Ashley Bell: A Novel (45 page)

Pax was accustomed to knowing what to do and doing it. Navy SEAL training was an intellectual, physical, and emotional ordeal, a test to near destruction, being torn down so as to be built better, an education Harvard couldn’t match, a cultivation of honor and valor and integrity and ethics that could survive even the crucible of war, at the same time creating a sense of brotherhood that would survive a lifetime without corrosion. The intent of spec-ops schooling was to make you confident but never arrogant, bold but never reckless, prudent but never shy of reasoned risk, sagacious rather than shrewd, determined rather than willful, and in every sense—intellectual, physical, emotional—strong enough to kick ass. You became a SEAL to be able to do whatever was necessary, and to be unable to do was to die a little.

He was dying a little as he watched Edgar Alwine film Murphy’s statement and watched Bibi lying immobile in her bed. She was beset by cancer, by coma, but there was something else going on, damn it, something that excited the medical experts as much as it baffled them, something that Pax thought might be the salvation of his girl. But he was reluctant to let his natural optimism inflate itself, as it was wont to do, because this world offered more false hopes than real.

Just then the answer to his question—what to do?—opened the door and walked into the room. Pogo. His name was Averell Beaumont Stanhope III, but everyone called him Pogo, in part because he would not answer to anything else. He had long been Bibi’s best pal, closer to her than any girlfriend. She didn’t know where the nickname came from; he had been Pogo as long as she’d known him. Pax respected the kid and found him good company, but he didn’t yet know him well. He knew only that with most people Pogo played dumb but wasn’t, that he truly didn’t care about money, that he pretended to be lazy but was not, that in spite of movie-star good looks, he was so lacking in vanity that he had need of a mirror only when he shaved.

Pogo shook Pax’s hand, but only en route to the hospital bed, where he stood, looking down at Bibi, tears forming in his eyes the moment that he saw her. When Edgar Alwine began filming Nancy’s statement, Pogo learned what had everyone agitated. Pax saw the kid brighten as the paranormal nature of these recent events inspired hope, but then a measure of sobriety tempered his expression, as if he instinctively perceived the danger of unrestrained optimism, following in his own way the very progression of Pax’s attitude.

When he could draw Pogo aside, Pax said quietly, “There may be some things we can do to help her, but not here.”

“What things?”

“My guess is, I’ll figure that out as we go.”

“You’ll figure it out—but it’s real?”

“No bullshit. You heard Nancy say what happened. There’s more they don’t know about.”

“But you do.”

“That’s right.”

Although Bibi had said that Pogo was more realist than dreamer, the kid proved not to be one of the legion of knee-jerk skeptics who worked to make the world a more bitter place by doubting the motives and wisdom of anyone not a clone of them. He was at once game: “What do you need me to do?”

“Do you have a car?”

“Yeah. I call it a car,” Pogo said, wiping his eyes with his fingertips, drying his fingers on his jeans, “but a lot of people have other names for it. A thirty-year-old Honda, primer for paint, but still sweet in its quiet way. Do I drive?”

“Why wouldn’t you drive? It’s your car.”

Pogo smiled. “Man, this could be totally sacred—on the road for Bibi with the Incredible Hulk riding shotgun.”

Pax tossed his duffel bag into the back of the Honda, hulked into the front passenger seat, and pulled the door shut as Pogo turned the key in the ignition, which settled the issue of whether the car was the junker that it appeared to be. It was not.

“You worked on the engine.”

“Now and then.”

“Maybe it’s a Humvee in disguise.”

“If this baby were a Transformer,” Pogo said, “about the most it would change into is a 1968 Dodge Charger.”

“As good as it gets. The 440 Magnum?”

“You’ve got an ear for gear.” Pogo drove out of the parking lot and turned right into the street.

Pax said, “You had to make some space to fit it. But the body looks factory normal.”

Pogo grinned. “Wouldn’t be fun if it looked like what it was.”

They were going to Bibi’s apartment. It seemed the most logical place to start. Nancy had given them her key, assuming only that Pax was staying there, not that he had another purpose as well.

“You sometimes think,” Pogo asked, “the Bibi we know isn’t the full Bibi?”

