Chapter 10

Holly finds herself driving the Coastal Highway without a destination in mind.

After she left Elaine’s home, Holly repeatedly tried Aaron’s phone but couldn’t reach him. As she drove back toward her office, her pulse hammered in her ears and her breathing sped up. She could sense the first panic attack in years creeping up on her. As she saw it, she had two choices: return to her office and self-medicate or get the hell out of Laguna. She opted for the latter.

After fifteen minutes of aimless driving, her phone rings. She taps the button on the steering wheel to answer, and Aaron’s first words are “Three missed calls, Holl? What’s wrong?”

“It backfired, Aaron! Elaine is going public.”

“She can’t do that.”

“There’s no way to stop her.”

“There must be,” he says flatly.

“There’s no dissuading her. Her delusion is fixed. It’s her new cause célèbre. Her hill to die on.”

“Let me try.”

“God no!” Holly punches her steering wheel. “That would be way over the line.”

“Surely, we’ve moved a little beyond ethical concerns by this point, Holl?”

She isn’t sure if he’s implying that her ethics have been questionable all along or that it’s too late to worry about them now. “OK, forget about ethics, Aaron. Practically speaking, it could make everything so much worse if you were to go see her.”

“Don’t take this wrong, Holl, but how could things get much worse?”

“Elaine would know I betrayed her confidentiality. Or worse, she could legitimately accuse me of trying to intimidate her into silence. The optics are beyond horrible.”

Aaron’s sigh reverberates through the speakers. “Then you need to lawyer up. Immediately.”

“What can an attorney do at this point?”

“He can send a cease-and-desist letter. Let her know just how much she would be risking by libeling you. How it could ruin her financially and destroy her reputation. After all, who would take her seriously as an advocate after crying wolf like that?”

Holly knows he’s right. She has already thought about talking to a lawyer. For a fleeting moment, she even considered reaching out to Reese, wondering if her preexisting relationship with Elaine might be advantageous. But Holly dismisses the thought as desperate and wildly inappropriate. Still, even though she’s convinced she didn’t cross any professional lines with Elaine, the thought of muzzling her vulnerable and hurting client through a lawyer makes Holly feel slimy. Like one of those weasels before #MeToo who used NDAs and other legal threats to silence their victims.

“I know just the guy,” Aaron goes on. “I’ll reach out to him. He’ll straighten it out.”

Holly ignores the slight doubt in his voice, focusing instead on her gratitude. Despite her ambivalence about their marriage and the gravitational life forces that have been pulling them apart for years, her husband is always there when she needs him most. “Thank you, Aaron. You have no idea…” Only the lump in her throat stops her from adding, “I love you.”

After Holly disconnects, she spots the signs for the turnoff to Dana Point and decides to drop in on her grandfather again. She parks in front of the house and lets herself inside, where she finds Walter in the kitchen, boiling water for his afternoon tea.

“Hello, Koala,” he says with a big smile.

“It’s all gone to crap, Papa,” she says as she plops down on a chair at the kitchen table. She hugs her knees to her chest, like she did when she was a teenager, as she pukes out the story of her confrontation with Elaine.

Walter doesn’t comment. Instead, he turns to the cupboard and pulls down another mug. He opens a packet and dissolves it in hot water before placing it in front of her. The hot chocolate is too sweet and far too processed for her taste. But it reminds her of childhood, which is exactly what she needs right now. “I’m sorry, Papa,” she murmurs into her cup.

He sits down across from her. “For what, my darling?”

“The harm I might’ve done. To the whole psychedelic therapy movement.”

Walter dismisses it with a small wave. “This isn’t your fault, Koala.”

And Holly knows she has come to the right place. “The waiting is the worst. Like being trapped in a glass house with a hurricane barreling down on you.”

He chuckles. “Someone’s got a flair for the dramatic.”

“You know how these things go.”

“You didn’t do anything inappropriate. Frankly, the whole thing is ludicrous.”

“Doesn’t matter. My client is a professional victims’ advocate. She knows how to make a splash.”

“With such a flimsy allegation?”

“Once it gets out, it will be impossible to stuff that genie back into the bottle. Even if the allegations are discredited, the damage will be done. My practice—what’s left of it, anyway—will never be the same.”

“About the MDMA, Holly. You protected yourself, right? Your clients procured their own medicine and signed waivers?”

“Of course.”

“This client, she hasn’t spoken out yet, has she?”

Holly shakes her head.

“Maybe she’s having second thoughts?”

“If you’d seen her eyes, you’d know better.”

“Have you spoken to a lawyer?”

“Aaron’s working on that.”

Walter lays a tremulous hand on her wrist. “You’ve weathered worse, Koala.”

Holly’s eyes fill with tears, but she blinks them away. “Even if I have, I’m not sure I can do it again.”

“You’re stronger than you think. Always have been.”

“And you’re blind when it comes to me.”

He lets go of her wrist. “That’s what macular degeneration will do.”

“Not funny.” Holly hates it when her grandfather jokes about his frailty. She can’t bear the thought of losing him, though she realizes he won’t be able to live on his own for much longer. And she knows that for Walter, losing his independence would be worse than death.

They sip their drinks in silence. Finally, Walter uses both hands to push himself up from the table. “You know what might help?”

“What’s that?” Holly asks, although she already has an inkling of what he has in mind.

“I’m too old and feeble to take you back to Peru. But maybe I can get you there in spirit?”

The comment confirms her suspicions. “Really, Papa?”

“Come,” Walter says as he shuffles out of the room, heading toward the solarium at the back of the house.

She follows him into the bright sunroom and, after he points to the black beanbag chair in the corner, drops down onto it.

