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Lester looked over the papers. He put the paper clipped packet down on his desk, but didn’t look away. Fingers drummed the mahogany.
“You don’t think he belongs here.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t think he belongs in Blue Zone.”
“I didn’t say that either.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Lester looked up at Cawley, frowning, but heart not really in it.
Truth was, Lester wasn’t sure. The papers in front of him were, candidly, tragic. This Andrew Laeddis was one sad case. He heard all his professors and mentors in his ear, telling him he was getting emotional again. Ruined his objectivity.
Three dead kids. Dead wife. The dark spiral afterwards.
The clinical side of him chewed slowly on the particulars of the case.
“He’s not violent. Well. Not hostile anyway.”
“He killed a nurse, Sheehan.”
“Yes, but the papers lead me to believe that’s hugely to do with their failings to follow even basic protocol.”
“I agree with you he doesn’t present as hostile, but the fact is his background makes him a greater risk than most hospitals can reasonably handle. And we have the vacancies.”
“The vacancies argument doesn’t sway me.”
“The best argument, then, is that Laeddis needs us.”
That was the best argument. He carded his fingers together and stared back down at the file, still unsure.
“He’s coming to Ashecliffe. Naehring."
That got Sheehan looking back up.
“Then what’s this charade?”
“It’s not official, but… well. Naehring.”
Lester sighed and pushed the file away, disgusted with the politics of it all.
“Look at that case and tell me you don’t want it, though.”
“I want it.”
------------------------------
Sheehan made a concerted effort not to frown. The grainy photos were a far cry from the in-person picture.
Laeddis was something incongruous.
The kind of guy who’s young at first glance. Looked like late twenties. Papers said thirty. But to hear the man speak, and how he held himself, you’d think him much older.
Young to be a US marshall, that was for sure. But this man was highly intelligent, a heavily decorated war hero. Married with three kids. Easy to see why, with his well-proportioned features and fierce competence. The kind of man who knew you only had one life, and was damned if he was going to sit around and waste it. Sheehan knew something of that. One didn’t get to his kind of position by wandering, but by climbing.
Shark would be an uncharitable comparison. The warden had eyes like a shark. The once-marshall had eyes like a leopard. Calculating and measuring. Still a hunter, but patient. Observing. Collecting data.
It made Sheehan uncharacteristically nervous. And it clicked that yes, Laeddis was exactly where he was supposed to be.
“Do you understand why you’ve been brought here?”
They were past introductions. The Teddy/Andrew back and forth was… illuminating.
“If what you’re asking is if I understand what I’ve been told, then yeah, I understand.”
“Hey, that’s a damn good start for transfer day.”
Laeddis just glared.
That was another thing unique about him. Nine times out of ten, patients had a lot to say, especially on day one. Complains, threats, unintelligible but furious ravings, manic fear, and inconsolable depressive breakdowns. A few would arrive so loopy and drugged up that they were utterly unaware they had even transferred facilities at all.
But Andrew Laeddis presented as annoyed and inconvenienced.
If there’s something you learned to do as a psychiatrist, it was to wait. Lester wrote his notes lazily, giving Laeddis ample time to speak his peace. He rather liked this about meeting new patients. Give people in the worst times of their life the opportunity to be heard, if nothing else.
“Dr. Sheehan, you’re making a really critical mistake in having me here. I’m not expecting you to understand that right now, but if you look up independent sources, you should be able to pretty easily verify that you’ve been fed grossly falsified information about me. I hope you would care to find that out?”
It was a professional challenge. And not an unreasonable one.
“Fair play, Laeddis-“
“Daniels, or Marshal.”
“-I promise to independently research the background of your case. But for today, for the here and now, how about we make the most out of this session? I’m of the personal opinion that everyone should take the opportunity to explore mental health resources at least once in their life. We can all stand to feel a little more settled in our skins.”
