Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(43)
From nearby came the deep, hoarse, trumpeting cry of a great blue heron, startling Bibi. She surveyed the sky, certain she had heard the bird’s flight call low overhead. Except for a distant police helicopter thumping through the cool night, nothing plied the heavens. A bird the size of the heron—four feet tall with a six-foot wingspan—could not be overlooked in motion. When the cry came again, louder and more protracted than before, it seemed to be not a common expression out of nature, but from out of time, a mystical alarm meant to shake her awake from her indecision. Hoping to be gone before the wrong people showed up, she ran out of the courtyard and into the parking lot.
The story that Murphy had told Dr. Sanjay Chandra ended with the cremation of Olaf and with Bibi’s retreat into her bedroom, where she remained for three days alone with the urn that contained the dog’s ashes. This seemed to be the natural end point of the tale, but there was another scene known only to the girl. Perhaps it did not qualify as a fully developed scene, only as a coda; no one but Bibi could know the extent and complexity of it.
In any other family, a sixteen-year-old girl would not have been able to sequester herself in her locked bedroom for three full days, feeding on a supply of apples, cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers, and dry-roasted almonds. When her parents were asleep, she ventured out to snatch sodas and bottled water from the refrigerator. She refused to respond to questions addressed to her through the door, though after the first few hours, her parents granted her the consideration of silence.
Her mother and father had always loved her deeply and without reservation, had always wanted the best for her, but their love had not been twined with expectations. They had not given her guidance regarding anything more than the rules of the household. Never had they suggested that any endeavor or aspiration was better than anything else she might be doing or wish to achieve. Their politics, to the extent that they had any, were libertarian, and their love for their daughter grew in a libertarian garden. If their attitudes in this matter had been different, the family might have been a place of unceasing argument and tension, for even by the time that Bibi was six or seven, she had ideas about some subjects that were different from her parents’ positions on those issues.
Often in her childhood, relatives and others had commented on her quiet nature and reserve (by which they intended to imply that she seemed shy or, worse than shy, aloof), had observed that she was unusually assured and self-reliant for her age (by which they meant that she struck them as being peculiar and suspicious), had noted always with well-meant concern that she took everything perhaps too seriously, that she engaged in every activity—whether reading books or surfing, or competitive skateboarding, or learning to play the clarinet—with a disturbing intensity (by which they wished to warn that she had the potential for obsessive-compulsive disorder), and had remarked in a tone of praise characterized by uneasiness that she might be some kind of genius or prodigy, or at least gifted (by which they avoided saying that they found her a bit weird). Nancy and Murphy understood that, in one sense at least, an alien lived with them, an otherworldly but benign creature who loved them but did not understand key things about them, such as the it’ll-be-what-it’ll-be doctrine that stood central to their creed; and they were cool with their daughter’s difference.
Therefore, with the urn containing Olaf’s ashes always near at hand, Bibi spent three days in solitude, though she was never lonely and certainly not bored. At her small corner desk, in her armchair, and often sitting up in bed, she wept with grief and wrote for hours at a stretch. Sometimes she made entries in her spiral-bound diary, at other times composed fiction in a large lined yellow tablet, her meticulous cursive script never faltering, regardless of the length of those sessions.
Frequently in the past, she had written while in a condition of infatuation—with ideas, with language, with storytelling—when, for an hour or two at a time, she had neither the desire nor the will to look up from the page. Alone with Olaf’s ashes, this infatuation was shot through with desperation, energized despair, as never before. Her primary motivation during those three days was to argue herself out of some bad ideas, one in particular, compared to which mere suicide would have been preferable.
She exhausted herself with writing, so that it seemed when she crashed, she should have had no imagination left to craft stories in her sleep. But her dreams swelled with wild adventure, threat, and mystery. She dreamed repeatedly—but not exclusively—of the tall and monkish figures in a variety of settings and scenarios. When those menacing phantasms turned toward her, she erupted from the nightmare every time, certain that she would have died in her sleep if she had glimpsed more than the pale moonlit suggestion of their horrific faces.
On the third day, she remembered a trick of forgetting that the captain taught her. In more than one war, Captain had seen things—the bloody aftermath of human viciousness, outrages from the darkest end of the spectrum of cruelty—that disturbed his sleep night after night, that left him despondent. He could not bear to live with the memories. The trick of forgetting had been revealed to him by a Gypsy or a Vietnamese shaman, or by an Iraqi version of a voodooist. The captain could not remember the identity of his benefactor, no doubt because for some good reason he had used the magic procedure to forget that person, too. Anyway, what you needed to do first was write the hated memory or the reckless desire or the evil intention on a slip of paper; the trick worked for more than the disposal of garbage memories. Then you said six words that had great power, said them with sincerity, with all your heart. After you had spoken that incantation, you put the slip of paper in an ashtray or a bowl, and you set it afire. Or you scissored the paper into tiny pieces and flushed them down a toilet. Or buried them in a graveyard. If you recited those magic words with humility, and if you were entirely truthful with yourself when you claimed to want forgetfulness, you would receive it.