It was surreal—standing where Heath had played and eaten and slept as a child.
Twelve years. All spent in these three small rooms.
He’d been isolated from other people, but he hadn’t been held prisoner, not technically. He’d been allowed to roam the grounds, hike into the forest and up the mountain to the overlook. He’d been educated in a broad range of subjects and encouraged to expand his knowledge with books. It wasn’t the confinement that was the problem—plenty of kids were raised in apartments tinier than this one in cities all over the world. It was that he’d been considered a specimen. An object to be observed rather than loved.
If he’d started out an anomaly, a peculiarity of human DNA, at the end he became a freak. Or, at least, that must’ve been how he felt. Just standing in the dingy apartment at Baskens, even I felt like an alien.
Heath had shown me his old bedroom—the one I had thought was the Siefferts’, that was papered in the brown roses. And then through the grass-cloth-papered sitting room. We were in the far room now, and I glanced at Cerny, standing by the chalkboard. I thought of Glenys—Cecelia—out in the rain, stiffening in the wet leaves.
“Where are the police?” I hissed at Heath, acutely aware of the knife in my boot.
“Don’t freak out. They’re on their way. In the meantime, just listen to what he has to say.”
I caught my reflection in the huge mirror over the sideboard. I looked so different now than earlier. Pale and lifeless.
I turned to Cerny. “Tell me about Cecelia.”
“She was my assistant, for many years. We had a brief dalliance, but there was a disagreement—”
Heath snorted. “She was in love with you. And you treated her like shit.”
“It was a mutual decision to part ways. She moved out west. Found a position at another institute, doing research on attachment disorders. And I opened the Baskens Institute.”
“She disappeared, like that, from both of your lives? Then showed up in time for this heartwarming family reunion?”
“I let her know Heath was coming home,” he said. “To try to untangle the past so he could move forward with his future. She came back because she wanted closure, just like I did. Just like Heath. Cecelia was always troubled by what we did. She never got over it.” He nodded at Heath. “She never got over losing him.”
I folded my arms. “Is that why you had to kill her? Because she loved Heath more than you?”
He smiled. “I’ll admit, when she returned to Baskens, I found that I . . . I still had a certain fondness for her. We had a reunion, of sorts. Those were her clothes, of course, that you found in my room.”
Heath looked sharply at me.
“But I assure you, Cecelia’s death was a result of her own actions. She was a troubled woman. Watch the tapes, Daphne. You’ll see.”
I looked down at the iPad. Opened the next file.
Heath’s boyhood unfolded before me. I watched him scream and run. Bang doors, throw lamps, books, and plates. He slammed his head against walls and floors. Toppled chairs, upended tables, urinated in every corner of every room.
There were calm moments too—when he ate or read or did schoolwork. He built birdhouses. On a canvas drop cloth spread on the living-room floor, hammering, sanding, and painting quietly. In these interludes, he appeared focused and relatively content. It looked like he worked on the birdhouses for countless hours.
Cerny cleared his throat. “The birdhouses were one of the primary rewards we used when Heath brushed his teeth or ate his lunch or bathed himself without oppositional behavior. Unfortunately, at some point along the way, he unearthed my old pellet gun and began to use the birds for target practice, shooting them right out of the houses. Needless to say, we had to find another reward.”
Heath had moved closer to the mirror and was staring into it. I wanted to ask him if he’d found that pellet gun again. If—sometime when I was up on the mountain or in the house and couldn’t hear the sound of the shots—he’d taken it to the birds I’d found yesterday. I wondered if he’d gathered them up later, in the weak morning light, dew drenched and cold, and flung them somewhere in the woods. If he’d burned them.
I turned away from him and opened the next file.
Music was the other reward Cerny and Cecelia offered Heath. Cecelia had an old-fashioned boom box, and, in the later years, an iPod attached to a speaker. She usually played music at Heath’s solitary mealtimes, in the dining room, but sometimes she did it at night in his bedroom. As he would settle himself in bed (alone, no kiss, no tuck-in), the room would fill with the strains of Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald. And Frank Sinatra, of course. Lots and lots of the Chairman of the Board.