Laeddis pinched the bridge of his nose, clearly a go-to calming mechanism. Lester jotted this down in his messy shorthand.
“I smoke too much.”
It was both expected and unexpected. The man was humoring him in engaging in Sheehan’s request. It seemed honest, but also neutral. Didn’t relate to anything about the reason why he was really here. But also, accidentally fascinating because while Andrew thought he smoked too much, it showed how entrenched he was in his own delusion. A patient, Laeddis probably hadn’t smoked in ages. But he would, were he still an active US marshall.
“You want to cut back?”
An easier approach than the more direct “why do you think that is?”
Laeddis leaned back in the seat. He was too disciplined to shrug in this context.
“It’s been on my mind a while.”
Sheehan gestured vaguely, prompting more.
“Never been a habit I wanted. Picked it up overseas. Feel some relief, but it also brings up bad memories.”
“Of the war?”
“Mainly.”
“Mainly?”
“Yes. Mainly.”
Not the response he hoped for. But they hadn’t exactly built up a lot of rapport yet. It was a fair response. He wouldn’t assume, but intuition and experience were telling him it was a habit his wife wanted him to kick. Now a source of remorse and unfulfilled duty.
“Well good news and bad news on that. Good news, I can definitely help you cut back. Bad news, it’s going to be less about talk therapy and more about access.”
“Why don’t you give me something useful I can take with me off this island.”
And hey, this was about as good a start as Lester could have hoped for.
------------------------------
Most days with Laeddis were good days. Exceptional days, even, by ward C standards.
But as they found out, the bad days were really fucking bad days.
Six orderlies in med bay at once. They had had to drag in extra beds. Sheehan visited them personally. One was still unconscious, and another looked like he’d rather be. It took Laeddis three weeks to do what no other patient had done in the last fifteen years, and that was well before their military funders had come in to help set up more comprehensive security measures and procedures.
He had broken out. And not just out of his cell, the cellblock, or even the building. This man had, against every single odd, made it through the gates and out to the beaches. Guards spotted his tracks, but they hadn’t apprehended him until he had already scrambled down the cliffs.
Lester hadn’t seen them tranq dart his patient, but he’d been clutching the seats of McPherson’s jeep and the bounced over the rough terrain, following the crackle of radio garble and static, hot on his trail. Lester had felt like he’d have a heart attack for sure.
This could have been so tremendously worse, he knew. Even now, his hands shook, thinking of the possibilities.
He was sat now next to Laeddis, who was just barely beginning to stir.
He’d had the foresight to steal the boots right off the first guard he had incapacitated, so his bare feet now were only lightly blistered at the worst. His hands however, hadn’t fared so well. They were strapped to the bed at the wrists, invulnerable to lockpicking. Medics had disinfected and bandaged the bleeding scrapes, but they were still riddled with lesser scrapes. Sand and dirt caught beneath the nails. Hands that told the story of a mad and desperate scramble in rough terrain. Two big bruises were against his right forearm where he had absorbed glancing blows from the guards’ batons. There were surely more under the smock.
A knock at the door. Sheehan turned to see Cawley step in. The man still had his coat layered over his evening wear.
They shared a look. Exhausted, relieved, and deeply troubled.
“We’ll need to adjust the chlorpromazine up,” Lester said, just to get it out of the way.
Cawley only nodded. Felt like failure to them both. Drugs, always drugs. They had monitored Laeddis on a very conservative dosage, and now that had backfired spectacularly.
Laeddis was officially their most dangerous patient.
------------------------------
“Chuck” was a surprise.
Five months in, and staff felt they had gotten a decent grip on Andrew’s fantasies. They had teased out a good balance of the chlorpromazine. Enough to keep him reasonably settled, but lucid enough to have meaningful dialogue. Lester wasn’t sure he had ever encountered another patient with such a rich and consistent fantasy. It was a complex, but paradoxically logical blend of fact and fiction. Entirely made up people, political figures, having plausible conversations and following a rational pattern. It was so… coherent. The only problem was little of it matched up to reality. And Lester had done his due diligence. He had made phone calls. Sent letters. Cross-referenced.
