Ashley Bell Read online

  At the periphery of vision, movement caught her attention. She looked up to see what, for an alarming moment, appeared to be lazily billowing smoke, evidence of a smoldering fire. But those fumes were only slithers of mist seeping through the screen that covered the attic vents, as though the ocean of fog outside possessed curiosity about the contents of the houses currently submerged in it.

  Little of the room’s copious contents had been the property of the captain; most belonged to Nancy and Murphy. Bibi had forgotten where in the aisles of stacked boxes the bell and other items had been tucked away.

  Sans bell, in the small soundless exhalations of fog, the silence pooled so deep that Bibi felt as if she were in a cellar rather than an attic. She might have thought that she had imagined the silvery ringing if the ladder and the lights hadn’t been proof of another presence.

  Because the one-inch particleboard had been securely screwed to the joists, rather than nailed, her feet found no creaks in it as she moved along the center line of the attic, looking left and right into the aisles of shelving and free-stacked goods. The captain had provided the labor to replace the old rotting plywood flooring, one of a number of small jobs that he did for free, to prove his value as a tenant, although no one felt it needed to be proved. That was just Captain’s way: always wanting to be useful.

  When she reached the next-to-last aisle at the east end of the attic, Bibi discovered a presence, perhaps the one who for some weeks she had been seeking with both yearning and misgiving. He—or someone—stood at the back of the aisle, ten feet from her, in the shadows past the fall of light.

  The apprehension that she had overcome before, that she felt was unworthy of her, flowered again, a black-petaled fright that severely tested her image of herself. Valiant girl? Or was she just another uncertain and confused kid pretending to be mature and brave, self-deceived by the fake-out she pulled on everyone else?

  “Captain?” she said softly.

  The presence moved toward her, into the light.

  She realized then that madness and sanity were two worlds separated from each other by no more than a single step.

  When Nurse Hernandez returned to Bibi’s room, she brought with her the chief of security for the hospital, whom she introduced as Chubb Coy. Whether Chubb was his real name or a nickname, he lived up to it. Pleasantly rounded rather than markedly fat, he moved with the lithe and supple ease of a dancer, which was peculiar to certain amply padded people. His last name was less appropriate than his first, because he was neither taciturn nor shy.

  Mira Hernandez powered the unoccupied first bed to its maximum height, and Mr. Coy opened his laptop on the mattress. Bibi stood with them as Mr. Coy tapped into the hospital’s video files from the night just passed.

  “Aren’t any security cameras in patients’ rooms,” he said, “or in other areas where their privacy has to be protected. Frivolous lawsuits already jack up medical costs. Costs would go through the roof if everybody’s grandma won a million bucks in court because she’d been humiliated being filmed while she used a bedpan.”

  In a gently chastising tone, Nurse Hernandez said, “Of course, maintaining patient privacy is important for much better and more important reasons than defending against legal action.”

  Mr. Coy in no way indicated that he realized he’d been quietly admonished for his frankness. “The stairwells are all monitored. And the public elevators. But not the elevators the staff use to move patients around. We monitor all the hallways. If a patient steps out of a room with his hospital gown untied in back and then wants ten million bucks ’cause Security had to look at his pathetic bare butt, well, so we have to go to court and hope there’s maybe at least a couple sane people on the jury. Not that I’d bet on it.”

  Nurse Hernandez looked past her associate and smiled at Bibi, and Bibi returned the smile reassuringly.

  Mr. Coy said, “Here’s the main east-west fourth-floor hallway, just outside your room. The time’s at the bottom.”

  The digital clock on the screen read 4:01 A.M. As the seconds flashed past and 4:01 turned to 4:02, a golden retriever appeared at the side of a man in a hoodie. The guy kept his head lowered as if to prevent the camera from capturing his face. He pushed open a door on the left and followed the dog through it.

  “Mr. Hoodie just went into your room,” said Chubb Coy. He fast-forwarded the video. “Then he comes out three minutes later, at four-oh-five. There he is. He and the dog leave how they came, by the elevator.”

