Ashley Bell: A Novel

The year that Bibi Blair turned ten, which was twelve years before Death came calling on her, the sky was a grim vault of sorrow nearly every day from January through mid-March, and the angels cried down flood after flood upon Southern California. That was how she described it in her diary: a sorrowing sky, the days and nights washed by the grief of angels, though she didn’t speculate on the cause of their celestial distress.

Even then, she was writing short stories in addition to keeping a diary. That rainy winter, her simple narratives were all about a dog named Jasper whose cruel master had abandoned him on a storm-swept beach south of San Francisco. In each of those little fictions, Jasper, a gray-and-black mongrel, found a new home. But at the end of every tale, his haven proved impermanent for one reason or another. Determined to keep his spirits high, good Jasper traveled southward, hundreds of miles, in search of his forever home.

Bibi was a happy child, a stranger to melancholy; therefore, it seemed odd to her then—and for years after—that she should write multiple woeful episodes about a lonely, beleaguered mutt whose search for love was never more than briefly fulfilled. Understanding didn’t come to her until after her twenty-second birthday.

In one sense, everyone is a magpie. Bibi was one, but she didn’t know it then. Much time would pass before she recognized some truths that she had hidden away in her magpie heart.

The magpie, a bird with striking pied plumage and a long tail, often hoards objects that strike it as significant: buttons, bits of string, twists of ribbon, colorful beads, fragments of broken glass. Having concealed these treasures from the world, the magpie builds a new nest the following year and forgets where its trove is located; therefore, having hidden its collection even from itself, the bird starts a new one.

People hide truths about themselves from themselves. Such self-deception is a coping mechanism, and to one extent or another, most people begin deceiving themselves when they’re children.

That sodden winter when she was ten, Bibi lived with her parents in a small bungalow in Corona del Mar, a picturesque neighborhood of Newport Beach. Although they were just three blocks from the Pacific, they had no ocean view. The first Saturday in April, she was home alone, sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of the quaint shingled house as warm rain streamed straight down through the palm trees and the ficuses, as it sizzled on the blacktop like hot oil on a griddle.

She was not a child who lazed around. Her mind remained always busy, spinning. She had a yellow lined tablet and a collection of pencils with which she was composing yet another installment in the saga of lonesome Jasper. Movement at the periphery of her vision caused her to look up, whereupon she discovered a soaked and weary dog ascending the sidewalk from the distant sea.

At ten, her sense of wonder had not been worn thin; and she sensed that a surprising turn of events was about to occur. In the grip of an agreeable expectation, she put down the tablet and the pencil, rose from the chair, and went to the head of the porch steps.

The dog looked nothing like the lonely mongrel in her stories. The bedraggled golden retriever halted where the bungalow walkway met the public sidewalk. Girl and beast regarded each other. She called to him, Here, boy, here. He needed to be coaxed, but eventually he approached the porch and climbed the steps. Bibi stooped to his level to peer into his eyes, which were as golden as his coat. You stink. The retriever yawned, as if his stinkiness was old news to him.

He wore a cracked and filthy leather collar. No license tag dangled from it. There wasn’t one of those name-and-phone-number plates riveted to it, which a responsible owner should have provided.

Bibi led the dog off the porch, through the rain, around the side of the house, into a brick-paved thirty-foot-square courtyard flanked by stuccoed privacy walls along the property lines to the east and west. To the south stood a two-car garage that opened onto an alleyway. Exterior steps rose to a small balcony and an apartment above the garage. Bibi avoided glancing up at those windows.

She told the retriever to wait on the back porch while she went into the house. He surprised her by being there when she returned with two beach towels, shampoo, a hair dryer, and a hairbrush. He ran with her across the courtyard, out of the rain and into the garage.

After she turned on the lights, after she took the stained and mud-crusted collar from around his neck, she saw something that she had not previously noticed. She considered dropping the collar in the garbage can, burying it under other trash, but she knew that would be wrong. Instead, she opened a drawer in the cabinet beside her father’s workbench, took one of several chamois cloths from his supply, and wrapped the collar in it.

A sound issued from the apartment overhead, a brief hard clatter. Startled, Bibi looked at the garage ceiling, where the open four-by-six joists were festooned with spider architecture.

She thought she heard a low and anguished voice, too. After listening intently for half a minute, she told herself that she must have imagined it.

Between two of the joists, backlit by a bare dust-coated bulb in a white ceramic socket, a fat spider danced from string to string, plucking from its silken harp a music beyond human hearing.

