The Devil You Know (17 page)

Chapter Fifteen

Marie
awoke on Sunday morning with the sunlight streaming into her room and got out
of bed with the best of intentions. She would wash, eat, and go to Mass at St.
Lucy’s. After, she would drive to Jasper’s to pick up Tom, and the two were
going to head north to Camarillo. Elise had been in the hospital for almost a
week now, and Marie felt overdue for a visit; the hospital extended visiting
hours throughout most of the day on Sundays. The night before, Tom had kindly
agreed to accompany her on the drive, and even though she had protested at
first on the grounds that it might upset him, she had agreed quickly enough,
pleased at the thought of being able to spend the day with him even on such an
unpleasant errand.

After
she had made herself a cup of coffee and a piece of toast folded in two with
strawberry jam in the middle, she found herself thinking about the Lovecraft
manuscript that Jasper had loaned her. When she had come home from Jasper’s the
night before, a few more goodnight kisses from Tom still making her tingle, she
had set the folder containing the story on top of her bookcase beside the
framed photo of Ryan that she kept there. For the first time in a while she
found the picture upsetting, quickly cycling through many of the feelings she
had undergone since his death: grief, anger, abandonment, depression, and,
finally, resignation. For a moment, she had considered putting the picture in a
drawer, but had finally decided to let it stay before making herself get ready
for bed.

Now
finishing her coffee, she did not think at all about Ryan or the picture.
Instead, she wrestled with a dilemma—whether to read the Lovecraft story
or get ready for Mass. Father Joe would be expecting her face in the
congregation; he always managed to single her out for a friendly wink in the
middle of his sermon. And the sermon this week, she knew, would be a good one.
She had listened to him deliver three versions of it in the office and had
typed the final revision on Friday. If she opted for Lovecraft now, she knew it
could mean getting just a taste of the story—the first page only—if
she still wanted to be ready in time for Mass.

A
few minutes later, still in her robe, she sat in her chair, carefully rubbed
her fingers against each other in case any breadcrumbs lingered on them, and
opened the folder. She picked up the manuscript and held it lightly between her
fingers, afraid that she might crease or tear the paper if she handled it too
roughly.
Just the first page
, she
told herself,
and then get dressed
.
But two pages later, she had not moved. A glance at her watch told her she
might still make it, but after another two pages had been carefully lifted back
over the staple that held the manuscript together, she knew she would not be
going to St. Lucy’s this morning. There were other churches, and though Father
Joe might look at her questioningly on Monday morning, he probably wouldn’t be
so forward as to ask where she had been. She could always tell him that she had
needed to get up to Camarillo to visit Elise and had been to Mass there—which
might actually be the truth, she told herself as she continued reading.

The
first thing that struck her about the story was that its narrator was not a
typical Lovecraft hero—usually a man doomed or driven mad by forbidden
knowledge he had inadvertently uncovered. Instead, the protagonist was a young
woman named Celia Bainbridge, and she was trying to find her father, a
professor of antiquities who had gone missing while conducting research in a
small New England town. In the course of her investigation, Celia discovered
his papers, including a bizarre phrase in an unknown language that the
professor had unearthed. The heroine eventually found herself in the caves underneath
the fictional town, where she discovered that the townspeople secretly
worshipped an ancient god who sometimes made himself manifest and demanded a
sacrifice. The girl’s father had been killed upon making the same discovery,
and now she was about to be given over to the dark god. But while strapped to
an altar far underground, Celia remembered the phrase from her father’s papers
and spoke it in a panic. Marie let herself linger over the words, Lovecraftian
in every syllable:
namon dagoreth
ashtakar sa
. The heroine spoke the words three times and then heard a
howling sound from deep in the cavern. The townspeople were driven mad by the
vanquishing of their god, and in the confusion, the altar table was overturned,
the ropes snapped, and Celia Bainbridge lived to tell her tale.

