Ashley Bell: A Novel (39 page)

Bibi did not switch on the attic lights. The electricity had probably been disconnected in preparation for the demolition crew. Even if power was available, she preferred not to ascend into the glare of the gable-to-gable string of bare light bulbs that she had been grateful for twelve years earlier. She had been scared on that previous adventure but also driven by a not unpleasant expectation; and she wanted to recapture as much of that mix of feelings as she could, the better to jar her memory. As an adult, she didn’t scare as easily as she had back in the day. A greater measure of darkness might juice the fear factor.

When she reached the top of the ladder and stepped into the attic, the flashlight silvered the fog drifting through one of the screened vents just under the eaves, a slowly churning mass, almost pulsing, like the ectoplasm summoned from another world during a séance. She recalled the long fingers of fog questing through the same opening on that Sunday morning twelve years earlier.

The central aisle flanked by rows of shelving was as before, although everything once stored there had long ago been removed. The shelves were backed with sheets of Masonite, preventing her from seeing into the side aisles until she arrived at the head of each.

On that far-away Sunday, maybe there had been a presence in the next to the last aisle on her left, though Bibi did not expect to encounter it now. She hoped only that, standing where she had stood then, teasing herself into a similar frame of mind, she might recall a useful fragment that had survived the flames of the captain’s memory trick.

The flashlight flensed away the darkness to the left, and no figure loomed there. She probed the side aisle to her right. It was likewise deserted.

A final pair of side aisles were unexplored, but logic insisted that she needed to remain in the precise spot where she had stood on that previous occasion. She faced to the left, trying to summon a recollection of whoever or whatever had moved from shadow into light.

She listened to settling noises in the old structure, of which there were many, breathed in the rankness of mold and rodent droppings, shivered not from fear but from the chill of the night, and waited, waited.

Although uneasy, even apprehensive, she wasn’t fearful to the degree she had been as a young girl. She doubted that she could recapture that anxious mood to a sufficient extent in the current environment. So she switched off the flashlight, plunging the attic into perfect darkness.

That was better.

Her apprehension acquired a sharper edge. The settling noises seemed to become more numerous and were certainly more intimate than they’d been before. Some might have been caused not by the shifting of inanimate materials, but instead by mice or rats, or by songless night birds roosting in the rafters. Without vision, she had a keener sense of smell. The odors were not more pleasant, but richer, with greater nuance. She thought that she heard someone breathing nearby, a quick and shallow respiration, but when she held her breath, she realized that she had been listening to herself.

The recollection came with no flash-and-dazzle, no trumpets of revelation, only two voices, hers as a child and the captain’s. The conversation that she recalled had occurred long before his death, not here in the attic, outside in a place where the black limbs of a tree cradled orange fire but were not set ablaze.

“Holy shit,” Captain says.

“Yeah.”

“Sorry, Bibi. Bad language.”

“It’s okay.”

“I mean, look at me,” Captain says, “I’m still shaking.”

“Me, too.”

“Good God, you kept this all to yourself for so long.”

“Like eight months. I had to keep it myself. Till you.”

“But I’ve been here six months.”

“I had to be sure, would you be okay to tell.”

“Sonofabitch. Sorry, Bibi. But
sonofabitch
! This is nuts.”

“I’m not crazy.”

“No. Of course you’re not, sweetheart. You’re the furthest thing from crazy. That isn’t what I mean.”

They are sitting in the chairs on the small balcony outside his apartment. The sun is orange, but still more than an hour from the sea, blazing through the branches of the ancient front-yard ficus that towers over the bungalow, beaming fire and spilling shadows into the courtyard.

Captain says, “So you decided right from the start, you can’t ever tell your mom and dad.”

“Not ever, never.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know so much why,” Bibi says. “I just know I can’t because…of the way they are. Yeah, they’re real nice and real smart, and all….”

“They’re good people,” Captain agrees.

“I love them lots.”

“You better damn well love them, missy. They deserve it.”

“Yes, sir. I know. I do.”

“You never stop loving them.”

“No, sir. I won’t.”

“They brought you into the world because they wanted you. And they sure love you to pieces.”

“But if they knew,” Bibi says, “they’d get it all wrong.”

“Almost anyone would, not just them.”