So when the orderly escorted Andrew in for their weekly session, he’d been blindsided to be called “Chuck.”
“Chuck? Chuck who?”
“Stop being an asshole and get me out of these restraints.”
“That’s a negative, I’m afraid.”
Hands restrained, Andrew squeezed his eyes tightly shut and tried to bury his head in his shoulder.
“Migraine?”
“You know what, don’t get me out. Sorry. We’ll have to try another time. It is a damn migraine. Of all the fucking times, I can’t believe it.”
Lester raced to connect the dots. Andrew looked pale.
“Don’t worry. I’ll get you something for it. But what was the plan?”
“You said you can get a pair of the orderly scrubs? That’s the best bet to get out of the complex. We can figure out making the ferry from there. If not, bust into the radio room at least to make contact with the mainland.”
Did Andrew think he was another patient? That didn’t seem quite right. Wouldn’t make sense for Sheehan to be unrestrained in a room with a restrained Laeddis, and Laeddis wasn’t far enough removed from reality to have that sort of delusion.
“I think the radio room is more likely, but even then I’m not so sure how we’re pulling that one off.”
He saw Andrew gnashing his teeth against the pain of the migraine.
“Two badges are better than one. I think we could persuade our way in.”
And there it was. If “Teddy” is a marshall, “Chuck” is likely the holder of badge number two.
Lester got Andrew a couple pills and had an orderly escort the man back to his room to ride out the migraine. Then he went looking for Cawley. This was a significant update.
------------------------------
The narrative gained body. Chuck Aule was Teddy’s new partner, both marshals sent to Ashecliffe to find Rachel Solando, an escaped patient on the island. Fictitious woman, a thinly veiled stand-in for his own late wife.
Even still, Andrew recognized him as Dr. Sheehan most days.
While the Chuck delusion was a regression, there were also big improvements in other ways.
He opened up, in his own way, about his life. His past. Little of it truthful, but for Andrew, they were vulnerabilities. Lester could read genuine pain, regret, embarrassment, and sadness in what Andrew opened up about.
How much he missed his wife. So much that he admitted feeling little ambition left to live. Justice, or sometimes revenge, were his drivers, and pretty flimsy ones.
He never spoke about his children, but he spoke about how bad he and Dolores had wanted them. He spoke about dreams where he was a “bad sailor.” An unconscious acknowledgement of feeling like a failed father mixed in with his own lackluster parental figure.
Lester never had a case weigh so heavy on him. He spent probably an unhealthy amount of time on the case. He wanted, so intensely it hurt, for Andrew Laeddis to feel well again. For him to not have had to forcibly rewire his brain so entirely to reject life’s most excruciating agonies. Andrew hurt so deeply because he cared so deeply. It was something, unfortunately, few other of his patients had. A deep moral compass. Working with the criminally insane would always be his passion, but Andrew was unique.
Andrew was special.
------------------------------
“That’s my patient!” Sheehan shouted in frustration. By necessity, most of these orderlies were big men. Bigger than Sheehan, and more trained to take the space they feel they needed to do their job.
“I’m his doctor. Move aside.” he barked. He was getting desperate, hearing Andrew’s yells, but him being out of sight.
Reluctantly, two orderlies made space.
Andrew was strapped to a gurney at the waist and wrists, but his legs were still thrashing, not yet pinned down.
He was bleeding.
“Hey hey hey,” Sheehan chided lightly, pressing a hand to Andrew’s forearm.
Andrew whipped his head to look, and visibly relaxed at the sight of his physician.
“Doctor…”
That was a good start. Able to calm down. Recognized Lester instead of Chuck.
“You were hurting yourself, Andrew. We’re done with that now. Let us take care of you.”
