The last two side aisles—one to the left, one to the right—still had not been explored. If someone had actually put a hand on her, he might have retreated into one of those spaces.
Valiant girls were never conquered by their fear. Valiant girls understood that if everyone backed away from confrontation with evil, this world would be a prison from pole to pole, ruled with cruelty and brutality by the worst of humanity, no corner left for freedom. Every retreat, every appeasement, was one step down a staircase to Hell on Earth.
She drew the pistol. A one-hand grip was never good, but she needed her left for the flashlight. Forward then, swivel to the left, to the right. If someone had touched her, he wasn’t in either of the last two aisles, and there was nowhere else that he could have gone.
Like a community of ghosts, fog escorted her down the apartment stairs and across the courtyard to the bungalow. She had come here to visit the two places where the lost memories of her youth might still be found, the second being her former bedroom. Because the house had been stripped of everything having value—from used appliances to antique fixtures—and because demolition would soon occur, the back door was unlocked.
She entered a house that had once been warm and welcoming, that had resonated with conversation and laughter and music, where her dad and mom had sometimes pushed aside the kitchen table to dance in the middle of the floor, where Olaf had been the family fur child for six happy years. None of those memories had been purged from Bibi, and she expected, after an absence of only three years, to be bathed in nostalgia when she crossed the threshold, to see at every turn the best moments of a blessed childhood and adolescence.
Instead, the air hung cold and damp and thick with a fungous scent. The flashlight revealed dirt and damage everywhere it probed: a ceiling discolored and sagging from an unchecked roof leak, holes in the plaster through which ribs of lath were revealed, a largely decomposed rat with eyeless sockets and tight grin of pointed teeth, empty hamburger containers and soda cans and candy wrappers perhaps discarded by the salvage workers in the first phase of demolition. But the disrepair and debris did not alone transform the familiar into the alien. Beneath the chill in the air and the bleakness of ruination lay another coldness, a frigid emptiness that had nothing to do with the want of furniture or the lack of central heating, that resulted from the absence of the human spirit.
By the time Bibi reached her bedroom, she understood as never before that home wasn’t a place but rather a place in the heart. In this troubled world, everything was transient except what we could carry with us in our minds and hearts. Every home ceased to be a home sooner or later, but not with its demolition. It survived destruction as long as just one person who had loved it still lived. Home was the story of what happened there, not the story of where it happened.
In the barren bedroom, where the plaster was now cracked and pocked and scaling, where the once lustrous wood floor was scarred and dull and splintered, Bibi felt the deepest chill of all. With only the inadequate brush and palette of the flashlight beam, she could not paint a picture of how the room had been. All the joy of the books that she had read here, all the glamor of distant rock-’n’-roll radio stations to which she had listened late into the night, marveling at differences in local cultures expressed in the style and patter of the DJs: None of that helped her to recall what a nurturing haven this had been. Instead, she saw it now as a somber and lonely space, where she had begun to lose a part of herself, where fear had driven her to sequester from recollection things of enormous importance.
She had come here with the hope that something she saw would free the imprisoned truth of what had happened in this room seventeen years earlier. What intruder had terrorized her, crawling in the dim glow of the Mickey Mouse night-light, and ultimately into her bed and under the covers?
The memory she regained, however, was of another conversation with the captain. It had taken place in the kitchen, a day or so after their tête-à-tête on the balcony above the courtyard. Murphy and Nancy were out for the evening at a concert. Captain cooked for Bibi and himself: his favorite recipe for chili-cheese dogs, with oven-baked fries bought at a supermarket from the special freezer section known only to currently serving and retired members of the Marine Corps. After they had finished eating at the kitchen table, as they were waiting to see if they could free up enough stomach room for an Eskimo Pie each, the captain raised the subject of forgetting.
Captain says, “I was taught a memory trick by this Gypsy in the Ukraine, after it wasn’t a part of the Soviet Union anymore. Is that right? Come to think of it, I might have learned it from this hundred-year-old shaman in Vietnam. Wherever and whoever, it’s a good trick and I’ve used it to forget terrible things I saw and couldn’t live with.”