head. "Andrew. Andrew Laeddis."
"Teddy."
Cawley watched him arrange the letters on the page.
"What's it say?"
Teddy laughed.
"Tell us."
Teddy shook his head.
"No, please, share it with us."
Teddy said, "You did this. You left those codes. You created the name Rachel Solando using my wife's name. This is all you." Cawley spoke slowly, precisely. "What does the last code say?"
Teddy turned the notebook so they could see it:
you are him
"Satisfied?" Teddy said.
Cawley stood. He looked exhausted. Stretched to the end of his rope. He spoke with an air of desolation Teddy hadn't heard before. "We hoped. We hoped we could save you. We stuck our reputations on the line. And now word will get out that we allowed a patient to play act his grandest delusion and all we got for it were a few injured guards and a burned car. I have no problem with the professional humiliation." He stared out the small window square. "Maybe I've outgrown this place. Or it's outgrown me. But someday, Marshal, and it's not far off, we'll medicate human experience right out of the human experience. Do you understand that?"
Teddy gave him nothing. "Not really."
"I expect you wouldn't." Cawley nodded and folded his arms across his chest, and the room was silent for a few moments except for the breeze and the ocean's crash. "You're a decorated soldier with extreme hand-to hand combat training. Since 'you've been here, you've injured eight guards, not including the two today, four patients, and five orderlies. Dr. Sheehan and I have fought for you as long and as hard as we've been able. But most of the clinical staff and the entire penal staff is demanding we show results or else we incapacitate you."
He came off the window ledge and leaned across the table and fixed Teddy in his sad, dark gaze. "This was our last gasp, Andrew. If you don't accept who you are and what you did, if you don't make an effort to swim toward sanity, we can't save you."
He held out his hand to Teddy.
"Take it," he said, and his voice was hoarse. "Please. Andrexv?
Help me save you."
Teddy shook the hand. He shook it firmly. He gave Cawley his most forthright grip, his most forthright gaze. He smiled. He said, "Stop calling me Andrew."
THEY LED HIM to Ward C in shackles.Once inside, they took him down into the basement where the men yelled to him from their cells. They promised to hurt him. They promised to rape him. One swore he'd truss him up like a sow and eat his toes one by one.
While he remained manacled, a guard stood on either side of him while a nurse entered the cell and injected something into his arm. She had strawberry hair and smelled of soap and Teddy caught a whiff of her breath as she leaned in to deliver the shot, and he knew her. "You pretended to be Rachel," he said.
She said, "Hold him."
The guards gripped his shoulders, straightened his arms.
"It was you. With dye in your hair. You're Rachel."
She said, "Don't flinch," and sank the needle into his arm. He caught her eye. "You're an excellent actress. I mean, you really had me, all that stuff about your dear, dead Jim. Very convincing, Rachel."
She dropped her eyes from his.
"I'm Emily," she said and pulled the needle out. "You sleep now."
"Please," Teddy said.
She paused at the cell door and looked back at him.
"It was you," he said.
The nod didn't come from her chin. It came from her eyes, a tiny, downward flick of them, and then she gave him a smile so bereft he wanted to kiss her hair.
"Good night," she said.
He never felt the guards remove the manacles, never heard them leave. The sounds from the other cells died and the air closest to his face turned amber and he felt as if he were lying on his back in the center of a wet cloud and his feet and hands had turned to sponge. And he dreamed.
And in his dreams he and Dolores lived in a house by a lake.
Because they'd had to leabe the city.
Because the city was mean and violent.
Because she'd lit their apartment on Buttonwood on fire.
Trying to rid it of ghosts.
He dreamed of their love as steel, impervious to fire or rain or the beating of hammers.
He dreamed that Dolores was insane.
And his Rachel said to him one night when he was drunk, but not so drunk that he hadn't managed to