That was better.
Her apprehension acquired a sharper edge. The settling noises seemed to become more numerous and were certainly more intimate than they’d been before. Some might have been caused not by the shifting of inanimate materials, but instead by mice or rats, or by songless night birds roosting in the rafters. Without vision, she had a keener sense of smell. The odors were not more pleasant, but richer, with greater nuance. She thought that she heard someone breathing nearby, a quick and shallow respiration, but when she held her breath, she realized that she had been listening to herself.
The recollection came with no flash-and-dazzle, no trumpets of revelation, only two voices, hers as a child and the captain’s. The conversation that she recalled had occurred long before his death, not here in the attic, outside in a place where the black limbs of a tree cradled orange fire but were not set ablaze.
“Holy shit,” Captain says.
“Yeah.”
“Sorry, Bibi. Bad language.”
“It’s okay.”
“I mean, look at me,” Captain says, “I’m still shaking.”
“Me, too.”
“Good God, you kept this all to yourself for so long.”
“Like eight months. I had to keep it myself. Till you.”
“But I’ve been here six months.”
“I had to be sure, would you be okay to tell.”
“Sonofabitch. Sorry, Bibi. But sonofabitch! This is nuts.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“No. Of course you’re not, sweetheart. You’re the furthest thing from crazy. That isn’t what I mean.”
They are sitting in the chairs on the small balcony outside his apartment. The sun is orange, but still more than an hour from the sea, blazing through the branches of the ancient front-yard ficus that towers over the bungalow, beaming fire and spilling shadows into the courtyard.
Captain says, “So you decided right from the start, you can’t ever tell your mom and dad.”
“Not ever, never.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know so much why,” Bibi says. “I just know I can’t because…of the way they are. Yeah, they’re real nice and real smart, and all….”
“They’re good people,” Captain agrees.
“I love them lots.”
“You better damn well love them, missy. They deserve it.”
“Yes, sir. I know. I do.”
“You never stop loving them.”
“No, sir. I won’t.”
“They brought you into the world because they wanted you. And they sure love you to pieces.”
“But if they knew,” Bibi says, “they’d get it all wrong.”
“Almost anyone would, not just them.”
“They wouldn’t mean to.”
“No, they wouldn’t.”
“But if they get it all wrong, what happens to me? To them and me and everything?”
“That’s something to worry about, all right.” He holds his hands up and stares at them. They are still trembling. He looks at Bibi. “How old are you for real?”
“Same as yesterday. Six and a half.”
“You are and you aren’t.”
“You know what I mean about Mommy and Daddy, how they are?”
Captain is quiet, but he’s thinking so hard and fast that Bibi wouldn’t be surprised if suddenly she heard his mind spinning. Then he says, “Yeah, I do. I know what you mean. But I’m not sure I can put it into words any better than you can.”
“So is it wrong not to tell them?”
“I can’t believe you kept it to yourself, almost eight months since it happened. Afraid and never showing it.”
“But is it wrong not to tell them?”
“No. It’s not wrong or right. It’s what’s best for you…for everyone.”
The silent sun slides limb by limb through the tree, and the mosaic of light and shadow on the courtyard floor slowly changes.
Captain says, “Tell me, what do you need most?”
“You mean…like what?”
“What do you most want to do about all this?”
“I wish none of it ever happened. I don’t want to be scared so bad.”
Captain says, “So you need to forget what happened, why it happened, how it happened?”
“But I can’t. I can’t ever forget.”
He held out one of his big hands, and she put her tiny hand in it, and they sat like that for a while, holding hands from chair to chair, as he seemed to think about the situation, and then he said, “Maybe there is. Maybe there is a way to forget.”
Bibi snapped from memory into the present, from the orange light of a westering sun into the pitch-black attic, when someone behind her put a hand on her right shoulder.
Startled, she simultaneously switched on the flashlight and fumbled it, dropped it. The beam rolled on the particleboard floor, sweeping a bright arc across the center aisle.
She ducked away from the hand on her shoulder, reached down, grabbed the flashlight, rose, pivoted, and slashed empty air with the beam. No one.