Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(117)
Room 456. Sunday afternoon, 3:29. Blue sky beyond the window. Sun westering but not yet declining in a red swoon. On the EKG screen, the girl’s heart rate spiking, the sound switched off but the trace line pumping, pumping faster. On the EEG, five brain wave indicators all tracking optimal patterns simultaneously, as every neurologist knew was not possible.
Nancy sat near the window, holding a newspaper that she hadn’t requested but that she had accepted from a well-meaning young candy striper, seeming to read it but never turning from the front page to the second.
Perched on another chair with his smartphone, Murph checked the surf conditions in Australia. Byron Bay and Narrabeen and Torquay and Point Danger. Then on to Bali: wave height at Kuta Reef, Nusa Dua, Padang Padang. Mainland Mexico at Mazatlán and San Blas. Todos Santos in Baja California, and Scorpion Bay. Durban in South Africa, and Cape St. Francis. He wouldn’t be surfing any of them today, probably never. He kept checking anyway. Pipeline and Sunset and Waimea on the north shore of Oahu. Honolulu Bay and Maalaea on Maui. He felt that he was losing his grip on sanity, sliding slowly into a defensive kind of madness.
Between Hawaii and Uruguay, he looked up from the phone and saw the EKG, where the heart trace was jumping above and below the midline, systolic and diastolic as they should be, not irregular, but faster than he had seen them track before.
In the bed, hair frizzed out around the grotesque electro cap, Bibi lay in silence, as she had lain for days. But then abruptly she groaned in distress.
Nancy dropped the newspaper and got to her feet. She reached the bed just as Bibi said, “No, hell, no, no…”
Waves and tides and far places forgotten, Murph scrambled bedside, the girl between him and Nancy.
Her sweet face squinched and her closed eyes closed tighter. “…cannot happen, will not happen, is not happening.”
Leaning over the bedrail, putting a hand on Bibi’s shoulder, Nancy said, “Sweetie, do you hear me? Bibi, it’s okay. We’re here, honey. Daddy and me, both here.”
“Not happening, not happening,” Bibi insisted. She turned her head from side to side, as though afflicted. Denying, resisting.
Murph reached for the call button looped to the bedrail, but he hesitated to push it.
There was a father-daughter connection that had always been a mystery to him, a knowing without knowing how, knowing when she was safe and when she was not. She could be at the Wedge in wicked water, riding mountains, big quakers three times her height, with the very real danger of being swept into the stacked rocks of the breakwater at the harbor’s mouth, where surfers had been killed, but he knew that he didn’t need to worry. Another time, she might have been with a friend or two, riding bicycles nowhere more dangerous than on the paved “boardwalk” that served the long peninsula or in the lightly traveled streets south of Balboa’s lower pier; and he phoned her to suggest that she come home or stop by Pet the Cat to keep him company for a while. She’d always heard the vague note of worry in his voice, and she had always done as he asked, and nothing had ever happened to her. But he believed that something might have happened if he hadn’t phoned her and changed the pattern of her day. It wasn’t as powerful as clairvoyance, this connection, but it was stronger than a hunch.
When Bibi groaned again and rolled her head upon the pillow, Nancy moved her hand from the girl’s shoulder to her bruised face. “Honey, can you hear me? Will you wake up for your mom? Can you wake up and smile for Daddy and me?”
In that way of knowing without knowing how, Murph understood that, as irrational as it seemed, Bibi was safe in the coma, or at least safer than she would be if she woke. The injuries to her face and the tattoo, as mysterious as stigmata, argued against what he felt, but the feeling remained undiminished. In fact he sensed that the coma was her only hope, that somehow in the coma she had a chance to…to what? Somehow defeat the cancer? The gliomatosis cerebri that no one had ever survived? Was that truly a possibility or only a father’s desperate wish? He watched her eyes twitching rapidly beneath the pale lids, looked at the five brain waves describing their optimal patterns, a phenomenon never before witnessed, and he thought about who Bibi was, the unique girl she had always been, and his desperate wish seemed like a rational hope.
Bibi repeated, “Is not happening.”
Putting a hand to her daughter’s brow, which was half covered by the electro cap, Nancy again urged her to wake, to return to them.
“No!” Murph whispered, but with such force that he startled his wife. “No, no, no, baby. Let her sleep. She needs to sleep.”
Nancy regarded him as if he were the king of kooks, a spleet, a geek-a-mo. “This isn’t sleep, Murph. This is a damn hateful cancer coma.”
Indicating the brain-wave readout, he said, “It isn’t a coma. It’s…something.”
Nancy looked from him to the precious girl, to him again, and whatever she saw in his face, his eyes, gave her pause.
A blush suffused Murph’s brow, his cheeks, a heat not quite like anything he had felt before. Fine beads of perspiration prickled his face, a sweat of awe, if there could be such a thing. His face must be glazed and shining; and he knew that his eyes were. Staring at his daughter, reassuring his wife, he said, “She’s walking the board.”
In the Honda, across the street and twenty yards uphill from Solange St. Croix’s house, Pogo sat behind the steering wheel, and Pax sat shotgun. Scattered through a rich currency of shadows, gold coins of sunlight shimmered on the windshield.