It
was a good story, and parts of it gave Marie chills as she read. When she was
done, she sat and just held the manuscript for a few minutes, wondering at its
rarity and telling herself how lucky she’d been to read it. “
Namon dagoreth ashtakar sa,
” she said to
Murphy, who had begun rubbing against her legs halfway through the story. The
cat gave her a curious, superior look, and then walked away with his tail in
the air. Marie watched him go and then slipped the manuscript back into
Jasper’s folder before looking at her watch. Mass at St. Lucy’s was half over,
and Father Joe was likely in the middle of the sermon she had typed. She smiled
to herself, a bit guiltily, and then got up to get dressed. Tom would not mind
her coming early, she told herself, and she smiled more broadly now at the
thought of spending the entire day with him, the true nature of their trip
currently pushed to the back of her mind.

* * * * * * * *

“Would
you like to find something on the radio?” Marie asked not long after she had
turned her car off Sunset and onto the Pacific Coast Highway. She had picked
Tom up at Jasper’s almost an hour before, and had then made the rather tedious
drive across Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Marie had stopped the car at the end
of Jasper’s street to lean over and kiss Tom passionately for a few minutes
after they had waved their goodbyes to the old man. She had wanted to giggle
upon starting the car, but had managed to hold it in.

“No,
this is fine,” Tom said now as the Chevrolet rolled north, the beach and blue
ocean to their left and the rugged hills of Malibu to their right. “Unless you
want something.”

“No,
no. You’re right. This is fine.” She turned her head to smile at Tom and was
glad when he reached for her hand, holding it for a while until she needed to
let go to work the car’s controls. She was not used to driving such far
distances, but Marie knew Tom did not yet trust himself behind the wheel, given
his condition. Since the first night they had kissed in the gazebo, though, Tom
had made no mention of his illness, nor had either of them once mentioned the
war.

But
as they followed the ocean road north, Tom surprised her by saying, “From here,
you wouldn’t think Pearl Harbor and everything else is part of the same ocean.”

Marie
was silent for a moment. “No, that’s true,” she finally said.

“And
Iwo Jima, Midway, all those islands. It’s like another world away.”

“It
seems like another world. The whole war and everything that came before it,
too.” She looked out at the water spreading out endlessly past the line of
breakers. “Now that it’s over, it seems like it could have just been a dream.”

“A
bad dream.”

“Is
that how it seems to you?” she asked.

He
shrugged. “Sometimes. And sometimes it’s right here.” He raised his hand up in
front of his face, so close that he was almost touching his eyes. “It’s like I
may as well have never come home.”

“You
must have seen such awful things.”

“That’s
part of it,” he said. “But it’s not just the memories. Or, I guess if it were
just memories I could put up with a few bad dreams and a few blue days. A few
drinks could chase those away for a while. Or a day at the beach.”

Marie
waited for him to continue and hesitated to say anything when he did not. She
glanced over to make sure he was all right, and she saw that he had a far away
look in his eyes. Nervous, she said, “If not the memories, then...”

He
looked at her and raised an eyebrow. “Then,” he said, sighing, “it’s just the
feeling. It’s sort of hard to explain, but…See, it’s like I can be here with
you, completely safe, happy, not a care in the world. And for no goddamn reason
I know I’m gonna die. Right now, I mean. The adrenaline kicks in, the sweats.
It’s like my brain’s telling me there’s a German tank over the next rise or a
unit tucked up in a stand of trees with their guns trained on me…When you’re
over there…there’s a thousand ways you could die….even stupid things like
getting run over by one of your own Jeeps or…or shot in the head while your
buddy’s cleaning his rifle. And you know it all the time. You can’t ever really
calm down. Always on alert, you know?”

Marie
took her eyes off the road a second to glance at him and nod.

Tom
shrugged and said, “But you can’t just turn it off when the Nazis surrender and
you’re back in the land of palm trees and pretty girls.”

He
was trying to make light of it, so she smiled for him, still knowing there had
to be more pain than she could imagine just below the surface. “I think I
understand,” she said.

