An object lying in a fan of trembling palm-frond shadows and lamplight caught her attention. She scooped up a small hardcover book that must have fallen out of Calida’s suitcase with the other divination gear. Bound in high-quality tan cloth, the volume featured two inlaid, stylized Art Deco figures crafted of intricately stained and engraved leather; they were depicted back to back, in profile—a panther leaping toward the spine, a gazelle leaping toward the right. There was neither a title nor an author’s name.
From nearby came the deep, hoarse, trumpeting cry of a great blue heron, startling Bibi. She surveyed the sky, certain she had heard the bird’s flight call low overhead. Except for a distant police helicopter thumping through the cool night, nothing plied the heavens. A bird the size of the heron—four feet tall with a six-foot wingspan—could not be overlooked in motion. When the cry came again, louder and more protracted than before, it seemed to be not a common expression out of nature, but from out of time, a mystical alarm meant to shake her awake from her indecision. Hoping to be gone before the wrong people showed up, she ran out of the courtyard and into the parking lot.
The story that Murphy had told Dr. Sanjay Chandra ended with the cremation of Olaf and with Bibi’s retreat into her bedroom, where she remained for three days alone with the urn that contained the dog’s ashes. This seemed to be the natural end point of the tale, but there was another scene known only to the girl. Perhaps it did not qualify as a fully developed scene, only as a coda; no one but Bibi could know the extent and complexity of it.
In any other family, a sixteen-year-old girl would not have been able to sequester herself in her locked bedroom for three full days, feeding on a supply of apples, cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers, and dry-roasted almonds. When her parents were asleep, she ventured out to snatch sodas and bottled water from the refrigerator. She refused to respond to questions addressed to her through the door, though after the first few hours, her parents granted her the consideration of silence.
Her mother and father had always loved her deeply and without reservation, had always wanted the best for her, but their love had not been twined with expectations. They had not given her guidance regarding anything more than the rules of the household. Never had they suggested that any endeavor or aspiration was better than anything else she might be doing or wish to achieve. Their politics, to the extent that they had any, were libertarian, and their love for their daughter grew in a libertarian garden. If their attitudes in this matter had been different, the family might have been a place of unceasing argument and tension, for even by the time that Bibi was six or seven, she had ideas about some subjects that were different from her parents’ positions on those issues.
Often in her childhood, relatives and others had commented on her quiet nature and reserve (by which they intended to imply that she seemed shy or, worse than shy, aloof), had observed that she was unusually assured and self-reliant for her age (by which they meant that she struck them as being peculiar and suspicious), had noted always with well-meant concern that she took everything perhaps too seriously, that she engaged in every activity—whether reading books or surfing, or competitive skateboarding, or learning to play the clarinet—with a disturbing intensity (by which they wished to warn that she had the potential for obsessive-compulsive disorder), and had remarked in a tone of praise characterized by uneasiness that she might be some kind of genius or prodigy, or at least gifted (by which they avoided saying that they found her a bit weird). Nancy and Murphy understood that, in one sense at least, an alien lived with them, an otherworldly but benign creature who loved them but did not understand key things about them, such as the it’ll-be-what-it’ll-be doctrine that stood central to their creed; and they were cool with their daughter’s difference.
Therefore, with the urn containing Olaf’s ashes always near at hand, Bibi spent three days in solitude, though she was never lonely and certainly not bored. At her small corner desk, in her armchair, and often sitting up in bed, she wept with grief and wrote for hours at a stretch. Sometimes she made entries in her spiral-bound diary, at other times composed fiction in a large lined yellow tablet, her meticulous cursive script never faltering, regardless of the length of those sessions.