“I take it you don’t appreciate fish for dinner,” Dr. Cerny’s voice suddenly rang out from the iPad, tinny but clear.
The time stamp at the bottom of the screen showed 9:36 p.m., and the brown floral walls were doused in shadow. They were gathered in the bedroom—Cerny, Cecelia, and what looked to be a young-teen Heath. Heath was sitting in bed, his knees drawn up under the covers. Cerny stood, arms folded, in one corner of the room, Cecelia in another.
Heath didn’t answer Cerny, and Cecelia shifted her weight. There was a strange feeling in the room. Something electric and dangerous even I could feel, just viewing the tape. I glanced at Heath, remembering how strange he’d acted when Reggie Teague had told us our first meal at Baskens would be fish.
On the tape, Heath spoke. “I warned you,” he said, his adolescent voice cracking. Goose bumps broke out on my arms.
“You don’t warn me,” Cerny said. “I’m the adult. I set the rules. You choose to either follow them or break them. Following rules brings rewards. Breaking them results in a zero sum.”
“I told you,” Heath said. “And I told Mom.”
“Cecelia.”
“Mom.” Heath’s voice was edged with an ominous tone.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Cecelia interjected. “Give him the music, Matthew. He’s tired, and he’s making an effort.”
“I’m making an effort,” Heath parroted.
Cerny folded his arms. “I disagree. You’re not making an effort. You’re mocking me.”
“Matthew—” Cecelia said.
Cerny held up his hand. “Let him advocate for himself. This is good practice. The world is full of people, Sam, and you are going to have to absorb this lesson—if not in your heart, in your head. How to negotiate with them. How to give them what they want sometimes. How to let them win. Others deserve to get what they want just as much as you do. You said you believed that. Do you?”
Heath said nothing.
“I didn’t ask if you felt happy about it or if you liked it. It’s called a cognitive moral conscience. You don’t have to feel things to know they are true. Do you agree, Sam, on principle, that others deserve to win occasionally?”
Heath didn’t answer. Cecelia, agitated, fussed with the buttons on her blouse.
“From time to time, out there in the real world, you may be given food you don’t particularly enjoy—fish, perhaps. Maybe even, dear God, liver. But because you value the person who prepared it for you, because you need something from that person who took the time to buy and prepare the fish or liver or what-have-you, you eat it. And while you are eating it, you pretend to experience enjoyment. You pretend to relish it. You feign gratitude. And after you have eaten it, you thank the person.”
Heath dropped back on the pillows with a loud huff.
“You do not throw the plate against the wall and grind the fish into an expensive hand-knotted wool rug with your foot.”
“Am I allowed to say, at any time, politely—honestly—that I don’t fucking like fish?”
“You can say anything you like, Sam. We’ve gone over this again and again. But if you want more . . . if you wish to override your particular brain wiring and genetic markers . . . appear like other neurotypicals around you—”
“Sheep,” Heath muttered.
Cerny drew a slow breath. “If you desire lasting connections with neurotypicals . . .”
The two stared at each other—man versus nearly-man.
“You will not throw your dinner,” Cerny finished. After a beat he nodded curtly at Cecelia. “No music tonight,” he said and left.
There was a long period of silence, then Cecelia switched off the lamp on top of the dresser. She walked to the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress.
“Go away,” Heath said, his voice muffled by the pillow.
She put out her pale, slender hand, letting it hover over Heath’s motionless form like she was casting some sort of spell. After a few seconds, she lowered it slowly, rested it on his back. It was possible I was imagining it, but I could swear I saw Heath’s body go rigid under her touch. She sat that way for a couple more moments, staring down at her hand on Heath’s back as if it was something disconnected from the rest of her body.
After a while she spoke. “Heath? My darling Heathcliff. It’s your Catherine. And if you’ll just thank me for the fish, I’ll give you a back rub.”
He lifted his head from the pillow, but it wasn’t tearstained. It was flat. Hard.
