14
AT THE TOP of the steep hill between Norway Valley and Arden, the zigzag, hairpin turns of Highway 93, now narrowed to two lanes, straighten out for the long, ski-slope descent into the town, and on the eastern side of the highway, the hilltop widens into a grassy plateau. Two weatherbeaten red picnic tables wait for those who choose to stop for a few minutes and appreciate the spectacular view. A patchwork of quilted farms stretches out over fifteen miles of gentle landscape, not quite flat, threaded with streams and country roads. A solid row of bumpy, blue-green hills form the horizon. In the immense sky, sun-washed white clouds hang like fresh laundry.
Fred Marshall steers his Ford Explorer onto the gravel shoulder, comes to a halt, and says, "Let me show you something. "
When he climbed into the Explorer at his farmhouse, Jack was carrying a slightly worn black leather briefcase, and the case is now lying flat across his knees. Jack's father's initials, P. S. S. , for Philip Stevenson Sawyer, are stamped in gold beside the handle at the top of the case. Fred has glanced curiously at the briefcase a couple of times, but has not asked about it, and Jack has volunteered nothing. There will be time for show-and-tell, Jack thinks, after he talks to Judy Marshall. Fred gets out of the car, and Jack slides his father's old briefcase behind his legs and props it against the seat before he follows the other man across the pliant grass. When they reach the first of the picnic tables, Fred gestures toward the landscape. "We don't have a lot of what you could call tourist attractions around here, but this is pretty good, isn't it?"
"It's very beautiful," Jack says. "But I think everything here is beautiful. "
"Judy really likes this view. Whenever we go over to Arden on a decent day, she has to stop here and get out of the car, relax and look around for a while. You know, sort of store up on the important things before getting back into the grind. Me, sometimes I get impatient and think, Come on, you've seen that view a thousand times, I have to get back to work, but I'm a guy, right? So every time we turn in here and sit down for a few minutes, I realize my wife knows more than I do and I should just listen to what she says. "
Jack smiles and sits down at the bench, waiting for the rest of it. Since picking him up, Fred Marshall has spoken only two or three sentences of gratitude, but it is clear that he has chosen this place to get something off his chest.
"I went over to the hospital this morning, and she ¡ª well, she's different. To look at her, to talk to her, you'd have to say she's in much better shape than yesterday. Even though she's still worried sick about Tyler, it's different. Do you think that could be due to the medication? I don't even know what they're giving her. "
"Can you have a normal conversation with her?"
"From time to time, yeah. For instance, this morning she was telling me about a story in yesterday's paper on a little girl from La Riviere who nearly took third place in the statewide spelling bee, except she couldn't spell this crazy word nobody ever heard of. Popoplax, or something like that. "
"Opopanax," Jack says. He sounds like he has a fishbone caught in his throat.
"You saw that story, too? That's interesting, you both picking up on that word. Kind of gave her a kick. She asked the nurses to find out what it meant, and one of them looked it up in a couple of dictionaries. Couldn't find it. "
Jack had found the word in his Concise Oxford Dictionary; its literal meaning was unimportant. "That's probably the definition of opopanax," Jack says. " '1. A word not to be found in the dictionary. 2. A fearful mystery. ' "
"Hah!" Fred Marshall has been moving nervously around the lookout area, and now he stations himself beside Jack, whose upward glance finds the other man surveying the long panorama. "Maybe that is what it means. " Fred's eyes remain fixed on the landscape. He is still not quite ready, but he is making progress. "It was great to see her interested in something like that, a tiny little item in the Herald . . . "
He wipes tears from his eyes and takes a step toward the horizon. When he turns around, he looks directly at Jack. "Uh, before you meet Judy, I want to tell you a few things about her. Trouble is, I don't know how this is going to sound to you. Even to me, it sounds . . . I don't know. "
"Give it a try," Jack says.