  “Just like I told you,” Bibi said to Mira Hernandez.

  The nurse shook her head. “Wait.”

  Turning away from the laptop, face-to-face with Bibi, Mr. Coy said, “Here’s the problem. At that time of night, we’re locked up except for the main lobby entrance and through the ER receiving area. There’s no video of that guy or his dog using one of those, either coming or going.”

  “Some other door that was supposed to be locked must have been open,” Bibi suggested.

  “Not a chance. We run a tight operation. Here’s another thing—it so happens the camera in the elevator he used goes on the blink at three-fifty, ten minutes before he sashays on scene, so there’s no video of him and the dog in the elevator, either coming up or going down. The camera in the ground-floor elevator alcove is working, but it never shows Mr. Hoodie either boarding the cab or getting out of it later.”

  Bibi looked at the laptop screen, where video from the previous night showed the corridor after the mysterious visitor’s departure. “I don’t understand.”

  “Me neither,” Chubb Coy said. “It’s stupid to think he and the dog boarded the elevator mid-floor, coming through the hatch in the ceiling of the cab. No way, José. So did you recognize the guy?”

  Bibi met the security chief’s eyes. They were gray flecked with blue, a steely contrast to the round amiable face in which they were set. “Recognize him from the video? But he didn’t show his face.”

  “From his posture, his walk, the dog?”

  “No. I didn’t recognize him.”

  “Whatever he was up to,” Chubb Coy said, “it wasn’t good.”

  “Well, I don’t know, but somehow I’m cured.”

  “The doctors confirmed that?”

  “Dr. Chandra is meeting with me this afternoon.”

  “I hope you had a miracle, I really do,” Coy said, although he clearly had his doubts. “But, see, I was a real cop before this. I’ve known a bunch of bad guys. People that act like Mr. Hoodie…you can bet the rent money, they’ve got sinister intentions.”

  Bibi did not remember turning away from the presence in the attic, but the next thing she knew, she was descending the ladder to the floor of the walk-in closet. At the bottom, when she looked up, she saw that the lights had been extinguished in the high room.

  Panic had not seized her. She was in the grip of something else, perhaps shock, that rendered her half numb to all sensation. Her mind wasn’t spinning at the moment; instead each smallest impression and sentiment twitched to the next as if a pair of lever-wrench pliers in her brain were ratcheting them along in a futile attempt to restore her usual flow of thoughts.

  She hesitated at the foot of the ladder, breath held, expecting someone to come into view above, uplit by the closet light. But when no one appeared, she gave the lowest segment of the ladder the hard push required to start it folding back into the ceiling. The ladder drew the trap door shut behind it, and the pull rope swayed back and forth like a pendulum.

  She did not remember passing through the bedroom or the living room, but she became aware of being in the kitchen, standing at the dinette table, staring at the white vase. It had been empty when she entered the apartment. Now it contained three fresh scarlet roses.

  As she descended the stairs from the balcony, thick fog flowed behind her and billowed around her as if it were the train of a magnificent white dress. In the courtyard, she could barely see the bricks underfoot, and the bungalow seemed to drift like a ghost ship on a s
hrouded sea, its lines visible but its substance unconvincing.

  When she went into the house, her parents were still sleeping. Bibi retreated to her room, took off her shoes. Without removing her clothes, she slipped under the covers.

  Something more had happened in the apartment attic than she had the fortitude to contemplate. She pushed away the memory of what had occurred, for it was both too frightening and too sad to bear, a weight no girl of ten—perhaps of any age—could carry for an hour, let alone for a lifetime. Better to put down that burden and let time bear it away.

  She slept without rest, a sleep of denial and forgetting.

  Her mother woke her. “Hey, sleepyhead. Get a move on. We’re going to brunch and then the movies.”

  With the covers pulled to her chin, Bibi said, “I don’t want to. I stayed up all night reading.” That was a lie, but not a mortal one. “You go without me. There’s leftover chicken in the fridge. I’ll make a big sandwich.”