“Do you want to give me a back rub?” he said. His voice was a mocking singsong, and she didn’t answer. “Tell me, Catherine, does it make you feel like we’re connected?”
She lifted a shoulder. “It does. A little bit.”
“And you like that?”
“I do, Heath. I enjoy feeling connected to you.”
“Must be nice. The doctor doesn’t think I can ever experience an authentic, noncognitive connection with another human being.” One side of his mouth curled. “Do you?”
“I . . .” She faltered.
“Be honest.”
“I hope so, for your sake. So you can know how it feels. It’s wonderful to feel love for another person. For your child.” She touched his arm. Her voice was barely more than a whisper. “Heathcliff. Just thank me for the fish. Won’t you? Won’t you do that for me? So you can have a back rub?”
A long pause. And then his subdued voice—
“I enjoyed the fish. It was delicious. Thank you, Catherine.”
I couldn’t tell if he’d capitulated or if he was mocking her. If he’d won or lost the battle.
She looked up at the camera—the one recording everything I was seeing—and then slipped off the bed. Grabbing a blanket from a chair, she walked toward the camera and covered the lens. Everything went dark.
But after a few seconds, the picture reappeared—bobbling, filled with sounds of fumbling and from a different angle. The angle was shot from the far room, the camera aimed through the sitting room into the open door of the bedroom. The camera zoomed in and focused on Heath’s bed.
I stared in shock. “It’s a two-way mirror,” I blurted.
In the dining room, Heath rapped on the mirror hanging over the buffet with one knuckle. “There’s an observation room on the other side of the wall. Where the doctor could monitor me in a more direct way. I didn’t know about it, not until much later.” He cut his eyes at Cerny. “But Cecelia did, even though sometimes she liked to pretend she didn’t. So she could push the good doctor’s buttons. Isn’t that right, Cerny? She did always enjoy playing us against each other.”
Disgust twisted through me. The sound was still being recorded. Cecelia hadn’t shut that off. And even from this distance and angle, it was clear from Cerny’s camera that she’d started to rub Heath’s back. Exactly what a mother might do to lull her son to sleep. And singing to him the way a mother would croon a lullaby—only it was a goddamn Sinatra song.
“Human contact wasn’t part of the treatment,” Heath said as I watched. “The operant conditioning meant neither of them could touch me in an affectionate, familial way, because showing warmth or affection could skew the results of the case study.”
“That’s abuse,” I said.
“B. F. Skinner would disagree,” Cerny said.
“Well, Skinner put rats in boxes to neutralize their environment,” Heath said drily. “So . . .”
The doctor held out his hands, a conciliatory gesture. “Look, Daphne, I understand how cold and unfeeling our experiment must appear to you. But it was rooted in solid science. The research Cecelia and I were doing was based on Skinner’s time-honored, research-based theories. He called it behavior shaping through operant conditioning. It involves a very particular schedule of positive and negative reinforcement and necessitated a truly, wholly isolated subject.”
“But he was a child,” I protested.
Cerny forged on. “Heath’s home life was unpredictable, chaotic. His birth mother was loving at times, neglectful and overly harsh at others. The truth is, if he’d remained in the home, Heath would’ve probably ended up as an adult with a slew of mental-health issues and a treatment-resistant personality disorder. Probably in prison. Cecelia and I gave him a second chance at life. We removed him from that environment and brought him to Baskens, a place where all his basic needs were provided and variables were controlled.”
The preposterousness of what I was hearing was just starting to sink in. My mouth felt dry, my lungs constricted. I kept picturing the knife in my boot. I imagined what would happen if I pulled it out. Brandished it in Cerny’s face. I saw myself aiming for his neck. Slashing. Blood everywhere.
Cerny’s voice jarred me out of my fevered daydream. “It was profound work, what we were endeavoring to do. If we were successful with Heath, imagine the impact. Children with antisocial precursors, like oppositional defiant disorder or conduct disorder, could be flagged for early intervention and offered treatment. Families could be restored, marriages rescued, lives saved. The world would never again have another Mengele or Jack the Ripper or Jeffrey Dahmer. Psychopaths could learn to assimilate, to contribute to society, just like Heath has done.”
