Ashley Bell: A Novel (8 page)

The dream that came to Bibi the first night in the hospital was one that she’d been having on and off for more than twelve years, since before Olaf, the dog, had found his way to her:

She is ten years old, asleep in her bedroom at the rear of the bungalow in Corona del Mar. She does not thrash or whimper, but across her softly illumined young face pass tormented expressions.

Abruptly she sits up in bed, though this awakening is part of the dream in which she still resides. In response to three shrieks of a night bird, she throws back the covers and steps to the window.

In the courtyard, lit by only the grin of a Cheshire moon, two mysterious robed and hooded figures, tall and shambling, carry a rolled rug, moving toward the garage apartment. Visibility is poor, but Bibi intuits deformities in their limbs and spines.

When she realizes that the rug is in fact a corpse wrapped in a shroud, she knows they must be returning the dead man to the place of his demise. As though it feels the weight of her stare, one of the bearers of the body turns its head to look at Bibi where she stands at the window. She expects a dimly visible skull within the hood, the classic countenance of Death, but a worse revelation awaits her. The night brightens somewhat, as if an immense solar flare has bloomed on the farther side of the planet, reflecting fiercely off the crescent moon. The hood keeps more secrets than the better light reveals. But before the intruder turns away from her, she sees something that she cannot abide; the glimpse so terrifies her that she does not—cannot, will not—carry the image with her into the waking world, but instead confines it to the world of sleep, forgotten or at least repressed.

For the second time in the dream, young Bibi sits up in bed, breathless, trembling, chilled to the marrow. When she switches on the lamp, she discovers the shrouded burden that the hooded creatures had been carrying. The wrapped figure sits in a corner chair, for the moment still. Then it squirms in the confining shroud—and speaks.

The third time Bibi sat up in bed, she was awake and no longer a child. By repetition, the nightmare had lost much of its power years earlier. She no longer cried out on waking or trembled. But the skin creped on the back of her neck, and a thin sweat cooled her brow.

As on other such occasions, a rough voice followed Bibi from the dream, speaking words out of context:
“…is everything.”

The voice was always the same one, but it did not repeat the same words every time. Sometimes he said, “supreme master” or “so sadly to seek,” or “the word was,” or scraps even more mystifying.

The other hospital bed remained empty. She was alone.

The ambient glow of the suburban sprawl laid a yellow faux frost on the window. Above her headboard, the lamp by which she’d written her impressions of the day was at its lowest setting, bright enough only to allow proper care when the nurse looked in on the patient.

The dream, which had been frequent when Bibi was ten, occurred less often as the decade passed. Now it came once or twice a year.

In the early days, she’d thought it might be predictive. But it was a dark fantasy that could never unfold in the real world.

Entering adolescence, she sometimes brooded about the persistent dream’s possible symbolic content. Because it recurred so often back then, she also wondered if she might be disturbed, psychologically unbalanced, as in crazy-waiting-to-happen. But no. No, that was the worst kind of young-adult-novel hokum: tragic young girl hiding her tri-polar psycho-paranoid true-werewolf nature from the world and from herself until she has a breakdown the very day before she would have been voted the Most Popular Girl in Ninth Grade and would have been kissed by the cutest bad-boy rebel in school. Even at that young age, she was remarkably self-possessed, confident of her right to be in the world and her ability to make her way on her own terms.

Now she dismissed the dream for what it surely always had been: nothing more than proof that finding the body by the dinette table had been traumatic—the abundance of blood, the blind and drooling eyes, the mouth gaping in a silent cry.

The bedside clock read 3:49
A.M
. In little more than six hours, she would receive a diagnosis from her physician. She had no reason to fear Dr. Sanjay Chandra, just as she had no reason to fear the bearers of the dead in a dream. There were no boogeymen. She would be well, all would be well, all manner of things would be well.

Reclining once more, her head upon her pillow, she closed her eyes. She told herself where she would be a day from now, a week from now, a year. Soon she slept again, and this time her sleep was not sullied by a nightmare.

When the seizure struck Bibi, her body spasmed on the bed, and from her throat issued thick wordless grunts. The episode was mild and brief, however, and it did not wake her.

