slept without rest, a sleep of denial and forgetting.
Her mother woke her. “Hey, sleepyhead. Get a move on. We’re going to brunch and then the movies.”
With the covers pulled to her chin, Bibi said, “I don’t want to. I stayed up all night reading.” That was a lie, but not a mortal one. “You go without me. There’s leftover chicken in the fridge. I’ll make a big sandwich.”
Picking up a book from the nightstand, where at least one novel remained always near at hand, Nancy read the title: “The Secret War in the Garden. Pretty thrilling, huh?”
“Mmmmm,” Bibi agreed.
Imagining themselves to be free spirits, footloose children of Nature, her parents encouraged their daughter to be independent and self-directing. She would never be chastised for staying up most of the night, either to read or to watch one stupid thing or another on television.
“The movie’s supposed to be totally funny,” Nancy said. “It’s the new Adam Sandler.”
Insisting on her exhaustion by keeping her eyes shut and her face in a sort of slack pout, by speaking with weary exasperation, Bibi said, “He’s not funny.”
“You’re too old for Adam Sandler, huh?”
“Decades.”
“My daughter, the fifth-grade sophisticate. Well, all right. But don’t hit the surf alone.”
“I never do. And it’s too cold, anyway.”
She remained in bed for fifteen minutes after her parents left, to be certain they were gone.
A short while later, as she sat at the kitchen table, finishing a breakfast of chocolate milk and Eggo waffles smeared with peanut butter, she began to tremble and then to shake uncontrollably, as if the hinges of her bones had come loose every one and all at once. She didn’t ask herself why the shaking. She didn’t want to know why. It wasn’t about a ghost, either real or imagined. Ghosts couldn’t harm her. Even if it had been a real ghost in the attic, she would most likely never see another. Ghosts didn’t swoop up every day, from all around, like sparrows and meadowlarks taking wing. If something else happened in the high room, some moment of insight or even revelation, it had been of so little importance that it had evaporated from memory while she’d slept, before her mother woke her. She insisted that she just had a chill. That was all. That was enough to explain the shakes.
Leaving the last few bites of the meal on her plate, she went into the living room, where the gas fireplace featured an electronic ignition; she switched it on with a remote control. Hands thrust in the pockets of her jeans, she stood at the hearth, basking in the heat, staring into the blue-and-yellow flames that leaped around the ceramic logs. Sometimes she liked to search for animals and faces in the shapen clouds of a summer day. Flames were too quick and fluid for the eye to glimpse the suggestion of any presence other than fire, and that was a good thing.
When the shakes passed, she decided to walk to the park along Ocean Avenue and sit on the bench at Inspiration Point, even if the fog still largely obscured the Pacific. The sea always calmed her, even just the scent of it and the soothing sound of waves dashing against rocks and splashing across the sand. But as she stepped onto the front porch, even before she pulled the door shut, an unexpected flood of tears spilled from her. She was not a girl who wept in front of others, and she retreated into the bungalow.
She didn’t wish to understand this bitter emotion any more than she had cared to analyze the cause of her shaking. She wanted only to stop crying, to shut off the flow before it might wash into view a reason for this grief, if it was grief, or this dread, if it was dread. When she realized that the tears might be as persistent as the shakes, she ran for the only medicine that reliably cured any bout of unpleasant feelings: a book.
Although her mother thought that Bibi had stayed up all night reading The Secret War in the Garden, which was the third young-adult novel in a beloved fantasy series, she had not yet begun the story. Now she snatched the book off her nightstand, hurried with it to the living room, switched on a floor lamp, dropped into an armchair, and sought refuge in the tale: The first rumors of war came from the field mice, who traveled daily between the garden behind the Jensen house and the world below, which was far larger than our world and still unknown to most people, though known to certain children.
At first, as Bibi read, she wiped her tear-streaked face with the sleeves of her sweatshirt. Soon, however, the blurred print became clear, and her eyes stopped sabotaging storytime.
And so it was that hour by hour, day by day, she moved away from the disturbing knowledge that she needed to put behind her. The eerie and unsettling experience in the attic became about nothing more than an apparition or hallucination. She rejected the revelation that had been part of the incident, cut it from the cloth of memory and sewed shut the hole it left—or thought she did.
She read books and wrote stories about Jasper, a black-and-gray dog who had been abandoned by his owner and sought a new home along the coast of California. A couple of weeks later, when a golden retriever came to her out of the rain, she kept him and named him Olaf. As kids do, she made a confidant of her dog and told him all her secrets—as she knew them. She told him about Captain, how wonderful he had been. She told Olaf that the apartment above the garage was an evil place, but she didn’t tell him why.
BIBI HAD FOLDED THE PAJAMAS AND THE ROBE into her drawstring bag and had donned the jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt she’d been wearing when Nancy had brought her to the hospital. This was an expression of confidence in her belief that the brain cancer had gone into remission, that the glioma hadn’t merely shrunk but had vanished.
When Dr. Sanjay Chandra entered the room, Bibi was pacing not to work off a bad case of nerves, but with impatience to get back into the world and reclaim her life. He halted at the sight of her, and his expression was so solemn that something caught in her throat, as if she had tried to swallow a large bite of meat without chewing it, though she hadn’t eaten anything.
What appeared to be solemnity, or even distress at the news he had to deliver, proved to be awe. “Nothing in my years of practice, nothing in my life, has prepared me for this. I’m not able to explain it, Bibi. It’s not possible, but you are entirely free of cancer.”
The previous day, Nancy had said that Dr. Chandra reminded her of Cookie, the gingerbread cookie that had come to life in an old children’s book that she had shared when Bibi was five years old. The resemblance owed more to Nancy’s sense of whimsy than to fact, and it certainly wasn’t so pronounced that some snarky magazine would pair Dr. Chandra’s and Cookie’s photographs in a “Separated at Birth” feature. However, everything about the physician—his boyish face, chocolate-drop eyes, musical voice, humility, and charm—made her want to like him. Upon his confirmation of remission, she loved the man. She flew to him like a child into the arms of an adored father.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she gushed, exhilarated even as she was embarrassed by her exhilaration.
He returned her embrace and then held her at arm’s length, his hands on her shoulders, smiling broadly and shaking his head slowly, as
