Ashley Bell

“Yes, Mom. I’m okay. I’m going to be fine.”

“Do you need anything? Water? Do you need water?”

Bibi’s mouth kept flooding with saliva, as if she were about to throw up, but she swallowed it and kept her breakfast down. The last thing she wanted was water.

In the hallway, after Manuel spoke with the tall man for a moment, the latter came into the cubicle and introduced himself as Dr. Armand Barsamian. His calm demeanor and confident manner would have reassured Bibi under other circumstances.

While he checked her eyes with an ophthalmoscope, he asked a few questions—her name, date of birth, Social Security number—and she realized that he wanted to ascertain whether or not her memory had been affected by whatever was happening to her.

“We need to get a CT scan of the brain,” Dr. Barsamian said. “If this is a stroke, the quicker we identify the cause—thrombosis, hemorrhage—and determine treatment, the more likely you’ll fully recover.”

Already an orderly with a gurney had appeared in the doorway. The physician helped Bibi lie upon it.

As she was wheeled away, her mother stood in the hall, looking bereft, as though she half expected never to see her daughter again. The orderly turned a corner, and Bibi lost sight of her mom.

On the second floor, the room containing the CT scanner felt chilly. She didn’t ask for a blanket. Superstitiously, she felt that the more stoic she remained, the better the outcome of the test.

She transferred from the gurney to the scanner table.

The orderly stepped out of the room as a nurse appeared with a tray on which were arranged a rubber-tube tourniquet, a foil packet containing a disposable cloth saturated with antibacterial solution, and a hypodermic needle containing a contrast medium that would make blood vessels and abnormalities of the brain show up more clearly.

“Are you okay, dear?”

“Thank you, yes. I’m okay.”

After the nurse departed, the unseen CT technician spoke to Bibi through an intercom from an adjacent chamber, explaining how the procedure would progress. The woman had a gentle girlish voice with the faint trace of a Japanese accent, so that when Bibi closed her eyes, a scene more vivid than the CT room formed around her.…

A flagstone path leads to a red moon gate entwined with dazzling white chrysanthemums. Beyond lies a teahouse sheltered by cherry trees in blossom, a scattering of their pale petals gracing the dark stone underfoot. Inside, geishas in silk kimonos wear their long black hair twisted up in elaborate arrangements held in place by ivory pins carved in the shape of dragonflies.

A sliding cradle in the table moved Bibi backward, headfirst, into the aperture of the scanner, rousing her from that teahouse of the mind. The procedure was completed so quickly that she wondered if it had been done correctly, though she knew that the hospital staff’s competence was the least of her concerns.

She was frightened by the speed with which they had handled her case since she had entered the ER waiting room. She would have no hope of peace until they arrived at a diagnosis. Nevertheless, the faster they worked, the more she felt as though she were sliding down a chute, accelerating, into an abyss.

7 (#ulink_ff60c39a-8b54-55ab-b7e2-390023325273)

Twelve Years Earlier

The Power of Cookies (#ulink_ff60c39a-8b54-55ab-b7e2-390023325273)

OLAF, THE STRAY GOLDEN RETRIEVER THAT wandered out of the rainstorm, had been with the Blair family for less than a week when he settled into the habit of climbing the stairs to the apartment above the garage. He enjoyed lounging on the small balcony that contained a pair of rocking chairs. He rested his chin on the bottom rail of the white-painted balustrade, peering between the balusters and into the courtyard behind the bungalow, as if he were a prince contentedly surveying his domain.

Each time she discovered him up there, young Bibi called him down, at first in a whisper that she was certain he could hear, because dogs had better hearing than did human beings. Although he watched her as she stood below, Olaf always pretended to be deaf to her entreaties. When she raised her voice to a stage whisper, he still failed to come to her, though the soft thumping of his tail against the balcony floor proved that he understood her commands.

She dared not climb the stairs to take the dog by the collar and escort him down. Once on the balcony, she would be only a few feet from the front door of the apartment. Too close.

Frustrated, Bibi paced the courtyard, glancing up repeatedly at Olaf but never at any of the three windows. The sun made mirrors of those panes of glass, so that she couldn’t see anyone even if he might be standing inside, watching. Nevertheless, she did not rest her gaze directly on any window.

She went into the bungalow and, from a tin in the pantry, took two of the carob cookies that the retriever couldn’t resist. In the courtyard once more, she held a treat in each hand, arms raised above her head, letting Olaf smell his delicious reward for obedience. She knew that he caught the carob scent, for even from the courtyard she could see his wet black nose twitching between the balusters.

The cookies had always worked before, but not this time. After a few minutes, Bibi retreated to the back porch of the bungalow and sat on a wicker sofa with thick cushions upholstered in a palm-leaf pattern.

