“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.”