Ashley Bell: A Novel (7 page)

Early on a Sunday morning in February of that rainy winter, six weeks before the dog came dripping and nameless along the sidewalk from the sea, Bibi Blair took one of the spare keys to the apartment off a Peg-Board in the pantry, quietly left the kitchen, and eased the door shut as she stepped onto the back porch of the bungalow.

Her parents were sleeping late, which they often did on this first morning of the week. Nancy had no open houses to oversee, as she did on some Sundays. And in this off-season, Pet the Cat welcomed shoppers only Monday through Saturday. They had been out well past midnight with friends, leaving Bibi in the care of Chastity Brickle, an insufferably self-absorbed fifteen-year-old babysitter who had no doubt already—and more than once—failed to live up to her first name. They would not stir for another couple of hours.

Rain had fallen before dawn. Now the low gray sky looked more like ashes than like a scrubwoman’s sodden rags. Bibi didn’t bother with an umbrella but quickly wended her way among the puddles in the brick-paved courtyard, to the garage at the back of the property.

At the top of the open stairs, standing on the balcony, she looked back and down upon the bungalow, half expecting to be caught. Her mom and dad were unaware that she spent time in the apartment, and although there was nothing shameful in what she was doing, she preferred that they never learned about those visits.

The front door opened on a small kitchen. Blue Formica counters. Blue-and-gray speckled linoleum floor. A dinette table and two chairs. Last year’s wall calendar revealed the page for November. Although the digital clock on the microwave oven glowed with the correct time, the refrigerator did not hum, having been turned off weeks ago. The air was still and cool and faintly musty.

Bibi never turned on the lights, lest they reveal her presence even in the daytime, which they would have done on this dim morning. Although lacking blinds, the two kitchen windows admitted only gray light as feeble as misted moonglow.

In the center of the table stood the round, narrow-necked white vase, from which had often flowered a few roses or carnations. The vase stood empty, its glaze softly radiant in the gloom, as though it might be a milky crystal ball placed there for a pending séance.

She stood staring at the floor beside the first chair, where the dead body had been found. All the blood had been cleaned up long ago, but Bibi thought—imagined?—that the faintest trace of it remained on the air, a cruel smell. She wrinkled her nose in repugnance.

This place had no charm anymore, and after these visits, she felt sad and unsettled. Sometimes bad dreams followed. Yet she kept returning. She didn’t fully understand what drew her there. She would never find anything to make sense of what had happened.
It just was what it was,
her parents said, and of course they were right.

In addition to the kitchen, the apartment included a living room and bedroom, both furnished, plus a bath and a walk-in closet. She usually toured the entire place, alert and observant, and yet as if she were half in a dream state, seeking she knew not what. On this occasion, however, as she crossed the kitchen toward the living-room door, which stood slightly ajar, she halted at the thump of footsteps elsewhere in the apartment.

Both the bedroom and the living room featured hardwood floors that were less than half covered with area carpets. The tread sounded like that of a large man, and a few floorboards creaked under weight, not with every step taken, but often enough to confirm that these were indeed footsteps in the apartment rather than a noise from outside.

In spite of the fact that she had been the one who found the body back in the day, Bibi was not at first alarmed, only intrigued. Just then she realized that she had been coming here in expectation of some encounter. What the nature of that encounter might be, she could not say even now, but she had anticipated it, and here it was.

Louder, louder grew the footsteps. Definitely in the living room now. Slowly approaching the door to the kitchen.

Fear found Bibi then. Fear, but not blind fright, not panic. She backed past the table, toward the balcony from which she had entered.

The portentous footsteps of a man unseen stopped at the living-room threshold. The ensuing silence shared the character of certain silences in disturbing dreams: those hushes that settle on the scene as if, after a suitable pause, the curtain will close and the sleeper arise, though in fact it always proves to be instead the quiet just prior to the final shock that wakes the dreamer, gasping.

The faintest scraping-ticking arose as the knuckles of the hinge leafs turned against pivot pins in need of oil, and the door swung ever so slowly into the kitchen, toward Bibi. It blocked her view of whoever stood on the threshold.

Remembering the blood and ghastly eyes of the November corpse, she bolted. She had no awareness of escaping, however, until she found herself crashing down the last steps into the brick courtyard.

She looked up the stairs. No one there. Above, the door to the apartment was closed. She must have thrown it shut as she departed.

