Ashley Bell: A Novel (44 page)

This time Bibi’s face did not serve as the canvas, and the medium of disfigurement wasn’t bruising and abrasion. Her arms lay at length above the top sheet and thin blanket. The right sleeve of her pajamas was rucked up halfway to her elbow. On her bared forearm, about two inches above her wrist bones, neatly formed black letters began to appear one at a time, as if her skin were parchment on which an invisible penman were printing his brand, to lay claim to her, body and soul. Although the words included no curse or demonic name, the crisp black letters appeared one after the other with such implacable intent that they could be regarded only as an ominous sign, no matter what their ultimate meaning might prove to be.

Murphy cringed from this inexplicable imprinting as if the message were being carved into his daughter’s flesh with a knife, turning away repeatedly only to look back again each time, saying “This is wrong, wrong, this is wrong.”

Against fear, anger was an inadequate defense, and Nancy could no longer sustain it. At the foot of the bed again, she stood aghast, robbed of the power to move or speak, transfixed by the manifesting letters, as if they would spell out both her daughter’s doom and her own.

Pax hoped to hear Bibi’s voice in his mind’s ear as before, even if it might be as enigmatic as on the two previous occasions. But as the first two lines on her forearm completed a name, and as a third line began to form, he heard nothing except expressions of amazement from the two nurses. And from Edgar Alwine, an observation: “It’s a tattoo, isn’t it? A very simple tattoo, perhaps poorly removed by laser and now resurfacing. Is that possible?”

“Bibi didn’t have any tattoos,” Nancy said.

Nancy’s
didn’t
rather than
doesn’t
suggested an unconscious resignation, a despondency if not despair, that chilled Pax. When he spoke, his intention was as much to correct the verb tense, regarding Bibi, as to clarify her position on tattoos. “She isn’t against them. She admires them when they’re really beautiful. But she doesn’t have any desire for one. She says a tattoo is a means of satisfying one emotional need or another, but she satisfies hers in other ways.”

While the chief of hospital security filmed, while the two nurses watched with the puzzled gravity of those whose fundamental certainties were proving uncertain, while Nancy stood benumbed by horror and helplessness, while Murphy bit on the knuckle of one fisted hand—the fist an expression of his desire to confront his daughter’s unknown tormentor, the biting of the knuckle emblematic of the confused child within the man—while the floodgates of the setting sun poured forth torrents of scarlet light that washed against the window, the fourth and final line welled into view on Bibi’s forearm, one black letter at a time, and the message—or the promise or the challenge, or whatever it might be—was complete:
ASHLEY BELL WILL LIVE
.

“Who is Ashley Bell?” asked Edgar Alwine.

No one in the room had heard of her.

“Where is Bibi, who is this name on her arm, how is any of this happening? Why? I don’t understand,” Nancy said.

Such misery informed the woman’s voice that her husband, usually quick to console and reassure her, evidently felt inadequate to the task. He turned to Pax with an expression familiar to any team leader in combat; he wanted guidance, and if not guidance, then confirmation of his own instincts, and if not confirmation, then reassurance.

But here Pax felt a lack of competence that he had never felt in battle. He did not know what to say to Murphy. He did not know what to do. He felt awkward. Awkward and useless and stupid, and he hated feeling all those things. That might be who he was at this moment, in this unprecedented situation, but it was not who he had been until now and, by God, would not be who he would be going forward. Since his earliest memories of his family and the horse ranch, there had been a rhythm to his life with which he had always been in step, no matter what changes in tempo might occur. The rhythm was still there. It was always there. The rhythm was a thing outside himself, not of his creation, and all he needed to do was hear it again.

Nancy went around to Bibi’s right side and took her hand. But she seemed either to be repelled by the limpness of that hand or, more likely, not repelled but dispirited by it, by the lifelessness that it implied. Perhaps the four simple and yet mysterious words, from which she could not take her eyes, suggested to her a previously unconsidered system to the world requiring that she follow a path of thought she found disturbing or daunting, for it seemed to Paxton that Nancy’s distress was of a complex character, that it was not solely grief prompted by the calamity that had befallen her daughter. Whatever other fears and worries might be troubling her, she turned from the bed and went to the window and stood staring out into the vast sky, where gulls rowed through an ocean of air or caught waves of wind and surfed without need to consider an approaching shore.

Edgar Alwine had yet to film anyone’s statement regarding the inexplicable appearance of the injuries to Bibi’s face. Just as he was about to start with Petronella, the door opened, and a youngish physician in a white lab coat entered, having been informed of the extraordinary stigmata but not yet of the four-word tattoo. He went directly to the patient and was equally astonished and concerned by what he saw. He brought himself up to speed by listening attentively as Petronella told her story to Alwine’s camera. The evident depth and sincerity of the doctor’s concern disposed Pax to like the man even before they were introduced.