Room 456 had three chairs for visitors. They were cheap and only as comfortable as they had to be for the name
chairs
to apply.

Dr. Sanjay Chandra didn’t want to loom over Bibi as she lay in bed, reporting on her health from a superior height. He placed two chairs by the window, and they sat facing each other, with blue sky and scattered white clouds to Bibi’s right, as if she were receiving this news in the foyer of Heaven.

In spite of wearing a white lab coat over iron-gray suit pants, a pale-blue shirt, and a blue tie, and although he had arrived carrying an ultrathin laptop with which he could evidently access all Bibi’s test results, Dr. Chandra had none of the intimidating presence that was natural to some physicians and cultivated by others. Soft-spoken, with an air of serenity that suggested that he had made peace with this world of endless frustrations and with his own ambition, he seemed less like a doctor than like a counselor of the troubled.

In preparation for this meeting, Bibi had taken a shower, brushed her long, dark hair, applied makeup, and donned a sapphire-blue silk robe over her pajamas. If the physician had bad news to deliver, she intended to receive it with style, to appear in no way pitiable or in the least defeated.

The diagnosis proved to be bad indeed, her prognosis even worse. A year to live. A year of decline and suffering.

She knew now why Dr. Chandra had wanted to speak to her alone. Neither her mother nor her father possessed the emotional fortitude to watch her receive this news. Her reaction, no matter how stoic, would have undone them, and Bibi would have been too concerned about them to remain focused on her options as single-mindedly as she must.

With the gentleness and compassion of a caring chaplain in a death-row conference with a condemned man, Dr. Chandra explained why Bibi was without good options. Her cancer was far advanced. Even caught early, gliomatosis cerebri was too dispersed in the brain for surgery to be a permanent solution. At this stage, chemotherapy and radiation would gain her little time, if any. “And the side effects will make the days ahead harder, Bibi. Much harder, I’m afraid.”

“No offense,” she said, “but what about a second opinion?”

“I asked Dr. Beryl Chemerinski to provide one. She is a highly respected surgical oncologist at another hospital, with no connection to me. She concurs with my conclusions. I wish she didn’t. You can do chemo and radiation nevertheless. Only you can make that decision.”

She met his eyes for the longest time. He didn’t look away. At last she said, “I guess they call this the moment of truth.”

“I believe in truth, Bibi. And I know you do, as well.”

She looked down at her hands. She made them into fists. The left one would not close tight. “I want to fight it. Chemo, whatever. One year to live, huh? Really just one year? We’ll see.”

After Dr. Sanjay Chandra departed, before Nancy arrived with Murphy, Bibi sat with her notebook and pen in one of the chairs by the hospital-room window, to record her thoughts and feelings while they were fresh. She was anxious, but not in the grip of dread. Not yet. The news had been a hard blow; however, she regarded it not as a calamity, but as a summons to action. Often her notebook provided a refuge from the world, and with it she seemed to step out of time, into a place where she had the leisure to reflect on her impressions and emotions before acting on them. This time-out frequently saved her from doing and saying things that she would have regretted.

As she settled into the chair, her attention was drawn beyond the window, to a flock of large seagulls. The hospital lay only a few blocks from the ocean. The birds soared, plunged, soared again, each to its own intentions, exhilarated by the gift of flight, their joy as clearly expressed as any messages ever printed on the heavens by the sky-writing planes that advertised to summer beach crowds.

Into her mind came a memory of gulls on a December morning when she was eighteen. She was crossing the university campus to visit Dr. Solange St. Croix, who with an email had called her to a student-teacher conference. The gulls were joyful then, too, but if she thought they were an omen foretelling a rewarding meeting with the professor, Bibi was soon disappointed, left confused, embarrassed….

In spite of heavy competition, Bibi had earned one of the few places in the university’s renowned and exclusive creative-writing program. Some of its graduates had over the years become bestselling novelists and literary stars. For three months, she had diligently honed her craft, until her work had caught the eye of Dr. St. Croix, whom some called the holy mother of the writing program.

