“Of course. Not like your friends give me any choice,” he joked.
Laura smiled.
“I was wondering if they had given you some sort of sedative. I don’t see anything in your file.”
“No sedatives.”
“I thought you’d be eager to talk with Holly, and perhaps…”
A hopeful smile lit up Ted’s face when he heard her name. He couldn’t help it.
“Were you able to reach her?”
“Yes. Holly specifically asked me to tell you that she won’t keep the girls from seeing their father; she knows how much you love them, and how much they love you. Cindy and Nadine miss you, but they understand that you are recovering in a hospital.”
“Maybe you were right yesterday: maybe it’s better to wait awhile. I only wanted to be sure they were okay.”
“It would be best to wait a few days, I think. You’re making good progress—giant steps. What changed your mind, Ted?”
“I had the same dream last night, on the porch of my house, but this time something else happened. I could go out past the porch to the ocean, only it wasn’t the ocean: it was a lake.”
Laura looked in her purse for her portable recorder. Ted had never left his house before in his dreams. This might mean…
She felt a growing excitement. She set the recorder on the table and asked him to tell her about the dream, in as much detail as he could. Ted began talking. Nothing had vanished when he awoke; it was all there in his mind, as vivid as a movie he had just finished watching.
The only detail he left out, because he thought it was irrelevant and because it was particularly painful to him, was finding Holly’s damp bikini on the beach chair.
When he finished, Laura turned off the recorder and put it back in her purse. She picked up her notebook to take some notes.
“Laura, all this time that you’ve been talking to Holly, to Dr. Carmichael, and, I imagine, to other people with connections to me, have you been able to locate Wendell?”
Laura gulped. The question took her by surprise.
“Ted, the dream you had last night should help you see the truth.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s no easy way to put this. Wendell is you.”
44
Laura knew from the start that Wendell wasn’t a real person but a projection of Ted that he had generated. Holly had confirmed that the lake house was theirs, that they used to spend almost every weekend at the lake, but that lately—since their marriage had started to go bad—it was mainly Ted who went there, by himself. He was the one who liked fishing; the one who owned the black Lamborghini, which he treated like another child; the one who had assembled the Disney princess castle that he had described so often during their sessions.
It was Ted himself who had met Lynch at college; they were pretty tight during their university years, and for some time thereafter. Later they started seeing less of each other, though they never completely lost contact. Holly assured Laura that when she and Lynch began going together, her marriage with Ted had already fallen apart and they had agreed it was time for them to end it. If they hadn’t done so yet, it was because they were waiting for the right time to tell their daughters.
Holly and Lynch were very discreet, though they made one single mistake: the dinner at the restaurant where they were caught on camera. They wanted to enjoy a normal night out, without skulking around, and they decided to drive separately to Beverly, ten miles away. They were foolish enough to take a seat by the window, because they wanted to feel completely free. They joked about it each time someone walked by and noticed them, Holly told Laura with regret. Neither she nor Lynch noticed the private detective who had tailed them from Boston.
Holly maintained that Ted had stopped loving her long before she gave up on him. Ted had always been reserved, a bit of a recluse, except with Holly; in recent months, however, he had even begun to act distant and undemonstrative with her. As much as Ted tried to hide it, his withdrawal became obvious. Sex became less and less frequent until it basically disappeared. He stopped seeking it, and for months it fell on Holly to take the initiative. She believed that his faltering desire could be revived, like throwing a miraculous piece of firewood onto a sputtering bonfire at the last moment. But it distressed her to have to beg for a few moments of mechanical frenzy.
She tried to deceive herself and believe Ted’s nightly excuses—too much work, the girls hadn’t fallen asleep yet—but the moment came when she saw it, she felt it. He didn’t desire her. It was as if her blindfold had fallen off. Ted traveled out of state once a month, sometimes twice, to visit his most important clients, the ones he needed to see in person as president of the company. These were their seven-figure clients, he always told Holly, the ones that really mattered, the ones he had to inform directly about the state of their investments. Ted would go away for at least three days, or often for a whole week, and come back in a better mood, bearing presents for the girls, acting nice again; Captain Erection would even deign to visit them for a night or two after his return.
But all too soon things would be back to normal. He became unsociable and moody again, and he’d take the first opportunity to run off to the lake and go fishing. Holly didn’t know if there was another woman, or several women; all she knew was that her husband was happiest when he was farthest from home.
It wasn’t exactly pride that Holly felt, but an obligation to verify the truth of her husband’s travels. She called his company, spoke to Ted’s secretary, to his business partner; everything checked out. Either he had planned everything very meticulously or he wasn’t cheating. Of course, who needed a whole week for a business trip? Ted told her he took advantage of the trips to go fishing, and she corroborated this point, too, with a fishing club out of Denver. Clearly, if Ted was cheating on her, he was much more careful about it than she herself would be a few weeks later when she sat down with her lover at a window seat in a restaurant in full view of the world.
At last Holly threw in the towel. In the end, it made no substantial difference whether Ted was cheating or not. There was something else now: she had started to fall out of love with him, almost without realizing it. After a few weeks she began to welcome her husband’s apathy, tacitly inviting it. She came to hope there was another woman, because that would make everything so much easier.