As they shook hands, Dr. Sanjay Chandra said, “When I told Bibi that she had one year to live, she gave me this look, such a look, I don’t think I could have broken eye contact if I tried, and she said, ‘Really just one year? We’ll see.’
We’ll see!
I’ve been so impressed with her, I’ve allowed myself the unallowable, to think that, well, maybe she’ll gain another year or two, even be the first to beat this thing, maybe do the impossible. But now this coma and these…these phenomena. I’ve no idea what to make of this. I’ll need extensive consultation with colleagues, other oncologists, neurologists, I don’t even know who yet.”

He rounded the bed to Bibi’s left side, to the EEG workstation that stood on a trolley cart. As he used the keyboard and pointed to things of interest that he called forth on the monitor, he spoke of the five brain waves—gamma, beta, alpha, theta, delta—of their frequency ranges, their amplitude, their purpose in optimal mental functioning. At times there were twenty wave-tracking readouts on the screen at once, not five, but they represented the feeds from the many electrodes in the electro cap that Bibi wore. The system was also capable of 3-D brain mapping from four perspectives, and Dr. Chandra brought some of those images onto the screen, not maps of Bibi’s brain in the moment, but selected studies from the past few days, about which he had particular comments. There were as well a feature called coherence analysis and another called power-spectra displays.

Pax understood more of it than he might have if anyone but Dr. Chandra had explained it, though most of the information passed as far over his head as a 747 at cruising altitude.

He came away with the essence of the situation, however, and that was enough to confirm what he suspected. Something unprecedented was happening, something as consequential as it was strange. It might be a historic development in the annals of medicine, but perhaps historic also in a broader sense.

Each of the five brain waves was indicative of a specific brain function, and there was an ideal level that represented superior performance. Gamma waves were associated with learning, cognition, perception, information processing, and the binding of all senses into a coherent order. Too little gamma activity signified learning disabilities and depression. Too much was linked to anxiety and stress. Optimal beta waves ensured good memory and problem solving. Ideal alpha waves were present when you were relaxed but with good focus, not daydreaming. Model theta waves meant your creativity, emotional connection, and intuition were all humming at their peak. Optimal delta-wave patterns were present when your immune system and natural-healing capacity were fully engaged, and also indicated deep restful sleep.

“When you’re awake,” Dr. Chandra said, “the five brain waves are ever-present, but only one is dominant at any one time, depending on what state of consciousness you’re in.”

Murphy and Nancy must have heard this before. But she turned her back to the window to listen, and Murphy moved close to Pax, giving his full attention to the physician, as did the two nurses.

Edgar Alwine filmed Dr. Chandra, perhaps not so much as part of his litigation-prevention file, but because he, too, sensed that in this moment, in this room, history might be made.

Calling onto the screen a simpler display than twenty feeds, revealing the five wave patterns of Bibi’s brain in real time, Sanjay Chandra said, “But there is not at any moment a dominant wave in her brain. Right now, each of these patterns is optimal, ideal. There is no precedent for this. It has never been observed before. Until her. And it’s been this way since we first hooked her up to the EEG Thursday morning, three and a half days ago.”

“Could it be a malfunctioning machine?” Paxton asked.

“No. That’s what we thought. But this is the second EEG we’ve used. It’s reporting the same activity as the first.”

“What does it mean?” Alwine asked, prodding the doctor for the purpose of the video.

Chandra regarded the screen in silence for a moment, marveling at the five dancing wave lines. “It means that since falling into the coma, she’s not really been in a coma at all, not as we understand a coma. She’s been in multiple states of consciousness simultaneously, while the rest of us are always in one. She’s at the same time deep asleep and functioning at a high cognitive level. She’s learning and
ferociously
processing information and rapidly searching her memory and problem solving and being enormously creative, maintaining a vigorous emotional connection—while also deep asleep and dreaming.”

Into Paxton’s mind just then came the beloved voice, clearer than it had been on the previous two occasions, the voice that he had hoped to hear again. Although she spoke only ten words, they were of such importance and had such a powerful impact that, stunned, he gripped the footrail of the bed to steady himself; and had there been a chair nearby, he would have collapsed into it.

Bibi stepped out of Room 6 into post-midnight Laguna Beach. If something had earlier rapped-tapped-scratched the windows and door to get her attention, it was either gone now or watching her from a secluded lair in the white eclipse of fog. Carrying the electronic map in her left hand, the pistol in her right, she walked through dense clouds that all but required radar navigation, the city quieted as if by a plague that had left no animal or insect life in its wake. In the canyons, the coyotes had chosen hunger over a blind hunt and had gone to bed. In their roosts, the birds stood wrapped in silent wings. Only the streetlamps, by their regimented placement, could be known for what they were. All other lights—of homes or businesses, or churches with pastors holding irrational expectations of late-hour converts—were blurred and hazy and forlorn, robbed of defining shapes, their distance impossible to judge, some of them encircled by faint coronas or multiple coronas, but others like sinkholes of light only slight degrees away from going as black as dead stars.

Anything could have happened in that murk. Anything could have taken her if she was wanted. But she arrived intact at Pogo’s Honda.