It was a fair bit of blood. Lester tried not to let his gaze wander to it. Right now Andrew needed to feel like a person, not a patient.
“Did you give him a sedative yet?” he asked an orderly.
“No, sir. Miga was just going to grab it.”
“Hold that order. He’s lost too much blood. Washington, go prep med bay. We’ll be taking him over now.”
Lester tried not to ignore the stickiness on his hand from where he was touching Andrew. Instead, he put pressure on a gash and put up the careful mental compartments he needed to ride through this event. They got the bed rolling. Lester maintained pressure on the wound.
“What’s even the point, doctor? They’re going to pension me out.”
“Marshal, you got a whole lot to live for. If you don’t have faith in yourself, have a little in me.”
“I’ll have to turn my badge in. The hell will I do now?”
“Damn the whole badge.”
Andrew looked pale. Not the way he went pale during a migraine, but something more ashen. It was frightening to see.
“My wife. It was my fault.”
That had Sheehan reeling. His wife’s death was always Laeddis’ fault. The out-there Laeddis. The Laeddis that “Teddy” wasn’t.
Lester could only have described the man’s expression as stricken.
“Sometimes it isn’t anyone’s fault,” Lester replied.
Andrew didn’t reply. They reached the med bay and the doctor there kicked him out.
He stood outside longer than he should have.
------------------------------
It was summer now. The island was at its most beautiful. Bright and breezy. Seagulls chorused down the beach, periodically taking flight in small groups. Staff and patients alike were in better moods. The kitchens prepared sun tea, and paired it with sweeter fruits. Lester wondered why they built a facility like this in a place where it’s dreary ten months of the year. Surely not conducive to improving mental states.
“Even I’m not sure the wisdom on this one, Lester.”
Cawley brought him out of his musings.
“It’s giving us the best chances. For all of us. Perfect conditions. We’ll be pressed to find a more aligned case than his to try this on.”
“That fit the model, yes, but the risks.”
“The risk assessment puts them at low.”
“It’s a limited rubric.”
“Naehring owes you and it’s still at the proposal stage. There will be other assessments well before we commit resources. If we need to back out or postpone, we will.”
“I need to look at this more.”
Lester shrugged, sipping his tea.
“It’s your project, John.”
Cawley nursed his bourbon. Awful drink for a day as nice as this one.
“That all aside for a moment. I checked in on him yesterday.”
“Yes, he told me.”
“You seem to be good for him. He’s looking a lot better. Sounding better. Back to that same dry sarcasm he arrived with.”
Lester smiled. It was true. Progress wasn’t always linear, but Andrew had been doing some genuine healing.
“We’re been putting a lot of work into his nightmares. Trying out some new coping methods for when he wakes up. Positive self-talk before bed. Still won’t talk about his kids, but I feel like we stand a good chance of making a breakthrough on his wife before the year is up. I can tell he’s beginning to challenge his narrative about her. He feels the missing pieces, but can’t bring himself to pick them up off the floor. I want to build up his coping skills now so when he starts to, he can manage the emotions better. He’s stuck in a mindset where it’s him versus the world. He wants to be vulnerable, but instinctively dreads it. He has very specific triggers for dissociation.”
They talked for some time about Andrew before straying into some other cases. The summer day was long, and right now, Shutter Island had hopeful days before it.
------------------------------
They were walking together along the courtyard perimeter when Andrew abruptly stopped talking, and shoved Lester roughly aside.
Before Lester could get his full bearings, supporting himself on the concrete wall, he saw Laeddis duck a punch and swipe the legs out from another man. A patient. Vingis, he recognized. Something went clattering out of Vingis’ hand, and he snarled.
It all happened quickly. Orderlies were shouting, sprinting across the courtyard. Andrew was dead calm. He had Vingis on his stomach in an arm lock, leveraging his own height and weight to keep the man stably pinned. Even the orderlies recognized in an instant that Andrew was their ally in this confrontation, and thanked the “Marshal” for helping them get control over their loose patient.
