Ashley Bell: A Novel (10 page)

Two weeks after fleeing from the apartment above the garage, four weeks before Olaf padded into her life, on another sleep-in Sunday for her parents, young Bibi rose and dressed while the last defenses of the night barely held off the advancing dawn. She tucked two granola bars into the pockets of her fleece-lined denim jacket and, as the morning spread its flamingo-pink wings across the east, she walked two and a half blocks to the park along Ocean Avenue.

She sat on a bench at Inspiration Point to watch the breaking surf and the dark sea as mottled green-greenblack as watermelon skin. From that perch, she sometimes imagined herself to be one of a pirate crew sailing on violent tides, or else a whale so big that she feared nothing in her shadowed watery world. This morning, she imagined life after death, not as it might be in Heaven, but as it might be here and now, in this world, if such things as ghosts were real.

After finishing the first granola bar and deciding not to linger long enough to eat the second, she returned home. If she was a girl of action, a girl of unshakeable intentions, like the girls whom she most admired in the books that she most enjoyed reading, she could no longer shrink from the mystery that demanded her attention.

By the alley gate, she let herself into the courtyard between garage and bungalow. Climbed the stairs. Hesitated on the balcony.

Two weeks earlier, the gray wet day had been appropriate to séances and conjurings—and to unsettling encounters with restless spirits. Under this bright and lively sky, with the warbling and clear, short whistles of meadowlarks celebrating the recent dawn, being in the mood for Pooh was easier than being in the mood for Poe.

Nevertheless, Bibi stood at the door, staring through the four panes in its upper half, studying the kitchen before she dared to enter. There was no corpse apparent either on the floor or standing grim and moon-eyed in expectation of her. She went inside.

On this brighter morning, the kitchen seemed to be a benign if not entirely welcoming place, until Bibi noticed the one change since her previous visit. On the table, the spherical white vase, which had held no flowers before, not for months, now contained three withered roses. The once-green sepals of the flowers’ receptacles were brown, and the petals were mostly brown as well, with few remaining traces of red coloring. Some petals had fallen to the table, where they lay as curled and crisp as the shells of dead beetles.

The sere and shriveled roses looked as if they had been here longer than two weeks. They were so thoroughly dehydrated that they might have been in the vase since November.

She should have left the apartment; but she could not. Unlike many other ten-year-old girls, she did not dream of being a princess or a pop star. She wanted to be plucky, intrepid, and lionhearted. Stalwart. Valiant. Superman and Supergirl had no appeal for her; everything was too easy for them and other invulnerable superheroes, without genuine danger. Bibi knew that life could never be that way. Every surfer surfed with sharks unseen and swam with the risk of riptides. Death was real. You had to face that truth if you were ever to grow up. She wanted no caped costume with an
S
upon her chest. But she would have been proud to wear a sweater with a small embroidered
V
—a
V
for
valiant
—though only if by her actions she earned it.

Therefore, rather than retreat from the mystery of the roses, she moved past the table toward the living-room door, which stood open, as she had left it two weeks earlier. Someone—something—had pushed it inward before she’d fled. As on that day, the door blocked her view of the threshold, where someone had been standing.

She felt confident that no one would be standing there now.

As she approached the door, she heard footsteps on a creaking hardwood floor, as she had heard them on her other visit. She halted, listening, but then realized the footsteps were moving away from her.

Lionhearted girls seldom retreated when they were threatened, and they never turned tail and ran without good reason. When she passed the door and reached the threshold, trembling more than she would have liked, no one waited there.

She saw a door swinging shut at the farther end of the living room. It closed with a bang and rattle.

None of the furniture had been removed. After what had happened here, Nancy and Murphy didn’t want another tenant. Eventually they would dispose of the furniture, sell it or give it away to Goodwill.

Rather than proceed to the bedroom, Bibi considered sitting on the edge of an armchair to await developments. Sometimes, patiently waiting to see what happened next was much wiser than making it happen, which was one of the differences between truly smart girls in smart books and airheaded girls in witless books.

After a hesitation, as a weakness crept into her legs and her mouth went almost as dry as the flowers in the kitchen, shame made her cross the living room. You were either plucky or not, stalwart or not, and the lionhearted didn’t make excuses in the quick of things, when you either gave it or you didn’t.

She halted at the bedroom door. Trying not to hear the rapid knocking of her heart, she listened for what sounds might come from the next room. She cocked her head to the left, to the right, and when her gaze drifted lower, she saw the blood on the doorknob. Red. Glistening. Wet. A single drop slid off the knob and fell to the floorboards in what seemed like slow motion.

Valiant girls were more than spunky and resolute. They were also wary, heedful, and prudent. And they knew with clearheaded certainty when it was wise to act upon those virtues. She didn’t bolt, but she backed slowly away from the bedroom. She turned and walked across the living room, quietly through the kitchen, out of the apartment. After she locked the door, she needed to hold the handrail as she made her way down to the courtyard.

