Ashley Bell Read online

  Abruptly Bibi came into his mind with such force that, startled, he almost bit his lip along with the half-eaten PowerBar. He thought of his singular girl often every day, but this unbidden image of her lovely face bloomed vividly in his mind’s eye, as no memory had ever pressed itself upon him before. He recognized the moment: he and Bibi stand-up paddleboarding side by side in Newport Harbor on a sunny summer day. She’d said something funny, and his comeback had cracked her up so much that she had almost fallen off her board.

  The vision of her face, prettily contorted in laughter, so lifted his spirits that he tried to hold on to it, to freeze-frame the recollection in all its astonishingly sharp and poignant detail. But memory wanes even as it waxes; she faded and could be summoned back only in a less intense manifestation.

  Paxton glanced at his G-Shock watch. 4:14 P.M. local time. That would be 4:14 A.M. where Bibi lived half a world away. She should be home in bed, sound asleep. Worry wound its way through him, not just the usual worries he sometimes had when he thought about Bibi, but a deep disquiet unique to this moment. He wondered if he had gone on a blackout operation at the worst possible time.

  This time, stilting in silence, the robed and hooded bearers of the dead convey the corpse along a hospital corridor where the roof and ceiling have been scalped away, allowing moonlight to bathe the scene. They enter Bibi’s room, and the face of one so shocks and horrifies, as always before, that she rebels against consideration of it and sits up in bed, sits up and wakes not from the dream, but from one dream scene to another. Gone are Death’s two henchmen, or whatever they might be. In one of the chairs by the window, in the red radiance of a sunset, sits the corpse cocooned in a white shroud glowing with the reflection of the burning sky. The fabric masking its face stretches, and a shallow concavity appears as its mouth opens. From it comes the voice that she knows well: “The forms…the forms…things unknown.” Frightened of hearing more, she sits up once again, but this time not in another dream scene, this time—

  —in the real hospital room.

  Morning had come with a difference in it.

  The tingling in her left side had completely relented, head to foot. Not one prickle, tickle, shiver, no static in the nerve paths.

  Sitting in bed, she flexed her left hand, which had at times seemed to be the instrument of another Bibi than her, some other self who wished to use it to her own—and different—purposes. Now she had full control of it once more. No weakness. She closed it into a fist, and though her fist was small, she liked the look of it.

  No headache. No dizziness. No foul taste.

  With an exhilarating quickness, she said, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. She sells seashells by the seashore.” Each word escaped her perfectly formed, without a slur or slip of tongue.

  She put down one of the safety railings and sat on the edge of the bed, where for a moment she hesitated, warning herself that the cessation of symptoms didn’t mean that she was somehow cured. If she dared to cry out in wonder and celebration, her voice might trigger an abrupt collapse into her previous condition. But no. That was pure and foolish superstition. There were not three goddesses of destiny as the ancient Greeks had believed, no sisters spinning and measuring out and cutting the thread of each life, who might take offense at her delight in having escaped the fate of cancer. She got out of bed and into her slippers, walked the room, walked it and then did a silly little dance, and in each case her left foot, just like her right, performed as she demanded without a moment of stiffness or a misstep.

  Through the doorway came a nurse, Petronella, whose hair was pulled tight and braided at the back. She’d been on duty the previous day and proved to be an efficient and confident woman who had seen everything that anyone in her career could expect to see and who seemed never to have been for a moment unsettled or caught unaware by any of it. Her chocolate-brown face warmed now with surprise and amusement as she stopped just inside the threshold and said, “Girl, what’s gotten into you this morning?”

  “I can dance,” Bibi said as she performed a modest soft-shoe number.

  “Maybe you can,” the nurse said, “but I’ll wait to see the evidence.”

  Bibi laughed and clapped her hands three times quickly. “No funky left foot, no tingling head to toe, no nothing. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers—perfectly pronounced, Petronella. I’m not sick anymore.”