Bibi thought of Charlotte the spider, who saved Wilbur the pig, her friend, in E. B. White’s book Charlotte’s Web. For a moment, Bibi was all but unaware of the garage as an image rose in her mind and became more real to her than reality:

Hundreds of tiny young spiders, Charlotte’s offspring fresh from her egg sac many weeks after her sad death, standing on their heads and pointing their spinnerets at the sky, letting loose small clouds of fine silk. The clouds form into miniature balloons, and the baby spiders become airborne. Wilbur the pig is overcome with wonder and delight, but also with sadness, while he watches the aerial armada sail away to far places, wishing them well but sorry to be deprived of this last connection to his lost friend Charlotte….

With a thin whine and soft bark, the dog brought Bibi back to the reality of the garage.

Later, after the retriever had been washed and dried and brushed, during a break in the rain, Bibi took him into the house. When she showed him the small bedroom that was hers, she said, If Mom and Dad don’t blow their tops when they see you, then you’ll sleep here with me.

The dog watched with interest as Bibi dragged a cardboard box out of the closet. It contained books that wouldn’t fit on the already heavily laden shelves flanking her bed. She rearranged the volumes to create a hollow into which she inserted the chamois-wrapped collar before returning the box to the closet.

Your name is Olaf, she informed the retriever, and he reacted to this christening by wagging his tail. Olaf. Someday, I’ll tell you why.

In time, Bibi forgot about the collar because she wanted to forget. Nine years would pass before she discovered it at the bottom of that box of books. And when she found it, she folded the chamois around it once more and sought a new place in which to conceal it.

That second Tuesday in March, with its terrible revelations and the sudden threat of death, would have been the beginning of the end for some people, but Bibi Blair, now twenty-two, would eventually call it Day One.

She woke at dawn and stood at the bedroom window, yawning and watching the still-submerged sun announce its approach with banners of coral-pink light, until at last it surfaced and cruised westward. She liked sunrises. Beginnings. Each day started with such promise. Anything good could happen. For Bibi the word disappointment was reserved for evenings, and only if the day had truly, totally sucked. She was an optimist. Her mother had once said that, given lemons, Bibi wouldn’t make lemonade; she would make limoncello.

Silhouetted against the morning blue, the distant mountains seemed to be ramparts protecting the magic kingdom of Orange County from the ugliness and disorder that plagued so much of the world these days. Across the California flatlands, the tree-lined street grids and numerous parks of south county’s planned communities promised a smooth and tidy life of infinite charms.

Bibi needed more than a mere promise. At twenty-two, she had big dreams, though she didn’t call them dreams, because dreams were wish-upon-a-star fantasies that rarely came true. Consequently, she called them expectations. She had great expectations, and she could see the means by which she would surely fulfill them.

Sometimes she was able to imagine her future so clearly that it almost seemed as if she had already lived it and was now remembering. To achieve your goals, imagination was almost as important as hard work. You couldn’t win the prize if you couldn’t imagine what it was and where it might be found.

Staring at the mountains, Bibi thought of the man she would marry, the love of her life now half a world away in a place of blood and treachery. She refused to fear too much for him. He could take care of himself in any circumstances. He was not a fairy-tale hero but a real one, and the woman who would be his wife had an obligation to be as stoic as he was about the risks he faced.

Love you, Paxton, she murmured, as she often did, as if that declaration were a charm that would protect him regardless of how many thousands of miles separated them.

After showering and dressing for the day, after snaring the newspaper from the doorstep, she went into the kitchen just as her programmed coffee machine drizzled the sixth cup into the Pyrex pot. The blend she preferred was fragrant and so rich in caffeine that the fumes alone would cure narcolepsy.

The vintage dinette chairs featured chrome-plated steel legs and seats upholstered in black vinyl. Very 1950s. She liked the ’50s. The world hadn’t gone crazy yet. As she sat at a chromed table with a red Formica top, paging through the newspaper, she drank her first coffee of the day, which she called her wind-me-up cup.

To compete in an age when electronic media delivered the news long before it appeared in print, the publisher of this paper chose to spend only a few pages on major world and national events in order to reserve space for long human-interest stories involving county residents. As a novelist, Bibi approved. Like good fiction, the best history books were less about big events than about the people whose lives were affected by forces beyond their control. However, for every story about a wife fighting indifferent government bureaucrats to get adequate care for her war-disabled husband, there was another story about someone who acquired an enormous collection of weird hats or who was crusading to be allowed to marry his pet parrot.

Like her first cup, her second coffee was black, and Bibi drank it as she ate a chocolate croissant. In spite of all the propaganda, she didn’t believe that oceans of coffee or a diet rich in butter and eggs was unhealthy. She ate what she wanted, almost in a spirit of defiance, remaining trim and healthy. She had one life, and she meant to live it, bacon and all.

As she ate a second croissant, she got a bite that tasted as rancid as spoiled milk. She spat it onto her plate and wiped her tongue with a napkin.

The bakery she frequented had always been reliable. She could see nothing wrong with the wad of pastry that she had spit out. She sniffed the croissant, but it smelled all right. No visible foreign substance tainted it.

