.”

“Do you know a patient, Peter, by the name of Andrew Laeddis?”

“No.”

“No? No one here by that name?”

Peter shrugged. “Not in Ward A. He could be in C. We don’t mingle with them. They’re fucking nuts.”

“Well, thank you, Peter,” Teddy said, and picked up the pencil and went back to doodling.

AFTER PETER BREENE, they interviewed Leonora Grant. Leonora was convinced that she was Mary Pickford and Chuck was Douglas Fairbanks and Teddy was Charlie Chaplin. She thought that the cafeteria was an office on Sunset Boulevard and they were here to discuss a public stock offering in United Artists. She kept caressing the back of Chuck’s hand and asking who was going to record the minutes.

In the end, the orderlies had to pull her hand from Chuck’s wrist while Leonora cried, “Adieu, mon cheri. Adieu.”

Halfway across the cafeteria, she broke free of the orderlies, came charging back across the floor toward them, and grabbed Chuck’s hand.

She said, “Don’t forget to feed the cat.”

Chuck looked in her eyes and said, “Noted.”

After that, they met Arthur Toomey, who kept insisting they call him Joe. Joe had slept through group therapy that night. Joe, it turned out, was a narcoleptic. He fell asleep twice on them, the second time for the day, more or less.

Teddy was feeling the place in the back of his skull by that point. It was making his hair itch, and while he felt sympathy for all the patients except for Breene, he couldn’t help wonder how anyone could stand working here.

Trey came ambling back in with a small woman with blond hair and a face shaped like a pendant. Her eyes pulsed with clarity. And not the clarity of the insane, but the everyday clarity of an intelligent woman in a less-than- intelligent world. She smiled and gave them each a small, shy wave as she sat.

Teddy checked Cawley’s notes—Bridget Kearns.

“I’ll never get out of here,” she said after they’d been sitting there for a few minutes. She smoked her cigarettes only halfway before stubbing them out, and she had a soft, confident voice, and a little over a decade ago she’d killed her husband with an ax.

“I’m not sure I should,” she said.

“Why’s that?” Chuck said. “I mean, excuse me for saying it, Miss Kearns—”

“Mrs.”

“Mrs. Kearns. Excuse me, but you seem, well, normal to me.”

She leaned back in her chair, as at ease as anyone they’d met in this place, and gave a soft chuckle. “I suppose. I wasn’t when I first came here. Oh my god. I’m glad they didn’t take pictures. I’ve been diagnosed as a manic-depressive, and I have no reason to doubt that. I do have my dark days. I suppose everyone does. The difference is that most people don’t kill their husbands with an ax. I’ve been told I have deep, unresolved conflicts with my father, and I’ll agree to that too. I doubt I’d go out and kill someone again, but you can never tell.” She pointed the tip of her cigarette in their direction. “I think if a man beats you and fucks half the women he sees and no one will help you, axing him isn’t the least understandable thing you can do.”

She met Teddy’s eyes and something in her pupils—a schoolgirl’s shy giddiness, perhaps—made him laugh.

“What?” she said, laughing with him.

“Maybe you shouldn’t get out,” he said.

“You say that because you’re a man.”

“You’re damn right.”

“Well then, I don’t blame you.”

It was a relief to laugh after Peter Breene, and Teddy wondered if he was actually flirting a bit too. With a mental patient. An ax murderer. This is what it’s come to, Dolores. But he didn’t feel altogether bad about it, as if after these two long dark years of mourning he was maybe entitled to a little harmless repartee.

“What would I do if I did get out?” Bridget said. “I don’t know what’s out in that world anymore. Bombs, I hear. Bombs that can turn whole cities to ash. And televisions. That’s what they call them, isn’t it? There’s a rumor each ward will get one, and we’ll be able to see plays on this box. I don’t know that I’d like that. Voices coming from a box. Faces from a box. I hear enough voices and see enough faces every day. I don’t need more noise.”

“Can you tell us about Rachel Solando?” Chuck asked.

She paused. It was more like a hitch, actually, and Teddy watched her eyes turn up slightly, as if she were searching her brain for the right file, and Teddy scribbled “lies” in his notepad, curling his wrist over the word as soon as he was done.

Her words came more carefully and smelled of rote.

“Rachel is nice enough. She keeps to herself. She talks about rain a lot, but mostly she doesn’t talk at all. She believed her kids were alive. She believed she was still living in the Berkshires and that we were all neighbors and postmen, deliverymen, milkmen. She was hard to get to know.”

She spoke with her head down, and when she finished, she couldn’t meet Teddy’s eyes. Her glance bounced off his face, and she studied the tabletop and lit another cigarette.

Teddy thought about what she’d just said, realized the description of Rachel’s delusions was almost word for word what Cawley had said to them yesterday.

“How long was she here?”

“Huh?”

“Rachel. How long was she in Ward B with you?”

“Three years? About that, I think. I lose track of time. It’s easy to do that in this place.”

“And where was she before that?” Teddy asked.

“Ward C, I heard. She transferred over, I believe.”

“But you’re not sure.”