Duran was puzzled by the question. “What about her?”
“You obviously like each other. I was wondering about your relationship.”
A frown from Duran. “She’s the plaintiff. I’m the defendant.”
Shaw smiled. “She says she’s dropped the suit.”
“I guess.”
“Then… perhaps you could stay with her for a while?”
It was Duran’s turn to smile. “I don’t think so,” he told him.
Shaw looked disappointed.
“There are some things… I don’t think Adrienne has talked to you about them, but… the two of us are… kind of in transit…”
“‘In transit’…”
“Yeah. For the foreseeable future.”
Shaw digested this for a moment, then excused himself, and went to the cafeteria line. Returning with a fresh pot of tea, he sat down, and said, “Why don’t we try the pentathol this afternoon? Actually—no. It’s Thanksgiving. My wife would kill me. We’ll save it for tomorrow. Anyway, I’ve got some sailing tapes—”
“Some what?”
“Audio tapes—Sounds of the Sea. Very relaxing. Water lapping against hull, lines rattling, sails snapping, fog horns—the whole nine yards—except you’ll be in a trance. So I guess you could call it ‘the whole ten yards.’”
Shaw was attempting to be funny, but the idea made Duran uncomfortable. Lines rattling. Sails snapping. “Where’d you get something like that?” he asked.
“What?”
“The sounds.”
“New Age Audio. Sixty-third and Lexington.” The psychiatrist swung his head to the side, sipped his tea and grinned. “Am I resourceful, or what?”
It was the jackets that triggered the memories—which was strange, because they never wore the jackets when they sailed. As Shaw had promised, Duran was immersed in the sounds of the ocean, the splash, and rush of water. With his eyes closed and the tape playing, he’d been racing with his friends, adjusting the rudder, falling off a little, judging the optimum heel and reach as they headed for the marker buoy. They were all wearing their jackets and, yet, as everyone knew, they never wore their jackets aboard.
“What ‘jackets’ are you talking about?” Shaw asked.
“Team jackets… not what you wear in competition. They’re what you wear before and after. And around campus.”
They’d already tried to see the campus through Duran’s eyes, to get him to describe its physical layout, the students, buildings, and professors, the names of the buildings, landmarks and statues. But Duran continued to block these efforts, forcing Shaw to focus on the seemingly inconsequential. Insignia printed on pencils and notebooks, area codes, and zipcodes, athletic gear—
And jackets.
“What color are they?”
“Black and white.”
“Black and white. That’s unusual. Are you sure? Are you sure you’re not recalling a photograph? Maybe they’re dark blue.”
“No they’re black. Ink black. White lettering.”
“Tell me about them.”
But Duran was growing more and more uncomfortable. He wanted to shift position, but he couldn’t. To say that his aversion to recalling his past made him freeze was not metaphorical. It was the way his fear manifested itself. He actually felt frozen, both cold and immobile, as if he were encased in ice, his metabolism slowing. Afraid to move, afraid to jar anything loose. But why? A logical sector of his mind was still weighing in on his reactions and it disapproved of his discomfort. How could he be afraid of thinking about jackets? How could jackets be threatening?
“Slow down,” Shaw said. “Describe them some more. Do they button or zip? What is the fabric made of?”
“I can’t think. There’s no room to think.” His sensations had narrowed to: pressure and cold. He had the panicked sensation that his head was being squeezed from all sides by plates of ice, his brain crystallizing.
“You can think. Do they button or zip?”
Nothing.
“Let’s hang the jacket up in your room,” Shaw suggested.
That was easier. The jacket was on a hook, not him. “They zip,” he said.
“Excellent! Is there anything on the front of the jacket? Apart from the zipper?”
“Embroidery”
“What color?”
“White.”
“What is it—the embroidered thing? Letters? A word?” He hesitated. “Your name?”
“It’s a bear,” Duran said, surprising himself as well as the doctor.
“Just the head? Or the whole thing?”
“It’s a bear,” Duran told him.
“A white bear?”
Duran nodded. Speaking seemed to take a huge effort and a long time. “A polar bear.”
“A polar bear,” Shaw said, almost in a whisper. But there was a sense of elation in his words. “Black and white. A polar bear,” Shaw repeated, this time in a louder voice—one that carried a distinct if muted tone of triumph, a tone that filled Duran with dread.
The polar bear was on the front of the jacket. And on the back, which he could now imagine clearly, were the words Bowdoin Sailing. These were the varsity jackets the school provided to its athletes: Bowdoin Sailing, Bowdoin Hockey, Bowdoin Soccer.
“Bowdoin,” Duran said. “Bowdoin College.”
“Ah,” said Shaw. “Of course. Admiral Peary. Polar bears.”
That was where he’d gone to school as an undergraduate: Bowdoin, not Brown. And no wonder he’d gone unrecognized at the Sidwell reunion—because he was a Maine boy, all the way. He remembered now. He’d gone to school in Bethel at the Gould Academy, where his mother had been an English teacher.
And then big segments of his past snapped into focus in a way that made his heart stagger—as if he had been on a long voyage, and the ship’s engine had suddenly cut out. His life passed before his eyes in an instant that unwound for what seemed like hours, and the result was like a near death experience. For a moment—that moment—he was sure he was having a heart attack. But then, the engine started again, and he realized he wasn’t having a heart attack, it was just Lew McBride, coming home to himself after a long absence. For an instant, he was overcome with elation—until an image began to form behind his eyes. An ochre room, a sort of… abattoir, the walls running with blood, and a nonsense thought shrieking through his head: My God, I’ve killed them all.
And then it was gone. The image vanished as quickly as it had come. His eyes flew open, and he found himself where he’d always been, sitting in a comfortable chair across from Doctor Shaw, filled with a wintry mix of joy and desolation. Glad to know who I am, he thought. Sorry it had to be me.
They stayed at it. Now that McBride remembered his name, he was struck by how well it fit. He remembered his mother—his real mother, not the icon in the picture frame at his apartment—lifting him up, and singing, “Hello, yewwwww! Hello, Lewwwww!”
“Wait a second,” Shaw ordered. “I want to flip the tape.”
He’d been Lewis. He’d been Lew. For a while, he’d been Mac—and, as he recalled, there was even a semester when his friends had called him Bridey. But Jeff, which he had answered to just an hour earlier, was as foreign to him as Horatio or Etienne.
“All right, ready to go again,” Shaw told him. “You said your father medalled in the Olympics. Was that it? I mean—that’s fantastic, of course. But, did he ever compete again?”
“No, just the once. He was the first American after Bill Koch to medal in a Nordic event. But he was thirty-four when he took the silver. After that, he worked mostly as a ski instructor.”
“Where?”
“Killington, for a while. Sugarloaf. Stowe. Sunday River would have been handier, but it didn’t exist at the time.”
“That’s in Maine?” Shaw guessed.
“Right. That’s where we lived. In Bethel. Anyway, he’d go off for three or four months—come home midweek, if things were slow. Later, when cross-country caught on, he gave lessons at the Bethel Inn—which is famous for it.”