  Picking up a book from the nightstand, where at least one novel remained always near at hand, Nancy read the title: “The Secret War in the Garden. Pretty thrilling, huh?”

  “Mmmmm,” Bibi agreed.

  Imagining themselves to be free spirits, footloose children of Nature, her parents encouraged their daughter to be independent and self-directing. She would never be chastised for staying up most of the night, either to read or to watch one stupid thing or another on television.

  “The movie’s supposed to be totally funny,” Nancy said. “It’s the new Adam Sandler.”

  Insisting on her exhaustion by keeping her eyes shut and her face in a sort of slack pout, by speaking with weary exasperation, Bibi said, “He’s not funny.”

  “You’re too old for Adam Sandler, huh?”

  “Decades.”

  “My daughter, the fifth-grade sophisticate. Well, all right. But don’t hit the surf alone.”

  “I never do. And it’s too cold, anyway.”

  She remained in bed for fifteen minutes after her parents left, to be certain they were gone.

  A short while later, as she sat at the kitchen table, finishing a breakfast of chocolate milk and Eggo waffles smeared with peanut butter, she began to tremble and then to shake uncontrollably, as if the hinges of her bones had come loose every one and all at once. She didn’t ask herself why the shaking. She didn’t want to know why. It wasn’t about a ghost, either real or imagined. Ghosts couldn’t harm her. Even if it had been a real ghost in the attic, she would most likely never see another. Ghosts didn’t swoop up every day, from all around, like sparrows and meadowlarks taking wing. If something else happened in the high room, some moment of insight or even revelation, it had been of so little importance that it had evaporated from memory while she’d slept, before her mother woke her. She insisted that she just had a chill. That was all. That was enough to explain the shakes.

  Leaving the last few bites of the meal on her plate, she went into the living room, where the gas fireplace featured an electronic ignition; she switched it on with a remote control. Hands thrust in the pockets of her jeans, she stood at the hearth, basking in the heat, staring into the blue-and-yellow flames that leaped around the ceramic logs. Sometimes she liked to search for animals and faces in the shapen clouds of a summer day. Flames were too quick and fluid for the eye to glimpse the suggestion of any presence other than fire, and that was a good thing.

  When the shakes passed, she decided to walk to the park along Ocean Avenue and sit on the bench at Inspiration Point, even if the fog still largely obscured the Pacific. The sea always calmed her, even just the scent of it and the soothing sound of waves dashing against rocks and splashing across the sand. But as she stepped onto the front porch, even before she pulled the door shut, an unexpected flood of tears spilled from her. She was not a girl who wept in front of others, and she retreated into the bungalow.

  She didn’t wish to understand this bitter emotion any more than she had cared to analyze the cause of her shaking. She wanted only to stop crying, to shut off the flow before it might wash into view a reason for this grief, if it was grief, or this dread, if it was dread. When she realized that the tears might be as persistent as the shakes, she ran for the only medicine that reliably cured any bout of unpleasant feelings: a book.

  Although her mother thought that Bibi had stayed up all night reading The Secret War in the Garden, which was the third young-adult novel in a beloved fantasy series, she had not yet begun the story. Now she snatched the book off her nightstand, hurried with it to the living room, switched on a floor lamp, dropped into an armchair, and sought refuge in the tale: The first rumors of war came from the field mice, who traveled daily between the garden behind the Jensen house and the world below, which was far larger than our world and still unknown to most people, though known to certain children.

  At first, as Bibi read, she wiped her tear-streaked face with the sleeves of her sweatshirt. Soon, however, the blurred print became clear, and her eyes stopped sabotaging storytime.

  And so it was that hour by hour, day by day, she moved away from the disturbing knowledge that she needed to put behind her. The eerie and unsettling experience in the attic became about nothing more than an apparition or hallucination. She rejected the revelation that had been part of the incident, cut it from the cloth of memory and sewed shut the hole it left—or thought she did.

