Night Film(183)

“From the devil’s curse.”

She chuckled. “I can assure you, and so can an army of doctors and specialists around the world, Ashley never suffered from a devil’s curse. Or any other type of curse. She had cancer. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She had it off and on all her life.”

I stared at her, stunned.

My first infuriated inclination was to tell her I knew what she was doing, force-feeding me another lie so I’d trust her. It was a preposterous assertion and I knew it wasn’t true.

It couldn’t be.

But then, almost as quickly, I wondered if I’d missed something—if Hopper had—if this, a real-life illness, had been there all the time, written in the sand, and we’d been straining our eyes, staring far out to sea, never once looking at our feet.

“Call Sloan-Kettering if you don’t believe me,” Gallo added petulantly. “Find someone to bribe in the records department, and they’ll tell you. Ashley was treated there three times, registered under Goncourt, her mother’s maiden name. The first time when she was five, the second when she was fourteen, and finally when she was seventeen, also at the University of Texas at Houston.”

She looked at me with triumph. “You’ll see I’m right.”

I said nothing, going through the dates in my head. Ashley had been only five years old when she’d crossed the devil’s bridge, condemning her to the curse. At fourteen, she’d abruptly abandoned her classical music career, and at seventeen—I felt a rush of disbelief: At seventeen Ashley had called Hopper, crying. She was desperate, he’d told us. She couldn’t live with her parents anymore. She wanted to go where they couldn’t find her. Had she wanted to escape her illness?

“It isn’t your fault,” Gallo announced flatly, as if reading my mind. “Whatever wild nonsense you’ve come to believe, curses and Satan, the bogeyman—though honestly, I’d have expected a grown man, a veteran reporter, to be a little more skeptical. But give yourself a break. Ashley was a charismatic girl. You’d be surprised what she’s convinced people of over the years. She was quite proficient in making people believe the impossible. Like her father. They had a knack, the both of them, for taking you by the hand, looking deep into your eyes, so you’d follow them down into the passageways of the absurd and unbelievable and live there forever, a total convert. I know. I did it. For forty-six years. Gave up everything. My husband. My kids. But now that it’s over I can see. Probably because I’m not one of them. I don’t have trouble distinguishing make-believe from reality. I live in the real world. And so do you.”

She said it insistently, even angrily, crossing her arms.

“Her sickness tore the family apart. For young children the prognosis for ALL is good. After the first round of treatment, most have remissions that last a lifetime. It wasn’t the case with Ashley. Every time we thought she was out of the woods, that she would at last be granted the gift of a life without round after round of shots and steroids, spinal taps, and stem-cell transplants, a few years would pass, she’d be tested, and the doctors would give us the terrible news again. Matilde had returned.”

“Matilde?” I repeated.

She nodded, eyeing me. “It was Ashley’s name for her illness. She nicknamed it, the way other children nickname imaginary friends, which will give you a good sense of the way her mind worked. When she was five, one morning she came into the kitchen, and as she ate her bowl of Cheerios she cheerfully announced to her mother that she had a new friend. Who? Astrid asked her. Matilde, she answered. Matilde. It was a strange name. No one knew where she’d heard it. Matilde is going to kill me, Ashley said. Everyone was startled, but then, she was her father’s daughter. Dramatic. Blessed—you might even say cursed—with the most graphic of imaginations. The very next day, Ashley became sick with a high fever. Tiny red spots covered her arms and her back. Astrid took her to the hospital, and the doctors gave us the terrible news.”

“But wasn’t Matilde meant to be the title of Cordova’s next film? A film that was never released.”

Gallo nodded. “He wanted to write about it. But he couldn’t. To write directly about something so gutting is like staring at the sun, day after day. You can’t really make it out, no matter how hard you try. You’re sure to go blind.” She sighed. “He didn’t want to work on another film, wanted only to save his daughter. It’s excruciating for a parent to lose a child. But it’s even worse to watch your child suffer, day in, day out, teetering interminably between life and death, living a life of death. But you go through with it, continue to fight, because you hope one day it won’t be like this. Life can be so cruel. It doles out just enough hope to keep you going, like a small cup of water and one slice of bread to someone on the verge of starvation.”

She paused to sip her drink. “Ashley made the decision not to tell anyone outside of the family,” Gallo continued. “Against her doctors’ advice. But she was adamant. She didn’t want to be pitied. She said—and she was only six at the time—it would hurt much more to be tiptoed around, treated as if she were a fragile butterfly with a ripped-off wing, than to suffer at the hands of Matilde. We all made a pact with her, swearing never to tell anyone. And if Ashley wasn’t well enough to go out into the world to experience life, her father arranged for the most fascinating and outrageous of lives to come to her. In between her hospital visits to the city four, sometimes five, times a week, she was homeschooled at The Peak, and the estate became a backdrop, a hostel, a secret hidden lodging, populated around the clock with philosophers and actors and artists and scientists, all of them teaching Ashley how to live and think and dream, teaching all of us, really.”