group-hug twenty-four/seven. We’ll melt down if we do.”
When Nancy tried to speak, she couldn’t. Her mouth trembled.
Bibi kissed her mother’s cheek. “You’re a sweetie. Now go. Eat too much. Drink too much. Live, Mom. Live. I sure intend to.”
In her hospital room again, she sat at the small table by the window and used her laptop to learn about anticancer and cytotoxic drugs. Alkylating agents. Nitrosoureas. Antimetabolites. Mitotic inhibitors. At least her disease was enhancing her vocabulary.
As the March afternoon dressed itself in scarlet to approach the evening, a nurses’ aide brought a dinner tray. Suitable reading with dinner did not include an article about the side effects of chemo. As she ate, Bibi watched amusing dog videos on YouTube.
The bad thing happened when she got up from her chair to wash her hands. A sudden pain of migraine intensity split her skull.
She almost dropped to her knees. She staggered, made her way onto the bed, and pressed the call button for a nurse.
Sudden headaches could be a symptom of gliomatosis cerebri, a consequence of pressure on the brain; however, they usually occurred in the morning. The tests she’d undergone the previous day had not revealed excess cerebrospinal fluid. “No hydrocephalus,” the doctor had said. Maybe that had changed.
Having raised the upper half of the bed, she sat with both hands clasped to her skull and imagined that she could feel the bone itself deforming with each throb. The nurse arrived, asked a few questions, and returned with aspirin plus another pill. Bibi didn’t ask about the second medication, just swallowed it with a long drink of water.
“I’ll keep checking on you,” the nurse promised. “Now rest.”
When the woman left, Bibi twice tried to recline, but both times she panicked when a vivid sense of falling overcame her. More than a mere feeling, it was an absolute conviction that she would tumble backward into a bottomless void, as if she were sitting on the brink of eternity. Besides, the very act of leaning backward as much as an inch or two intensified her headache. Even knowing that the inclined bed would prevent her from so much as lying full-length on her back, she made no third attempt. Sitting forward, head hung, eyes closed, she wrapped her arms around her torso as if to anchor herself.
To her surprise, in five minutes or less, the pain began to diminish. Aspirin didn’t work that quickly. Evidently, she owed her relief to the second medication.
When she opened her eyes, red radiance bathed everything, and she at first thought that she must be having vision problems again. Then she realized that none of the lights were on and that the room, previously brightened by only sunshine, was now illuminated by the sunset, which had melted the sky into a fire-shot river of molten glass slowly flowing west and away.
She reached for the lamp control that was clipped to the bedrail. The oval dimmer switch felt wrong in her fingers, felt soft and scaly, as if she had gripped the head of a living reptile, and the pale cord wriggled in protest. She dropped the switch and watched with astonishment as her suddenly stiff-fingered hand pecked at the air like a bird pecking at a tree trunk to feed on crawling insects, pecked violently, pecked and pecked, and she could not control it.
Seizure, she thought, and as if confirming her own diagnosis, she grunted and mewled like an animal, and made thin hacking sounds in the back of her throat.
The stiffness in her hand spread up the arm, through her body, and she fell backward against the inclined mattress, which stopped her, but she didn’t feel as if she had been stopped. The brink she had feared earlier was there, and she was overcome by a sensation of plunging into a void, down and down, plummeting, although the hospital room shimmering with crimson light did not recede, which it should have if she were really doing an Alice down a rabbit hole.
Several glossy spots of darkness appeared in her field of vision, floating like fat beads of black oil in the red radiance, first fewer than a dozen, then scores, then hundreds. As all light vanished and the glistening blackness flooded over her, she tried to cry out for help, but like all drowned girls before her, she had no voice.
Twelve Years Earlier
TWO WEEKS AFTER FLEEING FROM THE APARTMENT above the garage, four weeks before Olaf padded into her life, on another sleep-in Sunday for her parents, young Bibi rose and dressed while the last defenses of the night barely held off the advancing dawn. She tucked two granola bars into the pockets of her fleece-lined denim jacket and, as the morning spread its flamingo-pink wings across the east, she walked two and a half blocks to the park along Ocean Avenue.
She sat on a bench at Inspiration Point to watch the breaking surf and the dark sea as mottled green-greenblack as watermelon skin. From that perch, she sometimes imagined herself to be one of a pirate crew sailing on violent tides, or else a whale so big that she feared nothing in her shadowed watery world. This morning, she imagined life after death, not as it might be in Heaven, but as it might be here and now, in this world, if such things as ghosts were real.
After finishing the first granola bar and deciding not to linger long enough to eat the second, she returned home. If she was a girl of action, a girl of unshakeable intentions, like the girls whom she most admired in the books that she most enjoyed reading, she could no longer shrink from the mystery that demanded her attention.
By the alley gate, she let herself into the courtyard between garage and bungalow. Climbed the stairs. Hesitated on the balcony.
Two weeks earlier, the gray wet day had been appropriate to séances and conjurings—and to unsettling encounters with restless spirits. Under this bright and lively sky, with the warbling and clear, short whistles of meadowlarks celebrating the recent dawn, being in the mood for Pooh was easier than being in the mood for Poe.
Nevertheless, Bibi stood at the door, staring through the four panes in its upper half, studying the kitchen before she dared to enter. There was no corpse apparent either on the floor or standing grim and moon-eyed in expectation of her. She went inside.
On this brighter morning, the kitchen seemed to be a benign if not entirely welcoming place, until Bibi noticed the one change since her previous visit. On the table, the spherical white vase, which had held no flowers before, not for months, now contained three withered roses. The once-green sepals of the flowers’ receptacles were brown, and the petals were mostly brown as well, with few remaining traces of red coloring. Some petals had fallen to the table, where they lay as curled and crisp as the shells of dead beetles.
The sere and shriveled roses looked as if they had been here longer than two weeks. They were so thoroughly dehydrated that they might have been in the vase since November.
She should have left the apartment; but she could not. Unlike many other ten-year-old girls, she did not dream of being a princess or a pop star. She wanted to be plucky, intrepid, and lionhearted. Stalwart. Valiant. Superman and Supergirl had no appeal for her; everything was too easy for them and other invulnerable superheroes, without genuine danger. Bibi knew that life could never be that way. Every surfer surfed with sharks unseen and swam with the risk of riptides. Death was real. You had to face that truth if you were ever to grow up. She wanted no caped costume with an
