Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(133)
To an observer, she might have appeared defeated as she crawled on her hands and knees to the tall black-granite desk and sat on the floor with her back against its polished-slab front. She had lost her baseball cap. Her hair tumbled in disarray. If her battered face was as pale as her hands, pale almost to ash-gray, she must have looked at once weak and wild.
She was not weak, however, and wild only to the extent that she did not know what jungles waited within her or what powers, native to them, she would soon discover. She was not defeated. But she was in the cold grip of fright.
Pax and Pogo stood with Bibi’s parents, arrayed around her bed, watching her shudder and twitch under the bedclothes, as her exposed hands, palsied and plucking, seemed to flick something offensive from her fingertips, as though washing through the room were currents of stinging power that only she could feel.
The bizarre display alarmed Nancy to tears, but Murphy withheld the nurse-call button from her. Although no less distressed than his wife, he remained in the thrall of father’s intuition, convinced that his daughter was for the moment not in danger, but instead that in essence, in mind and soul, she occupied a mysterious place more real than dreams and safer than the depths of coma.
The shaking and erratic movements subsided, and then faded away completely. She lay quiet and composed. The cardiac monitor, which had recorded a mild increase in her heartbeat, now reported an equally mild decrease. As during the episode, the five brain waves continued pumping at optimal strength and in optimal patterns.
Having heard the contents of the microcassette, Pax and Pogo had more reason than Murphy to believe that his hope was rational. They also had good reason to fear there was a mortal threat to Bibi that came from within herself, that perhaps no other human being had ever faced.
They recounted the salient points of their day. The lockbox and the items in it other than the tape, including the dog collar bearing the name JASPER. The visit to Dr. St. Croix. The reason Bibi had been forced out of the writing program. The panther-and-gazelle notebook, the lines of Bibi’s handwriting that appeared before their eyes. The visit to Toba Ringelbaum. The identity of Ashley Bell: a fictional character based on fact, survivor of Dachau, brain-cancer specialist.
Nancy and Murphy were electrified by those discoveries and more than a little mystified, full of questions and keen for answers.
“We don’t have all the answers,” Pogo said. “But what’s on the tape—it comes at you like a fully macking behemoth. Beebs is all we thought she was, but a whole lot more.”
Before playing the tape for them, Pax wanted to know about the captain, Gunther Olaf Ericson. Nancy had been estranged from him for much of her life and had only found a way to let him back into her heart after he had become so important to Bibi. What was it that had come between Nancy and her father, back in the day?
From what little Pax had said upon arrival in Room 456, Nancy was aware that the tape contained an explosive revelation that might forever change her understanding of both her father and her daughter. As she strove to condense a significant portion of her past into a montage of moments, she held fast to one of Bibi’s limp hands. Her stare fixed sometimes on the floor, sometimes on the night pressing at the window, and sometimes on Bibi’s face, but it darted often to the small tape recorder, which Pax kept in his hand as if it was too precious to put down and risk that it might be knocked to the floor, broken.
Gunther had been a good man, Nancy said. Basically good. He wanted to do the right thing. The problem lay in his priorities. He was perhaps a man who should never have married or, having married, should not have had children, yet he’d had two daughters, Nancy and Edith. A warrior at heart, and for the right reasons—love of country and family—he signed up for one tour of duty after another, making of the Marine Corps not solely a career but also a full life of such intensity that his domestic life as husband and father became pale to him, became like the episodes of a bland television program that he watched from time to time when war and cold war would allow. He loved his wife and his daughters, but he lacked the language of the heart in which that love might be properly expressed. He was fluent in the language of honor and integrity and sacrifice, able to understand men who risked their lives for their country, who would die to protect a comrade in arms. But he couldn’t relate as easily to a wife who loved the small things of life, the quiet details in which it was said that you could discern the meaning of existence. Or to the daughters whose temperament was more like their mother’s. Anyway, as children, they possessed no awareness of the dangerous nature of the world or of the sacrifices required to keep America safe, to spare them from the horrors and deprivations that so many people in other countries endured as the given nature of existence.
When Nancy’s mother died in an accident, Gunther was away at war and didn’t get home in time for the funeral. If he understood what his grief-stricken children needed from him, he didn’t know how to give it. He seemed to be shaken if not devastated by his loss, but also bewildered, as though he had thought that all risk of death arose from the violence an enemy nation could wreak on his homeland, as if for him such threats as car accidents and house fires and cancer were abstractions, likely only as the consequences of enemy attack. He genuinely believed that a woman’s touch was required to raise two girls, and as he didn’t intend to remarry—“No one could ever replace your mom”—the woman he had in mind was his dead wife’s sister, who did indeed welcome Nancy and Edith into her home.