“They wouldn’t mean to.”

“No, they wouldn’t.”

“But if they get it all wrong, what happens to me? To them and me and everything?”

“That’s something to worry about, all right.” He holds his hands up and stares at them. They are still trembling. He looks at Bibi. “How old are you for real?”

“Same as yesterday. Six and a half.”

“You are and you aren’t.”

“You know what I mean about Mommy and Daddy, how they are?”

Captain is quiet, but he’s thinking so hard and fast that Bibi wouldn’t be surprised if suddenly she heard his mind spinning. Then he says, “Yeah, I do. I know what you mean. But I’m not sure I can put it into words any better than you can.”

“So is it wrong not to tell them?”

“I can’t believe you kept it to yourself, almost eight months since it happened. Afraid and never showing it.”

“But is it wrong not to tell them?”

“No. It’s not wrong or right. It’s what’s best for you…for everyone.”

The silent sun slides limb by limb through the tree, and the mosaic of light and shadow on the courtyard floor slowly changes.

Captain says, “Tell me, what do you need most?”

“You mean…like what?”

“What do you most want to do about all this?”

“I wish none of it ever happened. I don’t want to be scared so bad.”

Captain says, “So you need to forget what happened, why it happened, how it happened?”

“But I can’t. I can’t ever forget.”

He held out one of his big hands, and she put her tiny hand in it, and they sat like that for a while, holding hands from chair to chair, as he seemed to think about the situation, and then he said, “Maybe there is. Maybe there is a way to forget.”

Bibi snapped from memory into the present, from the orange light of a westering sun into the pitch-black attic, when someone behind her put a hand on her right shoulder.

Startled, she simultaneously switched on the flashlight and fumbled it, dropped it. The beam rolled on the particleboard floor, sweeping a bright arc across the center aisle.

She ducked away from the hand on her shoulder, reached down, grabbed the flashlight, rose, pivoted, and slashed empty air with the beam. No one.

The last two side aisles—one to the left, one to the right—still had not been explored. If someone had actually put a hand on her, he might have retreated into one of those spaces.

Valiant girls were never conquered by their fear. Valiant girls understood that if everyone backed away from confrontation with evil, this world would be a prison from pole to pole, ruled with cruelty and brutality by the worst of humanity, no corner left for freedom. Every retreat, every appeasement, was one step down a staircase to Hell on Earth.

She drew the pistol. A one-hand grip was never good, but she needed her left for the flashlight. Forward then, swivel to the left, to the right. If someone had touched her, he wasn’t in either of the last two aisles, and there was nowhere else that he could have gone.

Like a community of ghosts, fog escorted her down the apartment stairs and across the courtyard to the bungalow. She had come here to visit the two places where the lost memories of her youth might still be found, the second being her former bedroom. Because the house had been stripped of everything having value—from used appliances to antique fixtures—and because demolition would soon occur, the back door was unlocked.

She entered a house that had once been warm and welcoming, that had resonated with conversation and laughter and music, where her dad and mom had sometimes pushed aside the kitchen table to dance in the middle of the floor, where Olaf had been the family fur child for six happy years. None of those memories had been purged from Bibi, and she expected, after an absence of only three years, to be bathed in nostalgia when she crossed the threshold, to see at every turn the best moments of a blessed childhood and adolescence.

Instead, the air hung cold and damp and thick with a fungous scent. The flashlight revealed dirt and damage everywhere it probed: a ceiling discolored and sagging from an unchecked roof leak, holes in the plaster through which ribs of lath were revealed, a largely decomposed rat with eyeless sockets and tight grin of pointed teeth, empty hamburger containers and soda cans and candy wrappers perhaps discarded by the salvage workers in the first phase of demolition. But the disrepair and debris did not alone transform the familiar into the alien. Beneath the chill in the air and the bleakness of ruination lay another coldness, a frigid emptiness that had nothing to do with the want of furniture or the lack of central heating, that resulted from the absence of the human spirit.

By the time Bibi reached her bedroom, she understood as never before that
home
wasn’t a place but rather a place in the heart. In this troubled world, everything was transient except what we could carry with us in our minds and hearts. Every home ceased to be a home sooner or later, but not with its demolition. It survived destruction as long as just one person who had loved it still lived. Home was the story of what happened there, not the story of where it happened.

