Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(101)
Anything could have happened in that murk. Anything could have taken her if she was wanted. But she arrived intact at Pogo’s Honda.
After she put the portable GPS, the pistol, and her purse on the passenger seat and settled behind the wheel and locked the doors, she considered calling Pax. Had he phoned her in the past twenty-four hours, he would have gotten either voice mail or Terezin, since she had abandoned her phone with her Ford Explorer. But of course he had not reached out to her, because he was on a mission, under orders to run silent. And if she called him, she would only be disappointed by the failure to connect.
Except for the fog, she would not have bothered to switch on the GPS. She had memorized the route to 11 Sonomire Way, where she would find the imprisoned Ashley Bell—if Calida’s last act of divination had indeed produced hidden knowledge before she’d been relieved of her life and her fingers. In these occluding clouds, however, a guiding voice that precisely counted off the distance to every turn would be a great assistance.
She started the engine and switched on the headlights, which tunneled all of twelve or fourteen feet into the fallen sky, but before she drove away from the curb, she was overcome by the desire, the need, to speak to Pax as though he could hear her, half a world away, without a phone. This was the romantic nonsense of a child or a teenage girl, but she was both those things in addition to being an adult, for she remained all that she had ever been.
She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths and thought that she would express her love and longing for him. But when she spoke, she surprised herself by saying, “Pax, I need you. I am not dreaming. Find me.”
No one else heard Bibi, but she came through loud and clear to Paxton. Pax, I need you. I am not dreaming. Find me.
If, since entering the hospital room, he had not twice before heard her voice, he might have thought he imagined this or might have wasted time trying to explain it away. The previous two incidents—the tongue-twister involving Petronella’s name, and the stuff about still point where past and future were gathered—had prepared him to accept the reality of the phenomenon and to remain alert to every word that might come and to the nuances of what she said.
Unlike the former transmissions—or whatever they were—this one was directed to him by name. Comatose, apparently unaware of everyone around her, Bibi must in fact know that he had arrived. He’d read of coma patients who, on recovering, reported hearing every word spoken while they’d been apparently insensible. If anyone in such an isolate condition would remain firmly anchored to the wakeful realm above the waterline of sleep, it would be his Bibi, who so loved the world and all its wonders.
Furthermore, she’d spoken to him the moment Dr. Chandra had said that she was in multiple stages of consciousness simultaneously while also deep asleep and dreaming. She must have heard the physician. And she had specifically said that she was not dreaming, in spite of what could be read in the brain waves, in spite of the rapid eye movement, which always signified that a sleeper lay deep in dreams.
Edgar Alwine had begun to film Nurse Julia, and those in the room, all but Pax, were fixated upon her account of the inexplicable emergence of the four-word tattoo.
Find me. Bibi had said, Find me. She was lying in bed, there before his eyes, and didn’t need finding. Pax could have attributed her request to delirium or merely to the confusion that plagued the mind when it was lost in the false world of a coma, whatever that might be like. But she had sounded so like herself, so to-the-point and assertive, not panicked or bewildered, calm and determined to be heard. He didn’t know how she could reach out to him in this way or why she couldn’t convey the nature of her plight and her needs in a more detailed and helpful manner, but the restrictions under which she had to function were no excuse for him either to shrug off her request or to wait for further communications that might never come.
But if Bibi, in whatever deep and strange place she currently inhabited, wasn’t bewildered, Pax certainly was, and he didn’t know what he could do to help her.
The amorphous fog writhing in the headlight beams as if intent on finding a suitable form to wear henceforth, the low rumble-purr of the car engine like an expression of animal pleasure at the prospect of the journey ahead, the first thin exhalations of welcome heat from the floor and dashboard vents, the witchy light from the instrument panel reflected in her eyes as she met her own otherwise dark gaze in the rearview mirror…Every detail of the moment suddenly seemed to be a portent of an approaching event, fraught with hidden meaning and ripe for divination by crystal ball or tea leaves, or Scrabble tiles.
Bibi sat behind the wheel, considering what she had said aloud to Pax, and wondering why she’d said it. Although he was half a world away, the fact that she’d spoken to him wasn’t strange to her, only what she had said. Why say that she wasn’t dreaming, when of course she wasn’t, being wide awake? Why ask him to find her when she wasn’t lost? She understood the needing-him part. She always needed him. And in the current madness, just having him at her side would smooth some of the craziness out of the night.
She was reminded of the key thing she had learned since she’d left her apartment and gone on the run: that she kept secrets from herself, pieces of her life that had been lost to Captain’s memory trick. Because she had recovered parts of those memories, she knew now that they hadn’t been rendered into ashes and blown away forever. They were barreled and stored and awaited discovery. Maybe the answer to why she’d said what she’d said to Paxton would become clear to her when she found that memory barrel, hammered a hole at the bottom, drained it, and learned, to the last drop, what was in it. Meanwhile, she couldn’t understand herself or fully trust herself, which was frustrating but not as frustrating as being dead of cancer.