  She read books and wrote stories about Jasper, a black-and-gray dog who had been abandoned by his owner and sought a new home along the coast of California. A couple of weeks later, when a golden retriever came to her out of the rain, she kept him and named him Olaf. As kids do, she made a confidant of her dog and told him all her secrets—as she knew them. She told him about Captain, how wonderful he had been. She told Olaf that the apartment above the garage was an evil place, but she didn’t tell him why.

  Bibi had folded the pajamas and the robe into her drawstring bag and had donned the jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt she’d been wearing when Nancy had brought her to the hospital. This was an expression of confidence in her belief that the brain cancer had gone into remission, that the glioma hadn’t merely shrunk but had vanished.

  When Dr. Sanjay Chandra entered the room, Bibi was pacing not to work off a bad case of nerves, but with impatience to get back into the world and reclaim her life. He halted at the sight of her, and his expression was so solemn that something caught in her throat, as if she had tried to swallow a large bite of meat without chewing it, though she hadn’t eaten anything.

  What appeared to be solemnity, or even distress at the news he had to deliver, proved to be awe. “Nothing in my years of practice, nothing in my life, has prepared me for this. I’m not able to explain it, Bibi. It’s not possible, but you are entirely free of cancer.”

  The previous day, Nancy had said that Dr. Chandra reminded her of Cookie, the gingerbread cookie that had come to life in an old children’s book that she had shared when Bibi was five years old. The resemblance owed more to Nancy’s sense of whimsy than to fact, and it certainly wasn’t so pronounced that some snarky magazine would pair Dr. Chandra’s and Cookie’s photographs in a “Separated at Birth” feature. However, everything about the physician—his boyish face, chocolate-drop eyes, musical voice, humility, and charm—made her want to like him. Upon his confirmation of remission, she loved the man. She flew to him like a child into the arms of an adored father.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she gushed, exhilarated even as she was embarrassed by her exhilaration.

  He returned her embrace and then held her at arm’s length, his hands on her shoulders, smiling broadly and shaking his head slowly, as if marveling at her. “The first diagnosis was not mistaken. You did have gliomatosis cerebri.”

  “I’m sure I did. I know I did.”

  “Other tumors can break down and be absorbed, and the remission can be surprisingly quick. It’s not common, but it does occur. Except with this cancer. Never with this hateful thing. I’ll want to see you f
or follow-up. Quite a lot of follow-up.”

  “Of course.”

  “Oncologists specializing in gliomas will want to study you.”

  “Study me? I don’t know about that. I don’t think so.”

  “What is it about you that made the impossible possible? Is it genetic? A quirk in your body chemistry? A higher-functioning immune system? Studying you might save uncountable lives.”

  She felt irresponsible for having shied from the prospect of being studied. “Well, if you put it that way…”

  “I do. I put it that way.” He released her shoulders. His happy expression was infused with wonder again. “Yesterday, when I said you had at most a year to live, you said, ‘We’ll see.’ Do you remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s almost as if you knew then that you’d go home today.”

  Because Nancy and Murphy were coming for a long visit at four o’clock, Bibi hadn’t called to tell them what had happened in the night or that her death sentence had been miraculously commuted. Although she’d known that her health had been restored, she hadn’t wanted to pop the champagne cork with them, figuratively speaking, until she had Dr. Chandra’s confirmation. Besides, she wanted to see their surprise, their disbelief, their joy when they walked through the door and saw her in street clothes, her former glow restored.

  Fifteen minutes before Bibi’s parents were due, Chubb Coy, chief of security, peered through the open door. His pale-blue shirt with epaulets looked fresh, and his dark-blue slacks still held a sharp crease. He said, “Got a minute?”

  Rising from a chair by the window, Bibi said, “Suddenly, I have millions of minutes.”

  Failing to match her smile, Coy entered the room. “Since I spoke to you last, we’ve quick-scanned the parking-lot video for the past twenty-four hours. No Mr. Hoodie. No golden retriever. Seems they didn’t drive here or walk, and I’m not a guy who believes in crap like teleportation. What about you? You believe in teleportation?”