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
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?”