On the back porch of the bungalow, sitting on the wicker sofa, Bibi reviewed events, a thousand threads of thought spinning through the loom of her young mind, weaving a strange fabric. She wouldn’t tell her parents what had happened. They would find no flowers or blood in the apartment, just as her father had found no intruder two weeks earlier. Besides, Bibi sensed there was something she knew that she didn’t know she knew, an elusive understanding that, if she could arrive at it, would make sense of everything.

The morning grew mild, but Bibi remained cold to her bones.

Bibi realized she was awake when she heard the nurse talking with a nurses’ aide. She wasn’t able to open her eyes or speak. She could only listen. One said, “She’s exhausted, poor thing.” The other took her pulse, seemed to be satisfied, and let go of her wrist. Bibi realized that she was breathing shallowly, making a sound like a soft snore. They must think she was asleep. No one witnessed the violent seizure when it felled her earlier. They pulled the sheet and blanket up to her neck. She tried to tell them it wasn’t sleep that held her quiet, but something worse. The words formed in her mind, not in her mouth. She heard the nurse and the aide leaving, then a mortal silence.

She lay mute and blind and limp, unable to be sure whether she was lying on her back, on her chest, or on her side. No muscle in her body would respond to her command. A remembered fragment of verse came to her, its source for the moment forgotten:
A condition of complete simplicity.
She was indeed in a condition of complete simplicity, and although she should have been frightened, she was not. Valiant girl she would be, as she had been for so long, plucky and intrepid and stalwart. Lionhearted.

A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)…

With the second line of verse, she recalled the source
: Little Gidding
by T. S. Eliot.

She took some comfort from the fact that though her body seemed to have seceded from her soul, her mind remained clear and still part of her kingdom. Fragments of other Eliot lines came to her:

Quick now, here, now…At the still point…Neither from nor towards…Where past and future are gathered…

Bibi drifted away once more into a nothingness that might have been a more solemn oblivion than mere sleep.

Later she revived in a panic, acutely aware of the severe decline in her condition. Paralysis. Blindness. Her tongue cinched into a knot that would not allow her the grace of words. She had gone downhill faster than rhyming Jill after she tripped over the idiot Jack. Suddenly the Big Question was whether chemo and radiation made any sense in her case, or whether the better course of treatment, the more humane course, would be to give her a box of morphine lollipops and let her suck her way out of this world in some hospice run by kindly nuns. Valiant girl or not, she wanted to cry for herself, but if she wept, she could not feel the heat of tears or the tracks they made down her face.

She woke again in the night, and this time she could open her eyes and see by the dimmed lamp above her bed. The orientation of her body became obvious to her, as well: She was lying on her right side, facing the first—still empty—bed, and the door at the farther end of the room.

That door opened and a man entered, backlit by the hall light as he approached. Even when the door eased shut behind him, closing off the light, he remained a silhouette. Bibi saw the leash as he arrived between the beds. Earlier someone had put down the railing. The dog stood on its back legs, forepaws on the mattress, favoring Bibi with the fabled smile of its breed: a golden retriever. Perhaps more than any other breed, goldens had unique faces, and although for a moment she thought that this was Olaf, it was not.

This was just some Good Samaritan with a therapy dog named Brandy or Oscar or whatever. These days, hospitals were veritable dog parks, with hordes of well-meaning people trying to make the sick and the depressed get with the uplift program. She had seen others like these two since being admitted as the poster girl for aggressive tumor maturation, and they were all sweet, the people and the dogs, though she declined their determined efforts to help her find the giggles in gliomatosis.

Her left hand lay palm-down upon the mattress. She could see it but not move it.

The dog began to lick her hand, and at first she couldn’t feel that canine caress. Soon, however, her sense of touch returned, and the warm wet tongue working between her fingers filled her with a wild hope. To her surprise, she broke her paralysis, moved the hand, and repeatedly smoothed the fur on the retriever’s noble head.

As she petted the dog, their eyes met. She knew that hers were dark and unrevealing, but the retriever’s were so gold and luminous and deep that its gaze stirred something within her. That lustrous stare awakened the slumbering child that Bibi had once been, the easily enchanted girl who, in recognition of inevitable adulthood, had taken a page from the book of bears and had hibernated through a long winter.

When the dog dropped from the bed, Bibi said, “No, please,” but the visitors moved away.

At the door, as he opened it just wide enough to slip out into the hall, the man turned to look back, still just the outline of a man, and said, “Endeavor to live the life….”

Bibi had heard those words before, although in her current condition she could not quite remember when.

Alone in the near dark, she could not decide if something extraordinary had happened or if she had hallucinated the encounter.

She flexed her left hand, which was still moist with the dog’s saliva. She could feel her body to all its extremities. She wiggled her toes. When she tried to roll onto her back, she had no difficulty doing so.

As a great weariness descended, she wondered if she was awake or dreaming. In the absence of the loving dog, whether or not it had been real, a bleak sense of isolation pierced her, and she felt alone and lost. Her voice shamed her for the misery it revealed. Valiant girls did not so boldly disclose the distress of mind and heart, but it was all there in his name when she spoke it—“Paxton, Pax. Oh, Pax, where are you?”—and then a wave of darkness washed her into sleep or something like it.