When Bibi groaned again and rolled her head upon the pillow, Nancy moved her hand from the girl’s shoulder to her bruised face. “Honey, can you hear me? Will you wake up for your mom? Can you wake up and smile for Daddy and me?”
In that way of knowing without knowing how, Murph understood that, as irrational as it seemed, Bibi was safe in the coma, or at least safer than she would be if she woke. The injuries to her face and the tattoo, as mysterious as stigmata, argued against what he felt, but the feeling remained undiminished. In fact he sensed that the coma was her only hope, that somehow in the coma she had a chance to…to what? Somehow defeat the cancer? The gliomatosis cerebri that no one had ever survived? Was that truly a possibility or only a father’s desperate wish? He watched her eyes twitching rapidly beneath the pale lids, looked at the five brain waves describing their optimal patterns, a phenomenon never before witnessed, and he thought about who Bibi was, the unique girl she had always been, and his desperate wish seemed like a rational hope.
Bibi repeated, “Is not happening.”
Putting a hand to her daughter’s brow, which was half covered by the electro cap, Nancy again urged her to wake, to return to them.
“No!” Murph whispered, but with such force that he startled his wife. “No, no, no, baby. Let her sleep. She needs to sleep.”
Nancy regarded him as if he were the king of kooks, a spleet, a geek-a-mo. “This isn’t sleep, Murph. This is a damn hateful cancer coma.”
Indicating the brain-wave readout, he said, “It isn’t a coma. It’s…something.”
Nancy looked from him to the precious girl, to him again, and whatever she saw in his face, his eyes, gave her pause.
A blush suffused Murph’s brow, his cheeks, a heat not quite like anything he had felt before. Fine beads of perspiration prickled his face, a sweat of awe, if there could be such a thing. His face must be glazed and shining; and he knew that his eyes were. Staring at his daughter, reassuring his wife, he said, “She’s walking the board.”
In the Honda, across the street and twenty yards uphill from Solange St. Croix’s house, Pogo sat behind the steering wheel, and Pax sat shotgun. Scattered through a rich currency of shadows, gold coins of sunlight shimmered on the windshield.
“Holy moly, Batman,” Pogo said. “What would have happened to us if we’d gone up with her to the third floor?”
“I think my SEAL training would have been enough to get me out alive. I’m told you can punch pretty hard with your right.”
“Half-and-half with Scotch. Did her mother start her on that in the crib?”
Surveying the large sheets of heavily tinted window glass in the stacked slabs of the house, wondering if he and Pogo were watched in turn by the woman and if, catlike, she were licking cream from her lips, Pax said, “There’s something about her that’s almost likable. In fact, I feel sorry for her.”
Pogo wasn’t convinced. “How does that work?”
“She pretends she’s made the life she wanted, but on some level, she knows she got it wrong. She wanted artistic influence, and she got raw power instead. She wanted a literary life, but she got a life of writers’ conferences and symposiums and committees pressing for fiction to sell the approved social issues of the moment. Cocktail parties where networking takes the place of wit. Being targeted by envy blogs. She fancied herself a free spirit, Holly Golightly, but with a Jane Austen brain. But there’s no room at all for free spirits in modern academia, with its speech codes and humorless moralizing. So she makes two lives for herself, or three for all we know, or four, and in the end there’s no satisfaction in being multiple Solange St. Croixs instead of one.”
Pogo stared at him.
After a moment, Pax said, “What?”
“I thought you just blew up things.”
“I’ve blown up a lot of things.” Pax looked at his wristwatch, at the dashboard clock, and felt again that time was running out. “We better get moving.”
Starting the engine, Pogo said, “Well, all I know is, she pushed Beebs out of the writing program and humiliated her in a supermarket that time. And she called her some pretty rank names.”
As they drove downhill toward Coast Highway and the commercial heart of Laguna Beach, Pax said, “Okay, position check. For some reason, we don’t know why, Captain gives Bibi a list of quotations celebrating imagination.”
“Yeah. And she reads it so often, she just about wears out the paper.”
“So then Captain dies. Bibi’s ten, she’s brokenhearted, deep in mourning. She writes stories about an abandoned dog named Jasper.”
“Hundreds of pages of stories.”
“And one day a dog named Jasper shows up out of the blue.”
“Yeah. But she hides his collar with his name on it.”
“You’re sure she never told you about it.”
“Never did,” Pogo confirmed, and he turned north on Coast Highway.
“Then she’s seventeen,” Pax said, “and she writes about St. Croix’s house—”