He tells her to push aside the glass of Coca-Cola and to put her hands in her lap, palms up, and relax. Everything is going to be all right, he says. She has nothing to worry about, nothing she needs to fear. He is going to make everything right. She must listen to his voice, which has become softer and lower, listen to his voice and watch the candle flame pulsing in the red-glass cup, watch the flame, watch it without turning her head, follow it just with her eyes, the flame, and listen to his voice. He begins to move the votive back and forth before her eyes, back and forth in slow, smooth, shallow arcs, like a pendulum….
When she returns, she has no awareness of having been gone. She thinks nothing has happened, but he says that the hypnosis part is over. Now they are ready to play the memory trick. He provides her with an index card and a pen. Together they decide on the words. She must forget not only what crawled across her room that night eight months earlier, but also why and how it had gotten there. When the petition is airtight, when it leaves no loose end that might unravel, Captain retrieves a pair of tongs from a kitchen drawer and presents them to her for the burning.
She is convinced that the memory trick will work, that it is magic of the highest order and will make her life normal again, that the ugly scary memories will vanish like the magician’s deck of cards and, unlike the deck, will never return.
She grips the index card with the tongs.
From his chair across the table, Captain picks up one of the votives and holds it out to her.
The quivering flame stands as high as the rim of the glass.
Bibi turns the tongs so that one corner of the index card points into the votive, cleaves the flame, and is ignited.
In the jaws of the tongs, the burning object might be a cocoon, for from it arises a bright butterfly of fire that flexes its wings across the white cardstock, which peels away in gray ribbons. The butterfly appears about to leap free, to shake loose the remnants of the white chamber of resurrection that its larval form had woven for it and soar into luminous flight, but instead it collapses into a midge of flame.
Captain tells Bibi to open the tongs, so that the fragment of card trapped between its jaws will be consumed.
Bibi obeys, and the burning scrap falls to the red-Formica top of the dinette table, the same cool chrome table that one day will be in her first apartment, the table at which ten lettered tiles will years later spell the name ASHLEY BELL.
The final twist of combustible paper has its bright moment, and in two seconds dwindles into ashes.
The captain sweeps the ashes off the Formica, carries them to the trash compactor, and blows them off his hands, into the trash.
When he returns, he stands watching his young granddaughter for a moment before he asks, “What are you afraid of, Bibi?”
“Afraid of? I don’t know. Well, there’s this old dog, two blocks over, it’s not friendly. And I sure don’t like wasps at all.”
“Have you ever been alone at night in your bedroom and been afraid that something else was there with you?”
She frowns. “How could something be with me when I’m alone?”
Instead of answering her, he says, “I guess the night-light makes you feel safe.”
“Stupid silly Mickey Mouse,” she says, and makes a face that no one could mistake for anything other than exasperation. “I’m not a baby anymore. They shouldn’t treat me like a baby. I’m not a baby anymore, and I’m never gonna be a baby again—that’s how it works.”
“You’ve not even once been glad to have Mickey there?”
“Nope. I’d break him, you know, by accident, if that wouldn’t be wrong. I might do it anyway.” She notices the tongs still in her right hand. She sniffs the air. Her eyes widen. “We just did it, didn’t we?”
“Did what?”
“The voodoo Gypsy memory trick.”
“Yes, we did. How do you feel?”
“I’m okay. I feel good. Wow, that was cool, huh?”
“Do you have any idea what memories you burned?”
She tries to think, but then she shakes her head. “Nothing. I guess I didn’t need them. What did I forget?”
At the refrigerator, he opens the freezer compartment. “Are you ready for that Eskimo Pie?”
The memory is so vivid that when it wanes and leaves Bibi once more in a house prepared for demolition, she can for a moment smell the lingering scent of the burned index card.
For sixteen years, she had neither recalled the incident in her bedroom nor dreamed of it, until the previous night, when she’d fallen asleep in the armchair in her father’s office, above Pet the Cat. The architecture of forgetfulness was at last collapsing, but not quickly enough. She still could not recall the nature of the thing that had stalked her in this room, neither the how nor the why of it, only that the incident had occurred.
Although of low wattage, the glow from Mickey Mouse had been more diffuse than the brighter but narrow beam of the flashlight, which revealed less of the room than had the cartoon guardian. As Bibi probed here and there, she realized that she had gotten all she could—and less than she hoped—from this trespass.