Jamie said brokenly, “I knew this was going to happen. I didn’t get a doctor for her because I was afraid she’d be sent away.”
Al said, “Doc, maybe we ought to take you.”
Dr. Wiss smiled bleakly. He put his knuckles under Jamie’s chin, lifted his face, leaned over and said, “Jamie, we know all about the reports you write on her. We know all about the way you cut yourself. We know what you’re trying to do to her.”
She watched Jamie’s face. The light hit it squarely. The gray eyes slowly glazed.
The right arm moved like a thick snake. Dr. Wiss arched back and fell heavily. The stool spun, hit the smaller policeman across the shins with such force that he toppled across it.
Jamie seemed to fall across the policeman, but when he rolled into a crouching position he held a heavy revolver. Jamie made a flickering motion at Al with the gun and backed toward the door. He gave Fan a curiously dead look, and he was gone.
The moment he was out of sight the kitchen exploded with the silver shrill of Al’s whistle. Dr. Wiss stirred and sat up. He started to speak, and Al held up his hand for silence. They heard it. The slam of a shot and an answering shot almost on top of it. Al and the smaller policeman ran for the door.
Dr. Wiss moved to catch Fan as she swayed.
Al walked slowly when he came back. He looked at Wiss and said, “Frenchy heard the whistle just before Mr. Lowndes showed. He drew and yelled for him to drop his gun. Instead the guy takes a snap at Frenchy and — well — he ducked right into Frenchy’s return. Frenchy meant to get him in the legs. He got him too good when the guy ducked through.”
Fan stood and her heart seemed wrapped in tiny strands of glass. She couldn’t take a breath because that would break the strands. But something inside her spun and fell and she was hammering at the chest of Dr. Wiss with both hands. She couldn’t curse him because of the sounds which filled her throat, halfway between tears and laughter.
It was a quiet room and the days were beyond counting, oddly mixed up with the sting of a needle in her arm and then the slow sway down into darkness.
The bright kitchen was a clear square of memory against the blackness. But it had moved off so that the tiny figures who did unbelievable things in that kitchen were no longer real but seemed only tiny theater people, performing over and over again the same incredible drama.
Jamie was a far-away sadness and he could smile into her dreams out of the night.
In the sunlit morning, while she was propped up and idly turning the pages of a picture magazine they had brought her, Dr. Wiss came in. He sat beside the bed and his calm was something which seemed to reach out and hold her.
“It was Jamie who was mad,” she said.
“Sick is a better word, Fan. He’d been sick for a long time. I knew it when I read those notes.”
“But why? Why?” she asked helplessly.
“A feeling of inadequacy probably. I believe that he hated and resented you. And I suspect that he might have killed you had he not thought of this other means of removing you.”
Fan shivered. “But they wouldn’t have... put me away for good.”
“Who can tell? You’re sensitive, emotional. And his actions would have given you an almost insoluble problem. Who knows how any of us would react?”
Something unguarded in his tone made her turn quickly and look at him. There was a pleading about him, but as she looked at him he quickly assumed the mask of calm.
She said, “I’ll talk plainly this time. I’m going away and by myself I’m going to heal up the open hurts. When they’re healed, I’m going to ignore any scars there may be. It may take a long while. But when I feel whole again, I’m going to come back here.”
Their eyes met for a few seconds. He touched her hand — so briefly that he seemed hardly to have touched it at all. He left the room. Fan turned on her side and put the hand he had touched under her cheek and closed her eyes.