The professor’s office décor set new standards for minimalism. One desk, cold steel except for a black-granite top. Two chairs. The visitor’s seat featured wafer-thin blue cushions that ensured discomfort if one lingered past fifteen minutes. To the left of the long window stood a narrow bookcase with eight shelves, all half empty, as if to suggest that from the entire history of literature, only a few volumes merited inclusion in this collection. On the desk were only a laptop, currently closed, and beside it the printout of an essay that bore Bibi’s name on the cover page.

Dr. St. Croix—tall, thin, attractive in spite of herself—wore her graying hair in a bun long out of style and dressed as severely as a grieving widow. Her default image was of a cool, composed, and brilliant writing guru. She could be warm and funny, but she paid out her smiles sparingly, revealing her wit when least expected, thereby magnifying its effect. Now her eyes shone as cold and blue as the chemical gel in a refreezable ice pack. Her smile had flatlined.

Bibi knew that she was in trouble, but she didn’t know why.

“Miss Blair,” St. Croix said, “I understand you have expressed to other students some uncertainty about the value of being here.”

Dismayed to hear her perhaps naïve concern expressed in those words, she said, “No, not at all. I’ve learned so much already.”

“You worry that the system of inspiration at the core of this program is a confining set of rules, that to an extent it encourages disparate voices to sound alike.”

“Someone has exaggerated my concern, Dr. St. Croix. It’s just a small thing that I think about. It’s natural to have little doubts.”

“Our system of inspiration is not a set of rules, Miss Blair.”

“No. Of course it’s not.”

“We don’t press upon our students either a way of thinking or a rigid set of values.”

Bibi doubted that was true, but she kept silent.

“If you think in fact we do just that,” Solange St. Croix said, “then you have a fine excuse to drop out, one that even exasperated parents might have to accept as reasonable and ethical.”

Bibi half thought she hadn’t heard correctly. “Drop out?”

With undisguised contempt, the professor indicated the four-page manuscript. “How reckless of you to write about me.”

The recent assignment had been to choose someone in the writing program, student or instructor, someone you knew but whose residence—whether dorm room or apartment or home—you had never visited, and then to create as vividly as possible a credible living environment that grew from what you had observed about that person.

“But, Dr. St. Croix, you put yourself forward as a subject.”

“And you know perfectly well it’s not what you’ve written that is outrageous. It’s what you’ve
done.
”

“I don’t understand. What have I done?”

Bibi recoiled when she saw that her claim of puzzlement angered Solange St. Croix beyond all reason. The woman’s posture was that of righteous indignation. Something worse than vexation and barely less than wrath drew her face into leaner lines.

“What you think is clever, Miss Blair, is only low cunning. I have no patience for you. I won’t dignify your behavior by discussing it.” Her face flushed, and she seemed no less embarrassed than she was furious. “If you don’t drop out, I will see that you’re expelled, which will complicate any academic future you may have and be a stain on you as a writer, in the unlikely event you have a future as one.”

Even then, people didn’t push Bibi around without consequences. She stood up for herself when she was in the right. She leaned in to trouble. She was likewise practical, however, and she knew that she was outgunned in this inexplicable conflict. If she stayed, she would be struggling forward with a sworn enemy who was the founder of the writing program. She had no future here. Besides, while it was true that she had learned much in the past few months, it was also true that she entertained serious doubts about the program.

When Bibi reached for her manuscript, Solange St. Croix drew it back. “This is my evidence. Now get out.”

Beyond the hospital window, the seagulls sailed westward in a loose formation and out of sight.

Bibi didn’t know why the birds triggered the memory of Dr. St. Croix instead of recalling to mind one of the hundreds of memorable experiences she’d had involving surfing and the beach, where gulls were omnipresent. Unless perhaps it was blind hope that had made the link between then and now. Leaving the writing program had turned out to be a good thing, had led to her becoming a published author much faster than otherwise would have been the case. And so perhaps death from brain cancer was no more inevitable than had been the ruination of her writing career.

That made a kind of sense. But she knew intuitively that it was not the correct explanation.

She never had figured out what had so incensed the professor. And now she wondered if the offense of which she had never been properly accused was in some mysterious way related to the death by brain cancer that she now faced.