“She is exactly what she says she is. That’s part of her beauty. No deception. No masks. But I know what you mean. She’s at the same time a mystery.”

“She’s way deep,” Pogo said. “She’s got these currents running through her, they come up from some abyss, so deep that if you tried to scuba down there, you’d be crushed, you know, by the weight of all the ocean above.”

Pax nodded. “Sometimes it’s like she doesn’t know about herself what you just said.”

Braking to a stop at a red traffic light, Pogo spoke without glancing at Pax, though they were both wearing sunglasses and were therefore somewhat armored against the revelation of sentimentality. “I don’t know if I’ll ever love anybody as much as Beebs. She’s a sister to me, sister and brother and best friend, she’s the whole package. It means so much, man, I wouldn’t ever try for anything else, and spoil the way it is.”

“I know. You don’t have to say it. She feels the same.”

“Well, I just wanted it clear between us. Made me so damn happy when I first met you and you were what she said you were.”

“She deserves me, huh?”

“She deserves better, but you’re worth settling for.”

Pax laughed, and the traffic light changed, and he said, “You ever considered being a SEAL? I think maybe you’d make it.”

“I was born a seal, lowercase. Made for the ocean, but not the Navy. I’m not a dude with ambition.”

“I know,” Pax said. “Aspiration is your thing, not ambition. Skill rather than money. Honor rather than fame.”

“Bro, you have me confused with another Pogo.”

“Don’t think so. I know what’s under the hood. I have an ear for gear.”

They were silent for a block or so. Although the day was mild, the hard March sunlight laid a wintry glaze on window glass and white stucco walls, and even painted glistening icy-looking edges on the stiff green blades of the fan palms.

“You really think we can help her?” Pogo asked.

“I can’t stand to think anything else.”

“But brain cancer, a coma. Woof. A lot of bad news.”

“Cancer, yeah. But it’s not a coma. The brain waves prove that much. Not a coma.”

“Then what is it?”

Pax had been thinking about that since the third time Bibi’s voice had come to him. “We see her lying in the bed, and we think that’s her, that’s Bibi, but maybe it’s not. Not all of her, anyway.”

Pulling into the parking lot behind Bibi’s apartment complex, Pogo said, “Tell me you aren’t gassing off on some evil-twin trip.”

“When you’re asleep and dreaming, you’re in a sense dead to the real world, you’re living in the dream. Bibi’s not dreaming, but—”

“According to the brain waves, she’s dreaming.”

“The EEG also says she’s awake, which isn’t exactly the case, either. Anyway,
she
said she’s not dreaming.”

“Said? Said when?”

As Pogo slotted the Honda between younger vehicles of higher pedigrees, Pax sighed. “Okay. Here goes.” He recounted the three times that Bibi had spoken inside his head. “On one level, she’s aware of what’s going on in the hospital room…but right now it’s not where she’s living.”

“Yeah? So where
is
she living?”

“Damn if I know.”

“Living somewhere without her body.”

“I’m not saying it makes sense.”

“I thought that’s exactly what you were saying.”

“I’m saying, whether it makes sense or not, it’s what seems to be true. And she wants me—us—to find her.”

Pogo switched off the engine. Blond, tanned, eyes as dark and clear as sapphires, he looked in profile less like a standard-issue California surf rat than like a ship’s captain in the making. There was about him an aura of competence and responsibility that could be discerned also in the lines of his face, though a decade or two might pass before subtle evidence in the bone became obvious to everyone. Whatever he might make of himself, however, he would always be of the sea; just looking at him, you could almost hear waves breaking on the shore. After pondering, Pogo said, “I don’t know if I believe in telepathy.”

“Don’t know I do, either,” Pax admitted. “One thing I
do
know—wherever she is, even if it is a dream, what happens to her there affects her here. The bruises, the abrasions, the tattoo.”

“This is mondo weird.”

“I have a hunch, when we figure it out, it won’t be weird at all. When we’ve got all the pieces, it’ll make perfect sense.”

“Totally clever, how you got me to jump into this at the hospital, before you let me know what a kelphead mission it is.”

“You’d have jumped in with both feet anyway. What’s a kelphead?”

