Pax and Pogo and Nancy and Murph violated hospital rules by accompanying Bibi to every test venue, although they couldn’t all fit in the same elevator with the gurney and the hospital personnel. Without asking permission, the four of them gathered with the MRI technician and watched through the big window as Bibi was conveyed into the ominous tunnel, waving at them as she disappeared headfirst.
Everything went pretty much this time as it had when she had imagined being cured by the night visitor with the golden retriever and had imagined being retested with astonishing results. When Dr. Chandra came to her room past midnight with a retinue of fascinated physicians, he said nearly the same thing he had said when she had imagined this meeting: that nothing in his medical experience had prepared him for this, that he wasn’t able to explain it, that it wasn’t possible, but that she was entirely free of cancer.
She hugged him as she had done before, though this time she apologized for reeking like a pig. He told her that given her impossible brain-wave patterns and now this miraculous remission, all manner of specialists would want to study her. Although she knew the reason for her cure, and though she intended to keep it secret within her little family, she agreed to make herself available in the weeks ahead. After apologizing in advance, she hugged him again.
Dr. Chandra looked happy and wonderstruck when he said, “On Wednesday, when I told you that you had at most a year to live, you said, ‘We’ll see.’ Do you remember?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“It’s almost as if you knew then that you’d be going home soon.”
A post-midnight discharge was not unprecedented, but nearly so. Nevertheless, by 2:25 in the morning, Bibi was at her parents’ home in Corona del Mar and in the shower, the water cranked up as hot as she could tolerate. Bliss.
No one was sleepy, least of all Bibi, who’d had days of sleep or something like it. Pax and Pogo had stopped at a twenty-four-hour market on the way, to buy ground sirloin, hamburger buns, tomatoes, lettuce, and Maui onions. Because she’d been without solid food for more than four days, Bibi had been warned to start with a soft diet, but she refused to think that gastric distress could lay her low when cancer couldn’t. By the time she came downstairs to the kitchen, her parents, her beau, and her best friend were singing along with the Beach Boys, drinking Corona, and grilling monster burgers with all the trimmings.
Pax was the first to realize that Bibi’s facial bruising was gone, that her crushed and abraded ear was as good as new, that she apparently had healed herself. As they regarded her with something akin to reverence, she said, “Yeah, I have some big news, and I don’t know where all this is going in the days ahead. But wherever the hell it goes, compadres, if any of you ever looks at me again like you’re looking at me now, like I’m something too precious for words, I’ll kick your balls up past your gizzard. You, too, Mom.”
They ate on the roof deck, with the night sea black to the west, and talked until the sky pinked in the east, and then longer still, and for most of that time she sat on Pax’s lap, and touched his face from time to time, and marveled.
The shingled bungalow had not been torn down by the people who bought it from Bibi’s parents. She had imagined its destruction to facilitate the plot, themes, and atmospherics of her life-or-death quest. The house stood much as it had been in her childhood. On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, less than forty-eight hours after Bibi had been released from the hospital, she rang the doorbell, but no one responded.
The new owners were nice people, not the suspicious Gillenhocks who claimed to be retired investment bankers in the alternate world of Bibi’s fancy. They wouldn’t mind if she enjoyed their porch for a while. The rocking chairs were gone, but she sat in one of the patio chairs, looking out at the street, where the tresses of the palm trees rustled in a shifting breeze and the ficuses seemed to twinkle as their leaves—dark green on one side, pale green on the other—flickered this way and that in the changeable air.
In the weeks after Captain died, she had sat here to write some of her stories about Jasper, and here on a rainy day, a Jasper had come to her. As much as she loved her parents, they had not been able to understand her the way that Captain had understood her, and if she hadn’t eventually imagined sweet Jasper into her life, she might have imagined the captain alive again. She had desperately needed a dog, a dog suitably mysterious. To her, nature wasn’t merely a beautiful engine that powered fate. She didn’t believe in coincidence. Neither did Captain. Neither did dogs. In their constant joy and bottomless capacity for love, dogs were in tune with a more complex truth.
This place would always be home to her, and perhaps one day she and Pax would own it. Home is where the heart is. No, nothing quite as simple as that. Home is where you struggle, in a world of endless struggle, to become the best you can be, and it becomes home in your heart only if one day you can look back and say that, in spite of all your faults and failures, it was in this special place where you began to see, however dimly, the shape of your soul.