Ashley Bell Read online

  She woke at dawn and stood at the bedroom window, yawning and watching the still-submerged sun announce its approach with banners of coral-pink light, until at last it surfaced and cruised westward. She liked sunrises. Beginnings. Each day started with such promise. Anything good could happen. For Bibi the word disappointment was reserved for evenings, and only if the day had truly, totally sucked. She was an optimist. Her mother had once said that, given lemons, Bibi wouldn’t make lemonade; she would make limoncello.

  Silhouetted against the morning blue, the distant mountains seemed to be ramparts protecting the magic kingdom of Orange County from the ugliness and disorder that plagued so much of the world these days. Across the California flatlands, the tree-lined street grids and numerous parks of south county’s planned communities promised a smooth and tidy life of infinite charms.

  Bibi needed more than a mere promise. At twenty-two, she had big dreams, though she didn’t call them dreams, because dreams were wish-upon-a-star fantasies that rarely came true. Consequently, she called them expectations. She had great expectations, and she could see the means by which she would surely fulfill them.

  Sometimes she was able to imagine her future so clearly that it almost seemed as if she had already lived it and was now remembering. To achieve your goals, imagination was almost as important as hard work. You couldn’t win the prize if you couldn’t imagine what it was and where it might be found.

  Staring at the mountains, Bibi thought of the man she would marry, the love of her life now half a world away in a place of blood and treachery. She refused to fear too much for him. He could take care of himself in any circumstances. He was not a fairy-tale hero but a real one, and the woman who would be his wife had an obligation to be as stoic as he was about the risks he faced.

  “Love you, Paxton,” she murmured, as she often did, as if that declaration were a charm that would protect him regardless of how many thousands of miles separated them.

  After showering and dressing for the day, after snaring the newspaper from the doorstep, she went into the kitchen just as her programmed coffee machine drizzled the sixth cup into the Pyrex pot. The blend she preferred was fragrant and so rich in caffeine that the fumes alone would cure narcolepsy.

  The vintage dinette chairs featured chrome-plated steel legs and seats upholstered in black vinyl. Very 1950s. She liked the ’50s. The world hadn’t gone crazy yet. As she sat at a chromed table with a red Formica top, paging through the newspaper, she drank her first coffee of the day, which she called her “wind-me-up cup.”

  To compete in an age when electronic media delivered the news long before it appeared in print, the publisher of this paper chose to spend only a few pages on major world and national events in order to reserve space for long human-interest stories involving county residents. As a novelist, Bibi approved. Like good fiction, the best history books were less about big events than about the people whose lives were affected by forces beyond their control. However, for every story about a wife fighting indifferent government bureaucrats to get adequate care for her war-disabled husband, there was another story about someone who acquired an enormous collection of weird hats or who was crusading to be allowed to marry his pet parrot.

  Like her first cup, her second coffee was black, and Bibi drank it as she ate a chocolate croissant. In spite of all the propaganda, she didn’t believe that oceans of coffee or a diet rich in butter and eggs was unhealthy. She ate what she wanted, almost in a spirit of defiance, remaining trim and healthy. She had one life, and she meant to live it, bacon and all.

  As she ate a second croissant, she got a bite that tasted as rancid as spoiled milk. She spat it onto her plate and wiped her tongue with a napkin.

  The bakery she frequented had always been reliable. She could see nothing wrong with the wad of pastry that she had spit out. She sniffed the croissant, but it smelled all right. No visible foreign substance tainted it.

  Tentatively, she took another bite. It tasted fine. Or did it? Maybe the faintest trace of…something. She put down the croissant. She had lost her appetite.

  That day’s newspaper was thick with weird-hat collectors and the like. She put it aside. Carrying a third cup of coffee, she went to her office in the larger of the apartment’s two bedrooms.

  At her computer, when she retrieved the unfinished short story she’d been writing on and off for a few weeks, she stared for a while at her byline: Bibi Blair.

  Her parents had named her Bibi, not because they were cruel or indifferent to the travails of a child saddled with an unusual name, but because they were lighthearted to a fault. Bibi, pronounced Beebee, came from the Old French beubelot, meaning toy or bauble. She was no one’s toy. Never had been, never would be.

