Night Film(185)

She paused to glance tiredly around the room, as if recalling how warm and bustling it had once been, how alive with voices and music, before it had been buried like a lost civilization under the white sheets.

“It felt like the beginning of something. We enrolled her in school here. I prayed he’d return to his work.”

“Making another film.”

Gallo nodded, draining the rest of her drink.

“The prognosis for cancer gets worse after more relapses. The window for long-term survival begins to close. Toxicities have been building in the body, which is being demolished from the inside out. Early that May, Ashley was due for a checkup. She didn’t want to go. Because she knew the truth, of course. She always did. Her doctors recommended a treatment involving clinical trials, an experimental program in Houston. Shortly after that, Astrid discovered, hidden inside Ashley’s bedroom, a packed suitcase. And two one-way tickets to Brazil. When Astrid confronted Ashley, she said she was running away with Hopper and there was nothing anyone could do to stop her. She didn’t want treatment. But, of course, her life was at stake. She was just a teenager. This boy she claimed was the love of her life, some juvenile delinquent—none of us took it seriously. Who really loves at that age?”

“Romeo and Juliet,” I said.

“And Hopper and Ashley. Ashley and her father fought horribly over it. He threw her into the car, locked the doors, and told her she was going to Houston whether she liked it or not. She could tell the boy the truth or not. But Ashley decided not to. She said to love someone who is dying is torture. She’d rather the boy hate her, because within that hate is the motivation to move on, to forget, to vanquish—better that than be gutted by loss, to long for something that can never be. And for that deep love to turn into something else, like pity or revulsion—Ashley couldn’t bear it. She cut all ties with the boy. And went to Houston. She almost died there, but it was more from a broken heart than the disease.”

Gallo fell silent, her hardened profile softened, ever so slightly.

“Ashley got better?” I asked, after a moment.

“Yes. She went to Amherst. She had to leave early spring semester due to dizzy spells and fatigue, but after she rested at The Peak she was able to return her sophomore year. And she was all right. She graduated. And then, six months ago, it began again.”

“Matilde.”

Gallo nodded thoughtfully, staring at the coffee table. My mind was spinning because two things she’d said struck me: First, the detail about Ashley leaving early her freshman year at Amherst. It had actually been mentioned in the Vanity Fair article. Reading it, I’d wondered about the reason behind her mysterious departure, and now here it was, explained.

Second, there was a question of timing.

“How long was Ashley treated at the University of Texas?” I asked.

“Eight months? Why?”

“And then she returned to The Peak?”

She nodded slowly, puzzled. “She did the maintenance therapy back in New York. Why?”

“Did the family order medical equipment for her? A wheelchair? Or something from a company called Century Scientific?”

“I ordered everything for her. The Peak was outfitted like the Mayo Clinic. Everything to keep Ashley comfortable, so she wouldn’t be needlessly disturbed. She had round-the-clock nurses monitoring her.”

“And the garbage at The Peak is burned at night?”

“Crowthorpe Falls is always swarming with Cordovites. It’s their Mecca. They migrate there from around the world, hoping for a sighting. The last thing he wanted was a fan trawling through his trash, discovering a prescription revealing that Ashley was sick and jabbering about it on the Internet. We had to protect her. Though in the end, protection is just another cage.”

It had all come together. The incinerators Nora had seen up at The Peak, the glass vial marked biohazard, Nelson Garcia’s accidental UPS delivery back in December 2004—it all made sense now, in light of Ashley’s illness. But the rush of solving these last few mysteries was almost immediately replaced with something else, a sense of hollowness, even grief.

I felt let down. I always did, slightly, when I’d come to the end of an investigation, when, looking around, I realized there were no more dark corners to plumb.

And yet—this was different. The desolation came from the realization that all of the kirin were dead. They’d never existed in the first place. Because, however much I might not want to face it, wanting something larger than life for Ashley, some other tempestuous reality that defied reason, alive with trolls and devils, shadows that had minds of their own, black magic as powerful as H-bombs—I knew Inez Gallo was telling me the truth.

And her truth razed everything, clear-cut that magical and dark jungle I’d wandered into following Ashley’s footprints, revealing that I was actually standing on flat dry land, which was blindingly lit, but barren.





110


“The business with you started because she was sick again,” Gallo blurted with evident contempt.

I drained my drink, feeling the scalding whiskey course down my throat.

“How’s that?” I muttered.

She turned to me, exasperated. “I told you. Ashley was a charismatic girl. Thanks to her inventive upbringing, her solitary life at The Peak, her sickness, she had trouble distinguishing made-up stories from real life. When Ashley was ten, Astrid made the mistake of inviting a witch doctor from Haiti to reside for four months at the house for fun. She didn’t realize it would permanently uproot Ashley’s imagination, like running along a coastline filled with quietly roosting flamingos, displacing them. Suddenly, everything in Ashley’s head became riotous and squawking and in motion, all pink feathers and screeching and flapping wings everywhere. She came to believe in it all, voodoo. Witchcraft.” She shook her head. “I found spells she’d laid for me in my own room, protection from evil, or so she claimed. She was certain she’d been marked by something evil, that the devil was causing her illness. It was heartbreaking. And delusional. Ashley was terrified to be in close physical proximity to people she cared about, because she believed she’d harm them. She claimed this darkness growing inside her due to her—I don’t even know how to put it—her soul slowly being overtaken by the devil—that it made her dangerous. Lethal. The idea was, of course, absurd.”