“Maybe Heidi Trumbill is mellowing. John, thanks for getting the law boys onto it and getting that money turned loose for Susan.”
“She should get it by tomorrow.”
“And thanks for getting the court order set up to have the kids stay with Janice.”
“On this money, Trav, I have to escrow it until the estate appraisal is firm next October, but Gloria can borrow against it right here if she needs to. She ought to know that.”
“When I see her this afternoon I’ll see if I can get it through to her.”
In a lounge at the hospital, in a low voice Dr. Hayes Wyatt explained it in layman’s terms. “Think of the senses of sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste as being receptors, Mr. McGee. They have no analytical function. Think of a bundle of wires running from each receptor to the part of the brain which acts as a computer. The psychedelics are disassociative in that they loosen these customary connections between receptors and the analysis function. Messages become false and the analysis unreal. Hallucination. As the period of disassociation ends the connections grow tight again and the subject comes back into his familiar ‘ reality. The massive overdose she took tore all the wiring loose. It has to be fitted back slowly and carefully. To continue the analogy you can say the wiring is hanging free and it is in approximately the right areas, so it touches and brushes the proper connection quite often. But there is a continual hallucination which of course creates terror, so it is best to keep her mildly tranquilized. There are motor defects. She will say a nonsense word when she means to say something quite different. This alarms her too. I think there is a certain amount of progress. I don’t know how long it will continue, or if she will ever get all of the way back.”
“Why did she do it?”
“She remembers wanting to take some. She can’t remember the actual act. Possibly she is a semiaddictive, and even though LSD-25 is not physiologically habit-forming, the addictive personality has a tendency to overdose himself with any escape drug when depressed. She would be dead, of course, if you hadn’t found her when you did. Even then it was terribly close. Try to be perfectly natural with her. Cheerful. Confident. Ignore anything she says or does which seems out of line.”
So I saw her, and her smile came and went too quickly and her eyes were strange. She called me Trav and she called me Howie, and she got scared of something on the bed I couldn’t see. She dug her nails into my wrist and told me in a weak voice, “The cliffs are crooked near the edge. They wouldn’t be that way home. They don’t stop them here. They don’t care.”
I smiled my cheery way out and stopped a little way down the corridor and leaned against the wall, feeling more years than I had, more sourness than I was due.
I hunted up Hayes Wyatt and said, “So wouldn’t she be able to hook those wires up faster where she knew what the hell she was looking at, where she knew the smells and the way things feel, and the sounds?”
“Home? Yes, of course, that would be useful, I think. But I understand that as a practical matter she can’t afford the care she’d need there, much less maintain the house, so I haven’t…”
“But you’d approve it?”
“Certainly, but not right away. A week from now perhaps, with a guarantee she’d be taken…”
So I hauled Janice Stanyard and Susan down to John Andrus’ office. I gave my pitch. “The house is up for sale. Glory’s personal stuff is in storage. Anna Ottlo has gone to Florida. Okay. The court recommended to Mrs. Stanyard here that she find a bigger place. Susan here has the annuity income. Gloria has the insurance income, and she can borrow against the seventy-five she’s got coming if she has to. And Mrs. Stanyard has certain… resources. Financial. Aside from being a trained nurse.”
“Which I insist be used for Susan and the others,” Janice said with great firmness and dignity.
“And,” I continued, “Dr. Hayes Wyatt says that Gloria’s chances are going to be a lot better in familiar surroundings. The house is big enough. It’s a fine house, a fine location. So it makes a crazy menage any way you look at it, but what I say is that Janice and Susan and Glory dump everything into the pot and dig in there, and everything has a lot better chance of working out all the way around.”
So Susan scowled and scowled and then slowly lit up. The last stains of brutality were almost faded away. “Hey!” she said softly. “Hey now!”
And Janice said, “It just might…”
And John said, “I could see my way clear…”
Hayes Wyatt fudged the estimate of time by one day so we could bring her home in the early afternoon on Christmas Day. Heidi and Janice and I and the kids had trimmed the tree the night before. And on the previous day, on Friday the 23rd, I had lost my wits, my judgment, and my self-control in Carson, Pirie, Scott.
She sat in a big chair, blanketed and feet up, and smiled and smiled and smiled, and had some bad times but not as many as we had been told to ex_pect. John Andrus and wife stopped by gift bearing. So did Hayes Wyatt and wife. So, to my surprise, did Roger and Jeanie Geis and their kids. But Heidi told me on the side that she had gone and roughed brother up pretty good. He didn’t like it, but he was there. He endured it. He wore a little obligatory smile.
Janice and Susan and Freddy, the oldest boy, had done a great job of settling them all in.
And so, all turkeyed up and tuckered out, I took the thoughtful snow maiden back to her shelter at 180 East Burton Place, and when she tried to end the evening with a friendly social handshake, I dug her private and special gift out of the car trunk and said that he who bears gifts gets a nightcap. And then she looked even more thoughtful and said she had a gift for me, so I should come on up, but give her a minute or two to wrap it.
Drinks made, she went off and came back in no more than a minute with a plain white envelope. In red ink on the front of it she had written, “A Merry Christmas to Travis McGee.” In green ink she had drawn a small Christmas tree the way children, draw them, in jagged outline.
She sat with brandy snifter in hand, my gift to her on her lap, and said, “You first. It wasn’t going to be a gift. Maybe it isn’t a gift, really.”
I thumbed my gift open. Pale blue bank check. Certified. Eighteen thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars.
“What the hell, Heidi!”
‘Why don’t you just say thanks?“
“But you’re under no oblig…”
“Hush. You explained it all to me. Half is better than nothing at all. You made the deal with Gloria, but you didn’t go through with it. And Roger certainly wouldn’t let go of twenty cents of his when he finally gets it And out of family pride I just couldn’t have you going around thinking of this as the Geis disaster. Please don’t get all stuffy and noble and turn it down.”
“Okay. So I accept it. Thank you very much. But only on condition that I lay a very good morsel of it on our little venture, yours and mine.”
She went pale and her mouth trembled and she said, “But we aren’t really going to…”
“Open your present, girl.”
Her hands shook as she loosened the ribbons and the metallic paper. She stared down into the box. After she had unwrapped, in turn, the sun lotion, the giant beach towel, the big black sunglasses, the little beach coat, she had begun a dangerously hysterical giggling. And when she undid the last item, a bright bawdy little bikini that could probably have been packed into a shot glass without too much of it protruding, she stared at me and said, “But I couldn’t ever wear… ever wear… anything… anything like…”
So hysteria was suddenly tears. Hands to the face. Gifts spilling. The wrenching hopeless hoohaw of vocalized anguish. Went to the lady. Brushed gifts out of the way. Picked her up by the elbows, sat in her chair, lowered her back down onto the lap, hiked her long legs over the chair arm, wedged resistant head into side of my neck, held tight. Said, “There there. There there now.”