Bibi was building toward rage. She loathed this woman. Marissa Hoffline had been a bad teacher. She would never in a thousand years have won any organization’s teacher-of-the-year award. And now she was doing an equally bad job of being a wealthy wife, utterly without gratitude for the grace that had befallen her, transformed by money into an ogre of privilege and self-satisfaction. And she wouldn’t stop talking. If she kept talking, she was going to spoil everything. If she kept talking, talking, talking, she was going to say something that Bibi didn’t want to hear.
“You don’t need the little Jewess, Gidget. Just do what you need to do. Confront the terrible truth, accept what you need to accept about yourself, know yourself, and then do the deed that needs to be done.” Hoffline-Vorshack’s face was such a portrait of self-righteous satisfaction that Bibi wanted to hit her. Hard. Again and again. Shut her up. Kill her. But it would be murder, not killing. There was a difference.
The anger that Bibi had long dreaded to express, swollen now to rage, was a consequence of repressed fear. She understood that much at last. Captain’s memory trick didn’t in fact burn away traumatic experiences. It flushed them down a deep memory hole, where they—and the fear associated with them—festered in the dark. For seventeen years, the fear had been at a low boil, until it became a thick and bitter reduction of fear, became enduring terror, became a suppressed anxiety laced with helpless foreboding.
“Know yourself, Gidget,” Hoffline-Vorshack repeated.
“Shut up.”
“Learn your secrets.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
The former teacher said, “You know I’m right, Gidget. He asked you what you needed most, and you said to forget. But what you needed most back then wasn’t to forget. And it’s not what you need now.”
The Spanish Colonial Revival house with its many charms. The hallways and rooms fortified with books. The kitchen table around which more conversations had been held than meals had been eaten. Toba’s gentle and winsome face, her generous smile, her unfailing kindness. This was a pleasing place, comforting to mind and heart, but at this moment, Pax had neither the capacity to be comforted nor the time to allow the house and the singular old woman to work their magic.
Their hostess offered tea or coffee, both of which she brewed after Pax had called to ask if they might pay a visit, but he and Pogo declined. When Toba heard about Bibi’s brain cancer and her collapse into coma four days earlier, she poured her full mug of tea into the kitchen sink, replaced it with coffee, and spiked the coffee with both Baileys Irish Cream and bourbon. She did all that before she could speak a word in response to the news, and when she was able to talk, there was a tremor in her voice that wasn’t characteristic. “I rarely drink, but there are times when even drinking too much is not enough.”
The rest of what they had to tell her regarding the strangeness of Bibi’s condition—the unprecedented brain waves, the injuries to her face that appeared without apparent cause (though for the moment they said nothing of the tattoo)—didn’t lift Toba’s spirits, but did engage her imagination and energize her. They told her about Jasper and Olaf and the long-hidden dog collar, about the reason that Dr. St. Croix had driven Bibi out of the university writing program.
Although Pax had brought the notebook decorated with Pogo’s drawing, they didn’t at once mention the lines that had appeared on its pages as though written by a ghost. This wasn’t an interrogation, Toba being on their side, on Bibi’s side, but certain techniques of an interrogator were of use in an informal interview and even in casual conversation. Whether you were talking to an enemy combatant or to a friend, information drawn out in stages—in layers—tended to be more detailed, included more useful revelations. Not because the subject was purposefully withholding information. Simply, the human brain did not always know everything it knew, needed time for one thought to tease out another, to untie the many little knots in memory and recover an experience to its fullest.