“A fool. Bad surfer. Hardly ever on his board, mostly wiped out with his head in the kelp. I was one before she taught me the right moves. ‘Find me,’ huh? How does that work?”

Removing his sunglasses, Pax said, “Seems logical to start here at the apartment.”

Pogo took off his shades. “What if we suck at this Sherlock stuff?”

“We won’t.”

As Pax opened his door, Pogo said, “What happens to her there affects her here?”

Pax turned his head and met Pogo’s eyes. He knew what question would come next, because anyone who truly loved her could not leave it unasked.

The kid said, “Then what if…what if she dies there?”

“She won’t,” Pax said, and got out of the car.

The voice of a stern but caring woman, who might have been a nurse or an elementary-school teacher before recording directions for a GPS system, encouraged Bibi through fog and darkness. She drove south along the coast to Laguna Canyon Road, then inland along that twisty route, which had its dangerous stretches even in the best of weather.

She indulged no superstition regarding the world after midnight, didn’t believe that she had entered the witching hour when broomstick riders filled the sky, but she had a sense of impending occult menace on this particular night, as on no other. Justified paranoia plucked the harpstrings of her nerves until she half expected that, behind the cataracts of fog, the world was being rearranged like a vast stage undergoing set changes. Balancing that irrational fear was an intuitive feeling that Pax must be coming home to her, that in fact he was already nearby. From time to time, she glanced to her right, with the peculiar expectation that he rode in the passenger seat, but of course he was never there.

As the canyon road wound among the folded foothills, the fog that slowly tumbled like great masses of dripping white laundry gradually gave way to sheer curtains and then to isolated tattered scraps. By the time she passed under the first freeway and turned off the canyon road onto a state route, no shred of mist remained, and a while later, after she passed under the last of the county’s freeways, she came to lonely territory, low hills and arid meadows of scraggly grass, bleak in the moon-chilled night.

Her virtual companion, whose succinct guidance had thus far been flawless, spoke for the first time out of character, as should not have been possible. The voice sounded like that of a young girl. “In two hundred yards, you will want to stop at a house on the left.”

The highway topped a low rise and turned to the right as it descended, and ahead stood the promised house, soft light in its curtained windows. Two things about the three-story residence caused Bibi to take her foot off the accelerator and let the car coast down the gentle slope. First, it seemed to belong not merely in another state than California but on another continent, not here in open country but on a city street, with other houses crowded against it. Although lacking porch or portico, with no grand steps leading up to the front door, the house looked stately, its brick walls enhanced with limestone quoins at the corners and limestone surrounds at each window. Four chimneys pierced the steeply pitched roof, which might have been of slate. In addition to the strangeness of such a house in such a place, a feeling of familiarity caused Bibi to bring the coasting car almost to a stop. She had never traveled this highway before, had never seen this house. She could not recall having seen one very like it anywhere else, and yet moment by moment it seemed more familiar to her, until she was gripped by full-blown déjà vu.

As she eased past the place, a sudden memory flashed into her mind’s eye: Ashley Bell in a white dress with pale-blue lace collar, standing at a third-floor window, gazing out from this very house. She could recall nothing else, neither the occasion nor the date, but the memory was so clear and so poignant that she knew it must be real. The feeling of kindredness between Bibi and this girl, which had overcome her upon first seeing the photograph in Calida’s office, the sense of an equivalence between them, a sisterhood, rose in her once more, even more intense than previously.
Ashley Bell in a white dress with pale-blue collar, standing at a third-floor window…
If Bibi had known this child, then here was
another
incidence of self-deception, another part of her life edited out and burned away with the use of Captain’s memory trick.

She didn’t dare swing the Honda into the dirt driveway and approach the house boldly. There were countless foolish ways to die, but she hoped to avoid the egregiously stupid ones. She accelerated, drove over another low rise, out of sight of the residence, and parked on the shoulder of the highway. She sat contemplating her next move, trying to decide whether it might be egregiously stupid or just stupid. But in the end, there was nothing else she could do other than investigate the house.

The young girl’s voice that had issued from the GPS might have been that of Ashley Bell. Who else could it have been? There was no other child in this affair. After an absence of some hours, the supernatural forces that Calida had let into Bibi’s life seemed to have returned.