“I’m
glad. A lot of people think guys like me are just lazy, or cowards.” He paused.
“It’s getting better, though, slowly. Sometimes I think I could maybe go back
to work soon, or start looking at least. But I still have…you know, episodes
every so often. I can’t imagine having to explain that to a boss.” He turned so
he was looking more directly at Marie, his arm up on the seatback. “If I ever
just…sort of go away from you, if I don’t say anything when you talk, don’t be
scared, okay?”

Marie
nodded. “All right,” she said.

“Just
wait it out. It eases up after a few minutes.”

“Okay.”

“Does
it scare you?”

“No.”

Tom
smiled. “I didn’t think it would. You’re a pretty tough character.” He slid his
hand onto her shoulder as she drove and twirled the ends of her hair in his
fingers. “A pretty tough character,” he repeated with a smile.

“Stop it,” she said with a laugh and brushed his hand
away. He smiled with her and turned back to face the front again, and she
reached for his hand once more.

Soon
the hills of Malibu gave way to more rugged coastline, and Marie followed the
highway past Point Magu before cutting inland, heading in the direction of the
small town of Camarillo and the hospital grounds. Marie had never been to an
asylum before, and what she saw before her seemed out of step with what she had
been expecting. Opened not quite ten years earlier, the hospital was actually a
huge complex of buildings, most of them two stories tall and all built to look
like the old Spanish missions with tiled roofs, archways, long arcades and a
tall, ornate bell tower atop the main building fronting the parking lot where
Marie and Tom left her car. Trees dominated the landscaping around the hospital
buildings—palms, sycamores, pepper trees and jacarandas. The latter were
starting to bloom, their delicate, purple flowers standing out in contrast to
the white walls of the hospital buildings.

In
the lobby of the main building, they gave their names, and Marie filled out a
form detailing her request to visit Elise. The clerk behind the desk directed
them toward a waiting area while he made a call. It had been several days since
Marie had tried to find out about Elise’s condition or her progress, and she tried
listening now as the clerk spoke on the phone, but his voice was muffled, and
the echo produced by the high ceiling made every noise in the room blend
together indistinguishably. A few minutes later, a tall man in a hospital
uniform entered the lobby, checked in at the desk, and then approached Marie
and Tom. He handed them paper “Visitor” badges, and led them out of the lobby
and onto the hospital grounds.

As
they made their way through corridors, arcades and tunnels from one part of the
hospital to another, Marie wondered when she would begin to encounter the
unpleasant side of the hospital she had been imagining since first learning of
Elise’s confinement. She had expected filth and stench and an array of patients
who were little more than inmates, some harmlessly vacant and others
dangerously deranged. While the presence of bars on all the windows they walked
past seemed to confirm her expectations, she also noticed that the bars were
ornate and decorative with no two looking alike. Buildings and arcades
surrounded myriad courtyards, all dominated by expanses of green lawn. Most of
these courtyards had benches scattered among them, and on some of these sat
quite normal-looking men and women, none of them supervised, none of them
appearing disturbed, but all of them wearing tan jumpsuits that identified them
as patients rather than orderlies or doctors.

As
they walked along, Marie kept glancing at Tom, trying to gauge his reaction.
Like her, he seemed perplexed; she assumed it was because of the beauty of the
place, but she worried that being on the grounds was causing him to suffer from
unpleasant memories. She linked her arm in his and tipped her head up to say
quietly, “You okay?”

He
looked down at her with a smile. Then he shook his head in amazement. “The VA
was nothing like this,” he replied, his voice just as hushed as hers.

They
came to a square two-story building, and their guide ushered them through heavy
wooden doors. They walked along an arched hallway for several yards and found
themselves in a large common room. A wall of windows lit the room, and neatly
arranged tables and chairs filled it. Burly hospital orderlies were posted at
the door, and more than a dozen groups of patients and visitors sat in clusters
at the tables. The little groups around elderly patients made Marie think of
family reunions. While many of the patients looked sad or vacant, others looked
genuinely pleased to have family and friends around them.