In movies, people on the run from killers, having recently seen the severed fingers of a corpse, did not take time out for breakfast. They didn’t take time out for the bathroom, either, or to think about how little life and movies resembled each other.
With a pen and a small notebook that she carried in her purse, she made a note to that effect, which she headlined REMEMBER FOR NOVEL: MOVIES AND LIFE. While she ate, her intention was to make a list of things she needed to buy and to do in order to stay off the grid as much as possible, but she wasn’t surprised that she should also be jotting down ideas for her fiction. After all, she wasn’t always running for her life and trying to save the life of another, though she was always a writer.
Okay, she needed a disposable cell phone. Although it didn’t have the smartphone features she might need, it couldn’t be traced to her and wouldn’t make her vulnerable to GPS bloodhounds. And if they still sold those electronic GPS maps, which wouldn’t have any link to another device known to be owned by her, she could use one.
She found herself making another note off the subject, this one regarding the three occasions that she had used Captain’s trick to forget unwanted memories. They had been spread over ten years. She headlined the list IMPORTANT!
The first time had been when, with Captain’s help and a candle flame, she had burned to ashes the incident of the crawling thing. She’d been five years and ten months old when the creature terrorized her, six and a half when she took steps to forget it.
The second time, she was ten, and the captain had been dead about four months. She burned the memory of what happened in the attic above his apartment, which still remained beyond recollection. In that instance, she had not even written the memory on paper, but had merely stood before the ceramic logs in the bungalow’s living-room fireplace and had offered the memory to the gas flames.
As Bibi composed her list with salient details, Norm’s resonated with conversations, clinking cutlery, rattling china and glassware, and background music that she could not identify and that soon she did not hear. With her concentration came a silence broken not even by the sounds of her eating, for she heard nothing now other than the whisper of pen on paper.
The third time, she had been sixteen, half crazy over the loss of Olaf, confused and distraught and bitter and angry, when to her had come a most hideous idea, an intention so loathsome that she could hardly believe it had originated in her own mind; and though the plan that began to form was so out of character, she knew that the temptation to implement it would be irresistible. Had she acted on that idea, she would have ruined her life and the lives of her parents. And so she wrote it on a page of a notebook, tore it out, and fed the page to flames in the fireplace, taking no chance that offering it without committing it to writing would work as it had worked before.
In those three forgotten moments were the roots of her current troubles. What had crawled the floor of her bedroom? What happened in that spidered attic where fog quested through the vents? To ease the unendurable pressure of her emotions in the wake of the dog’s cremation, what abomination had obsessed her, what violence or outrage had she feared committing so much that it must be burned out of her memory?
She was surprised that she had finished eating. As she put her fork down on the empty plate, the sounds and pleasing aromas of the establishment seeped back into her awareness.
There in the ordinariness of Norm’s restaurant, Bibi wondered about the extraordinary nature of her secret self. Proof seemed to be mounting that a singular darkness gathered in her heart, though she saw herself as a child of sea and sand, of ocean breeze and summer light. She knew that few people ever completely—or even largely—understood themselves. And yet she had assumed that she was one of the enlightened few, that she could read herself from first page to last and grasp every nuance of Bibi Blair.
After she assured the waitress that she wanted nothing else, Bibi left a tip, picked up the check with the intention of paying at the cashier’s station, and rose from the booth. As she slung her purse over her shoulder and turned, she saw Chubb Coy at the farther end of the busy restaurant, having breakfast in a booth by the big front windows. The hospital security chief had no evident interest in her, apparently didn’t even know she was there. His attention was focused entirely on his pancakes and his breakfast companion, Solange St. Croix, holy mother of the university writing program.