Ashley Bell: A Novel (61 page)

The impossible Mojave fog, a ghost of the sea that had existed there millions of years ago, washed against the portholes. Deep in the whiteness, gliding shadows passed, immense and strange, as though Bibi’s busy imagination could not resist supplying those intimations of the behemoths that plied the ocean of an earlier creation.

Approaching the lovely girl, who sat with eerie equanimity, Bibi did a small editorial revision involving the manacle that cuffed her to the chair, and it clattered to the floor.

Ashley Bell stood and stepped forward. She wore black patent-leather shoes, white stockings, a white pleated skirt, and a crisp white blouse with pale-blue embroidered butterflies on the cuffs and collar.

They met face-to-face, no more than a foot apart. Her skin was flawless, as in the photograph, her features in exquisite proportion. Those wide-set eyes, the singular violet shade of certain hyacinths, were remarkable not solely for their color but also because they were unusually pellucid, her stare direct and piercing, as if she didn’t merely see Bibi but also read her soul.

“You’re thirteen and I’m twenty-two, but we’re the same height,” Bibi said. “How can that be?”

Ashley Bell smiled and said, “How, indeed?”

Bibi was surprised to hear herself say, “I know you. We’ve met before.”

“Yes. Eight years ago.”

“Where?”

“In a book,” said Ashley Bell.

Wonder rose in Bibi. “You survived Dachau.”

“Yes. And wound up in America.”

“Those are the clothes you were wearing when the SS came for your family.”

“My mother and father resisted. They were murdered, and I was dragged from the house.”

Astonishment of the emotions. Amazement of the intellect. And wonder growing. “That’s where I saw the house before. In Toba’s first book,” Bibi said. “Toba Ringelbaum. It was a house in a German city, not in the middle of nowhere in the Mojave desert. How could I forget you, Toba’s wonderful book, Toba herself?”

She had taken from fact only what she had needed to craft her fiction, and blocked from memory anything that might have made her realize that she was in a dreamlike state of creation, anything that would have allowed her to understand that she remained cancer-riddled and unable to go on any real quest for a cure.

“You grew up to be a surgical oncologist,” Bibi remembered. “Specializing in brain cancer.”

“You don’t need an oncologist, Beebs. Don’t need me anymore,” Ashley said. “I was never really in danger. How could I be, with my story told and finished long ago, in a book now out of print? It was you who needed to be saved.” Her voice changed. Now she spoke with Bibi’s voice. “And you needed to overcome Captain’s memory trick, so that you could discover that you had the power to cure yourself.”

“Do I really? Do I have such power?”

“If you can imagine Jasper so vividly that one day a Jasper comes to you…Well, surely then you can imagine yourself free of cancer.”

As she spoke, Ashley Bell underwent a metamorphosis, her blond hair darkening nearly to black. Her hyacinth eyes darkled as well, and her features became a mirror image of Bibi’s.

The Bibi who had been Ashley put a hand on Bibi’s brow and then reached into her head as though flesh and bone presented no obstacle, her fingertips blindly tracing the surface of the brain, the gyri and sulci, the folds and fissures. This was an intimacy beyond Bibi’s experience, and she stood breathless, for the brain was the throne of the soul. Some said that the soul did not exist, and we all wondered from time to time if the skeptics might be right, if we might be only animals. But the Bibi who had been Ashley not only traced the gyri and the sulci, peeling away the web of cancer, but she saw what her fingers felt, saw the brain in all its complexity, and Bibi saw it as well, a masterpiece of gray matter and within it a soft light that wasn’t merely the current of brain waves, but the shining and eternal essence of the girl whom Paxton loved.

When the other Bibi withdrew her hand, tangled in her fingers were black skeins of tissue, alien and foul, which could be nothing other than the hideous threads of gliomatosis cerebri. She worked her fingers, rolling the spiderweb filaments into a glistening bundle as big as a golf ball before throwing them aside. She leaned forward, embraced Bibi, and whispered, “Let’s finish this, Beebs. Close your eyes. Let’s finish this and go home.”

When Bibi opened her eyes a moment later, there was only one of her—as should always have been the case.

Alone, she moved slowly through the colossal room in a condition of purest awe, as she might have felt if she had been born and raised in a deep cavern and had come aboveground after nearly a quarter of a century to see the starry night sky for the first time.