I glanced at Heath. His body was tense, back curled.
“But what about the nightmares?” I asked. “If your experiment was so successful, why was he waking up every night, screaming and ripping bedsheets and breaking windows?”
Cerny furrowed his brows. “I don’t know. The nightmares could have something to do with what Cecelia did. The way she interfered with the study. She broke protocol. It was very damaging to our work.”
It was ridiculous, the assertion that Cecelia attempting to show Heath a shred of kindness could cause nightmares. Cerny was delusional, at the least. But we needed to keep him talking, and I was curious.
“Why didn’t you fire her?” I asked him.
Heath and Cerny exchanged a brief glance.
“I considered it. There were mitigating factors.”
“Would you like to see it?” Heath said suddenly. “The observation room on the other side of the mirror?”
He had turned his back to us and was staring at his reflection in the gilt-framed mirror. He was so beautiful, this man. This survivor of an unimaginable childhood. How was it that he could even stand here, in this space, and not break down completely? I felt a pain grip my heart, so that I could barely breathe.
“I would,” I said.
Heath led me back out into the hall, through the pocket doors. Under the attic stairs, he reached up to the top corner of the small door and slid a bolt lock open. He jostled the door in a practiced way, yanking the knob up and out, and the door swung open.
“The doctor kept files in here. A camera. He kept it bolted so I couldn’t get in. Later, when I was older and I figured out it was here, he padlocked it, because he knew I’d destroy it if I had the chance.” He put a hand on my arm. “I’m glad you’re seeing it, Daphne. I’m glad you’re finally seeing everything.”
I entered the small room and stood very still, letting my eyes adjust to the dark. Inside wasn’t much—just a dusty, dark cubicle with a sharply pitched ceiling above one metal desk and a metal chair, identical to the one in the attic surveillance room. The far wall was dominated by a large, smoky pane of glass—the reverse side of the mirror. I could see, in the dim half light, Dr. Cerny standing in the room on the opposite side, hands in his pockets, a thoughtful look on his face. He was staring directly at me. Staring but not seeing.
I was suddenly acutely aware of Heath’s body next to me. I could feel heat emanating from him, a human heart pumping blood, and cells responding. This man was more than just a set of learned behaviors, fossilized by years of conditioning. Surely inside him there was a glimmer of empathy. Of love. It couldn’t have all been an act. We weren’t an act.
“This is where he preferred to watch me,” he said. “The cameras were always running, one to a room, but I think he preferred this old-school setup. He told me once, later, when I was older, that he could tell what I was feeling by the way I moved around the room, the way I breathed and blinked my eyes. He said he could sit all day and night, watching my brain at work.”
“Jesus.” I shook my head. “So you’ve been back in contact with him? For how long?”
He took my hand. “Do you want to know the truth, Daphne? Really? All of it?”
I was paralyzed, unable to make any kind of reasonable decision about which path to take. It was like my brain had suddenly dumped all its storehouse of information and in doing so, lost the ability to decide. Was there anything I could do to escape this nightmare and still be with Heath? I didn’t know. I had absolutely no halfway-reasonable frame of reference for any of this.
“If you do,” he continued, “then watch the rest of that video.”
I still didn’t move.
“But only if you want to.”
Which, all of a sudden, because of the glint of his eyes in the dark and the broken sound of his voice, I found I wanted to. I tapped the screen, and the video sprang to life.
From the perspective of Cerny’s camera behind the two-way mirror, I could tell Cecelia was still rubbing Heath’s back and singing Sinatra in her soft, clear voice. Instantly, all my hackles went back up, but I told myself not to flinch or look away. It was important to Heath—to us—that I watch it all. At last, when Cecelia finished the song and turned off the light beside Heath’s bed, she bent over him.
“She kissed you good night,” I said, surprised.
