Nurse Hernandez sat in a chair by the window, the one in which Dr. Sanjay Chandra had sat the previous day, when he had delivered the dreadful prognosis. Bibi sat facing the nurse in what she now thought of as her lucky chair. In fact, every item in the room now seemed to be a lucky something: the lucky table between them, the lucky bed, the lucky TV that she had never turned on, her lucky silk robe, her lucky slippers.
“I need you to help me understand,” said Nurse Hernandez. “You think the golden retriever cured you?”
“No. Maybe. Hell, I don’t know. The dog had something to do with what’s happened. It must have. Listen, I’m not saying it’s a miracle dog. What would that mean, anyway, ‘miracle dog’? Sounds ridiculous. But the dog and the man who brought him—they must know something. Don’t you think so? I think so. Well, the man might know something. The dog wouldn’t necessarily know. Who knows what dogs know? And even if the dog knew something, it wouldn’t be able to tell us what it knew, because dogs can’t talk. So we need to talk to the man.”
Nurse Hernandez regarded Bibi in silence for a moment and then said, “You seem to be agitated.”
“No. Not agitated. I’m hyper. Good hyper. Hyped up. Wouldn’t you be, too, if you were riddled with brain cancer one day and free of it the next?”
The nurse didn’t want to encourage false hope. “Let’s not get ahead of the doctors, Bibi.”
“See, the thing is, I had a huge seizure last evening, when no one was here. I thought I was dying. Passed out. Later I woke when a nurse checked on me. She figured I was asleep. But I was paralyzed, and I couldn’t speak, and it was awful. I knew I was nearly gone, almost out of here, worm food. The next time I woke, it was the dog. After the dog, I wasn’t paralyzed anymore, I could talk. And this morning, when I woke like this”—she made a fist of her previously weak left hand and pumped it in the air—“I knew something good had happened, the biggest good thing possible.”
As nice as she might be, as patient as she was, Nurse Hernandez nevertheless looked as if she wanted to say, But that’s the point—it isn’t possible. Instead, after typing a note on her laptop, she said, “See, my problem is…we don’t allow any therapy dogs in the hospital after visiting hours. There weren’t any here last night.”
“There was one,” Bibi insisted cheerily. “A beautiful golden.”
“Are you sure you couldn’t have dreamed it or hallucinated it?”
“My hand was warm and sticky with dog drool.”
“Okay, well, so the man with the dog—what did he look like?”
“He was backlit, just a silhouette, and then in shadows.”
“What was the dog’s name? Do you remember?”
“I don’t know. The owner didn’t say.”
“The first thing they usually do is introduce the dog.”
“Maybe usually, but not this time.”
After the nurse typed on her laptop again, she looked up and smiled, but there was a look of misgiving in her eyes when she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean this to sound like a police interrogation, Bibi. I really do want to understand if…”
“If it turns out I’m cured? It’s okay. You can say it. You won’t be encouraging false hope. I am cured. You think I’m hyper now? Just wait till Dr. Chandra tells me there’s no cancer. I’ll be bouncing off the walls. That’s the kid in me. Most people can’t wait to leave kidhood behind. But I keep the kid in my heart, you know, and once in a while she gets out. It’s a writer thing. The past is material. You never want to forget it, how it was, how it felt.”
Nurse Hernandez listened with interest, as if she didn’t think Bibi was just babbling. When she could get a word in, she said, “What did this man with the golden retriever say to you?”
“Nothing. Until he was going out the door with the dog. Then he looked back and said, ‘Endeavor to live the life.’?”
The nurse frowned. “What did he mean by that? It sounds…I don’t know. It sounds odd, kind of formal. Don’t you think?”
Bibi shrugged. “Probably he just meant that I should get on with my life.” She had heard those words before but couldn’t remember when or where. She wondered why she failed to tell Mira Hernandez that she had heard those words before.
Suddenly she had a girl-detective thought that pleased her. “What about security cameras? They usually store their video for thirty days. If you review it from last night and see this guy and his dog, then you’ll know I wasn’t dreaming.”
When the ladder folded out of the ceiling to the floor of the walk-in closet, Bibi knew that an invitation had been issued, but she hesitated to accept it. In spite of the rigid geometry of the ladder, something about the way it zigzagged downward in segments made her think of a snake.
As she stared up into the attic, the darkness above retreated, although not entirely, when a string of bare bulbs brightened the upper realm from gable to gable.