One day Justin Lynch dropped by to visit them. Ted wasn’t home, nor were the girls. Holly got along well with Justin, so she asked him to come in. They shared a glass of wine, talked, and in just two hours Holly told him everything. Everything. Justin had no idea they were having so many problems with their marriage. Much less, he assured her, did he know whether Ted had a lover. His friend had never told him anything along those lines; Ted was very reserved, Justin said apologetically. But the chemistry between Justin and Holly was evident, and he quickly became her closest confidant.
When her situation had grown unbearable, Holly decided to talk to Ted and tell him the obvious. Divorce was best. He agreed from the beginning. By then Ted had started suffering terrible headaches; his body was protesting. Holly and Justin continued seeing each other, always as confidants, but their mutual attraction grew until it was unbearable. The more they got to know each other, the more they liked being together. The preliminary divorce agreement between Holly and Ted was all it took for them to give free rein to their affair. The fact that they suspected Ted might also have a lover was a lie they told themselves to lessen their sense of guilt.
Holly never knew that Ted, convinced that he had a malignant tumor taking over his brain, had begun seeing Dr. Carmichael around this time. Much less did she know that the idea of ending his life was slowly but surely taking shape in his mind.
Another thing she learned only later was that a private detective was following her and had photographed her at the restaurant. Ted had never confronted her, or Lynch, either; instead, he kept the photos in an envelope inside his wall safe, and went on with his life a
s if nothing had happened, remaining in that transitional limbo until they decided how to manage the matter of their divorce as it concerned the girls and their nearest family. In fact, those were paradoxically the days when they got along best.
Holly found the photos only later, much later, she would tell Laura afterward. She didn’t have access to the safe and had had to force it open. But that was a month after the fact! For a whole month, Ted had continued living with her without breathing a word, as if it didn’t matter to him.
Why did Ted wait a month? A month before he went to see Lynch at his office, after almost everyone but Lynch had left his building, and beat him with a brass lamp. Someone on the floor below heard the beating and the screams and called the police, who found Ted sitting in the lobby of the building with the lamp in his lap and his friend’s blood all over him. When the officer who found him asked for his name, he said he didn’t know, but a short while later he said that his name was Wendell. They took him in and discovered that his real name was Theodore McKay.
The beating put Lynch in the hospital, in a coma. The doctors were optimistic for the first few days; they performed an emergency operation to repair a damaged artery and hoped that, in combination with osmotherapy to reduce fluid pressure on the brain, the inflammation would be relieved and he would awaken. But that didn’t happen.
Holly visited every week. Justin had few close relatives; it was devastating to find him always alone, lying on that hospital bed, waiting for a miracle that might never arrive. Holly couldn’t say she had fallen in love with him, but she was sure she had been heading in that direction. And she felt responsible, of course. Why hadn’t she been more careful? At Laura’s recommendation, she tried therapy, and it really did help her. Nobody could have guessed that Ted, a peaceful person, open to dialogue, could have kept his discovery of her infidelity a secret for an entire month, only to explode like Mount Vesuvius.
Ted, for his part, went into a catatonic state. He was admitted to Lavender Memorial. Dr. Laura Hill took his case and immediately contacted Dr. Carmichael, who had been treating Ted up until then.
45
Ted listened to Laura without interrupting her. When she told him about the beating he had given Lynch, he seemed slightly surprised, but that was all.
“Is he still in a coma?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“There’s no doubt I did it, is there?”
Laura shook her head.
“There’s got to be an explanation,” Ted said. “Why would I beat a friend and put him in a coma? Believe me, his having a consensual relationship with my wife wouldn’t be enough of an excuse. I’ve never done anything like that. Maybe he really pissed me off, I don’t deny it, but not so much that I’d want to kill him. There’s got to be more to it than that.”
“The answer is inside your head, and in Lynch’s, but for the time being he can’t tell us anything.”
“My God.”
“You clearly weren’t well when you acted as you did. The same is true of the days leading up to it. Holly says that for an entire month you held on to the photos from the restaurant, keeping them secret, which she says wasn’t like you. She’s sure you normally would have said something to her about it.”
He nodded.
There had to be something else. It was hard to speculate about Lynch, the friend who Ted couldn’t remember at all. Maybe Lynch knew something about Ted that could hurt Holly…
Laura saw that he was worried. “What are you thinking?”
“Did Holly tell you anything about Lynch? Any suspicions? I imagine that if she had an affair with him, it was because she thought he was a good man, but sometimes, you know, we get mixed up with the wrong person.”
“I know what you mean. Look, I’ll be honest with you. Holly told me that Lynch is a calm sort of guy, nice, considerate. Though he and Holly began to have feelings for each other, he was the one who refused to go any further until you and she had come to a verbal agreement about the divorce. Lynch wanted to talk to you and explain everything. Of course, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t something else; it’s just what Holly thinks of him.”
“Holly is a very intuitive person. If that’s what she said, it’s most likely true.”