Tentatively, she took another bite. It tasted fine. Or did it? Maybe the faintest trace of…something. She put down the croissant. She had lost her appetite.

That day’s newspaper was thick with weird-hat collectors and the like. She put it aside. Carrying a third cup of coffee, she went to her office in the larger of the apartment’s two bedrooms.

At her computer, when she retrieved the unfinished short story she’d been writing on and off for a few weeks, she stared for a while at her byline: Bibi Blair.

Her parents had named her Bibi, not because they were cruel or indifferent to the travails of a child saddled with an unusual name, but because they were lighthearted to a fault. Bibi, pronounced Beebee, came from the Old French beubelot, meaning toy or bauble. She was no one’s toy. Never had been, never would be.

Another name derived from beubelot was Bubbles. That would have been worse. She would have had to change Bubbles to something less frivolous or otherwise become a pole dancer.

By her sixteenth birthday, she was accustomed to her name. By the time she was twenty, she thought Bibi Blair had a quirky sort of distinction. Nevertheless, sometimes she wondered if she would be taken seriously, as a writer, with such a name.

She scrolled down the page from the byline and stopped at the second paragraph, where she saw a sentence that needed revision. When she began to type, her right hand served her well, but the left fumbled over the keys, scattering random letters across the screen.

Her surprise turned to alarm when she realized that she could not feel the keys beneath her spasming fingers. The sense of touch had deserted them.

Bewildered, she raised the traitorous hand, flexed the fingers, saw them move, but couldn’t feel them moving.

Although coffee had entirely rinsed away the rancid taste that earlier had spoiled her enjoyment of the second croissant, the same foulness filled her mouth again. She grimaced in disgust and, with her right hand, reached for the coffee. The rim of the cup rattled against her teeth, but the brew once more washed her tongue clean.

Her left hand slipped off the keyboard, onto her lap. For a moment, she couldn’t move it, and in panic she thought, Paralysis.

Suddenly a tingling filled the hand, the arm, not that vibratile numbness that followed a sharp blow to the elbow, but a crawling sensation, as if ants were swarming through flesh and bone. As she rolled her chair away from the desk and got to her feet, the tingling spread through the entire left side of her body, from scalp to foot.

Although Bibi didn’t know what was happening to her, she sensed that she was in mortal peril. She said, But I’m only twenty-two.

Nancy Blair always booked the earliest appointment at Heather Jorgenson’s six-chair salon in Newport Beach because it was her considered opinion that even the best stylists, like Heather, did less dependable work as the day wore on. Nancy would no sooner have her hair cut in the afternoon than she would schedule an after-dinner face-lift.

Not that she needed plastic surgery. At forty-eight, she looked thirty-eight. At worst thirty-nine. Her husband—Murphy, known to all as Murph—said that if she ever let a cosmetic surgeon mess with her face, he would still love her, but he’d start calling her Cruella de Vil, after the stretched-tight villainess in 101 Dalmatians.

She had great hair, too, thick and dark, without a fleck of gray. She got it cut every three weeks because she liked to maintain a precise look.

Her daughter, Bibi, had the same luxurious dark-brown hair, almost black, but Bibi wore hers long. The dear girl was always gently pressing her mother to move on from the short and shaggy style. But Nancy was a doer, a goer, always on the run, and she didn’t have the patience for the endless fussing that was required to look good with a longer do.

After wetting Nancy’s hair with a spray bottle, Heather said, "I read Bibi’s novel, The Blind Man’s Lamp. I really liked it."

Oh, honey, my daughter has more talent in one pinkie than most other writers have in their fingers and their thumbs. Even as she made that declaration with unabashed pride, Nancy realized that it was less than eloquent, even a little silly. Whatever the source of Bibi’s talent for language, it hadn’t come with her mother’s genes.

It should have been a bestseller, Heather said.

"She’ll get there. If that’s what she wants. I don’t know if it is. I mean, she shares everything with me, but she’s guarded about her writing, what she wants. A mysterious girl in some ways. Bibi was mysterious even as a child. She was like eight when she made up these stories about a community of intelligent mice that lived in tunnels under our bungalow. Ridiculous stories, but she could almost make you believe them. In fact, we thought for a while she believed in those damn mice. We almost got her therapy. But we realized that she was just Bibi being Bibi, born to tell stories."

As an ardent consumer of magazines that chronicled the lives of celebrities in plenty of photos and minimal prose, Heather perhaps had not heard Nancy after the third sentence of that long ramble. "But, gee, why wouldn’t she want to be a bestseller—and famous?"

Maybe she does. But it’s not why she writes. She writes because she has to. She says her imagination is like a boiler that’s all the time building up too much pressure. If she doesn’t let out some of the steam every day, it’ll explode and blow off her head.