  Another name derived from beubelot was Bubbles. That would have been worse. She would have had to change Bubbles to something less frivolous or otherwise become a pole dancer.

  By her sixteenth birthday, she was accustomed to her name. By the time she was twenty, she thought Bibi Blair had a quirky sort of distinction. Nevertheless, sometimes she wondered if she would be taken seriously, as a writer, with such a name.

  She scrolled down the page from the byline and stopped at the second paragraph, where she saw a sentence that needed revision. When she began to type, her right hand served her well, but the left fumbled over the keys, scattering random letters across the screen.

  Her surprise turned to alarm when she realized that she could not feel the keys beneath her spasming fingers. The sense of touch had deserted them.

  Bewildered, she raised the traitorous hand, flexed the fingers, saw them move, but couldn’t feel them moving.

  Although coffee had entirely rinsed away the rancid taste that earlier had spoiled her enjoyment of the second croissant, the same foulness filled her mouth again. She grimaced in disgust and, with her right hand, reached for the coffee. The rim of the cup rattled against her teeth, but the brew once more washed her tongue clean.

  Her left hand slipped off the keyboard, onto her lap. For a moment, she couldn’t move it, and in panic she thought, Paralysis.

  Suddenly a tingling filled the hand, the arm, not that vibratile numbness that followed a sharp blow to the elbow, but a crawling sensation, as if ants were swarming through flesh and bone. As she rolled her chair away from the desk and got to her feet, the tingling spread through the entire left side of her body, from scalp to foot.

  Although Bibi didn’t know what was happening to her, she sensed that she was in mortal peril. She said, “But I’m only twenty-two.”

  Nancy Blair always booked the earliest appointment at Heather Jorgenson’s six-chair salon in Newport Beach because it was her considered opinion that even the best stylists, like Heather, did less dependable work as the day wore on. Nancy would no sooner have her hair cut in the afternoon than she would schedule an after-dinner face-lift.

  Not that she needed plastic surgery. At forty-eight, she looked thirty-eight. At worst thirty-nine. Her husband—Murphy, known to all as Murph—said that if she ever let a cosmetic surgeon mess with her face, he would still love her, but he’d start calling her Cruella de Vil, after the stretched-tight villainess in 101 Dalmatians.

  She had great hair, too, thick and dark, without a fleck of gray. She got it cut every three weeks because she liked to maintain a precise look.

  Her daughter, Bibi, had the same luxurious dark-brown hair, almost black, but Bibi wore hers long. The dear girl was always gently pressing her mother to move on from the short and shaggy style. But Nancy was a doer, a goer, always on the run, and she didn’t have the patience for the endless fussing that was required to look good with a longer do.

  After wetting Nancy’s hair with a spray bottle, Heather said, “I read Bibi’s novel, The Blind Man’s Lamp. I really liked it.”

  “Oh, honey, my daughter has more talent in one pinkie than most other writers have in their fingers and their thumbs.” Even as she made that declaration with unabashed pride, Nancy rea
lized that it was less than eloquent, even a little silly. Whatever the source of Bibi’s talent for language, it hadn’t come with her mother’s genes.

  “It should have been a bestseller,” Heather said.

  “She’ll get there. If that’s what she wants. I don’t know if it is. I mean, she shares everything with me, but she’s guarded about her writing, what she wants. A mysterious girl in some ways. Bibi was mysterious even as a child. She was like eight when she made up these stories about a community of intelligent mice that lived in tunnels under our bungalow. Ridiculous stories, but she could almost make you believe them. In fact, we thought for a while she believed in those damn mice. We almost got her therapy. But we realized that she was just Bibi being Bibi, born to tell stories.”

  As an ardent consumer of magazines that chronicled the lives of celebrities in plenty of photos and minimal prose, Heather perhaps had not heard Nancy after the third sentence of that long ramble. “But, gee, why wouldn’t she want to be a bestseller—and famous?”