  The nurse’s smile first froze and then melted. With pity in her eyes and sympathy in her voice, she said, “Things come and go, then they come again, child. It’s best to stay real with that.”

  Bibi shook her head. “It’s true. It’s real. I don’t know what the hell just happened, but something sure did. I can feel it through and through. Clean. Healthy. I need to talk to Dr. Chandra. He needs to see me. We’ve got to take another look at this.”

  After another two-week reprieve from temptation: the Sunday-morning quiet, the sunless day fogbound and chilly, the key in the lock, the creak of the hinges, the white vase on the table without flowers this time, the open inner door, the living-room threshold, the living room itself, the closed bedroom door. If the blood on the doorknob had been real on her previous visit, someone had wiped the brass clean in the meantime.

  Sometimes Bibi did not understand herself. She wasn’t a foolish girl, yet she had returned. She knew that she was no coward, that she didn’t need to test her courage, but here she stood. She remained convinced that the dead didn’t come back, and yet she wondered. Worst of all, she understood that it would not be a good thing if one of them did find a way back into the world of the living; nonetheless, a part of her kind of, sort of, undeniably yearned to have just such an encounter, supposing of course that it turned out to be magical in the best possible way.

  She worried that she might have dark impulses. She knew about dark impulses because she’d read about them in novels. She read at a tenth-grade level, five grades above her station, which led her to believe that she must be well informed about compulsions, fixations, obsessions, manias, and morbid drives. Such dark impulses could be of the mind or the heart. She was certain that she was not insane; and so she hoped that whatever dark impulses she had were of the heart, and were therefore not particularly dangerous.

  Valiant girls routinely did brave things or else they lost their chance to be above the herd. Thereafter they became sad, timid women, washed-out wallflowers, pitiful drudges condemned to drab lives in gray rooms. Bibi had been boogie-boarding since the age of seven, full-on surfing for almost a year now, and she had no intention of becoming a would-have-been, had-been, washed-up, washed-out loser either now or fifty years from now.

  You had to drop in from the peak, shoot the curl, tear it up when the surf was off the Richter. No fear. That was the difference between a true surf rat and a goob, a spleet, a wilma, and a wanker. Valiant girls could never be goobs, spleets, wilmas, or wankers.

  She turned the knob and opened the bedroom door.

  Everything remained pretty much as it had been back when the apartment was occupied. The bed had been stripped of its spread, blanket, and sheets, leaving only a mattress cover, and the pillows had been put away in a linen closet. Otherwise, nothing had changed.

  Like a ghost sea, like high tide as high as it might have been a million years earlier, thick fog pressed at the two windows, and only a murky drowned light found its way inside. Because the bedroom lay at the back of the apartment, the lamps that Bibi turned on could not have been seen from the bungalow even if there had been no fog.

  The bathroom stood open, but the walk-in closet door was closed. She surprised herself by knocking on it.

  No response.

  She thought, Drop in from the peak, rip it, don’t hair-out.

  She opened the door, turned on the light. Valiant girls didn’t believe in boogeymen, and there wasn’t one waiting for her.

  A pull rope hung from a ceiling trap door. She knew that if she yanked on the rope, the trap would come open on sturdy h
inges and springs, and a segmented ladder would unfold from the back of it.

  For the first time during this visit, she heard noises that she hadn’t made. They came from the attic.

  She considered the rope, but, somewhat to her chagrin, she did not at once reach up for it.

  Someone must have pushed hard on the trap door from above, for it swung open and the springs sang like an annoyed cat. The ladder unfolded to the closet floor.

  Peering into the gloom above, Bibi said, “Captain? Are you up there, Captain?”