Wow. Heather’s face in the mirror, above Nancy’s face, loomed wide-eyed and chipmunky. She was a cute girl. She would have been even cuter if she’d had her upper incisors brought into line with braces.

Bibi doesn’t mean that literally, of course. Her head isn’t going to explode any more than there were intelligent mice living under our bungalow back in the day.

Heather’s insistent teeth lent a comic quality to her expression of concern. She was adorable.

Murph had once declared that if a girl was cute enough, some men found an overbite sexy. Ever since, Nancy had been wary of any attractive woman in her husband’s life who needed orthodontal work. Murph had never met Heather. If Nancy had anything to say about it, he never would. Not that he cheated. He didn’t. He wouldn’t. Maybe he didn’t believe that his wife would castrate him with bolt cutters, as she’d sworn she would, but he was smart enough to know that the consequences of infidelity would be ugly.

Close your eyes, Heather said, and Nancy closed them, and the spray bottle of water made a spritzing sound. Then a little fragrant mousse. Then a final blow-dry and shaping with a brush.

When her hair was done, it was perfect, as always. Heather was such a talented cutter, she wouldn’t refer to herself as a beautician or a hairstylist. Her card identified her as a coiffeuse, and that little pretension, so Newport Beach, was in her case justified.

Nancy paid and tipped. She was assuring her coiffeuse that she would pass along the good review of The Blind Man’s Lamp to the author when she was interrupted by her phone’s current ringtone—a few bars of that old Bobby McFerrin song Don’t Worry, Be Happy. She checked the caller ID, took the call, and said, Bibi, baby.

As if from beyond some barrier more formidable than distance, Bibi said, Mom, something’s wrong with me.

Bibi was sitting in a living-room armchair, her purse on her lap, trying to dispatch the creepy head-to-foot tingling sensation with positive thinking, when her mother burst into the apartment as if she were leading a style-police SWAT team intent on ferreting out people wearing unimaginative coordinated ensembles. Nancy looked splendidly eclectic in a supple-as-cloth black-leather sports-jacket-cut men’s coat from St. Croix, an intricately patterned ecru top by Louis Vuitton, black Mavi jeans with subtle and carefully crafted areas of wear, and black-and-red athletic shoes by some designer whose name Bibi could not recall.

She didn’t share her mother’s obsession with fashion, as her off-brand jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt attested.

As Nancy crossed the room toward the armchair, a rush of words spilled from her. You’re pale, you’re positively gray, oh, my God, you look terrible.

I do not, Mom. I look normal, which spooks me worse than if I were stone-gray with bleeding eyes. How can I look normal and have these symptoms?

I’m going to call nine-one-one.

No, you’re not, Bibi said firmly. I’m not going to make a spectacle of myself. Using her good right hand, she pushed herself up from the chair. Just drive me to the hospital ER.

Nancy looked at her daughter as she might have regarded some pathetic truck-stricken creature lying crippled at the side of a highway. Her eyes blurred with tears.

Don’t you dare, Mother. Don’t you cry at me. Bibi indicated a small drawstring bag beside the armchair. Can you get that for me? It’s pajamas, toothbrush, overnight things in case I have to stay till tomorrow. No way I’m going to wear one of those tie-in-the-back hospital gowns with my butt hanging out.

Her voice as quivery as aspic, Nancy said, I love you so much.

I love you, too, Mom. Bibi started toward the door. Come on, now. I’m not afraid. Not much. You always say, ‘It’ll be what it’ll be.’ Say it, so live it. Let’s go.

But if you’ve had a stroke, we should call nine-one-one. Every minute matters.

I haven’t had a stroke.

Hurrying ahead of her daughter, opening the door but blocking the exit, Nancy said, On the phone, you told me your left side is paralyzed—

Not paralyzed. Tingling. As if fifty cell phones, set on mute, were taped to my body, vibrating all at once. And my left hand is a little weak. That’s all.

Sounds like a stroke. How do you know it isn’t?

"It’s not a stroke. My speech isn’t slurred. My vision’s okay. No headache. No confusion. And I’m only twenty-two, damn it."

Nancy’s expression softened from anxious dread to what might have been chagrin as she realized that she was alarming rather than assisting her daughter. Okay. Yes, you’re right. I’ll drive you.

The third-floor apartments opened onto a covered balcony, and Bibi kept her right hand on the railing as they moved toward the north end. A pleasantly cool day. Songbirds celebrating. In the courtyard, the palms and ferns rustled faintly in the mild breeze. Phantom silvery fish of sunlight schooled back and forth across the water in the swimming pool, and the simple scene was profoundly beautiful as it had never appeared to her before.

When they came to the end of the balcony, Nancy said, Honey, are you sure you can do stairs?