  “Maybe she does. But it’s not why she writes. She writes because she has to. She says her imagination is like a boiler that’s all the time building up too much pressure. If she doesn’t let out some of the steam every day, it’ll explode and blow off her head.”

  “Wow.” Heather’s face in the mirror, above Nancy’s face, loomed wide-eyed and chipmunky. She was a cute girl. She would have been even cuter if she’d had her upper incisors brought into line with braces.

  “Bibi doesn’t mean that literally, of course. Her head isn’t going to explode any more than there were intelligent mice living under our bungalow back in the day.”

  Heather’s insistent teeth lent a comic quality to her expression of concern. She was adorable.

  Murph had once declared that if a girl was cute enough, some men found an overbite sexy. Ever since, Nancy had been wary of any attractive woman in her husband’s life who needed orthodontal work. Murph had never met Heather. If Nancy had anything to say about it, he never would. Not that he cheated. He didn’t. He wouldn’t. Maybe he didn’t believe that his wife would castrate him with bolt cutters, as she’d sworn she would, but he was smart enough to know that the consequences of infidelity would be ugly.

  “Close your eyes,” Heather said, and Nancy closed them, and the spray bottle of water made a spritzing sound. Then a little fragrant mousse. Then a final blow-dry and shaping with a brush.

  When her hair was done, it was perfect, as always. Heather was such a talented cutter, she wouldn’t refer to herself as a beautician or a hairstylist. Her card identified her as a coiffeuse, and that little pretension, so Newport Beach, was in her case justified.

  Nancy paid and tipped. She was assuring her coiffeuse that she would pass along the good review of The Blind Man’s Lamp to the author when she was interrupted by her phone’s current ringtone—a few bars of that old Bobby McFerrin song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” She checked the caller ID, took the call, and said, “Bibi, baby.”

  As if from beyond some barrier more formidable than distance, Bibi said, “Mom, something’s wrong with me.”

  Bibi was sitting in a living-room armchair, her purse on her lap, trying to dispatch the creepy head-to-foot tingling sensation with positive thinking, when her mother burst into the apartment as if she were leading a style-police SWAT team intent on ferreting out people wearing unimaginative coordinated ensembles. Nancy looked splendidly eclectic in a supple-as-cloth black-leather sports-jacket-cut men’s coat from St. Croix, an intricately patterned ecru top by Louis Vuitton, black Mavi jeans with subtle and carefully crafted areas of wear, and black-and-red athletic shoes by some designer whose name Bibi could not recall.

  She didn’t share her mother’s obsession with fashion, as her off-brand jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt attested.

  As Nancy crossed the room toward the armchair, a rush of words spilled from her. “You’re pale, you’re positively gray, oh, my God, you look terrible.”

  “I do not, Mom. I look normal, which spooks me worse than if I were stone-gray with bleeding eyes. How can I look normal and have these symptoms?”

  “I’m going to call nine-one-one.”

  “No, you’re not,” Bibi said firmly. “I’m not going to make a spectacle of myself.” Using her good right hand, she pushed herself up from the chair. “Just drive me to the hospital ER.”

  Nancy looked at her daughter as she might have regarded some pathetic truck-stricken creature lying crippled at the side of a highway. Her eyes blurred with tears.

  “Don’t you dare, Mother. Don’t you cry at me.” Bibi indicated a small drawstring bag beside the armchair. “Can you get that for me? It’s pajamas, toothbrush, overnight things in case I have to stay till tomorrow. No way I’m going to wear one of those tie-in-the-back hospital gowns with my butt hanging out.”

  Her voice as quivery as aspic, Nancy said, “I love you so much.”

  “I love you, too, Mom.” Bibi started toward the door. “Come on, now. I’m not afraid. Not much. You always say, ‘It’ll be what it’ll be.’ Say it, so live it. Let’s go.”

  “But if you’ve had a stroke, we should call nine-one-one. Every minute matters.”

  “I haven’t had a stroke.”

  Hurrying ahead of her daughter, opening the door but blocking the exit, Nancy said, “On the phone, you told me your left side is paralyzed—”

  “Not paralyzed. Tingling. As if fifty cell phones, set on mute, were taped to my body, vibrating all at once. And my left hand is a little weak. That’s all.”