For a while, as the spent sky sluggishly refilled its reservoir with laden clouds drawn off the ocean, Bibi watched the apartment’s two kitchen windows. No face appeared at either. No suggestion of movement stirred through the gloom beyond those panes.

Eventually, she retreated to the wicker sofa on the back porch of the bungalow, where she had left a paperback and the notebook in which she composed the stories about Jasper, the lonely dog.

Later, her father appeared, ready to make his weekly inspection of the garage apartment, to check for roof leaks and other problems.

“Dad.” When he looked back at her from the bottom of the porch steps, she said, “Be careful.”

He frowned. “Careful of what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I heard someone up there.”

As larky as ever, he said, “Maybe that raccoon got down through the attic again. He’s damn well gonna pay rent this time.”

When he returned ten minutes later, he had found neither the raccoon nor any other uninvited lodger.

As the sky gathered rain to spend, young Bibi retreated to her room to write a Jasper story. Two weeks passed before she dared to return to the apartment.

On the drive home from the hospital, through the alien night, Murph and Nancy shared an awful, solemn silence. The mutual quiet became so oppressive, so suffocating, that several times one or the other tried to slash it away with words, but both were rendered incoherent and emotionally bewildered by the loss that seemed to lie in their future. The unthinkable loss.

With greater success in retail and real estate, they had moved from the bungalow three years earlier, into a two-story pale-yellow stucco house with sleek modern lines. They still lived in that part of Corona del Mar known as the Village, no longer three blocks short of the Pacific but only one and a half. From the roof deck, from one upstairs room, and from the front terrace on the ground floor, they had an angled view of the ocean that lay beyond the end of the east-west street.

Murph had been proud that two surf rats—as he still thought of himself and Nancy—could remain in touch with their beach roots and nevertheless earn a major piece of the California dream. That night, however, the house meant nothing to him, and in fact it seemed cold and unfamiliar, as if by mistake they had let themselves into a residence owned by strangers.

He and Nancy had always been understanding of each other, always available to each other, uncannily in sync in all circumstances. He assumed they would sit together at the kitchen table, the lights low, maybe in candlelight, and together work their way through the horror and the pain of what had befallen them.

As it turned out, neither of them was ready for that. As if the shock, still building force hour by hour, had not only cast them off their moorings, but also had washed them far back in time, both chose to revert to the coping mechanisms of their youth. No doubt they would come together soon, but not yet.

Nancy went into the ground-floor powder bath, snared the box of Kleenex from the counter, dropped the lid of the toilet with a bang, and sat down as from her came the most wretched sounds of grief that Murphy had ever heard issue from anyone. When he spoke to her and tried to enter the half bath, she said, “No, not now, nooo,” and pushed the door shut in his face.

Feeling helpless, useless, he stood listening to her despairing sobs, to the thin shrill animal sounds of utter desolation that tore from her between desperate ragged breaths. She sounded like a child, racked as much by fear as by misery. Her heartbreak sharpened his own until he could not stand to listen to her a moment longer.

If Nancy reverted to childhood in her grief, Murphy fell back into the angry rebellion of adolescence. He took a six-pack of cold beer from the refrigerator and carried it up to the roof deck. He wanted to punch someone, anyone, just punch and punch until he was exhausted and his knuckles were swollen. He wanted someone to pay—to suffer and be chastened—for the unfairness of Bibi’s cancer. But there was no one to hold responsible, nor anyone to comfort him, not in a world where what will be will be. Instead, he sat in a redwood lounge chair, opened the first can of Budweiser, and chugged it as he stared over his neighbors’ roofs, over the few lights along the last width of the bluff, stared out into the vast night sea, which lay black under a moonless sky, black under a higher blackness salted with icy stars, its presence confirmed only by the rhythmic rumble of the breakers punishing the shore. Halfway through the second beer, he began to cry. Weeping only fueled his anger, and the angrier he became, the harder he wept.

He wished they had gotten another dog after Olaf died. Dogs needed no words to console you. Dogs were the ultimate practitioners of the therapy of touch. Dogs knew and accepted the hard realities of life that human beings could not acknowledge until those obvious truths were exhaustively described with words, and even then there was often more bitter acknowledgment than humble acceptance.

Dogless, perhaps soon to be childless, after only two beers, Murphy felt lost. If he had tried to go downstairs to his wife at that moment, he would not have been surprised if he’d been unable to find his way off the roof deck.

With a crisp metallic sound, the ring-pull peeled open the third can.