The open iron staircase featured pebbled-concrete treads. The symmetry of the stairs, the grace with which they descended to the courtyard, qualified them as sculpture. Bibi had not previously seen the stairs as art; the prospect of perhaps never seeing them again must have given her this new perspective.

Yeah, I can do stairs, Bibi impatiently assured her mother. "I just can’t dance down them."

She negotiated flight after flight without a serious incident, except that three times her left foot did not move when it should have, and she needed to drag it from one tread to the next.

In the parking lot, as they approached a BMW with vanity license plates that announced TOP AGENT, Nancy started for the front passenger door, evidently remembered that coddling was not wanted, and hurried around to the driver’s side of the vehicle.

To Bibi’s relief, she found that getting into the car was no more difficult than boarding the gently rocking gondola of a Ferris wheel.

Starting the engine, Nancy said, Buckle up, sweetie.

I am buckled up, Mother. Hearing herself, she felt like an adolescent, dependent and a little whiny, and she loathed being either of those things. I’m buckled.

Oh. You are. Yes, of course you are.

Nancy exited the parking lot without coming to a full stop, turned right on the street, and accelerated to get through a nearby intersection before the traffic light changed.

It would be ironic, Bibi said, if you killed us trying to get to a hospital.

Never had an accident, honey. Only one ticket, and that was in a totally fraudulent, tricked-up speed trap. The cop was a real smog monster, a mean-eyed kak who wouldn’t know glassout conditions from mushburgers.

Surfer lingo. A smog monster was an inlander. A kak was a dick. Glassout was when the ocean flowed unruffled, perfect for surfing, and mushburgers were the kind of waves that made surfers think about leaving the water for a skateboard.

Sometimes it was difficult for Bibi to keep in mind that her mother had long ago been a surfer girl supreme, riding tubes, taking the drop with the best of them. Nancy still loved the sun-baked sand and the surf. From time to time, she paddled out and caught some waves. But of the words that defined her now, surfer was not as high on the list as it had once been. These days, other than when she was on the beach, surfspeak crept into her vocabulary only when she had a beef about one authority figure or another.

She concentrated on the traffic, no tears in her eyes anymore, jaw set, brow creased, checking out the rearview mirror, the side mirrors, switching lanes more often than usual, totally into the task, as she otherwise was only when she went after a real-estate listing or thought that a property sale might be on the verge of closing.

Oh, crap. Bibi snatched a few tissues from the console box and spat into them twice, without effect.

What is it, what’re you doing?

That disgusting taste.

What taste?

Like spoiled milk, rancid butter. It comes and goes.

Since when?

Since…this started.

You said your only symptoms were the weak hand, the tingling.

I don’t think it’s a symptom.

It’s a symptom, her mother declared.

In the distance, the hospital towered over other structures, and at the sight of it, Bibi acknowledged to herself that she was more afraid than she had wanted to admit. The architecture was unexceptional, bland, and yet the closer they drew to the place, the more sinister it appeared.

There’s always a silver lining, she assured herself.

Her mother sounded anxious and dubious: Is there?

For a writer, there always is. Everything is material. We need new material for our stories.

Nancy accelerated through a yellow traffic light and turned off the street into the medical complex. It’ll be what it’ll be, she said, almost to herself, as if those words were magical, each of them an abraxas that would ward off evil.

Please don’t say that to me again, Bibi requested, more sharply than she intended. Not ever again. You’re always saying it, and I don’t want to hear it anymore.

Following an ER sign that directed them off the main loop and to the left, Nancy glanced at her daughter. All right. Whatever you want, honey.

Bibi at once regretted snapping at her mother. I’m sorry. So sorry. The first two words came out all right. But she heard the distortion in the last two, which sounded like show sharry.

As they pulled to a stop in front of the emergency entrance, Bibi admitted to herself the reason she hadn’t called 911: She possessed a writer’s well-honed understanding of story construction. Perhaps from the moment that her left hand had failed to engage the computer keyboard as she directed it, and surely from the moment the tingling had begun, she’d known where this was going, where it had to go, which was into a dark place. Every life was a story, after all, or a collection of stories, and not all of them tapered gracefully to a happy ending. She had always assumed her life would be a tale of happiness, that she would craft it as such, and during the onset of her symptoms, she had been reluctant to consider that her assumption might be naïve.

Although spring heat hadn’t yet reliably settled over the Southern California coast, Murphy Blair went to work that morning wearing sandals, boardshorts, a black T-shirt, and a blue-and-black plaid Pendleton shirt worn open, with the sleeves rolled up. His shock of sandy-brown hair was shot through with blond streaks, legitimate sun bleaching, not bottle-born, because even on low-Fahrenheit days, he found the sun for a few hours. He was walking proof that, with sufficient obsession and contempt for melanoma, a summer tan could be maintained year-round.