  “Sounds like a stroke. How do you know it isn’t?”

  “It’s not a stroke. My speech isn’t slurred. My vision’s okay. No headache. No confusion. And I’m only twenty-two, damn it.”

  Nancy’s expression softened from anxious dread to what might have been chagrin as she realized that she was alarming rather than assisting her daughter. “Okay. Yes, you’re right. I’ll drive you.”

  The third-floor apartments opened onto a covered balcony, and Bibi kept her right hand on the railing as they moved toward the north end. A pleasantly cool day. Songbirds celebrating. In the courtyard, the palms and ferns rustled faintly in the mild breeze. Phantom silvery fish of sunlight schooled back and forth across the water in the swimming pool, and the simple scene was profoundly beautiful as it had never appeared to her before.

  When they came to the end of the balcony, Nancy said, “Honey, are you sure you can do stairs?”

  The open iron staircase featured pebbled-concrete treads. The symmetry of the stairs, the grace with which they descended to the courtyard, qualified them as sculpture. Bibi had not previously seen the stairs as art; the prospect of perhaps never seeing them again must have given her this new perspective.

  “Yeah, I can do stairs,” Bibi impatiently assured her mother. “I just can’t dance down them.”

  She negotiated flight after flight without a serious incident, except that three times her left foot did not move when it should have, and she needed to drag it from one tread to the next.

  In the parking lot, as they approached a BMW with vanity license plates that announced TOP AGENT, Nancy started for the front passenger door, evidently remembered that coddling was not wanted, and hurried around to the driver’s side of the vehicle.

  To Bibi’s relief, she found that getting into the car was no more difficult than boarding the gently rocking gondola of a Ferris wheel.

  Starting the engine, Nancy said, “Buckle up, sweetie.”

  “I am buckled up, Mother.” Hearing herself, she felt like an adolescent, dependent and a little whiny, and she loathed being either of those things. “I’m buckled.”

  “Oh. You are. Yes, of course you are.”

  Nancy exited the parking lot without coming to a full stop, turned right on the street, and accelerated to get through a nearby intersection before the traffic light changed.

  “It would be ironic,” Bibi said, “if you killed us trying to get to a hospital.”

/>   “Never had an accident, honey. Only one ticket, and that was in a totally fraudulent, tricked-up speed trap. The cop was a real smog monster, a mean-eyed kak who wouldn’t know glassout conditions from mushburgers.”

  Surfer lingo. A smog monster was an inlander. A kak was a dick. Glassout was when the ocean flowed unruffled, perfect for surfing, and mushburgers were the kind of waves that made surfers think about leaving the water for a skateboard.

  Sometimes it was difficult for Bibi to keep in mind that her mother had long ago been a surfer girl supreme, riding tubes, taking the drop with the best of them. Nancy still loved the sun-baked sand and the surf. From time to time, she paddled out and caught some waves. But of the words that defined her now, surfer was not as high on the list as it had once been. These days, other than when she was on the beach, surfspeak crept into her vocabulary only when she had a beef about one authority figure or another.

  She concentrated on the traffic, no tears in her eyes anymore, jaw set, brow creased, checking out the rearview mirror, the side mirrors, switching lanes more often than usual, totally into the task, as she otherwise was only when she went after a real-estate listing or thought that a property sale might be on the verge of closing.

  “Oh, crap.” Bibi snatched a few tissues from the console box and spat into them twice, without effect.

  “What is it, what’re you doing?”

  “That disgusting taste.”

  “What taste?”

  “Like spoiled milk, rancid butter. It comes and goes.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since…this started.”

  “You said your only symptoms were the weak hand, the tingling.”

  “I don’t think it’s a symptom.”

  “It’s a symptom,” her mother declared.

  In the distance, the hospital towered over other structures, and at the sight of it, Bibi acknowledged to herself that she was more afraid than she had wanted to admit. The architecture was unexceptional, bland, and yet the closer they drew to the place, the more sinister it appeared.