In the barren bedroom, where the plaster was now cracked and pocked and scaling, where the once lustrous wood floor was scarred and dull and splintered, Bibi felt the deepest chill of all. With only the inadequate brush and palette of the flashlight beam, she could not paint a picture of how the room had been. All the joy of the books that she had read here, all the glamor of distant rock-’n’-roll radio stations to which she had listened late into the night, marveling at differences in local cultures expressed in the style and patter of the DJs: None of that helped her to recall what a nurturing haven this had been. Instead, she saw it now as a somber and lonely space, where she had begun to lose a part of herself, where fear had driven her to sequester from recollection things of enormous importance.

She had come here with the hope that something she saw would free the imprisoned truth of what had happened in this room seventeen years earlier. What intruder had terrorized her, crawling in the dim glow of the Mickey Mouse night-light, and ultimately into her bed and under the covers?

The memory she regained, however, was of another conversation with the captain. It had taken place in the kitchen, a day or so after their tête-à-tête on the balcony above the courtyard. Murphy and Nancy were out for the evening at a concert. Captain cooked for Bibi and himself: his favorite recipe for chili-cheese dogs, with oven-baked fries bought at a supermarket from the special freezer section known only to currently serving and retired members of the Marine Corps. After they had finished eating at the kitchen table, as they were waiting to see if they could free up enough stomach room for an Eskimo Pie each, the captain raised the subject of forgetting.

Captain says, “I was taught a memory trick by this Gypsy in the Ukraine, after it wasn’t a part of the Soviet Union anymore. Is that right? Come to think of it, I might have learned it from this hundred-year-old shaman in Vietnam. Wherever and whoever, it’s a good trick and I’ve used it to forget terrible things I saw and couldn’t live with.”

“What things?”

“Things you see in war that will destroy you if you can’t stop thinking about them.”

“Tell me one.”

“If I hadn’t played the memory trick on myself, if I could remember those things, I still wouldn’t tell you.”

“Yeah, but I told you about what happened to me. I showed you how it happened and everything.”

“And I almost wish you hadn’t, missy.”

Having eaten their hotdogs by the light of six candles in small red-glass votives, they sit now in that warm flickering glow, the captain nursing a second beer and Bibi pretending that her Coke with a lime slice is a grown-up drink that might give her a hangover.

She says, “I like tricks. There’s this magician, he comes in Pet the Cat sometimes. I saw him make cards just disappear in front of my nose.”

“Making bad memories disappear is a thousand times harder. It’s true magic. I bet that magician fella brought the cards back—”

“Yeah, he did. Like poof!”

“—but once you burn memories with this trick of mine, they won’t ever come back. Are you still sure forgetting is best?”

“I’m sure,” Bibi says. “I don’t want to be afraid all the time. Aren’t you sure, Captain?”

“Sometimes…” He falls quiet. Then he begins again. “Sometimes, I start thinking around the edges of one of the holes. One of the memory holes. Thinking around the edges, trying to pull the burnt threads together. I try to fill it in. The hole. I get obsessed with filling it in. Sometimes what I fill it in with is maybe even worse than what was there in the first place.”

Bibi doesn’t know how to respond to that. The captain seems almost to be talking to himself, so maybe she doesn’t need to say anything.

In sunlight or in shadow, the captain is a striking figure, so tall and strong, with his mane of white hair and weather-beaten face and eyes that are full of sorrow even when he laughs. In candlelight, he is yet more compelling, like someone in movies, the man you must go to when everything goes wrong, the one the hero seeks out when he’s at rope’s end and needs guidance.

After considering her question through the remainder of his beer and after getting a third from the refrigerator, he says, “Yes, I do think it’s for the best, though God help me if I’m wrong. You know what hypnotism is, missy?”

“Sure. The guy swings a watch on a chain, like in front of your eyes, and makes you cluck like a chicken.”

“It isn’t just for stage shows. It can be used to break someone of smoking cigarettes or to overcome, say, a fear of flying. And for other good, healing purposes. For the memory trick to be useful, the voodooist had to hypnotize me first.”

“Why?”

“While I was under hypnosis, he implanted the unshakeable belief that the memory trick would work. Later, because I believed that it worked, it did work. You understand?”