His shop, Pet the Cat, was on Balboa Peninsula, the land mass that sheltered Newport Harbor from the ocean, in the vicinity of the first of two piers. The name of the store referred to the motion that surfers made when they were crouched on their boards, stroking the air or water as if to smooth their way through a section.

The display windows were full of surfboards and bitchin’ shirts like Mowgli tees, Wellen tees, Billabong, Aloha, Reyn Spooner. Murph sold everything from Otis eyewear with mineral-glass lenses to Surf Siders shoes, from wetsuits to Stance socks featuring patterns based on the art of surfing champion John John Florence.

At fifty, Murph lived his work, worked to play, played to live. When he arrived at Pet the Cat, the door was unlocked, the lights were on, and Pogo was standing behind the counter, intently reading the instruction pamphlet for Search, the GPS surf watch by Rip Curl.

Glancing up at his boss, Pogo said, I’m gonna get one of these here for damn sure.

Three years earlier, he escaped high school with a perfect two-point grade average and foiled his parents’ attempt to force him onto a college track. He lived frugally with two other surf rats, Mike and Nate, in a studio apartment above a thrift shop in nearby Costa Mesa, and drove a primer-gray thirty-year-old Honda that looked as though it was good for nothing more than being a target car in a monster-truck demolition derby.

Sometimes an underachieving wanker took refuge in the surfing culture and remained largely or entirely womanless until he died with his last Social Security check uncashed. For two reasons, Pogo didn’t have that problem. First, he was a wave king, fearless and graceful on the board, eager to master even the huge monoliths that had come with Hurricane Marie, admired for his style and heart. He might have been a champion if he’d possessed enough ambition to participate in competitions. Second, he was so gorgeous that when he passed, women tracked him as if their heads were attached to their necks with ball-bearing swivel hinges.

You gonna give me the usual discount on this? Pogo asked, indicating the GPS surf watch.

Murph said, Sure, all right.

Twelve weekly payments, zero interest?

What am I—a charity? It’s not that expensive.

Eight weeks?

Murph sighed. Okay, why not. He pointed at the flat blank screen of the large TV on the wall behind the counter, which should have been running vintage Billabong surf videos to lend atmosphere to the shop. Tell me that’s not on the fritz.

It’s not. I just sort of forgot about it. Sorry, bro.

Bro, huh? Do you love me like a brother, Pogo?

Totally, bro. My real brother, Clyde, he’s a brainiac stockbroker, might as well be from Mars.

His name’s Brandon. What’s with this Clyde?

Pogo winked. You’ll figure it out.

Murph took a deep breath. You want the shop to prosper?

As he fired up the Billabong videos, Pogo said, Sure, yeah, I want you to rule the scene, bro.

Then you’d help my business a lot if you went to work at some other surf shop.

Pogo grinned. I’d be crushed if I thought you meant that. But, see, I get your dry wit. You should do stand-up.

Yeah, I’m a riot.

No, really. Bonnie thinks you’re hilarious, too.

Bonnie, your nose-to-grindstone sister who works her butt off to keep that restaurant afloat? Oh. I see. Bonnie and Clyde. Anyway, she’s another brainiac. You mean you and her share a sense of humor?

Pogo sighed. Hey, when I say ‘brainiac,’ I don’t use the term pejoratively. I have lots in common with my twin siblings.

‘Pejoratively,’ huh? Sometimes you give yourself away, Pogo. Murph’s cell phone rang, and he checked the caller ID. Nancy. He said, What’s up, sugar?

A chill climbed his spine and found his heart as his wife said, I’m scared, baby. I’m afraid Bibi’s had a stroke.

On a Tuesday morning, the ER wasn’t as busy as it would be on the 7:00-P.M.-to-3:00-A.M. shift. The night would bring those injured by drunk drivers, victims of muggers, battered wives, and all manner of aggressive or hallucinating druggies sliding along the razor’s edge of an overdose. When Bibi arrived with her mother, only five people were in the waiting room, none of them bleeding profusely.

At the moment, the triage nurse was actually an emergency-care technician named Manuel Rivera, a short, stocky man in hospital blues. He checked her pulse and took her blood pressure as he listened to her recite her symptoms.

Bibi slurred a few words, but for the most part her speech was clear. She felt better and safer, being in a hospital, until Manuel’s sweet face, almost a Buddha face, darkened with worry and he guided her to a wheelchair. With apparent urgency, he rolled her through a pair of automatic doors into the ER ahead of the other people who were waiting for treatment.

Each emergency-room bay was a cubicle with a gray vinyl-tile floor and three pale-blue walls and one glass wall that faced the hallway. Toward the head of the bed stood a heart monitor and other equipment, awaiting use.

Nancy settled in one of the two chairs for visitors, holding her and Bibi’s purses, hands clutching them as if she anticipated a robbery attempt, though it wasn’t a purse snatcher that she feared.