“I think the same as you, though,” Laura said. She searched for something in a folder full of plastic envelopes. “Something must have made you react to Lynch like that. Maybe something you discovered when you followed him. I haven’t talked to the private detective who worked for you, but Holly did, and the guy says that all he did was tail them and give you the photos.”
“The detective’s name is Peterson, isn’t it?”
“You remember him?”
“Wendell told me about him. God, all this time I’ve been talking about someone who doesn’t exist. How is that possible?”
“Your friendship with Lynch, your relationship with Holly, the lakeshore house—they’re all part of Wendell. Your mind has compartmentalized that information, and now it belongs to him. In a sense, you could say that you don’t have access to it. You seem to have a locked room inside your head now.”
Open the door.
Laura spoke measuredly. It was as if with each word she was testing Ted’s capacity to continue assimilating information.
“What do you have there?” Ted asked. Laura had pulled a photograph from the folder. It was small and had been taken years ago.
It showed a young Ted and Lynch at a college dorm party, smiling next to a poster of Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. For Ted, the poster immediately brought back memories. It had hung in the hallway outside his dorm room. Uma had dark hair and was smoking provocatively. The Ted in the photo was handsome, thin, with hair down to his shoulders. He wore a bandanna like Axl Rose and had a plastic cup in his hand. At his side, Lynch wore the same jovial smile as when he rang the doorbell at Ted’s house in the imagined vision. His good looks were magnetic.
“I remember that poster perfectly. But not Lynch. Looks like we were close.”
Laura nodded. She returned the photo to the folder.
“In my dream, there was something new about the lakeside house,” Ted said. “A feeling of familiarity to the place. Also, when I woke up today I realized something: I couldn’t recall Wendell’s face. I wasn’t sure what color his eyes were; his features were blurry in my mind. Was he thin? Did he wear glasses? I couldn’t quite tell.”
“As for Wendell, there’s something I want to ask you,” Laura said. “Does his name mean anything to you?”
Ted thought about it.
“If you mean did I ever know anybody with that name, the answer is no. At least not so far as I can remember. Which, under the circumstances, isn’t very far.”
Laura nodded.
“I can’t believe I put a man into a coma,” Ted said, holding his head and shaking it over and over.
“Don’t think about it, Ted. I’m convinced that part of your psychosis began before the incident with Lynch. Long before. I gave it a lot of thought before I revealed to you that Wendell doesn’t exist, that he’s really a part of you in disguise.”
“Are you afraid I might go back into one of those cycles?”
“I doubt it. We’ve come too far.”
“Too far?”
“Exactly. Think about the first cycle. In it, you were going to take your life because of a brain tumor. In turn, you had to kill Wendell, the part of you that knew the truth about Holly’s affair, and also the part that was responsible for beating Lynch. In a certain sense, it constituted a perfect cycle. My theory is that you had planned to kill yourself after your encounter with Lynch, but your judgment was clouded and you didn’t do it. Then your mind devised this cycle, repeating it over and over, in which you killed Wendell and everything he represented.”
“I see where you’re going,” Ted said. “In that cycle, I didn’t even have any problems with Holly.”
“It was the perfect suicide.”
“And Blaine? Where does he c
ome in?”
This was the only question Laura had feared, the one she had no answer for since her discovery of the Buzz Lightyear sticker. She didn’t want to mention that just yet, so she merely gave him the answer she would have given only two days earlier.
“You had to find a way to justify murdering Wendell, and your mind conceived of this brilliant plan of suicidal people killing each other. Think: What’s the best way to dissuade a man from taking his own life? By appealing to his awareness of how hard his suicide will be on his family. That’s the key. I’m sure that these same questions were in your head while you were weighing the idea. You see, Ted, why I say the first cycle was the perfect suicide? In it, you even solved the problem of how it would affect your loved ones. Everything worked perfectly. And the Blaine case was all over the news in the days before you were admitted to Lavender; I collected tons of newspaper articles about it. Most likely you used it to construct the cycle. And bear in mind another important factor: Lynch was a stranger to you. Only Wendell knew him.”
“Why did our sessions form part of the cycle? Why weren’t they like the rest of my life at Lavender, which I have no recollection of?”
“Well, at first they didn’t enter into it. It was only when we began to explore your past that our sessions started bursting into the cycles, breaking them open. Do you have the horseshoe?”
Ted nodded. He could feel the weight of it in his pocket.
“That was when the first cracks appeared in the first cycle. Memories of your girls running up the path to the lakeside house, for example. That was your unconscious trying to find a way to shatter that idyllic ending, to unmask Wendell.”
Ted nodded in amazement. He understood.
“That’s why I didn’t kill him in the second cycle,” he said, recalling it.
“Exactly. In the second cycle, you were already aware that Wendell and Lynch actually knew each other, that they’d been college roommates. That was your life history, Ted! All you were doing was discovering your own ties to Lynch. But Wendell didn’t want to be unmasked, because that would mean outing that part of yourself, so he tried getting you angry at Lynch, among other things, by showing you the photo at the restaurant. Remember, in the second cycle you also knew about your problems with Holly. In each cycle, you came closer to reality.”
Kill the Next One Page 19