  This time, the MRI machine seemed not in the least ominous, not a tunnel of doom, but instead a passageway to resurrection. Bibi didn’t need the earbuds that she had required previously, didn’t want the music, because her racing thoughts were music of a better kind, the equivalent of up-tempo jazz full of sizzle and sparkle, thoughts shot through with amazement, astonishment, wonder, and not a little awe. The impossible had happened. She knew. She knew. She didn’t need to wait for the test results. She felt the truth of remission in her bones, in every part of her healthy body. They said that gliomatosis cerebri never went into remission. Until now. Let them do it all again: the functional MRI, magnetic-resonance angiography, magnetic-resonance spectrography. They would find nothing. Not even one cluster of cancer cells. Her joyfully spinning thoughts repeatedly spun back to the incredible mystery at the heart of this new chance at life, to the unfathomed reason for her reprieve, a puzzle that challenged the writer in her to understand the hidden story.

  After the MRI, they wanted to repeat certain other tests. She could tell by their expressions that they were thunderstruck by the results they had thus far seen. None of them was rash enough to tell her that the impossible had happened, not yet, not before they were absolutely sure, but Bibi knew. She knew.

  Mira Hernandez was young to be the head of nursing in such a large hospital. She appeared to be no older than forty, a pretty woman with glossy sable hair, wide-set eyes as black as the fur of a Halloween cat, and full lips, the bottom one of which she kept chewing as she listened while Bibi answered her questions.

  Nurse Hernandez sat in a chair by the window, the one in which Dr. Sanjay Chandra had sat the previous day, when he had delivered the dreadful prognosis. Bibi sat facing the nurse in what she now thought of as her lucky chair. In fact, every item in the room now seemed to be a lucky something: the lucky table between them, the lucky bed, the lucky TV that she had never turned on, her lucky silk robe, her lucky slippers.

  “I need you to help me understand,” said Nurse Hernandez. “You think the golden retriever cured you?”

  “No. Maybe. Hell, I don’t know. The dog had something to do with what’s happened. It must have. Listen, I’m not saying it’s a miracle dog. What would that mean, anyway, ‘miracle dog’? Sounds ridiculous. But the dog and the man who brought him—they must know something. Don’t you think so? I think so. Well, the man might know something. The dog wouldn’t necessarily know. Who knows what dogs know? And even if the dog knew something, it wouldn’t be able to tell us what it knew, because dogs can’t talk. So we need to talk to the man.”

  Nurse Hernandez regarded Bibi in silence for a moment and then said, “You seem to be agitated.”

  “No. Not agitated. I’m hyper. Good hyper. Hyped up. Wouldn’t you be, too, if you were riddled with brain cancer one day and free of it the next?”

  The nurse didn’t want to encourage false hope. “Let’s not get ahead of the doctors, Bibi.”

  “See, the thing is, I had a huge seizure last evening, when no one was here. I thought I was dying. Passed out. Later I woke when a nurse checked on me. She figured I was asleep. But I was paralyzed, and I couldn’t speak, and it was awful. I knew I was nearly gone, almost out of here, worm food. The next time I woke, it was the dog. After the dog, I wasn’t paralyzed anymore, I could talk. And this morning, when I woke like this”—she made a fist of her previously weak left hand and pumped it in the air—“I knew something good had happened, the biggest good thing possible.”

  As nice as she might be, as patient as she was, Nurse Hernandez nevertheless looked as if she wanted to say, But that’s the point—it isn’t possible. Instead, after typing a note on her laptop, she said, “See, my problem is…we don’t allow any therapy dogs in the hospital after visiting hours. There weren’t any here last night.”

  “There was one,” Bibi insisted cheerily. “A beautiful golden.”

  “Are you sure you couldn’t have dreamed it or hallucinated it?”

  “My hand was warm and sticky with dog drool.”

  “Okay, well, so the man with the dog—what did he look like?”

  “He was backlit, just a silhouette, and then in shadows.”

  “What was the dog’s name? Do you remember?”

  “I don’t know. The owner didn’t say.”

  “The first thing they usually do is introduce the dog.”

  “Maybe usually, but not this time.”

