“Six months after I came to live in the apartment, eight months after your terrifying experience, you finally trusted me enough to tell me about it. You felt you couldn’t tell your mom and dad, that they wouldn’t…well, wouldn’t understand. Whether that was right or wrong…it seemed that forgetting was for the best. And there I was with a way to make forgetting possible. A coincidence? I’ve never believed in them. And knowing the kind of girl you are, how fast you’re growing up—I mean, in mind and heart, so wise for one so young—I suspect eventually you also won’t believe in coincidences. Anyway, you told me your colorful, very wild and dark story, and stupidly, in the way that unimaginative adults can be stupid when they’ve long lost their sense of wonder, I tried to dismiss it as just a bad dream. So you proved it to me. No experience in war ever so terrified me as what happened there in my apartment kitchen. The purpose of this tape, which I will tell you when I give it to you, is to serve as…I don’t know…as some kind of restoration of the way things might have been, as some kind of therapy for you if it turns out I was foolish, even reckless, to help you forget what you had done, what you could do, if I was a damn fool to teach you the memory trick.”
In the recess under the desk, Bibi wept for the captain, that he had suffered regret and worried about having harmed her, when in fact his coming to live above the garage had been a great blessing. This freshening of grief to no extent displaced her fear. She felt sorrow and terror in equal measure. And though she told herself that Valiant girls did not hide from anything, that they stood up and in the open, facing threats forthrightly, she remained in the shadowed kneehole, sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs, and let out a thin sound of distress when, from out of the past, Captain’s voice came to her with revelations.
Bibi loved the book as much as her mother had promised that she would, as much as her mother, too, had loved it when she was a little girl. Cookie’s Big Adventure. Words and pictures. Bibi had graduated to books with more words a year earlier, and recently had been able to read them all by herself, without her mother narrating. She took pride in her ability to read at a level beyond her years.
Cookie, who was a gingerbread cookie in the shape of a man, with chocolate-drop eyes and a white-icing smile, was the best character in any book that she had yet to read. He was funny and cute and eager for adventure. Cookie came to life after being baked, while cooling on the baker’s tray, though why was a mystery; the author didn’t say. Cookie wasn’t brittle, didn’t break apart easily, as you might think he would. He was supple, strong, and quick. He remained gingerbread through and through, but there was magic in him, like in Frosty the Snowman.
When Cookie left the bakery and found himself in a busy city, he was so happy to explore and discover and learn. He had scary moments, when a truck almost ran over him, almost smashed him to pieces, and when a hungry dog chased him. But for the most part, his adventures were exciting in a good way, and hilarious.
In the week since her mother had given her the book, Bibi must have read it a thousand times, maybe two thousand, she didn’t count. Cookie sort of became her best friend. She didn’t easily make friends her age. The kids in preschool were mostly boring. Aunt Edith and a few other relatives thought Bibi was different. She’d overheard them saying so to her mother. She didn’t know what they meant, how she was different, and she didn’t really care. If anyone had asked her, Bibi would have said that those same relatives seemed strange to her, and she could no more explain why they were strange than they seemed to be able to explain why they found her different. Then into her life came the amazing Cookie, who was different, too, with a brave heart and a daring spirit, much as Bibi wished herself to be. Cookie and Bibi, best friends forever.
Between readings of the book, Bibi sometimes made up stories of her own about Cookie, his further adventures. She couldn’t draw well. She didn’t attempt to sketch his exploits. But she could see them vividly in her mind, in color, full of lively action, like waking dreams.
On this evening, after being put to bed and kissed goodnight, Bibi sat up again to read Cookie’s Big Adventure several times, by the soft light of her bedside lamp, while the muffled voices and music of the TV came to her from the living room. Maybe she dozed off, the book hugged to her chest, because when she scooched up from the pile of pillows into which she had slid, the house was quiet. Her parents had gone to sleep.
She sat for a while, looking at her favorite picture of Cookie and talking to him as if he were indeed her friend and capable of listening, caring. She told him that she wished he would come to life for her, the way that he had come to life in the wonderful story, and she really did wish it, want it, need it. She could so clearly see him rising from the page of the book as he had risen from the baker’s tray before setting out into the city.