Dean Koontz - Ashley Bell

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 the best of them. Nancy still loved the sun-baked sand and the surf. From time to time, she paddled out and caught some waves. But of the words that defined her now, surfer was not as high on the list as it had once been. These days, other than when she was on the beach, surfspeak crept into her vocabulary only when she had a beef about one authority figure or another.

She concentrated on the traffic, no tears in her eyes anymore, jaw set, brow creased, checking out the rearview mirror, the side mirrors, switching lanes more often than usual, totally into the task, as she otherwise was only when she went after a real-estate listing or thought that a property sale might be on the verge of closing.

“Oh, crap.” Bibi snatched a few tissues from the console box and spat into them twice, without effect.

“What is it, what’re you doing?”

“That disgusting taste.”

“What taste?”

“Like spoiled milk, rancid butter. It comes and goes.”

“Since when?”

“Since … this started.”

“You said your only symptoms were the weak hand, the tingling.”

“I don’t think it’s a symptom.”

“It’s a symptom,” her mother declared.

In the distance, the hospital towered over other structures, and at the sight of it, Bibi acknowledged to herself that she was more afraid than she had wanted to admit. The architecture was unexceptional, bland, and yet the closer they drew to the place, the more sinister it appeared.

“There’s always a silver lining,” she assured herself.

Her mother sounded anxious and dubious: “Is there?”

“For a writer, there always is. Everything is material. We need new material for our stories.”

Nancy accelerated through a yellow traffic light and turned off the street into the medical complex. “It’ll be what it’ll be,” she said, almost to herself, as if those words were magical, each of them an abraxas that would ward off evil.

“Please don’t say that to me again,” Bibi requested, more sharply than she intended. “Not ever again. You’re always saying it, and I don’t want to hear it anymore.”

Following an ER sign that directed them off the main loop and to the left, Nancy glanced at her daughter. “All right. Whatever you want, honey.”

Bibi at once regretted snapping at her mother. “I’m sorry. So sorry.” The first two words came out all right. But she heard the distortion in the last two, which sounded like show sharry.

As they pulled to a stop in front of the emergency entrance, Bibi admitted to herself the reason she hadn’t called 911: She possessed a writer’s well-honed understanding of story construction. Perhaps from the moment that her left hand had failed to engage the computer keyboard as she directed it, and surely from the moment the tingling had begun, she’d known where this was going, where it had to go, which was into a dark place. Every life was a story, after all, or a collection of stories, and not all of them tapered gracefully to a happy ending. She had always assumed her life would be a tale of happiness, that she would craft it as such, and during the onset of her symptoms, she had been reluctant to consider that her assumption might be naïve.

ALTHOUGH SPRING HEAT HADN’T YET RELIABLY settled over the Southern California coast, Murphy Blair went to work that morning wearing sandals, boardshorts, a black T-shirt, and a blue-and-black plaid Pendleton shirt worn open, with the sleeves rolled up. His shock of sandy-brown hair was shot through with blond streaks, legitimate sun bleaching, not bottle-born, because even on low-Fahrenheit days, he found the sun for a few hours. He was walking proof that, with sufficient obsession and contempt for melanoma, a summer tan could be maintained year-round.

His shop, Pet the Cat, was on Balboa Peninsula, the land mass that sheltered Newport Harbor from the ocean, in the vicinity of the first of two piers. The name of the store referred to the motion that surfers made when they were crouched on their boards, stroking the air or water as if to smooth their way through a section.

The display windows were full of surfboards and bitchin’ shirts like Mowgli tees, Wellen tees, Billabong, Aloha, Reyn Spooner. Murph sold everything from Otis eyewear with mineral-glass lenses to Surf Siders shoes, from wetsuits to Stance socks featuring patterns based on the art of surfing champion John John Florence.

At fifty, Murph lived his work, worked to play, played to live. When he arrived at Pet the Cat, the door was unlocked, the lights were on, and Pogo was standing behind the counter, intently reading the instruction pamphlet for Search, the GPS surf watch by Rip Curl.

Glancing up at his boss, Pogo said, “I’m gonna get one of these here for damn sure.”

Three years earlier, he escaped high school with a perfect two-point grade average and foiled his parents’ attempt to force him onto a college track. He lived frugally with two other surf rats, Mike and Nate, in a studio apartment above a thrift shop in nearby Costa Mesa, and drove a primer-gray thirty-year-old Honda that looked as though it was good for nothing more than being a target car in a monster-truck demolition derby.

Sometimes an underachieving wanker took refuge in the surfing culture and remained largely or entirely womanless until he died with his last Social Security check uncashed. For two reasons, Pogo didn’t have that problem. First, he was a wave king, fearless and graceful on the board, eager to master even the huge monoliths that had come with Hurricane Marie, admired for his style and heart. He might have been a champion if he’d possessed enough ambition to participate in competitions. Second, he was so gorgeous that when he passed, women tracked him as if their heads were attached to their necks with ball-bearing swivel hinges.