  After the nurse typed on her laptop again, she looked up and smiled, but there was a look of misgiving in her eyes when she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean this to sound like a police interrogation, Bibi. I really do want to understand if…”

  “If it turns out I’m cured? It’s okay. You can say it. You won’t be encouraging false hope. I am cured. You think I’m hyper now? Just wait till Dr. Chandra tells me there’s no cancer. I’ll be bouncing off the walls. That’s the kid in me. Most people can’t wait to leave kidhood behind. But I keep the kid in my heart, you know, and once in a while she gets out. It’s a writer thing. The past is material. You never want to forget it, how it was, how it felt.”

  Nurse Hernandez listened with interest, as if she didn’t think Bibi was just babbling. When she could get a word in, she said, “What did this man with the golden retriever say to you?”

  “Nothing. Until he was going out the door with the dog. Then he looked back and said, ‘Endeavor to live the life.’ ”

  The nurse frowned. “What did he mean by that? It sounds…I don’t know. It sounds odd, kind of formal. Don’t you think?”

  Bibi shrugged. “Probably he just meant that I should get on with my life.” She had heard those words before but couldn’t remember when or where. She wondered why she failed to tell Mira Hernandez that she had heard those words before.

  Suddenly she had a girl-detective thought that pleased her. “What about security cameras? They usually store their video for thirty days. If you review it from last night and see this guy and his dog, then you’ll know I wasn’t dreaming.”

  When the ladder folded out of the ceiling to the floor of the walk-in closet, Bibi knew that an invitation had been issued, but she hesitated to accept it. In spite of the rigid geometry of the ladder, something about the way it zigzagged downward in segments made her think of a snake.

  As she stared up into the attic, the darkness above retreated, although not entirely, when a string of bare bulbs brightened the upper realm from gable to gable.

  This second invitation failed to encourage her to ascend in search of the captain.

  She had called him Captain because at one time he had been a captain in the United States Marine Corps. He’d had many colorful adventures in times of war and times of peace, and Bibi had enjoyed his stories no matter how often she cajoled him into repeating them. He’d held other jobs after leaving the corps, and he’d been the tenant in the apartment above the garage for five years—until she found him dead in the kitchen, lying in so much blood that he seemed to be afloat.

  Captain was a man of courage and integrity and honor. She had always been safe in his company. He would never have harmed her. He would have died for her.

  If the captain was in the attic, even if he had come back from a place where dead heroes went for eternity, surely she had no reason to fear him. Valiant girls did not discourage—and certainly did not defeat—themselves by abandoning reason and indulging superstition with all its irrational fears.

  “Captain?” s
he asked again. “Are you up there, Captain?”

  In answer came the sweet ringing of bells. Rather, it was the ringing of a single special bell that sounded like three. The captain had brought it back from Vietnam many years earlier, a souvenir of his days in a wearying and misfought war.

  Beautifully crafted of silver, the size of a wineglass, the bell housed an ingenious mechanism. The three clappers were suspended so that they operated simultaneously and yet didn’t interfere with one another’s arcs. The first clapper struck the waist of the bell. The second summoned sound from the hip of the classically shaped silver, the third from the lip. The three notes were different but complementary, and together they produced a most pleasant musical ringing.

  Before the war, before the gray pall of communism, Vietnam had been a land of enchantment, with unique myths and much exotic lore. By its appealing music, the bell suggested the magical nature of the country’s history. The memory of the elegant shape and glimmer of the silver form, the unison notes—each an octave apart from the one below it—and her profound affection for the man who had owned this bell at last drew Bibi up the ladder.

  Upon his death, Captain had no siblings or children in far-flung places for whom his charming little collection of souvenirs needed to be accounted and forwarded. Nancy said all those items were Bibi’s if she wanted them, and she wanted them very much. The sight of his humble treasures, however, sharpened her grief. Back in November, less than three months earlier, her mother had helped her pack them away for the day when the sting of Captain’s death had been dulled by time.

  Although she mourned him no less than she had on the day that she found his corpse, she entered the attic with a tentative gladness equal to her intense curiosity, which would not be quenched. Particleboard provided a floor, and the raftered space rose high enough for an adult to stand erect everywhere except near the eaves. Upon Bibi’s arrival, the ringing stopped.