Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(128)
Instead of a dragon, the cover featured the face of a beautiful young girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen. Pale-blond hair. Complexion as smooth as bisque porcelain. Remarkable violet eyes. The wide-set eyes, which shone with intelligence, the direct and limpid stare, the planes and curves of the face, and the faint suggestion of defiance in the set of the mouth seemed to reveal an appealing personality, as if in this case appearance and reality were the same.
“When Arline Blum read the manuscript of the novel inspired by her life,” Toba explained, “the dear woman liked it more than she should have, considering I didn’t do the greatest justice to it. She was always a lovely, generous person. Anyway, the British publisher wanted to have the face of Ashley Bell on the cover, instead of that horrid dragon. They meant to have an illustrator paint it. I’d seen this photo of Arline when she was a girl, and I thought it perfect. She was agreeable to letting it be used. It was in black-and-white, of course, but the artist used it for reference, and painted the cover in the photorealistic style. I’m sure this is the only reason the British edition sold so much better than the American.”
“She’s kind of…mesmerizing,” Pogo said. “Did she grow up to be this beautiful?”
“Yes, indeed. And her heart was more beautiful than her face. Like I said, four years she’s been gone. I will always miss her.”
As striking as it was, the portrait on the book jacket could not be considered strange.
Pax said, “Toba, we were wondering how—but also why—Bibi might have gotten that tattoo, why Ashley Bell is a part of this. And you said there was ‘one more strange thing.’?”
“In the novel,” Toba said, “Ashley Bell survives Dachau, just as did Arline Blum, and comes to America, as did Arline, and by the early 1970s becomes a successful and highly regarded surgeon, as did Arline. My fiction was too beholden to fact. Modeled on Arline, Ashley Bell in the novel is a surgical oncologist specializing in brain cancer.”
In the west, the sun settled toward the sea, and there were just enough clouds of varied textures to ensure, a quarter of an hour from now, the day would come to its end with a burning sky. As if melting, shadows elongated in the golden light, which would soon be red.
At the window in Room 456, Nancy looked down at the hospital parking lot and didn’t like what she saw, didn’t like it at all, and turned away. The rows of parked cars reminded her of caskets lined up the way that she had seen them on the news when men killed in war were sent home by the planeload.
Murph had gone downstairs to the cafeteria to get sandwiches and pasta salads for dinner, which they would eat together in this room. Neither of them wanted to leave until visiting hours were over, and perhaps not even then.
While Murph was getting their dinner, Nancy had decided to bail out of the real-estate business, depending on what happened next. She loved selling houses, helping people who needed new homes, and she was good at it, better at being a Realtor than Murph was at selling surfboards, and he was pretty darned good. But if something happened to Bibi—not just the undefined something, face it, if she died—every property in the world would be, to Nancy, haunted. Every house she showed to every prospective buyer would have been a house where Bibi might have lived one day and raised a family with Pax. Every bare lot, waiting for an architect to finish the house design, would be a gravesite waiting for a headstone. Wrung like a rag in the hands of anxiety, that is what she told herself as she paced the room.
Although it sounded as if she might be making a bargain with fate, she wasn’t promising to give up her career if only Bibi were allowed to live. There was no point in such dickering. That kind of sentimental gesture made you feel a little better if you were feeling like crap, gave you a sense of control when in fact you had none, but it was meaningless. What would happen would happen. Fate was a bitch; she made no bargains. What Nancy was really saying to herself, by planning to give up real-estate sales, was that losing her daughter so young would surely drain the meaning from her work, her life. But you had to face reality even when reality sucked.
She was standing at the foot of the bed, watching the comatose girl, when dried blood and fresh blood flew from Bibi’s damaged ear, spattered across the pillowcase, the sheets. As though an invisible presence had clawed open the crusted abrasions, blood dribbled from them again.
For a hundred feet or so, Bibi made her way through a white-out worthy of an arctic blizzard, a white-out without wind or polar cold, but nonetheless disorienting and fearsome. When the lights of the construction-trailer windows were hardly brighter than the phantom phosphorescence on a just-switched-off TV screen, she took her flashlight from an inside jacket pocket and dared to switch it on.
If they had roaming security guards, she might be seen, but she could not worry about that. Intuition told her, the threats she faced from this point would not be as mundane as rent-a-cops. Since Pogo had brought the Honda to Pet the Cat, since she had set out on this quest, she had gone much farther than the miles on the odometer would attest. She felt as if she had traveled to an unknown country on an undiscovered continent, to the brink of a nameless abyss. There was the known world and the supernatural world that shadowed it, and the veil that had been deteriorating between them now began to dissolve entirely.
Or maybe it was another veil rotting by the moment, a veil between her life as she believed it to have been and her life as it truly had been, between what she was and what she could be. The abyss on the brink of which she stood was the truth.