Before he knew what he was doing, he accepted the hand Andrew extended to him, and let himself get pulled up to standing.
The makeshift shiv on the ground was a nasty thing. Vingis never did like anyone, and Sheehan was no exception.
“Sorry. You okay?” Andrew asks. Again, cool as a cucumber. This was Laeddis the marshal. The soldier.
Lester nodded, not trusting his voice just yet.
An orderly hovered nearby.
Andrew’s eyes flicked around for a moment, and gestured the orderly over himself, asking him to take the shiv off the ground. Then he put a hand on Lester’s shoulder and steered him away from the scene.
“Thank you. I. I didn’t see him. You must think I’m an idiot.”
“Not at all. That’s what partners are for. You know, I don’t think I told you, but I was pretty sour when they assigned you to me. Nothing personal. Just planned on coming here alone. Denied my request to go solo. I think they made the right call, though. You’re a good guy, Chuck. Your peripheral vision is dogshit, but you’re a smart guy. The longer we’re here, the more I’m realizing I can’t do this case alone, and I’m glad it’s you here with me.”
And wasn’t that something?
“Yeah? You’re not half bad yourself, Daniels. Except at poker. You’re pretty bad at that.”
Andrew barked a laugh and gave Lester a hardy clap on the back.
------------------------------
It’s strange how time can drag and drag and drag, and then you look back and wonder where it all went. That’s how Sheehan felt stepping off the boat with Laeddis. Daniels. He mentally chided himself. Daniels. For the next few days, he was here on Shutter Island with US Marshal Teddy Daniels to investigate Ashecliffe Hospital’s missing patient. Sticking to this in all things would be imperative.
He had, for all intents and purposes, stepped entirely into Teddy’s world.
The world the whole damn island has spent over six months intensely planning for. Six months of planning for what they hope would be no more than three days. Three days to wrest this good man from the grip of psychosis, and give him a chance to face his own truth and fight to accept it.
If anyone could do it, it was Teddy Daniels.
------------------------------
They were fools for going out in the storm. It gave him comfort to see Teddy so undaunted, but at the end of day, it was blatantly irresponsible to put this kind of blind faith in a mental institution patient, no matter the extenuating circumstances.
The whipping winds were so strong that Lester could no longer hear Teddy, who was shouting at him. The mausoleum was dry and sturdy, but it was small and the broken door made it a shoddy shelter.
Teddy guided him to the very back behind the cement slab to the stone bench built into the wall. It was a little drier and a little less noisy, but it was a mausoleum in the middle of a hurricane at the start of autumn on a little island, and it was cold. So cold that Lester was strongly considering abandoning the place entirely. Until the whole tree flying past cured him of any such notion.
“Take off your jacket,” Teddy half yelled.
That was it. Maybe the man really had gone insane.
“You crazy?” he yelled back.
Teddy rolled back his eyes.
He wedged himself into the corner of the bench, back to the wall and legs pulled up on the seat. He opened his own jacket up and gestured to Lester to come to him. Lester did, but only to hear Teddy better.
“We don’t know how long we have to ride it out here. We’re going to lose body warmth rapidly if we’re not playing it safe. And I mean dangerously. You sit in front of me, back to chest, and you put on your jacket backwards.”
The logic was sound, but the mental visual… it gave Lester pause.
Teddy only raised his eyebrows slightly. Almost challenging.
Lester… turned off his brain.
He quickly pulled off his jacket and pulled it back on backwards. Even the momentary cold on his back felt like the chill of death, so he backed into the space between Teddy’s legs and leaned into the broad and strong warmth of Daniels’ larger body. His next shiver was not from the cold as he settled in.
Daniels adjusted their jackets to be as tight as possible, conserving heat between them. They stayed like that for a little time, just quiet. Lester felt Teddy’s heart beat, and the slight puff of breath at his neck. Smelled a hint of aftershave under the mud and wet the storm had been slapping them with.