Walter slides an LP out of its sleeve and places it on the turntable. Soon, the sweep of orchestral strings fills the room, and Holly recognizes the soothing melody for the first movement of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, one of their favorites.

Walter opens a decorative black box near the turntable and extracts a long, slim silver canister.

She laughs out loud. “Since when do you vape?”

“My eyesight’s not good enough to pack a pipe. Besides, the fingers are too arthritic. This wouldn’t be my first choice, but these vape pens come preloaded with predictable doses.”

She nods to the pen. “DMT, right?”

“Yes, dimethyltryptamine. The active ingredient of ayahuasca.”

She exhales. “The God Molecule.”

“Nonsense. What a loopy term for a neuroactive biochemical,” Walter grumbles. “Then again, it’s not solely hippies and psychonauts who are prone to such hyperbole. The Incans used to call ayahuasca the ‘spirit vine.’?”

“Speaks to its potency, doesn’t it?”

“I’d brew you a tea like we used to drink in Peru, but that would take hours and hours to have any effect.”

“But smoking DMT is so intense. Way more powerful than LSD or ketamine.”

“True. But it has a very quick onset and then offset. The whole trip will last thirty minutes or less. With any luck it will reboot your mind. Reframe your thoughts. Perhaps it’s exactly what you need right now?”

Holly can practically see herself as an eighteen-year-old, sitting cross-legged on a patch of dirt under a dense canopy of leaves across from her curandero, her trip guide, who wore the same traditional Peruvian chullo hat and alpaca-wool sweater every day. She vividly recalls the brilliant visions that swirled inside her head soon after she drank the earthy, bitter ayahuasca tea. Her father was central to those visions. She remembers how her chest warmed at the glowing sight of him. And how he repeatedly told her, in the most loving and conciliatory tone, that she wasn’t responsible for the car crash that killed him.

At the time, the visions felt so real that Holly accepted her dad’s reassurances as fact. They freed her from the spiral of self-recrimination and suicidal thoughts. She returned home from Peru a different person. Almost whole. But since the ayahuasca had never conjured specific memories of the accident itself, in time doubt began to creep back in. More and more, Holly wondered if the exoneration her dad offered her in those visions was simply the product of her wishful imagination. And she coped the only way she knew how: by avoiding thoughts of the accident and never seeking out details of what actually happened that day.

Walter now holds the vape pen out to her, and Holly hesitates a moment before she takes it between her fingers. He digs in a drawer behind him and pulls out a black blindfold, which Holly also accepts and then slips over her forehead.

He eases himself down into the chair across from her. “I’ll be here for you, Koala.”

“My curandero?”

“I wish I were as qualified.” He chuckles. “No. I’ll simply be your trip sitter.”

Holly holds the pen near her lips, feeling unexpectedly nervous all of a sudden. “Two long inhales, right?”

“Yes.” Walter smiles. “Find your safe and happy place.”

Holly can only smile to herself. Being here with her grandfather is one of her happiest—and safest—places.

She exhales and then brings the pen to her lips, tasting the cool tip. She sucks in fully, feeling the burn of the smoke as it snakes down her windpipe. Fighting off a cough, she holds her breath, keeping the chemicals trapped in her lungs for as long as possible. She blows out a white puff of smoke and then launches into a coughing fit. The unexpectedly acrid stench makes her eyes water.

“Stinks, doesn’t it?” Walter chuckles.

As soon as Holly catches her breath, she inhales a second long puff. Then she lowers the mask over her eyes. Everything goes dark around her.

“Go back to the forest, Koala.”

Holly can’t tell if it’s her imagination, but her grandfather’s voice already sounds distorted. “Remember how the branches were everywhere?” he asks. “So thick you couldn’t see the sun or the sky above.”

A vision begins to take shape. But it’s not a forest. Lights of every color surround her. Like a tunnel made from a prism. At first, the lights weave and bend in synchrony with the strings and horns of the orchestra. And then they turn into streaks as Holly suddenly shoots down a tunnel past them, as if fired out of a cannon. But the movement feels so calm and tranquil, more like floating in a warm bath than rocketing through space.

Suddenly, the lights explode above her, and she’s standing under the crescendo of fireworks. For a moment, there’s only darkness again. Then something slowly materializes out of the blackness, as though the individual molecules are bonding right in front of her eyes to take the shape of something. No, not something. Someone. But the form isn’t entirely human. His whole body is translucent. And while Holly can make out his facial features, she can also somehow see his brain behind it. And his beating heart inside his chest.

He takes a step toward her. As he flexes his knees, she can see the muscles under the skin of his legs contract against the bones. But she feels no fear. Only love. She opens her arms to welcome him.

Hollycopter.

Even if he hadn’t uttered the nickname that he alone used for her, she would have recognized him. She can feel his presence as strongly as a warm breeze against her cheek.

Daddy!

I’m here, Holly.

Where is here?

With you. Wherever you are. Wherever you go.

Joy overwhelms her. An ecstasy which is almost painful in its intensity. You are, Dad?

Always, Hollycopter.

She feels the wet warmth of her own tears soaking the bottom of her blindfold, and remembers that she has a body, anchored to the earth by gravity. The accident, Dad… was it my fault?

No, Hollycopter.

Tell me what happened, Daddy! I can’t remember.

Something else appears beside her father’s ethereal form, and he turns toward it. It’s made entirely of light, and yet also looks familiar. Then she places it. The old family station wagon! Suddenly, the vehicle bursts into flames, and Holly recoils from the intense heat of the blaze.

But the raging fire doesn’t deter her father. He approaches it. Holly lunges to try to stop him, but her feet won’t budge. All she can do is wave her hands frantically.

No, no, no, Daddy. Don’t!

He flashes her a smile that is love incarnate.

And then he slowly lowers himself inside the flaming vehicle.