Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(13)
Louder, louder grew the footsteps. Definitely in the living room now. Slowly approaching the door to the kitchen.
Fear found Bibi then. Fear, but not blind fright, not panic. She backed past the table, toward the balcony from which she had entered.
The portentous footsteps of a man unseen stopped at the living-room threshold. The ensuing silence shared the character of certain silences in disturbing dreams: those hushes that settle on the scene as if, after a suitable pause, the curtain will close and the sleeper arise, though in fact it always proves to be instead the quiet just prior to the final shock that wakes the dreamer, gasping.
The faintest scraping-ticking arose as the knuckles of the hinge leafs turned against pivot pins in need of oil, and the door swung ever so slowly into the kitchen, toward Bibi. It blocked her view of whoever stood on the threshold.
Remembering the blood and ghastly eyes of the November corpse, she bolted. She had no awareness of escaping, however, until she found herself crashing down the last steps into the brick courtyard.
She looked up the stairs. No one there. Above, the door to the apartment was closed. She must have thrown it shut as she departed.
For a while, as the spent sky sluggishly refilled its reservoir with laden clouds drawn off the ocean, Bibi watched the apartment’s two kitchen windows. No face appeared at either. No suggestion of movement stirred through the gloom beyond those panes.
Eventually, she retreated to the wicker sofa on the back porch of the bungalow, where she had left a paperback and the notebook in which she composed the stories about Jasper, the lonely dog.
Later, her father appeared, ready to make his weekly inspection of the garage apartment, to check for roof leaks and other problems.
“Dad.” When he looked back at her from the bottom of the porch steps, she said, “Be careful.”
He frowned. “Careful of what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I heard someone up there.”
As larky as ever, he said, “Maybe that raccoon got down through the attic again. He’s damn well gonna pay rent this time.”
When he returned ten minutes later, he had found neither the raccoon nor any other uninvited lodger.
As the sky gathered rain to spend, young Bibi retreated to her room to write a Jasper story. Two weeks passed before she dared to return to the apartment.
On the drive home from the hospital, through the alien night, Murph and Nancy shared an awful, solemn silence. The mutual quiet became so oppressive, so suffocating, that several times one or the other tried to slash it away with words, but both were rendered incoherent and emotionally bewildered by the loss that seemed to lie in their future. The unthinkable loss.
With greater success in retail and real estate, they had moved from the bungalow three years earlier, into a two-story pale-yellow stucco house with sleek modern lines. They still lived in that part of Corona del Mar known as the Village, no longer three blocks short of the Pacific but only one and a half. From the roof deck, from one upstairs room, and from the front terrace on the ground floor, they had an angled view of the ocean that lay beyond the end of the east-west street.
Murph had been proud that two surf rats—as he still thought of himself and Nancy—could remain in touch with their beach roots and nevertheless earn a major piece of the California dream. That night, however, the house meant nothing to him, and in fact it seemed cold and unfamiliar, as if by mistake they had let themselves into a residence owned by strangers.
He and Nancy had always been understanding of each other, always available to each other, uncannily in sync in all circumstances. He assumed they would sit together at the kitchen table, the lights low, maybe in candlelight, and together work their way through the horror and the pain of what had befallen them.
As it turned out, neither of them was ready for that. As if the shock, still building force hour by hour, had not only cast them off their moorings, but also had washed them far back in time, both chose to revert to the coping mechanisms of their youth. No doubt they would come together soon, but not yet.
Nancy went into the ground-floor powder bath, snared the box of Kleenex from the counter, dropped the lid of the toilet with a bang, and sat down as from her came the most wretched sounds of grief that Murphy had ever heard issue from anyone. When he spoke to her and tried to enter the half bath, she said, “No, not now, nooo,” and pushed the door shut in his face.
Feeling helpless, useless, he stood listening to her despairing sobs, to the thin shrill animal sounds of utter desolation that tore from her between desperate ragged breaths. She sounded like a child, racked as much by fear as by misery. Her heartbreak sharpened his own until he could not stand to listen to her a moment longer.
If Nancy reverted to childhood in her grief, Murphy fell back into the angry rebellion of adolescence. He took a six-pack of cold beer from the refrigerator and carried it up to the roof deck. He wanted to punch someone, anyone, just punch and punch until he was exhausted and his knuckles were swollen. He wanted someone to pay—to suffer and be chastened—for the unfairness of Bibi’s cancer. But there was no one to hold responsible, nor anyone to comfort him, not in a world where what will be will be. Instead, he sat in a redwood lounge chair, opened the first can of Budweiser, and chugged it as he stared over his neighbors’ roofs, over the few lights along the last width of the bluff, stared out into the vast night sea, which lay black under a moonless sky, black under a higher blackness salted with icy stars, its presence confirmed only by the rhythmic rumble of the breakers punishing the shore. Halfway through the second beer, he began to cry. Weeping only fueled his anger, and the angrier he became, the harder he wept.