Manuel lowered the power bed and assisted Bibi to sit on the edge. Unless you feel dizzy, don’t lie down yet, he instructed.

He rolled the wheelchair into the hallway, where he met a tall athletic-looking man in scrubs, evidently a physician. The doctor wheeled before him a portable computer station designed to be used while the operator remained standing, into which he entered details regarding the preliminary diagnosis and treatment of each patient he attended.

Are you all right, baby? Nancy asked.

Yes, Mom. I’m okay. I’m going to be fine.

Do you need anything? Water? Do you need water?

Bibi’s mouth kept flooding with saliva, as if she were about to throw up, but she swallowed it and kept her breakfast down. The last thing she wanted was water.

In the hallway, after Manuel spoke with the tall man for a moment, the latter came into the cubicle and introduced himself as Dr. Armand Barsamian. His calm demeanor and confident manner would have reassured Bibi under other circumstances.

While he checked her eyes with an ophthalmoscope, he asked a few questions—her name, date of birth, Social Security number—and she realized that he wanted to ascertain whether or not her memory had been affected by whatever was happening to her.

We need to get a CT scan of the brain, Dr. Barsamian said. If this is a stroke, the quicker we identify the cause—thrombosis, hemorrhage—and determine treatment, the more likely you’ll fully recover.

Already an orderly with a gurney had appeared in the doorway. The physician helped Bibi lie upon it.

As she was wheeled away, her mother stood in the hall, looking bereft, as though she half expected never to see her daughter again. The orderly turned a corner, and Bibi lost sight of her mom.

On the second floor, the room containing the CT scanner felt chilly. She didn’t ask for a blanket. Superstitiously, she felt that the more stoic she remained, the better the outcome of the test.

She transferred from the gurney to the scanner table.

The orderly stepped out of the room as a nurse appeared with a tray on which were arranged a rubber-tube tourniquet, a foil packet containing a disposable cloth saturated with antibacterial solution, and a hypodermic needle containing a contrast medium that would make blood vessels and abnormalities of the brain show up more clearly.

Are you okay, dear?

Thank you, yes. I’m okay.

After the nurse departed, the unseen CT technician spoke to Bibi through an intercom from an adjacent chamber, explaining how the procedure would progress. The woman had a gentle girlish voice with the faint trace of a Japanese accent, so that when Bibi closed her eyes, a scene more vivid than the CT room formed around her….

A flagstone path leads to a red moon gate entwined with dazzling white chrysanthemums. Beyond lies a teahouse sheltered by cherry trees in blossom, a scattering of their pale petals gracing the dark stone underfoot. Inside, geishas in silk kimonos wear their long black hair twisted up in elaborate arrangements held in place by ivory pins carved in the shape of dragonflies.

A sliding cradle in the table moved Bibi backward, headfirst, into the aperture of the scanner, rousing her from that teahouse of the mind. The procedure was completed so quickly that she wondered if it had been done correctly, though she knew that the hospital staff’s competence was the least of her concerns.

She was frightened by the speed with which they had handled her case since she had entered the ER waiting room. She would have no hope of peace until they arrived at a diagnosis. Nevertheless, the faster they worked, the more she felt as though she were sliding down a chute, accelerating, into an abyss.

Olaf, the stray golden retriever that wandered out of the rainstorm, had been with the Blair family for less than a week when he settled into the habit of climbing the stairs to the apartment above the garage. He enjoyed lounging on the small balcony that contained a pair of rocking chairs. He rested his chin on the bottom rail of the white-painted balustrade, peering between the balusters and into the courtyard behind the bungalow, as if he were a prince contentedly surveying his domain.

Each time she discovered him up there, young Bibi called him down, at first in a whisper that she was certain he could hear, because dogs had better hearing than did human beings. Although he watched her as she stood below, Olaf always pretended to be deaf to her entreaties. When she raised her voice to a stage whisper, he still failed to come to her, though the soft thumping of his tail against the balcony floor proved that he understood her commands.

She dared not climb the stairs to take the dog by the collar and escort him down. Once on the balcony, she would be only a few feet from the front door of the apartment. Too close.

Frustrated, Bibi paced the courtyard, glancing up repeatedly at Olaf but never at any of the three windows. The sun made mirrors of those panes of glass, so that she couldn’t see anyone even if he might be standing inside, watching. Nevertheless, she did not rest her gaze directly on any window.

She went into the bungalow and, from a tin in the pantry, took two of the carob cookies that the retriever couldn’t resist. In the courtyard once more, she held a treat in each hand, arms raised above her head, letting Olaf smell his delicious reward for obedience. She knew that he caught the carob scent, for even from the courtyard she could see his wet black nose twitching between the balusters.

