Like Chubb Coy. The chief of hospital security. What did he have to do with any of this except to serve as a distraction, to thwart her by misdirection? He showed up at Norm’s, at breakfast with St. Croix, later popped into the professor’s Victorian retreat to kill her when she might have been about to make an important revelation, alluding to Flannery O’Connor and Thornton Wilder and Jack London, with whose work he was no more likely to be familiar than he was likely to be a master of particle physics.
Suddenly a truth about Chubb Coy circled Bibi, circled like a night bird gliding the darkness with a keen eye on its prey, the same truth from which she had recoiled earlier, the truth that she had burned with the memory trick. She drove with her left hand, the pistol clutched in her right, weaving along the lonely highway, her heart seeming to jump-jump-jump rather than merely beat, frenzied convulsions in her chest, and she thought, He didn’t quote those books because he wanted to, he quoted them because I made him do it. That was not the truth that she rendered ashes in the motel sink, but it was somehow a funhouse-mirror reflection of that truth. She didn’t understand how she could make Chubb Coy do anything. That made no sense. She kept replaying the curious thought, trying to understand it, but instead of gaining clarity with repetition, it lost coherence—until she abruptly realized that the thing under the passenger seat, the unwanted passenger, had been silent for some time.
Room 456. Sunday afternoon, 3:29. Blue sky beyond the window. Sun westering but not yet declining in a red swoon. On the EKG screen, the girl’s heart rate spiking, the sound switched off but the trace line pumping, pumping faster. On the EEG, five brain wave indicators all tracking optimal patterns simultaneously, as every neurologist knew was not possible.
Nancy sat near the window, holding a newspaper that she hadn’t requested but that she had accepted from a well-meaning young candy striper, seeming to read it but never turning from the front page to the second.
Perched on another chair with his smartphone, Murph checked the surf conditions in Australia. Byron Bay and Narrabeen and Torquay and Point Danger. Then on to Bali: wave height at Kuta Reef, Nusa Dua, Padang Padang. Mainland Mexico at Mazatlán and San Blas. Todos Santos in Baja California, and Scorpion Bay. Durban in South Africa, and Cape St. Francis. He wouldn’t be surfing any of them today, probably never. He kept checking anyway. Pipeline and Sunset and Waimea on the north shore of Oahu. Honolulu Bay and Maalaea on Maui. He felt that he was losing his grip on sanity, sliding slowly into a defensive kind of madness.
Between Hawaii and Uruguay, he looked up from the phone and saw the EKG, where the heart trace was jumping above and below the midline, systolic and diastolic as they should be, not irregular, but faster than he had seen them track before.
In the bed, hair frizzed out around the grotesque electro cap, Bibi lay in silence, as she had lain for days. But then abruptly she groaned in distress.
Nancy dropped the newspaper and got to her feet. She reached the bed just as Bibi said, “No, hell, no, no…”
Waves and tides and far places forgotten, Murph scrambled bedside, the girl between him and Nancy.
Her sweet face squinched and her closed eyes closed tighter. “…cannot happen, will not happen, is not happening.”
Leaning over the bedrail, putting a hand on Bibi’s shoulder, Nancy said, “Sweetie, do you hear me? Bibi, it’s okay. We’re here, honey. Daddy and me, both here.”
“Not happening, not happening,” Bibi insisted. She turned her head from side to side, as though afflicted. Denying, resisting.
Murph reached for the call button looped to the bedrail, but he hesitated to push it.
There was a father-daughter connection that had always been a mystery to him, a knowing without knowing how, knowing when she was safe and when she was not. She could be at the Wedge in wicked water, riding mountains, big quakers three times her height, with the very real danger of being swept into the stacked rocks of the breakwater at the harbor’s mouth, where surfers had been killed, but he knew that he didn’t need to worry. Another time, she might have been with a friend or two, riding bicycles nowhere more dangerous than on the paved “boardwalk” that served the long peninsula or in the lightly traveled streets south of Balboa’s lower pier; and he phoned her to suggest that she come home or stop by Pet the Cat to keep him company for a while. She’d always heard the vague note of worry in his voice, and she had always done as he asked, and nothing had ever happened to her. But he believed that something might have happened if he hadn’t phoned her and changed the pattern of her day. It wasn’t as powerful as clairvoyance, this connection, but it was stronger than a hunch.