After a while, Teddy started up conversation. They talked about the storm, the war, and about Teddy’s ruminations on what led him to come to the island. Pressed up together, murmurings in Lester’s ear. Soft, deep voice. At some point, Lester started to doze. He tucked his head to the left, leaning on a broad shoulder. An arm unwrapped from him just long enough to tug his collar a little higher.
Teddy was a protector, Lester understood in that moment. Teddy was the new chance to be the protector that Andrew yearned to be again.
------------------------------
“I’m really crazy, then.”
“You’re suffering from acute psychosis, Andrew. Along with a few other comorbidities. They’re medical conditions. You didn’t choose this. You just fell headfirst out of the bad luck tree and hit damn near every branch on the way down.”
That got a wan smile.
“I need you to lean on me. You’ve had a holy grail of a breakthrough. Actually unprecedented, in every meaning of the word. But progress isn’t linear. You’re still going to have bad days. But you need to lean on me.”
“Lester, it feels like every day is going to be a bad day.”
“Let me challenge that. First of all, you said my name instead of Chuck. That’s progress. Secondly, I appreciate the honesty. That’s the best thing you can do to help me help you.”
“God, that’s so corny.”
“Maybe you need a little more corny in your life.”
“I’m struggling to understand… anything. Everything feels real. Conflicting things. I can’t even trust my own mind.”
The misery in his voice was palpable.
“Human brains are the most complicated field of study. Period. We’ll never understand them fully, but as a psychiatrist, I can tell you that they’re capable of nothing short of miracles. You’re receiving cutting edge care, and there are an incredible amount of resources and options in front of you.”
“Honestly, a lobotomy isn’t sounding so bad right now.”
Lester frowned deeply.
“Not that option.”
“No?”
“I won’t allow it.”
“Why not? Aren’t I right that those happen here?”
“Extremely and increasingly infrequently, and even that’s too often. At least in my and Cawley’s opinions.”
“But what if I want one? Cawley said I’m the most dangerous patient in this hospital. Maybe I should agree to it. For the greater good.”
“I said, I won’t allow it.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I care about you too much.”
He hadn’t really meant to say that. Could have said any number of things about the risks, the ethics, Cawley’s quest to steer the field away from pharmaceutical and surgical interventions... But his reply had been the most honest.
Lester looked down, a bit embarrassed by his own candor. The way he said it. The way it hung in the room.
“Your hands are soft.”
Lester looked up at the non sequitur.
“I made myself look past it. When you handed the gun over to McPherson on our way in, you fumbled the holster. When we played poker, I noticed how soft your hands were. They’re doctor's hands. A US marshal wouldn’t be caught dead with soft hands like these.”
Gently, Andrew took said hands in his own. It was true. Andrew had surely lost callouses and toughness in the last few years, but they were nothing like Lester’s slender fingers with smooth cuticles and delicate joints.
Andrew carded their fingers together. Just their finger tips; not all the way down to the palms.
“Your hands are cold.”
A thumb traced slowly from his wrist to his palm, resting finally on his heart line.
“My mother used to say, cold hands, warm heart.”
“I’m not sure either part of that idiom is meant to be taken literally.”
“Shut up, Lester.”
Andrew carded their hands together more fully, and the unexpected rush of intimacy of the feeling bloomed on Lester’s face.
“I have a proposition for you.”
Lester felt like he’d agree to damn near anything at this moment.
“Hm?”
“I’ll agree to try your treatments, and not bring up a lobotomy again. You be patient with me on my bad days. And you teach me your poker tricks.”
“Are we negotiating?”
“You looking to sweeten the deal, doctor?”
“Yeah. I am. I’m going to need you to teach me how exactly you blew up Cawley’s car.”
Andrew squeezed his hands as he laughed loud and bright, and it felt like love.