She did as Terezin asked, imagining the entire quest onto her home computer and her laptop, though not for his benefit, only for her own, that she should never forget all that had happened. She harbored no intention of publishing the story. And she would not leave this world that she had imagined for the mother-murdering monster to use as his playground. Let him perish with it. She was no god; she was a mortal liar.

No need to walk the corridor or take the elevator, now that she understood the true nature of this place. She imagined floating like a haunting spirit down through the higher floors of the building, down-down-down into the reception hall, and a moment later she found herself there.

When she raised her eyes to the big red circle with twin bolts of stylized lightning, the inlaid stone melted as if it were wax and streamed to the floor. Around her, the white quartz walls began to lose their opacity, until they became as transparent as sheets of glass, while at the same time Room 456 appeared like a heat-veiled mirage and began rapidly to solidify, though it was without patient or visitors.

She didn’t walk but floated across the disintegrating reception-hall floor toward the hospital bed, as the transparent walls of the building could no longer hold back the sea of fog. Billowing white mist flooded across the scene, claiming forever what had been the future headquarters of Terezin, Inc., as it would claim the rest of this world that she had imagined into existence during the past four days, which for her had seemed to be only two. By the end, even the fog would cease to exist.

The bedrail was down. She climbed onto the mattress. Put her head upon the pillow. Closed her eyes.

And opened them to the sight of the four people whom she loved most in all the world.

What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?

That she was three years older than Bibi Blair. That she was the ill-fated heroine of
Love Story
by Erich Segal. That she never had a chance, and she broke millions of hearts in her dying.

When Bibi opened her eyes, she saw four hearts waiting to be broken. She at once gave them a reprieve by saying, “Wow. I’m not going through
that
again. Brain cancer sucks.”

As Bibi pulled the electro cap off her head, Nancy said, “Honey, wait, no, what’re you doing?”

“My hair’s a mess,” she said, as the EEG went into alarm mode, “and it stinks like stale sweat. I stink all over. Yuck. I can’t wait to take a shower.”

When she sat up in bed and examined the catheter taped to the crook of her left arm, wondering if she might be able to remove it herself, Murphy went a bit nuts, seized simultaneously by tentative joy and trepidation, hands shaking and mouth trembling as he hovered, babbling, “You’re awake, you’re talking, baby, don’t get up, chill out, Beebs, you can’t get up, you’re talking, look at you, I love you, you’re scaring me.”

To Pax, Bibi said, “Hi, hunk. I love you more than oxygen.” And to Pogo she said, “You were there when I needed you, dude, loaning me your car. No, wait. I invented all that. But if it had been real, you would have lent it to me, wouldn’t you, sweet boy?”

“
Mi
jalopy
es su
jalopy,” Pogo said.

Pax and Pogo seemed to be riding with her abrupt recovery much better than were her mom and dad, almost as if they understood and had internalized a little of what had happened, though she couldn’t figure out how that could be possible.

In response to the EEG alarm, a nurse arrived. Recovering quickly from the shock of seeing her formerly comatose patient so animated, she tried to calm everyone and explain that the catheter could not come out until the doctor ordered it removed. “You still need to be hydrated, Bibi.”

“What I need,” Bibi replied, “is two cheeseburgers and a pizza. I’m starving. A glucose diet sucks. Sorry I smell so bad.”

“You don’t smell bad,” the nurse assured her.

“Well, see, I still have a nose, so while it’s kind of you to say I don’t smell, I really do. By the way, I don’t have brain cancer anymore. We need to do all those tests again, so you can let me go home.” She winked at Pax and said, “You look delicious. What are you grinning about?”

Just then a night-duty intern arrived, as did another nurse, and a discussion ensued about whether or not Bibi still had cancer, who had the authority to order the tests, and whether they would have to wait until morning. Technicians were on duty to do everything from X rays to MRIs; they had to be there for the ER, which never closed. Murphy and Nancy somehow got the idea that the problem was related to insurance-company reluctance to pay for off-hour tests, and they declared that they would pay cash, to hell with the insurance company. Pax said he would pay for the tests, and Pogo said he would sell his damn car to pay for them. But finally everyone was made to understand that the insurance-company thing was a misunderstanding and that no one would have to pay cash. The head nurse on that shift reached Dr. Sanjay Chandra by phone. He expressed doubt that Bibi could know that she was cancer-free, doubt that it was even possible for gliomatosis cerebri to go into remission, but he ordered the catheter removed and the tests performed after Bibi spoke with him and told him she was symptom-free.