Fred says, "Okay," knits his fingers together, and bows his head. Then he looks up again, and his eyes are as vulnerable as a baby's. "Ahhh . . . I don't know how to put this. Okay, I'll just say it. With part of my brain, I think Judy knows something. Anyhow, I want to think that. On the other hand, I don't want to fool myself into believing that just because she seems to be better, she can't be crazy anymore. But I do want to believe that. Boy oh boy, do I ever. "
"Believe that she knows something. " The eerie feeling aroused by opopanax diminishes before this validation of his theory.
"Something that isn't even real clear to her," Fred says. "But do you remember? She knew Ty was gone even before I told her. "
He gives Jack an anguished look and steps away. He knocks his fists together and stares at the ground. Another internal barrier topples before his need to explain his dilemma.
"Okay, look. This is what you have to understand about Judy. She's a special person. All right, a lot of guys would say their wives are special, but Judy's special in a special way. First of all, she's sort of amazingly beautiful, but that's not even what I'm talking about. And she's tremendously brave, but that's not it, either. It's like she's connected to something the rest of us can't even begin to understand. But can that be real? How crazy is that? Maybe when you're going crazy, at first you put up a big fight and get hysterical, and then you're too crazy to fight anymore and you get all calm and accepting. I have to talk to her doctor, because this is tearing me apart. "
"What kinds of things does she say? Does she explain why she's so much calmer?"
Fred Marshall's eyes burn into Jack's. "Well, for one thing, Judy seems to think that Ty is still alive, and that you're the only person who can find him. "
"All right," Jack says, unwilling to say more until after he can speak to Judy. "Tell me, does Judy ever mention someone she used to know ¡ª or a cousin of hers, or an old boyfriend ¡ª she thinks might have taken him?" His theory seems less convincing than it had in Henry Leyden's ultrarational, thoroughly bizarre kitchen; Fred Marshall's response weakens it further.
"Not unless he's named the Crimson King, or Gorg, or Abbalah. All I can tell you is, Judy thinks she sees something, and even though it makes no sense, I sure as hell hope it's there. "
A sudden vision of the world where he found a boy's Brewers cap pierces Jack Sawyer like a steel-tipped lance. "And that's where Tyler is. "
"If part of me didn't think that might just possibly be true, I'd go out of my mind right here and now," Fred says. "Unless I'm already out of my gourd. "
"Let's go talk to your wife," Jack says.
From the outside, French County Lutheran Hospital resembles a nineteenth-century madhouse in the north of England: dirty red-brick walls with blackened buttresses and lancet arches, a peaked roof with finial-capped pinnacles, swollen turrets, miserly windows, and all of the long facade stippled black with ancient filth. Set within a walled parkland dense with oaks on Arden's western boundary, the enormous building, Gothic without the grandeur, looks punitive, devoid of mercy. Jack half-expects to hear the shrieking organ music from a Vincent Price movie.
They pass through a narrow, peaked wooden door and enter a reassuringly familiar lobby. A bored, uniformed man at a central desk directs visitors to the elevators; stuffed animals and sprays of flowers fill the gift shop's window; bathrobed patients tethered to I. V. poles occupy randomly placed tables with their families, and other patients perch on the chairs lined against the side walls; two white-coated doctors confer in a corner. Far overhead, two dusty, ornate chandeliers distribute a soft ocher light that momentarily seems to gild the luxurious heads of the lilies arrayed in tall vases beside the entrance of the
gift shop.
"Wow, it sure looks better on the inside," Jack says.
"Most of it does," Fred says.
They approach the man behind the desk, and Fred says, "Ward D. " With a mild flicker of interest, the man gives them two rectangular cards stamped VISITOR and waves them through. The elevator clanks down and admits them to a wood-paneled enclosure the size of a broom closet. Fred Marshall pushes the button marked 5, and the elevator shudders upward. The same soft, golden light pervades the comically tiny interior. Ten years ago, an elevator remarkably similar to this, though situated in a grand Paris hotel, had held Jack and a UCLA art-history graduate student named Iliana Tedesco captive for two and a half hours, in the course of which Ms. Tedesco announced that their relationship had reached its final destination, thank you, despite her gratitude for what had been at least until that moment a rewarding journey together. After thinking it over, Jack decides not to trouble Fred Marshall with this information.