“She’d been doing it for a while, in secret. She sometimes hugged me when he wasn’t looking. Ruffled my hair. Nothing out of line in the eyes of normal people, but at Baskens, a mortal sin.”
He jutted his chin at the iPad. On-screen, Cecelia was closing the door between the bedroom and sitting room, then she walked toward the dining room. Slowly, purposefully, defiantly, her gaze fixed on the two-way mirror and the camera Cerny had aimed at her.
“She was messing with him,” I said.
And then, after a couple of seconds, she veered out one of the side doors that led to the main hallway. Inside the observation room, Cerny turned the camera, and the room where we were standing now materialized on-screen.
It was still and silent for a beat, then the door banged open. Cecelia stood in backlight, ferocious and ready for battle. Off camera, Cerny began a slow-clap.
“Bravo, darling,” he said. “Nine years of work, nine years of grueling, tedious, groundbreaking work, compromised. All because of your pathetic maternal yearnings.”
He stood, crossing into the frame. Cecelia squared her shoulders.
“He’s a child, Matthew. A human, who will, one day, hopefully, be able to survive in a world of other humans. He needs to understand how to move among them. To relate to them on more than an intellectual level.”
“We agreed on the terms of the treatment.”
“To thrive, a child needs warmth.”
“No,” Cerny snapped. “You need warmth. And it disappoints me to see how easily you will sacrifice your scientific ethics in order to get it.”
He moved closer to her, and I could hear her swallow audibly in response. Her body tensed as he spoke again.
“I was very clear with you that I needed an assistant who possessed the discipline and endurance to grapple with the complexities of a difficult project. You told me you would be that person.”
“And I am,” Cecelia said. “But you can’t keep treating me this way. I’ve done everything you wanted. Given up my life. Given you everything I had . . .”
He was so close to her, their bodies were touching. I could see she was trembling as he laid his palm on her face, then moved it to cup her chin.
“You still go down to the creek, don’t you?” he asked. “To stare at those goddamn trees. To wallow in the past, to mourn the things you can’t ever have.”
“They’re a memorial, Matthew.” Her voice was breaking now. “For the children. Our children.”
“Not our children, Cecelia. Cells, that’s all. Cells that never developed.”
She let out a whimper. “It’s hard for me. Be patient, please. I can be what you need.”
“You can’t,” he roared, grabbing her face and squeezing it. “You’ve already compromised everything. We are scientists, Cecelia. We deal in facts. In quantifiable data, not in yearnings of the soul. We don’t play house. We don’t pretend to be Heathcliff and Cathy. We do important work that will change the course of psychiatry forever. That could change the understanding of mental health universally. And you so cavalierly throw it away? If you’re so pathetic, so desperate for the touch of a—”
“Please—”
“—another human being, then go down to town and find yourself one of those mouth breathers sitting at the bar, drinking beer and dreaming they’re the ones running the football down the field.”
He still had her face clenched in his hands, and now he’d shoved her up against the wall. I saw a tear slip down her cheek, then her hands rise up to press against his chest. Only she wasn’t trying to push him away—instead she seemed to be caressing him.
“He’s your son, isn’t he?” she said. “Yours and that woman’s—”
“Oh my God! Cecelia, no! Listen to yourself! I’ve told you a million times, I found that woman through an ad in the newspaper. The boy is not my son. He is ours. Ours. And, if you remember, we made a pact to help him . . . regardless of how difficult it got. We promised to help this boy, and disregard our weaknesses and desires and endless longing to receive love in return—”
She swung at him, awkwardly, catching him on the side of the face with her open palm, but he caught her hand. Then, pushing her against the door, he pressed forward and kissed her. She let him. In fact, she opened herself to him, softening, throwing her arms around him as he ground her against the door. The camera captured it all, the whole torrid moment, but as I watched, something occurred to me. Something I hadn’t thought to ask Heath this whole time.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why didn’t you ever tell anyone what they did to you? Why didn’t you call the police?”
There was no answer.
He was gone. Just as I realized it, I saw the door shut and heard the unmistakable sound of a bolt sliding into the lock.