Olaf liked to lie there beside her, his head in her lap, while she stroked his face, scratched his chest, and rubbed his tummy. The porch roof blocked her view of the apartment windows, but she could just still see the lower part of the balcony railing and the dog with his snout between two balusters. He was watching her, all right.

Bibi brought one of the carob treats to her nose, smelled it, and decided that it would not be offensive to the human tongue. She bit the cookie in half and chewed. It didn’t taste bad, but it didn’t taste fabulous, either. Carob was supposed to have a flavor much like that of chocolate, which dogs couldn’t eat, but it would never put Hershey out of business.

From his perch on the apartment balcony, Olaf had seen half of his treat brazenly consumed. His chin no longer rested on the bottom rail of the balustrade. His snout poked between two balusters a foot below the top rail, which meant that he’d gotten to his feet.

Bibi waved the remaining half of the cookie back and forth in front of her nose, back and forth, raising her voice to express her unqualified approval of that delicacy. “Mmmmm, mmmmm, mmmmm.”

Olaf bolted down the stairs from the balcony, across the brick courtyard, and onto the porch. He bounded onto the sofa, landing with such force that the wicker crackled and creaked in protest.

“Good boy,” said Bibi.

With his soft mouth, he took the half cookie from between her thumb and forefinger. She fed him the second cookie whole, and while he chewed it with noisy pleasure, she said, “Don’t go up there again. Stay away from the apartment. It’s a bad place. It’s terrible. It’s evil.”

After he finished licking his chops, the dog regarded her with what she took to be solemn consideration, his pupils wide there in the shadows of the porch, his golden irises seeming to glow with an inner light.

8 (#ulink_cbb37db1-0b03-5c5c-a415-0dad99fff74f)

Hammered and Fully Prosecuted (#ulink_cbb37db1-0b03-5c5c-a415-0dad99fff74f)

NANCY TOLD HERSELF TO CHILL OUT, GEL, TO sideslip through the moment, ride out the chop, to just sit in one of the visitor chairs and wait for Bibi to be brought back from the CT scan. But even when she had been an adolescent surf mongrel learning the water, she had never been a Barbie with the placidity of a doll. When on a board, she had always wanted to shred the waves, tear them up, and when the waves were mushing and the land had more appeal than the ocean, she had always nonetheless pumped through the day with her usual energy.

And so when Murph turned the corner from the first ER hallway into the second, Nancy was pacing back and forth outside the cubicle from which Bibi had been wheeled away on a gurney. She didn’t see him immediately, but intuited his arrival by the way a couple of nurses did double takes and smiled invitingly and whispered to each other. Even at fifty, Murphy looked like Don Johnson in the actor’s Miami Vice days, and if he had wanted other women, they would have been hanging off him like remora, those fish that, with powerful suckers, attached themselves to sharks.

Murph still wore a black T-shirt, a Pendleton with the sleeves rolled up, and boardshorts, but in respect for the hospital, he had stepped out of sandals and into a pair of black Surf Siders with blue laces, worn without socks. Newport Beach was one of the few places in the country where a guy dressed like Murph would not seem out of place in a hospital or, for that matter, in a church.

He put his arms around Nancy, and she returned his hug, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Didn’t need to speak. Needed only to cling to each other.

When they pulled back from the embrace and were just holding hands, Murph said, “Where is she?”

“They took her for a CAT scan. I thought they would have brought her back by now. I don’t know why they haven’t. It shouldn’t take so long—should it?”

“Are you okay?”

“I feel like I’ve been hammered, fully prosecuted,” she said, both terms surfer lingo for wiping out and getting brutally thrashed by a killer wave.

“How’s Bibi doing?” he asked.

“You know her. She copes. Whatever’s happening to her, she’s already thinking what she’ll do once she’s gotten through it, if maybe it’s good material for a story.”

Rolling his mobile computer station before him, Dr. Barsamian, the chief ER physician during the current shift, approached them with the news that Bibi had been admitted to the hospital following her CT scan. “She’s in Room 456.”

The doctor’s eyes were as black as kalamata olives. If in fact he knew something horrific about Bibi’s condition, Nancy could read nothing in his gaze.

“The CT scan seems to have been inconclusive,” Barsamian said. “They’ll want to do more testing.”

In the elevator, on the way from the first floor to the fourth, Nancy suffered a disturbing moment of sensory confusion. Although the position-indicator light on the directory above the doors went from 1 to 2, then to 3, she could have sworn that the cab was not ascending, that it was descending into whatever might occupy the building’s two subterranean levels, that they were being cabled and counterweighted down into some enduring darkness from which there would be no return.