After she put the portable GPS, the pistol, and her purse on the passenger seat and settled behind the wheel and locked the doors, she considered calling Pax. Had he phoned her in the past twenty-four hours, he would have gotten either voice mail or Terezin, since she had abandoned her phone with her Ford Explorer. But of course he had not reached out to her, because he was on a mission, under orders to run silent. And if she called him, she would only be disappointed by the failure to connect.

Except for the fog, she would not have bothered to switch on the GPS. She had memorized the route to 11 Sonomire Way, where she would find the imprisoned Ashley Bell—if Calida’s last act of divination had indeed produced hidden knowledge before she’d been relieved of her life and her fingers. In these occluding clouds, however, a guiding voice that precisely counted off the distance to every turn would be a great assistance.

She started the engine and switched on the headlights, which tunneled all of twelve or fourteen feet into the fallen sky, but before she drove away from the curb, she was overcome by the desire, the need, to speak to Pax as though he could hear her, half a world away, without a phone. This was the romantic nonsense of a child or a teenage girl, but she was both those things in addition to being an adult, for she remained all that she had ever been.

She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths and thought that she would express her love and longing for him. But when she spoke, she surprised herself by saying, “Pax, I need you. I am not dreaming. Find me.”

No one else heard Bibi, but she came through loud and clear to Paxton.
Pax, I need you. I am not dreaming. Find me.

If, since entering the hospital room, he had not twice before heard her voice, he might have thought he imagined this or might have wasted time trying to explain it away. The previous two incidents—the tongue-twister involving Petronella’s name, and the stuff about still point where past and future were gathered—had prepared him to accept the reality of the phenomenon and to remain alert to every word that might come and to the nuances of what she said.

Unlike the former transmissions—or whatever they were—this one was directed to him by name. Comatose, apparently unaware of everyone around her, Bibi must in fact know that he had arrived. He’d read of coma patients who, on recovering, reported hearing every word spoken while they’d been apparently insensible. If anyone in such an isolate condition would remain firmly anchored to the wakeful realm above the waterline of sleep, it would be his Bibi, who so loved the world and all its wonders.

Furthermore, she’d spoken to him the moment Dr. Chandra had said that she was in multiple stages of consciousness simultaneously while also deep asleep and dreaming. She must have heard the physician. And she had specifically said that she was not dreaming, in spite of what could be read in the brain waves, in spite of the rapid eye movement, which always signified that a sleeper lay deep in dreams.

Edgar Alwine had begun to film Nurse Julia, and those in the room, all but Pax, were fixated upon her account of the inexplicable emergence of the four-word tattoo.

Find me.
Bibi had said,
Find me.
She was lying in bed, there before his eyes, and didn’t need finding. Pax could have attributed her request to delirium or merely to the confusion that plagued the mind when it was lost in the false world of a coma, whatever that might be like. But she had sounded so like herself, so to-the-point and assertive, not panicked or bewildered, calm and determined to be heard. He didn’t know how she could reach out to him in this way or why she couldn’t convey the nature of her plight and her needs in a more detailed and helpful manner, but the restrictions under which she had to function were no excuse for him either to shrug off her request or to wait for further communications that might never come.

But if Bibi, in whatever deep and strange place she currently inhabited, wasn’t bewildered, Pax certainly was, and he didn’t know what he could do to help her.

The amorphous fog writhing in the headlight beams as if intent on finding a suitable form to wear henceforth, the low rumble-purr of the car engine like an expression of animal pleasure at the prospect of the journey ahead, the first thin exhalations of welcome heat from the floor and dashboard vents, the witchy light from the instrument panel reflected in her eyes as she met her own otherwise dark gaze in the rearview mirror…Every detail of the moment suddenly seemed to be a portent of an approaching event, fraught with hidden meaning and ripe for divination by crystal ball or tea leaves, or Scrabble tiles.

Bibi sat behind the wheel, considering what she had said aloud to Pax, and wondering why she’d said it. Although he was half a world away, the fact that she’d spoken to him wasn’t strange to her, only
what
she had said. Why say that she wasn’t dreaming, when of course she wasn’t, being wide awake? Why ask him to find her when she wasn’t lost? She understood the needing-him part. She always needed him. And in the current madness, just having him at her side would smooth some of the craziness out of the night.

She was reminded of the key thing she had learned since she’d left her apartment and gone on the run: that she kept secrets from herself, pieces of her life that had been lost to Captain’s memory trick. Because she had recovered parts of those memories, she knew now that they hadn’t been rendered into ashes and blown away forever. They were barreled and stored and awaited discovery. Maybe the answer to why she’d said what she’d said to Paxton would become clear to her when she found that memory barrel, hammered a hole at the bottom, drained it, and learned, to the last drop, what was in it. Meanwhile, she couldn’t understand herself or fully trust herself, which was frustrating but not as frustrating as being dead of cancer.

“So get on with it, Beebs,” she said. She wasn’t the only girl in trouble. Ashley Bell would be murdered—and suffer who knew what horrors and indignities before the lethal blow—perhaps as soon as twenty-four hours from now. When she pulled away from the curb and drove slowly south on Pacific Coast Highway, the GPS began to offer directions, like a little spirit guide in a box.