When she got out of bed, her mother grabbed her, embraced her with the ferocity of a Realtor who never let a client get away. Nancy was crying and laughing, and her kisses were wet, and she said, “How can this be, how can this happen?” And Bibi said, “After all, it
won’t
be what it’ll be,” and into her mother’s confusion, she said, “I love you so much, Mom, I always have, I always will.” Murphy was there, it became a group hug, and he was a bigger mess than Nancy. In spite of all his thrashing the waves, lacerating and shredding and riding the behemoths with no fear, Big Kahuna of his generation, he was nonetheless a softie, all heart and as tender as a kitten. He couldn’t speak, except to say her name, over and over, as if he had thought he’d never say it again to her alive. Pogo, too, looking at her with those blue eyes that melted other women, but with a love as pure as any that anyone had ever known, her brother from another mother, adoring her as she adored him. “Beebs,” he said, and she said, “Dude,” and he held her just long enough to convince himself that she was as real as she had always been.

In sweaty and rumpled pajamas, hair wild and tangled from being scrunched under the electro cap, certain that her breath could put a coat of rust on polished iron, Bibi nevertheless fell into Paxton’s arms, and he folded her to him so that the hospital room seemed almost to disappear. She said that she was a mess, and he said that she was the best thing he’d ever seen, and she said she stank, and he said she smelled like springtime, and damn could that man kiss.

When an orderly arrived with the gurney and Bibi was transferred to it, along with her IV rack, she said to him, “I’m sorry I stink,” and he said, “No, hey, I’ve smelled a lot worse.”

Pax and Pogo and Nancy and Murph violated hospital rules by accompanying Bibi to every test venue, although they couldn’t all fit in the same elevator with the gurney and the hospital personnel. Without asking permission, the four of them gathered with the MRI technician and watched through the big window as Bibi was conveyed into the ominous tunnel, waving at them as she disappeared headfirst.

Everything went pretty much this time as it had when she had
imagined
being cured by the night visitor with the golden retriever and had
imagined
being retested with astonishing results. When Dr. Chandra came to her room past midnight with a retinue of fascinated physicians, he said nearly the same thing he had said when she had imagined this meeting: that nothing in his medical experience had prepared him for this, that he wasn’t able to explain it, that it wasn’t possible, but that she was entirely free of cancer.

She hugged him as she had done before, though this time she apologized for reeking like a pig. He told her that given her impossible brain-wave patterns and now this miraculous remission, all manner of specialists would want to study her. Although she knew the reason for her cure, and though she intended to keep it secret within her little family, she agreed to make herself available in the weeks ahead. After apologizing in advance, she hugged him again.

Dr. Chandra looked happy and wonderstruck when he said, “On Wednesday, when I told you that you had at most a year to live, you said, ‘We’ll see.’ Do you remember?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

“It’s almost as if you knew then that you’d be going home soon.”

A post-midnight discharge was not unprecedented, but nearly so. Nevertheless, by 2:25 in the morning, Bibi was at her parents’ home in Corona del Mar and in the shower, the water cranked up as hot as she could tolerate. Bliss.

No one was sleepy, least of all Bibi, who’d had days of sleep or something like it. Pax and Pogo had stopped at a twenty-four-hour market on the way, to buy ground sirloin, hamburger buns, tomatoes, lettuce, and Maui onions. Because she’d been without solid food for more than four days, Bibi had been warned to start with a soft diet, but she refused to think that gastric distress could lay her low when cancer couldn’t. By the time she came downstairs to the kitchen, her parents, her beau, and her best friend were singing along with the Beach Boys, drinking Corona, and grilling monster burgers with all the trimmings.

Pax was the first to realize that Bibi’s facial bruising was gone, that her crushed and abraded ear was as good as new, that she apparently had healed herself. As they regarded her with something akin to reverence, she said, “Yeah, I have some big news, and I don’t know where all this is going in the days ahead. But wherever the hell it goes, compadres, if any of you ever looks at me again like you’re looking at me now, like I’m something too precious for words, I’ll kick your balls up past your gizzard. You, too, Mom.”

They ate on the roof deck, with the night sea black to the west, and talked until the sky pinked in the east, and then longer still, and for most of that time she sat on Pax’s lap, and touched his face from time to time, and marveled.