Shutter Island(23)

She turns left into the living room and the back of her is charred, smoldering a bit. The bottle is no longer in her hand, and small ribbons of smoke unwind from her hair.

She stops at a window. “Oh, look. They’re so pretty like that. Floating.”

Teddy is beside her at the window, and she’s no longer burned, she’s soaking wet, and he can see himself, his hand as he places it on her shoulder, the fingers draping over her collarbone, and she turns her head and gives his fingers a quick kiss.

“What did you do?” he says, not even sure why he’s asking.

“Look at them out there.”

“Baby, why you all wet?” he says, but isn’t surprised when she doesn’t answer.

The view out the window is not what he expects. It’s not the view they had from the apartment on Buttonwood, but the view of another place they stayed once, a cabin. There’s a small pond out there with small logs floating in it, and Teddy notices how smooth they are, turning almost imperceptibly, the water shivering and gone white in places under the moon.

“That’s a nice gazebo,” she says. “So white. You can smell the fresh paint.”

“It is nice.”

“So,” Dolores says.

“Killed a lot of people in the war.”

“Why you drink.”

“Maybe.”

“She’s here.”

“Rachel?”

Dolores nods. “She never left. You almost saw it. You almost did.”

“The Law of Four.”

“It’s code.”

“Sure, but for what?”

“She’s here. You can’t leave.”

He wraps his arms around her from behind, buries his face in the side of her neck. “I’m not going to leave. I love you. I love you so much.”

Her belly springs a leak and the liquid flows through his hands.

“I’m bones in a box, Teddy.”

“No.”

“I am. You have to wake up.”

“You’re here.”

“I’m not. You have to face that. She’s here. You’re here. He’s here too. Count the beds. He’s here.”

“Who?”

“Laeddis.”

The name crawls through his flesh and climbs over his bones.

“No.”

“Yes.” She bends her head back, looks up at him. “You’ve known.”

“I haven’t.”

“Yes, you have. You can’t leave.”

“You’re tense all the time.” He kneads her shoulders, and she lets out a soft moan of surprise that gives him a hard-on.

“I’m not tense anymore,” she says. “I’m home.”

“This isn’t home,” he says.

“Sure it is. My home. She’s here. He’s here.”

“Laeddis.”

“Laeddis,” she says. Then: “I need to go.”

“No.” He’s crying. “No. Stay.”

“Oh, God.” She leans back into him. “Let me go. Let me go.”

“Please don’t go.” His tears spill down her body and mix with her pouring belly. “I need to hold you just a little longer. A little longer. Please.”

She lets loose a small bubble of a sound—half sigh, half howl, so torn and beautiful in its anguish—and she kisses his knuckles.

“Okay. Hold tight. Tight as you can.”

And he holds his wife. He holds her and holds her.



FIVE O’CLOCK IN the morning, the rain dropping on the world, and Teddy climbed off the top bunk and took his notebook from his coat. He sat at the table where they’d played poker and opened the notebook to the page where he’d transcribed Rachel Solando’s Law of 4.

Trey and Bibby continued to snore as loud as the rain. Chuck slept quietly, on his stomach, one fist tucked close to his ear, as if it were whispering secrets.

Teddy looked down at the page. It was simple once you knew how to read it. A child’s code, really. It was still code, though, and it took Teddy until six to break it.

He looked up, saw Chuck watching him from the lower bunk, Chuck’s chin propped up on his fist.

“We leaving, boss?”

Teddy shook his head.

“Ain’t nobody leaving in this shit,” Trey said, climbing out of his bunk, pulling up the window shade on a drowning landscape the color of pearl. “No how.”

The dream was harder to hold suddenly, the smell of her evaporating with the ascent of the shade, a dry cough from Bibby, Trey stretching with a loud, long yawn.

Teddy wondered, and not for the first time, not by a long shot, if this was the day that missing her would finally be too much for him. If he could turn back the years to that morning of the fire and replace her body with his own, he would. That was a given. That had always been a given. But as the years passed, he missed her more, not less, and his need for her became a cut that would not scar over, would not stop leaking.

I held her, he wanted to say to Chuck and Trey and Bibby. I held her as Bing Crosby crooned from the kitchen radio and I could smell her and the apartment on Buttonwood and the lake where we stayed that summer and her lips grazed my knuckles.

I held her. This world can’t give me that. This world can only give me reminders of what I don’t have, can never have, didn’t have for long enough.