She squinches her face. “Maybe not.”

“Well, that’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to understand it for it to work.”

“Maybe I don’t understand that, either.” Bibi sips her lime-slice Coca-Cola and tries to give Captain the same serious look he gives her, so that he’ll know she isn’t being a baby, that she’s thought about this and wants it for good reasons, though she can’t imagine one reason that would be bad to want it. “Help me. Please. You’ve got to, Captain. Help me like the Gypsy voodoo helped you.”

For a while, the captain says nothing. He is full of silences this evening, not his usual self. He doesn’t look at Bibi but at his can of beer, at the candles, at his left hand and the two stumps where his little finger and ring finger should be.

Finally he picks up one of the red-glass votives. Although he holds it by the thick bottom, it must still be hot, but he doesn’t seem to mind the heat. He looks at Bibi, and there is something in his eyes that she couldn’t in a million years put a name to, but it makes her terribly sad, though not just sad, it makes her afraid for the captain.

He tells her to push aside the glass of Coca-Cola and to put her hands in her lap, palms up, and relax. Everything is going to be all right, he says. She has nothing to worry about, nothing she needs to fear. He is going to make everything right. She must listen to his voice,
which has become softer and lower, listen to his voice and watch the candle flame pulsing in the red-glass cup, watch the flame, watch it without turning her head, follow it just with her eyes, the flame, and listen to his voice. He begins to move the votive back and forth before her eyes, back and forth in slow, smooth, shallow arcs, like a pendulum….

When she returns, she has no awareness of having been gone. She thinks nothing has happened, but he says that the hypnosis part is over. Now they are ready to play the memory trick. He provides her with an index card and a pen. Together they decide on the words. She must forget not only what crawled across her room that night eight months earlier, but also why and how it had gotten there. When the petition is airtight, when it leaves no loose end that might unravel, Captain retrieves a pair of tongs from a kitchen drawer and presents them to her for the burning.

She is convinced that the memory trick will work, that it is magic of the highest order and will make her life normal again, that the ugly scary memories will vanish like the magician’s deck of cards and, unlike the deck, will never return.

She grips the index card with the tongs.

From his chair across the table, Captain picks up one of the votives and holds it out to her.

The quivering flame stands as high as the rim of the glass.

Bibi turns the tongs so that one corner of the index card points into the votive, cleaves the flame, and is ignited.

In the jaws of the tongs, the burning object might be a cocoon, for from it arises a bright butterfly of fire that flexes its wings across the white cardstock, which peels away in gray ribbons. The butterfly appears about to leap free, to shake loose the remnants of the white chamber of resurrection that its larval form had woven for it and soar into luminous flight, but instead it collapses into a midge of flame.

Captain tells Bibi to open the tongs, so that the fragment of card trapped between its jaws will be consumed.

Bibi obeys, and the burning scrap falls to the red-Formica top of the dinette table, the same cool chrome table that one day will be in her first apartment, the table at which ten lettered tiles will years later spell the name
ASHLEY BELL.

The final twist of combustible paper has its bright moment, and in two seconds dwindles into ashes.

The captain sweeps the ashes off the Formica, carries them to the trash compactor, and blows them off his hands, into the trash.

When he returns, he stands watching his young granddaughter for a moment before he asks, “What are you afraid of, Bibi?”

“Afraid of? I don’t know. Well, there’s this old dog, two blocks over, it’s not friendly. And I sure don’t like wasps at all.”

“Have you ever been alone at night in your bedroom and been afraid that something else was there with you?”

She frowns. “How could something be with me when I’m alone?”

Instead of answering her, he says, “I guess the night-light makes you feel safe.”

“Stupid silly Mickey Mouse,” she says, and makes a face that no one could mistake for anything other than exasperation. “I’m not a baby anymore. They shouldn’t treat me like a baby. I’m not a baby anymore, and I’m never gonna be a baby again—that’s how it works.”

“You’ve not even once been glad to have Mickey there?”

“Nope. I’d break him, you know, by accident, if that wouldn’t be wrong. I might do it anyway.” She notices the tongs still in her right hand. She sniffs the air. Her eyes widen. “We just did it, didn’t we?”