Bibi did not remember turning away from the presence in the attic, but the next thing she knew, she was descending the ladder to the floor of the walk-in closet. At the bottom, when she looked up, she saw that the lights had been extinguished in the high room.
Panic had not seized her. She was in the grip of something else, perhaps shock, that rendered her half numb to all sensation. Her mind wasn’t spinning at the moment; instead each smallest impression and sentiment twitched to the next as if a pair of lever-wrench pliers in her brain were ratcheting them along in a futile attempt to restore her usual flow of thoughts.
She hesitated at the foot of the ladder, breath held, expecting someone to come into view above, uplit by the closet light. But when no one appeared, she gave the lowest segment of the ladder the hard push required to start it folding back into the ceiling. The ladder drew the trap door shut behind it, and the pull rope swayed back and forth like a pendulum.
She did not remember passing through the bedroom or the living room, but she became aware of being in the kitchen, standing at the dinette table, staring at the white vase. It had been empty when she entered the apartment. Now it contained three fresh scarlet roses.
As she descended the stairs from the balcony, thick fog flowed behind her and billowed around her as if it were the train of a magnificent white dress. In the courtyard, she could barely see the bricks underfoot, and the bungalow seemed to drift like a ghost ship on a shrouded sea, its lines visible but its substance unconvincing.
When she went into the house, her parents were still sleeping. Bibi retreated to her room, took off her shoes. Without removing her clothes, she slipped under the covers.
Something more had happened in the apartment attic than she had the fortitude to contemplate. She pushed away the memory of what had occurred, for it was both too frightening and too sad to bear, a weight no girl of ten—perhaps of any age—could carry for an hour, let alone for a lifetime. Better to put down that burden and let time bear it away.
She slept without rest, a sleep of denial and forgetting.
Her mother woke her. “Hey, sleepyhead. Get a move on. We’re going to brunch and then the movies.”
With the covers pulled to her chin, Bibi said, “I don’t want to. I stayed up all night reading.” That was a lie, but not a mortal one. “You go without me. There’s leftover chicken in the fridge. I’ll make a big sandwich.”
Picking up a book from the nightstand, where at least one novel remained always near at hand, Nancy read the title: “The Secret War in the Garden. Pretty thrilling, huh?”
“Mmmmm,” Bibi agreed.
Imagining themselves to be free spirits, footloose children of Nature, her parents encouraged their daughter to be independent and self-directing. She would never be chastised for staying up most of the night, either to read or to watch one stupid thing or another on television.
“The movie’s supposed to be totally funny,” Nancy said. “It’s the new Adam Sandler.”
Insisting on her exhaustion by keeping her eyes shut and her face in a sort of slack pout, by speaking with weary exasperation, Bibi said, “He’s not funny.”
“You’re too old for Adam Sandler, huh?”
“Decades.”
“My daughter, the fifth-grade sophisticate. Well, all right. But don’t hit the surf alone.”
“I never do. And it’s too cold, anyway.”
She remained in bed for fifteen minutes after her parents left, to be certain they were gone.
A short while later, as she sat at the kitchen table, finishing a breakfast of chocolate milk and Eggo waffles smeared with peanut butter, she began to tremble and then to shake uncontrollably, as if the hinges of her bones had come loose every one and all at once. She didn’t ask herself why the shaking. She didn’t want to know why. It wasn’t about a ghost, either real or imagined. Ghosts couldn’t harm her. Even if it had been a real ghost in the attic, she would most likely never see another. Ghosts didn’t swoop up every day, from all around, like sparrows and meadowlarks taking wing. If something else happened in the high room, some moment of insight or even revelation, it had been of so little importance that it had evaporated from memory while she’d slept, before her mother woke her. She insisted that she just had a chill. That was all. That was enough to explain the shakes.