“No,” she’d say. “That’s you.”
HE TALKED TO the priest and the priest made a visit or two. He talked to her sisters, and the older one, Delilah, came up from Virginia for a week once, and that seemed to help for a while.
They both avoided any suggestion of doctors. Doctors were for crazy people. Dolores wasn’t crazy. She was just tense.
Tense and sad.
TEDDY DREAMED SHE woke him up one night and told him to get his gun. The butcher was in their house, she said. Downstairs in the kitchen. Talking on their phone in Russian.
THAT NIGHT ON the sidewalk in front of the Cocoanut Grove, leaning into the taxi, his face an inch from hers…
He’d looked in and he thought:
It was simply that.
He didn’t feel the GI’s desperation to have sex with her before he shipped out because he knew, at that moment, that he’d be coming back from the war. He’d be coming back because the gods didn’t align the stars so you could meet the other half of your soul and then take her away from you.
He leaned into the car and told her this.
And he said, “Don’t worry. I’m coming back home.”
She touched his face with her finger. “Do that, won’t you?”
HE DREAMED HE came home to the house by the lake.
He’d been in Oklahoma. Spent two weeks chasing a guy from the South Boston docks to Tulsa with about ten stops in between, Teddy always half a step behind until he literally bumped into the guy as he was coming out of a gas station men’s room.
He walked back in the house at eleven in the morning, grateful that it was a weekday and the boys were in school, and he could feel the road in his bones and a crushing desire for his own pillow. He walked into the house and called out to Dolores as he poured himself a double scotch and she came in from the backyard and said, “There wasn’t enough.”
He turned with his drink in hand and said, “What’s that, hon?” and noticed that she was wet, as if she’d just stepped from the shower, except she wore an old dark dress with a faded floral print. She was barefoot and the water dripped off her hair and dripped off her dress.
“Baby,” he said, “why you all wet?”
She said, “There wasn’t enough,” and placed a bottle down on the counter. “I’m still awake.”
And she walked back outside.
Teddy saw her walk toward the gazebo, taking long, meandering steps, swaying. And he put his drink down on the counter and picked up the bottle and saw that it was the laudanum the doctor had prescribed after her hospital stay. If Teddy had to go on a trip, he portioned out the number of teaspoonfuls he figured she’d need while he was gone, and added them to a small bottle in her medicine cabinet. Then he took this bottle and locked it up in the cellar.
There were six months of doses in this bottle and she’d drunk it dry.
He saw her stumble up the gazebo stairs, fall to her knees, and get back up again.
How had she managed to get to the bottle? That wasn’t any ordinary lock on the cellar cabinet. A strong man with bolt cutters couldn’t get that lock off. She couldn’t have picked it, and Teddy had the only key.
He watched her sit in the porch swing in the center of the gazebo and he looked at the bottle. He remembered standing right here the night he left, adding the teaspoons to the medicine cabinet bottle, having a belt or two of rye for himself, looking out at the lake, putting the smaller bottle in the medicine cabinet, going upstairs to say good-bye to the kids, coming back down as the phone rang, and he’d taken the call from the field office, grabbed his coat and his overnight bag and kissed Dolores at the door and headed to his car…
…and left the bigger bottle behind on the kitchen counter.
He went out through the screen door and crossed the lawn to the gazebo and walked up the steps and she watched him come, soaking wet, one leg dangling as she pushed the swing back and forth in a lazy tilt.
He said, “Honey, when did you drink all this?”
“This morning.” She stuck her tongue out at him and then gave him a dreamy smile and looked up at the curved ceiling. “Not enough, though. Can’t sleep. Just want to sleep. Too tired.”
He saw the logs floating in the lake behind her and he knew they weren’t logs, but he looked away, looked back at his wife.
“Why are you tired?”
She shrugged, flopping her hands out by her side. “Tired of all this. So tired. Just want to go home.”
“You are home.”
She pointed at the ceiling. “Home-home,” she said.
Teddy looked out at those logs again, turning gently in the water.
“Where’s Rachel?”
“School.”
“She’s too young for school, honey.”
“Not my school,” his wife said and showed him her teeth.
And Teddy screamed. He screamed so loudly that Dolores fell out of the swing and he jumped over her and jumped over the railing at the back of the gazebo and ran screaming, screaming no, screaming God, screaming please, screaming not my babies, screaming Jesus, screaming oh oh oh.
And he plunged into the water. He stumbled and fell forward on his face and went under and the water covered him like oil and he swam forward and forward and came up in the center of them. The three logs. His babies.
Edward and Daniel were facedown, but Rachel was on her back, her eyes open and looking up at the sky, her mother’s desolation imprinted in her pupils, her gaze searching the clouds.
He carried them out one by one and lay them on the shore. He was careful with them. He held them firmly but gently. He could feel their bones. He caressed their cheeks. He caressed their shoulders and their rib cages and their legs and their feet. He kissed them many times.
He dropped to his knees and vomited until his chest burned and his stomach was stripped.
He went back and crossed their arms over their chests, and he noticed that Daniel and Rachel had rope burns on their wrists, and he knew that Edward had been the first to die. The other two had waited, hearing it, knowing she’d be coming back for them.
He kissed each of his children again on both cheeks and their foreheads and he closed Rachel’s eyes.
Had they kicked in her arms as she carried them to the water? Had they screamed? Or had they gone soft and moaning, resigned to it?
He saw his wife in her violet dress the night he’d met her and saw the look in her face that first moment of seeing her, that look he’d fallen in love with. He’d thought it had just been the dress, her insecurity about wearing such a fine dress in a fine club. But that wasn’t it. It was terror, barely suppressed, and it was always there. It was terror of the outside—of trains, of bombs, of rattling streetcars and jackhammers and dark avenues and Russians and submarines and taverns filled with angry men, oceans filled with sharks, Asians carrying red books in one hand and rifles in the other.
She was afraid of all that and so much more, but what terrified her most was inside of her, an insect of unnatural intelligence who’d been living in her brain her entire life, playing with it, clicking across it, wrenching loose its cables on a whim.
Teddy left his children and sat on the gazebo floor for a long time, watching her sway, and the worst of it all was how much he loved her. If he could sacrifice his own mind to restore hers, he would. Sell his limbs? Fine. She had been all the love he’d ever known for so long. She had been what carried him through the war, through this
