Shutter Island

by Dennis Lehane

Teddy feared time was taking her from him, grinding away at the picture frames in his head, crushing them.

He said to Chuck, “Heard much about this place?” “A mental hospital, that’s about all I know.” “For the criminally insane,” Teddy said. “Well, we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t,” Chuck said. Teddy caught him smiling that dry grin again. “You never know, Chuck. You don’t look a hundred percent stable to me.” “Maybe I’ll put a deposit down on a bed while we’re here, for the future, make sure they hold a place for me.”

The search struck Teddy as desultory, as if no one but he and Chuck truly had his heart in it.

We were supposed to grow old together, Dolores. Have kids. Take walks under old trees. I wanted to watch the lines etch themselves into your flesh and know when each and every one of them appeared. Die together.

Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.

how do you live with that? How do you tell the wife and the parents and the kids that you’ve done this thing? You’ve executed unarmed people? You’ve killed boys? Boys with guns and uniforms, but boys just the same? Answer is—You can’t tell ’em. They’ll never understand. Because what you did was for the right reason. But what you did was also wrong. And you’ll never wash it off.”

There was no simple answer for that. How did anyone know where faith developed? One moment, it wasn’t there, the next it was. Teddy had known men in war whom he’d trust with his life on a battlefield and yet never with his wallet once they were off it. He’d known men he’d trust with his wallet and his wife but never to watch his back in a fight or go through a door with him.

she was so simply his love, his girl, watching him approach as if she were memorizing him and his walk and those flowers and this moment, and he wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could, when you felt as if you’d been born for only one moment, and this, for whatever reason, was it.