Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(146)
Pax was the first to realize that Bibi’s facial bruising was gone, that her crushed and abraded ear was as good as new, that she apparently had healed herself. As they regarded her with something akin to reverence, she said, “Yeah, I have some big news, and I don’t know where all this is going in the days ahead. But wherever the hell it goes, compadres, if any of you ever looks at me again like you’re looking at me now, like I’m something too precious for words, I’ll kick your balls up past your gizzard. You, too, Mom.”
They ate on the roof deck, with the night sea black to the west, and talked until the sky pinked in the east, and then longer still, and for most of that time she sat on Pax’s lap, and touched his face from time to time, and marveled.
The shingled bungalow had not been torn down by the people who bought it from Bibi’s parents. She had imagined its destruction to facilitate the plot, themes, and atmospherics of her life-or-death quest. The house stood much as it had been in her childhood. On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, less than forty-eight hours after Bibi had been released from the hospital, she rang the doorbell, but no one responded.
The new owners were nice people, not the suspicious Gillenhocks who claimed to be retired investment bankers in the alternate world of Bibi’s fancy. They wouldn’t mind if she enjoyed their porch for a while. The rocking chairs were gone, but she sat in one of the patio chairs, looking out at the street, where the tresses of the palm trees rustled in a shifting breeze and the ficuses seemed to twinkle as their leaves—dark green on one side, pale green on the other—flickered this way and that in the changeable air.
In the weeks after Captain died, she had sat here to write some of her stories about Jasper, and here on a rainy day, a Jasper had come to her. As much as she loved her parents, they had not been able to understand her the way that Captain had understood her, and if she hadn’t eventually imagined sweet Jasper into her life, she might have imagined the captain alive again. She had desperately needed a dog, a dog suitably mysterious. To her, nature wasn’t merely a beautiful engine that powered fate. She didn’t believe in coincidence. Neither did Captain. Neither did dogs. In their constant joy and bottomless capacity for love, dogs were in tune with a more complex truth.
This place would always be home to her, and perhaps one day she and Pax would own it. Home is where the heart is. No, nothing quite as simple as that. Home is where you struggle, in a world of endless struggle, to become the best you can be, and it becomes home in your heart only if one day you can look back and say that, in spite of all your faults and failures, it was in this special place where you began to see, however dimly, the shape of your soul.
On Wednesday, she and Pax sat on a bench at Inspiration Point, watching the sea as it carried to shore millions of fragments of the sun and cast them, cooled and foaming, on the sand.
With only three months to go on his current re-up, he had arranged to spend them stateside, assisting in the training of new recruits. He had given the Navy SEALs ten good years, and he would give to Bibi what years remained.
As pelicans flew in formation low along the coast and sandpipers worked the wet beach for lunch and a couple of hundred yards offshore schooling dolphins arced in and out of the water, she and Pax talked about how cautious she must be in the exercise of her imagination. This was not her world to change even if she thought that she could change it for the better. Considering how disastrous might be the unintended consequences of her actions, her greatest flights of fancy were best kept to the pages of books. If they had children—and they would—and if one terrible day cancer or some other hateful ailment threatened to cut short a precious life, she would have to risk those unintended consequences, as she might have to do as well in other extreme circumstances. Valiant girls, however, were always judicious and prudent. Pax wondered if she might be unique in all the world or if perhaps everyone possessed latent powers of imagination equal to hers. She thought the latter must be true, because she didn’t believe that she was special. She said, “If we were imagined into existence with a universe of wonders, then the power to form the future with our imagination must be in our bloodline,” and out in the sun-spangled sea, the dolphins danced.
On Saturday, Bibi had a lunch date with Pogo at Five Crowns in Corona del Mar. She arrived half an hour early and left her car in the restaurant parking lot.
At the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Poppy Avenue, she stood remembering the two teenage girls as she had last seen them, Hermione and Hermione, one blond and one brunette, walking south to the corner and then west, not yet grown into their grace, leaning against each other, perhaps laughing, so alive. Bibi had known them only a short while, yet she had felt a remarkable affection for them because of their gameness and vulnerability, their combination of knowingness and innocence. That day, as they had faded out of sight in the fog, she had said to herself, There go two dead girls, and had been distressed by that surprising thought.
Now she understood the full meaning of those words. Hermione and Hermione, daughters of Harry Potter faniacs, had not been walking toward their murderer or anything as dramatic as that. They were two dead girls because they had never been living. They had been citizens of Bibi’s imagination, who had never drawn one breath or laughed one laugh that anyone could hear.
Now she walked the length of tree-shaded Poppy to the sea, and back again, past houses that she’d seen a thousand times. She studied each dwelling with greater interest than before, half hoping that she would glimpse those girls passing a window, discover them lounging on a deck, coming out a door. This casual search could end only as had the search for Ashley Bell: an encounter with no one other than herself. Nevertheless, she entertained a little hope anyway, as an antidote to the sadness that shadows every writer’s heart. For all the effort of creation, for all the hours at the keyboard and the intellectual exercise and the emotion expended, all of a writer’s creations are but a ghost of the Truth, as ephemeral as are all the works of humanity in this world within time.