Ashley Bell

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.”

16 (#ulink_cf752ea9-39f0-5b61-ada5-ff2ddc06712e)

A Memory Inexplicable in These Circumstances (#ulink_cf752ea9-39f0-5b61-ada5-ff2ddc06712e)

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.

17 (#ulink_c42cd93b-0798-5f22-b96a-9d8b14cd3ed1)

In the Hours Before the Crisis (#ulink_c42cd93b-0798-5f22-b96a-9d8b14cd3ed1)

BIBI WAS SITTING ON THE EDGE OF HER BED, making a list in the spiral-bound notebook, when her parents arrived with the intention of lifting her spirits as best they could, although they did not succeed in this. The moment that they walked through the door, the stricken look in their eyes was poorly synchronized with their smiles.

They didn’t fail her; they never could. Only she could keep her spirits up. Anyway, she wasn’t depressed, certainly not despairing. She didn’t have time for that. Or the inclination. Even as grim as it sounded, her prognosis was a challenge, and the only reasonable way to respond to a challenge was to rise to it.

She was still the girl whose mind was always spinning, and now it spun out tasks for her mother, which she added to the list in the notebook. “They’re keeping me here until tomorrow, maybe even till the day after. Dr. Chandra needs to do a few more tests to plan a course of chemo and radiation. The choice is mine, and I’m going to fight. I need you to go to my apartment, bring my laptop. I’m going to research the crap out of this. I need changes of underwear. And socks. My feet get cold. Some of my nice soft towels. The ones here are scratchy. And all my vitamins. My iPod with the headphones. I’ll have to use headphones in here.” Because she maintained a post-office box, she needed her mail to be collected and brought to her. She described a few other errands as she appended them to the list, and then she tore off two pages and handed them to her mother.

Grateful to have something to do other than dwell on his daughter’s situation, Murphy said, “We’ll split up the work, Nancy. You take the apartment stuff. I’ll do the other running around.”