The cookies had always worked before, but not this time. After a few minutes, Bibi retreated to the back porch of the bungalow and sat on a wicker sofa with thick cushions upholstered in a palm-leaf pattern.

Olaf liked to lie there beside her, his head in her lap, while she stroked his face, scratched his chest, and rubbed his tummy. The porch roof blocked her view of the apartment windows, but she could just still see the lower part of the balcony railing and the dog with his snout between two balusters. He was watching her, all right.

Bibi brought one of the carob treats to her nose, smelled it, and decided that it would not be offensive to the human tongue. She bit the cookie in half and chewed. It didn’t taste bad, but it didn’t taste fabulous, either. Carob was supposed to have a flavor much like that of chocolate, which dogs couldn’t eat, but it would never put Hershey out of business.

From his perch on the apartment balcony, Olaf had seen half of his treat brazenly consumed. His chin no longer rested on the bottom rail of the balustrade. His snout poked between two balusters a foot below the top rail, which meant that he’d gotten to his feet.

Bibi waved the remaining half of the cookie back and forth in front of her nose, back and forth, raising her voice to express her unqualified approval of that delicacy. Mmmmm, mmmmm, mmmmm.

Olaf bolted down the stairs from the balcony, across the brick courtyard, and onto the porch. He bounded onto the sofa, landing with such force that the wicker crackled and creaked in protest.

Good boy, said Bibi.

With his soft mouth, he took the half cookie from between her thumb and forefinger. She fed him the second cookie whole, and while he chewed it with noisy pleasure, she said, "Don’t go up there again. Stay away from the apartment. It’s a bad place. It’s terrible. It’s evil."

After he finished licking his chops, the dog regarded her with what she took to be solemn consideration, his pupils wide there in the shadows of the porch, his golden irises seeming to glow with an inner light.

Nancy told herself to chill out, gel, to sideslip through the moment, ride out the chop, to just sit in one of the visitor chairs and wait for Bibi to be brought back from the CT scan. But even when she had been an adolescent surf mongrel learning the water, she had never been a Barbie with the placidity of a doll. When on a board, she had always wanted to shred the waves, tear them up, and when the waves were mushing and the land had more appeal than the ocean, she had always nonetheless pumped through the day with her usual energy.

And so when Murph turned the corner from the first ER hallway into the second, Nancy was pacing back and forth outside the cubicle from which Bibi had been wheeled away on a gurney. She didn’t see him immediately, but intuited his arrival by the way a couple of nurses did double takes and smiled invitingly and whispered to each other. Even at fifty, Murphy looked like Don Johnson in the actor’s Miami Vice days, and if he had wanted other women, they would have been hanging off him like remora, those fish that, with powerful suckers, attached themselves to sharks.

Murph still wore a black T-shirt, a Pendleton with the sleeves rolled up, and boardshorts, but in respect for the hospital, he had stepped out of sandals and into a pair of black Surf Siders with blue laces, worn without socks. Newport Beach was one of the few places in the country where a guy dressed like Murph would not seem out of place in a hospital or, for that matter, in a church.

He put his arms around Nancy, and she returned his hug, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Didn’t need to speak. Needed only to cling to each other.

When they pulled back from the embrace and were just holding hands, Murph said, Where is she?

They took her for a CAT scan. I thought they would have brought her back by now. I don’t know why they haven’t. It shouldn’t take so long—should it?

Are you okay?

I feel like I’ve been hammered, fully prosecuted, she said, both terms surfer lingo for wiping out and getting brutally thrashed by a killer wave.

How’s Bibi doing? he asked.

You know her. She copes. Whatever’s happening to her, she’s already thinking what she’ll do once she’s gotten through it, if maybe it’s good material for a story.

Rolling his mobile computer station before him, Dr. Barsamian, the chief ER physician during the current shift, approached them with the news that Bibi had been admitted to the hospital following her CT scan. She’s in Room 456.

The doctor’s eyes were as black as kalamata olives. If in fact he knew something horrific about Bibi’s condition, Nancy could read nothing in his gaze.

The CT scan seems to have been inconclusive, Barsamian said. They’ll want to do more testing.

In the elevator, on the way from the first floor to the fourth, Nancy suffered a disturbing moment of sensory confusion. Although the position-indicator light on the directory above the doors went from 1 to 2, then to 3, she could have sworn that the cab was not ascending, that it was descending into whatever might occupy the building’s two subterranean levels, that they were being cabled and counterweighted down into some enduring darkness from which there would be no return.

When the light moved to the 4 on the directory and the doors of the cab slid open, her anxiety did not abate. Room 456 was to the right. When she and Murph got there, the door stood open. The room contained two unoccupied beds, the sheets fresh and taut and tucked.

Bibi’s drawstring bag stood on the nightstand beside the bed that was