Better behaved than its French cousin, the elevator trembles to a stop and with only a slight display of resistance slides open its door and releases Jack Sawyer and Fred Marshall to the fifth floor, where the beautiful light seems a touch darker than in both the elevator and the lobby. "Unfortunately, it's way over on the other side," Fred tells Jack. An apparently endless corridor yawns like an exercise in perspective off to their left, and Fred points the way with his finger.
They go through two big sets of double doors, past the corridor to Ward B, past two vast rooms lined with curtained cubicles, turn left again at the closed entrance to Gerontology, down a long, long hallway lined with bulletin boards, past the opening to Ward C, then take an abrupt right at the men's and women's bathrooms, pass Ambulatory Ophthalmology and Records Annex, and at last come to a corridor marked WARD D. As they proceed, the light seems progressively to darken, the walls to contract, the windows to shrink. Shadows lurk in the corridor to Ward D, and a small pool of water glimmers on the floor.
"We're in the oldest part of the building now," Fred says.
"You must want to get Judy out of here as soon as possible. "
"Well, sure, soon as Pat Skarda thinks she's ready. But you'll be surprised; Judy kind of likes it in here. I think it's helping. What she told me was, she feels completely safe, and the ones that can talk, some of them are extremely interesting. It's like being on a cruise, she says. "
Jack laughs in surprise and disbelief, and Fred Marshall touches his shoulder and says, "Does that mean she's a lot better or a lot worse?"
At the end of the corridor, they emerge directly into a good-sized room that seems to have been preserved unaltered for a hundred years. Dark brown wainscoting rises four feet from the dark brown wooden floor. Far up in the gray wall to their right, two tall, narrow windows framed like paintings admit filtered gray light. A man seated behind a polished wooden counter pushes a button that unlocks a double-sized metal door with a WARD D sign and a small window of reinforced glass. "You can go in, Mr. Marshall, but who is he?"
"His name is Jack Sawyer. He's here with me. "
"Is he either a relative or a medical professional?"
"No, but my wife wants to see him. "
"Wait here a moment. " The attendant disappears through the metal door and locks it behind him with a prisonlike clang. A minute later, the attendant reappears with a nurse whose heavy, lined face, big arms and hands, and thick legs make her look like a man in drag. She introduces herself as Jane Bond, the head nurse of Ward D, a combination of words and circumstances that irresistibly suggest at least a couple of nicknames. The nurse subjects Fred and Jack, then only Jack, to a barrage of questions before she vanishes back behind the great door.
"Ward Bond," Jack says, unable not to.
"We call her Warden Bond," says the attendant. "She's tough, but on the other hand, she's unfair. " He coughs and stares up at the high windows. "We got this orderly, calls her Double-oh Zero. "
A few minutes later, Head Nurse Warden Bond, Agent OO Zero, swings open the metal door and says, "You may enter now, but pay attention to what I say. "
At first, the ward resembles a huge airport hangar divided into a section with a row of padded benches, a section with round tables and plastic chairs, and a third section where two long tables are stacked with drawing paper, boxes of crayons, and watercolor sets. In the vast space, these furnishings look like dollhouse furniture. Here and there on the cement floor, painted a smooth, anonymous shade of gray, lie padded rectangular mats; twenty feet above the floor, small, barred windows punctuate the far wall, of red brick long ago given a couple of coats of white paint. In a glass enclosure to the left of the door, a nurse behind a desk looks up from a book. Far down to the right, well past the tables with art supplies, three locked metal doors open into worlds of their own. The sense of being in a hangar gradually yields to a sense of a benign but inflexible imprisonment.
