Ashley Bell - Dean Koontz

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the mirror, above Nancy’s face, loomed wide-eyed and chipmunky. She was a cute girl. She would have been even cuter if she’d had her upper incisors brought into line with braces.

      “Bibi doesn’t mean that literally, of course. Her head isn’t going to explode any more than there were intelligent mice living under our bungalow back in the day.”

      Heather’s insistent teeth lent a comic quality to her expression of concern. She was adorable.

      Murph had once declared that if a girl was cute enough, some men found an overbite sexy. Ever since, Nancy had been wary of any attractive woman in her husband’s life who needed orthodontal work. Murph had never met Heather. If Nancy had anything to say about it, he never would. Not that he cheated. He didn’t. He wouldn’t. Maybe he didn’t believe that his wife would castrate him with bolt cutters, as she’d sworn she would, but he was smart enough to know that the consequences of infidelity would be ugly.

      “Close your eyes,” Heather said, and Nancy closed them, and the spray bottle of water made a spritzing sound. Then a little fragrant mousse. Then a final blow-dry and shaping with a brush.

      When her hair was done, it was perfect, as always. Heather was such a talented cutter, she wouldn’t refer to herself as a beautician or a hairstylist. Her card identified her as a coiffeuse, and that little pretension, so Newport Beach, was in her case justified.

      Nancy paid and tipped. She was assuring her coiffeuse that she would pass along the good review of The Blind Man’s Lamp to the author when she was interrupted by her phone’s current ringtone—a few bars of that old Bobby McFerrin song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” She checked the caller ID, took the call, and said, “Bibi, baby.”

      As if from beyond some barrier more formidable than distance, Bibi said, “Mom, something’s wrong with me.”

       4

       Searching for the Silver Lining

      BIBI WAS SITTING IN A LIVING-ROOM ARMCHAIR, her purse on her lap, trying to dispatch the creepy head-to-foot tingling sensation with positive thinking, when her mother burst into the apartment as if she were leading a style-police SWAT team intent on ferreting out people wearing unimaginative coordinated ensembles. Nancy looked splendidly eclectic in a supple-as-cloth black-leather sports-jacket-cut men’s coat from St. Croix, an intricately patterned ecru top by Louis Vuitton, black Mavi jeans with subtle and carefully crafted areas of wear, and black-and-red athletic shoes by some designer whose name Bibi could not recall.

      She didn’t share her mother’s obsession with fashion, as her off-brand jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt attested.

      As Nancy crossed the room toward the armchair, a rush of words spilled from her. “You’re pale, you’re positively gray, oh, my God, you look terrible.”

      “I do not, Mom. I look normal, which spooks me worse than if I were stone-gray with bleeding eyes. How can I look normal and have these symptoms?”

      “I’m going to call nine-one-one.”

      “No, you’re not,” Bibi said firmly. “I’m not going to make a spectacle of myself.” Using her good right hand, she pushed herself up from the chair. “Just drive me to the hospital ER.”

      Nancy looked at her daughter as she might have regarded some pathetic truck-stricken creature lying crippled at the side of a highway. Her eyes blurred with tears.

      “Don’t you dare, Mother. Don’t you cry at me.” Bibi indicated a small drawstring bag beside the armchair. “Can you get that for me? It’s pajamas, toothbrush, overnight things in case I have to stay till tomorrow. No way I’m going to wear one of those tie-in-the-back hospital gowns with my butt hanging out.”

      Her voice as quivery as aspic, Nancy said, “I love you so much.”

      “I love you, too, Mom.” Bibi started toward the door. “Come on, now. I’m not afraid. Not much. You always say, ‘It’ll be what it’ll be.’ Say it, so live it. Let’s go.”

      “But if you’ve had a stroke, we should call nine-one-one. Every minute matters.”

      “I haven’t had a stroke.”

      Hurrying ahead of her daughter, opening the door but blocking the exit, Nancy said, “On the phone, you told me your left side is paralyzed—”

      “Not paralyzed. Tingling. As if fifty cell phones, set on mute, were taped to my body, vibrating all at once. And my left hand is a little weak. That’s all.”

      “Sounds like a stroke. How do you know it isn’t?”

      “It’s not a stroke. My speech isn’t slurred. My vision’s okay. No headache. No confusion. And I’m only twenty-two, damn it.”

      Nancy’s expression softened from anxious dread to what might have been chagrin as she realized that she was alarming rather than assisting her daughter. “Okay. Yes, you’re right. I’ll drive you.”

      The third-floor apartments opened onto a covered balcony, and Bibi kept her right hand on the railing as they moved toward the north end. A pleasantly cool day. Songbirds celebrating. In the courtyard, the palms and ferns rustled faintly in the mild breeze. Phantom silvery fish of sunlight schooled back and forth across the water in the swimming pool, and the simple scene was profoundly beautiful as it had never appeared to her before.

      When they came to the end of the balcony, Nancy said, “Honey, are you sure you can do stairs?”

      The open iron staircase featured pebbled-concrete treads. The symmetry of the stairs, the grace with which they descended to the courtyard, qualified them as sculpture. Bibi had not previously seen the stairs as art; the prospect of perhaps never seeing them again must have given her this new perspective.

      “Yeah, I can do stairs,” Bibi impatiently assured her mother. “I just can’t dance down them.”

      She negotiated flight after flight without a serious incident, except that three times her left foot did not move when it should have, and she needed to drag it from one tread to the next.

      In the parking lot, as they approached a BMW with vanity license plates that announced TOP AGENT, Nancy started for the front passenger door, evidently remembered that coddling was not wanted, and hurried around to the driver’s side of the vehicle.

      To Bibi’s relief, she found that getting into the car was no more difficult than boarding the gently rocking gondola of a Ferris wheel.

      Starting the engine, Nancy said, “Buckle up, sweetie.”

      “I am buckled up, Mother.” Hearing herself, she felt like an adolescent, dependent and a little whiny, and she loathed being either of those things. “I’m buckled.”

      “Oh. You are. Yes, of course you are.”

      Nancy exited the parking lot without coming to a full stop, turned right on the street, and accelerated to get through a nearby intersection before the traffic light changed.

      “It would be ironic,” Bibi said, “if you killed us trying to get to a hospital.”

      “Never had an accident, honey. Only one ticket, and that was in a totally fraudulent, tricked-up speed trap. The cop was a real smog monster, a mean-eyed kak who wouldn’t know glassout conditions from mushburgers.”

      Surfer lingo. A smog monster was an inlander. A kak was a dick. Glassout was when the ocean flowed unruffled, perfect for surfing, and mushburgers were the kind of waves that made surfers think about leaving the water for a skateboard.

      Sometimes it was difficult for Bibi to keep in mind that her mother had long ago been a surfer girl supreme, riding tubes, taking the drop with

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