A low hum of voices comes from the twenty to thirty men and women scattered throughout the enormous room. Only a very few of these men and women are talking to visible companions. They pace in circles, stand frozen in place, lie curled like infants on the mats; they count on their fingers and scribble in notebooks; they twitch, yawn, weep, stare into space and into themselves. Some of them wear green hospital robes, others civilian clothes of all kinds: T-shirts and shorts, sweat suits, running outfits, ordinary shirts and slacks, jerseys and pants. No one wears a belt, and none of the shoes have laces. Two muscular men with close-cropped hair and in brilliant white T-shirts sit at one of the round tables with the air of patient watchdogs. Jack tries to locate Judy Marshall, but he cannot pick her out.
"I asked for your attention, Mr. Sawyer. "
"Sorry," Jack says. "I wasn't expecting it to be so big. "
"We'd better be big, Mr. Sawyer. We serve an expanding population. " She waits for an acknowledgment of her significance, and Jack nods. "Very well. I'm going to give you some basic ground rules. If you listen to what I say, your visit here will be as pleasant as possible for all of us. Don't stare at the patients, and don't be alarmed by what they say. Don't act as though you find anything they do or say unusual or distressing. Just be polite, and eventually they will leave you alone. If they ask you for things, do as you choose, within reason. But please refrain from giving them money, any sharp objects, or edibles not previously cleared by one of the physicians ¡ª some medications interact adversely with certain kinds of food. At some point, an elderly woman named Es-telle Packard will probably come up to you and ask if you are her father. Answer however you like, but if you say no, she will go away disappointed, and if you say yes, you'll make her day. Do you have any questions, Mr. Sawyer?"
"Where is Judy Marshall?"
"She's on this side, with her back to us on the farthest bench. Can you see her, Mr. Marshall?"
"I saw her right away," Fred says. "Have there been any changes since this morning?"
"Not as far as I know. Her admitting physician, Dr. Spiegleman, will be here in about half an hour, and he might have more information for you. Would you like me to take you and Mr. Sawyer to your wife, or would you prefer going by yourself ?"
"We'll be fine," Fred Marshall says. "How long can we stay?"
"I'm giving you fifteen minutes, twenty max. Judy is still in the eval stage, and I want to keep her stress level at a minimum. She looks pretty peaceful now, but she's also deeply disconnected and, quite frankly, delusional. I wouldn't be surprised by another hysterical episode, and we don't want to prolong her evaluation period by introducing new medication at this point, do we? So please, Mr. Marshall, keep the conversation stress-free, light, and positive. "
"You think she's delusional?"
Nurse Bond smiles pityingly. "In all likelihood, Mr. Marshall, your wife has been delusional for years. Oh, she's managed to keep it hidden, but ideations like hers don't spring up overnight, no no. These things take years to construct, and all the time the person can appear to be a normally f
unctioning human being. Then something triggers the psychosis into full-blown expression. In this case, of course, it was your son's disappearance. By the way, I want to extend my sympathies to you at this time. What a terrible thing to have happened. "
"Yes, it was," says Fred Marshall. "But Judy started acting strange even before . . . "
"Same thing, I'm afraid. She needed to be comforted, and her delusions ¡ª her delusional world ¡ª came into plain view, because that world provided exactly the comfort she needed. You must have heard some of it this morning, Mr. Marshall. Did your wife mention anything about going to other worlds?"
"Going to other worlds?" Jack asks, startled.
"A fairly typical schizophrenic ideation," Nurse Bond says. "More than half the people on this ward have similar fantasies. "
"You think my wife is schizophrenic?"
Nurse Bond looks past Fred to take a comprehensive inventory of the patients in her domain. "I'm not a psychiatrist, Mr. Marshall, but I have had twenty long years of experience in dealing with the mentally ill. On the basis of that experience, I have to tell you, in my opinion your wife manifests the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. I wish I had better news for you. " She glances back at Fred Marshall. "Of course, Dr. Spiegleman will make the final diagnosis, and he will be able to answer all your questions, explain your treatment options, and so forth. "
The smile she gives Jack seems to congeal the moment it appears. "I always tell my new visitors it's tougher on the family than it is on the patient. Some of these people, they don't have a care in the world. Really, you almost have to envy them. "
"Sure," Jack says. "Who wouldn't?"
"Go on, then," she says, with a trace of peevishness. "Enjoy your visit. "
A number of heads turn as they walk slowly across the dusty wooden floor to the nearest row of benches; many pairs of eyes track their progress. Curiosity, indifference, confusion, suspicion, pleasure, and an impersonal anger show in the pallid faces. To Jack, it seems as though every patient on the ward is inching toward them.
A flabby middle-aged man in a bathrobe has begun to cut through the tables, looking as though he fears missing his bus to work. At the end of the nearest bench, a thin old woman with streaming white hair stands up and beseeches Jack with her eyes. Her clasped, upraised hands tremble violently. Jack forces himself not to meet her eyes. When he passes her, she half-croons, half-whispers, "My ducky-wucky was behind the door, but I didn't know it, and there he was, in all that water. "
"Um," Fred says. "Judy told me her baby son drowned in the bath. "
Through the side of his eye, Jack has been watching the fuzzy-haired man in the bathrobe rush toward them, openmouthed. When he and Fred reach the back of Judy Marshall's bench, the man raises one finger, as if signaling the bus to wait for him, and trots forward. Jack watches him approach; nuts to Warden Bond's advice. He's not going to let this lunatic climb all over him, no way. The upraised finger comes to within a foot of Jack's nose, and the man's murky eyes search his face. The eyes retreat; the mouth snaps shut. Instantly, the man whirls around and darts off, his robe flying, his finger still searching out its target.
What was that, Jack wonders. Wrong bus?
Judy Marshall has not moved. She must have heard the man rushing past her, his rapid breath when he stopped, then his flapping departure, but her back is still straight in the loose green robe, her head still faces forward at the same upright angle. She seems detached from everything around her. If her hair were washed, brushed, and combed, if she were conventionally dressed and had a suitcase beside her, she would look exactly like a woman on a bench at the train station, waiting for the hour of departure.
So even before Jack sees Judy Marshall's face, before she speaks a single word, there is about her this sense of leave-taking, of journeys begun and begun again ¡ª this suggestion of travel, this hint of a possible elsewhere.
"I'll tell her we're here," Fred whispers, and ducks around the end of the bench to kneel in front of his wife. The back of her head tilts forward over the erect spine as if to answer the tangled combination of heartbreak, love, and anxiety burning in her husband's handsome face. Dark blond hair mingled with gold lies flat against the girlish curve of Judy Marshall's skull. Behind her ear, dozens of varicolored strands clump together in a cobwebby knot.
"How you feeling, sweetie?" Fred softly asks his wife.
"I'm managing to enjoy myself," she says. "You know, honey, I should stay here for at least a little while. The head nurse is positive I'm absolutely crazy. Isn't that convenient?"
"Jack Sawyer's here. Would you like to see him?"
Judy reaches out and pats his upraised knee. "Tell Mr. Sawyer to come around in front, and you sit right here beside me, Fred. "
Jack is already coming forward, his eyes on Judy Marshall's once again upright head, which does not turn. Kneeling, Fred has taken her extended hand in both of his, as if he intends to kiss it. He looks like a lovelorn knight before a queen. When he presses her hand to his cheek, Jack sees the white gauze wrapped around the tips of her fingers. Judy's cheekbone comes into view, then the side of her gravely unsmiling mouth; then her entire profile is visible, as sharp as the crack of ice on the first day of spring. It is the regal, idealized profile on a cameo, or on a coin: the slight upward curve of the lips, the crisp, chiseled downstroke of the nose, the sweep of the jawline, every angle in perfect, tender, oddly familiar alignment with the whole.