Dean Koontz - Ashley Bell

“What tests?” Nancy asked.

“An MRI, blood work, the usual.”

“None of this is usual to us,” Nancy said, trying for a light tone of voice and failing.

“She’ll be all right. It’s nothing intrusive. She’s doing fine.”

The much-too-young nurse’s reassurances sounded as hollow as a politician’s promises.

“She’ll be a while. You might want to go down to the cafeteria for lunch. You’ll have the time.”

After the nurse left, Nancy and Murph stood for a moment in bewilderment, looking around the room as though they had just now been teleported into it by an act of sorcery.

“Cafeteria?” he asked.

Nancy shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”

“I was thinking coffee.”

“Hospitals ought to have bars.”

“You never drink before five-thirty.”

“I feel like starting.”

She turned toward the window and then, with a sudden thought, turned away from it. “We need to tell Paxton.”

Murph shook his head. “We can’t. Not now. Don’t you remember? His team is on a blackout mission. No way to reach them.”

“There’s got to be a way!” Nancy protested.

“If we tried and Bibi found out, she’d want our scalps. Even though they’re not married yet, she’s getting more like him each day, tough-minded and committed to the way things are in that life.”

Nancy knew he was right. “Who would have thought it would be her we’d have to worry about instead of him?”

She switched on the TV. None of the programs was entertaining. All of them seemed intolerably frivolous. The news inspired despair.

They went down to the cafeteria for coffee.

LATER, BIBI WOULD BE TOLD THAT THE CT SCAN had been inconclusive but suggestive, that her doctors would have preferred a stroke to what was now suspected. Having eliminated the possibility of embolism or hemorrhage, they proceeded with a growing concern that they refrained from sharing with her. Their smiles were masks, not because they wished to deceive her, but because physicians, no less than their patients, live to hope.

Later, too, she would learn that if embolism and hemorrhage were ruled out, her best chance of a full recovery might be a diagnosis of brain abscess, which was a pus-filled cavity surrounded by inflamed tissue. This life-threatening condition could be treated with antibiotics and corticosteroids. Often surgery proved unnecessary.

They drew blood for a culture. They took chest X rays. They hooked her up for an EEG that lasted almost an hour, to study the electrical activity of her brain.

By the time she was gurneyed to another room for an MRI, Bibi felt as though she had run a marathon up countless flights of stairs. She wasn’t merely tired but fatigued. Such weariness couldn’t be the result of what little physical activity the day had entailed. She assumed that her growing exhaustion was yet another symptom of her illness, like the head-to-foot tingling along her left side, the rancid taste that came and went, and the weakness in her left hand.

She had no appetite for lunch, and they had offered her only water. Perhaps fasting was required for some of the tests. Or maybe they were anxious to gather all the information required for an urgently needed diagnosis.

Because the MRI machine was an enclosed tunnel only slightly greater in diameter than a human body, a nurse asked, “Are you claustrophobic?”

“No,” Bibi said, refusing a mild sedative as she lay on the table that would carry her into the ominous cylinder.

She refused to admit even the possibility of such a weakness. She wasn’t a wimp, never had been, never would be. She admired toughness, fortitude, determination.

Instead, she accepted earbuds that allowed her to listen to music and a handheld device with which she could signal the equipment operator if she became distressed.

Her time in the machine would be lengthy. Modern MRI technology allowed scans with highly specific purposes. A functional MRI would provide measurements of nerve-cell activity in the brain. Magnetic-resonance angiography could assess heart function and blood-vessel flow throughout the body. Magnetic-resonance spectrography would provide detailed analysis of chemical changes in the brain caused by a variety of afflictions.

The music proved to be wordless, mellow orchestral versions of songs she couldn’t quite identify. From time to time, the machine made thumping noises audible through the music, as if the technician needed to spur the MRI along with hammer blows. Bibi felt her heart laboring. The signaling device grew slippery in her sweaty hand.

She closed her eyes and tried to distract herself with thoughts of Paxton Thorpe. A beautiful man in every way: his body and face, his eyes, his heart and mind. She’d met him more than two years earlier. Five months ago, she had accepted his proposal. Just as her name had meaning, so did his: Paxton meant town of peace, which was ironic, considering that he was a kick-ass Navy SEAL. Pax was currently on a full-silence mission with his team, going somewhere to do something to bad people who no doubt deserved even worse than they were going to get. The team would be operating in blackout mode for maybe a week or ten days. No phone calls. No tweets. No way for him to be told what was happening to his fiancée.

She missed him desperately. He said that she was the touchstone by which he would, at the end of his life, measure whether he had been a good man or not, fool’s gold or the real thing. She already knew the answer: the real thing. He was her rock, and she wanted him now, but she was already steeped in the stoic code of the military and refused to be reduced to tears by his absence. In fact, sometimes she thought she must have been a military wife in a previous life, for the mindset of one came so naturally to her.

As the humming machine knocked and thumped, saliva suddenly filled Bibi’s mouth. As before, this suggestion of impending regurgitation wasn’t accompanied by nausea, and the threat passed.

In her mind’s ear, she heard her mother say, It’ll be what it’ll be. Those five words were Nancy and Murphy’s mantra, their concession to the ways of nature and fate. Bibi loved them as much as any child loved her parents, but their understanding of the world’s true nature did not match hers. She would concede nothing to fate. Nothing.

BY FOUR O’CLOCK THAT AFTERNOON, DR. SANJAY Chandra had become the principal physician in charge of Bibi’s case.

Nancy liked him on sight, but for the strangest reason. In her childhood, she’d been enchanted by a book about a gingerbread cookie that came to life. In the illustrations, the cookie, whose name was Cookie, had not been as dark as gingerbread, but instead a warm shade of cinnamon, with a lovely smooth round face and chocolate-drop eyes. If the book hadn’t been at least forty years old, about the same age as the physician, she might have thought that the artist had known him and that he’d been the inspiration for the look of the storybook character. Dr. Chandra possessed a sweet, musical voice, as you might expect that a cookie-come-to-life should have, and his manner was likewise pleasing.

After the array of tests she endured, Bibi had been returned to her hospital room in a state of exhaustion. In spite of her concern about her condition, she wanted only to sleep before dinner. She had passed out as if she’d mainlined a sedative.

Dr. Chandra didn’t want to disturb her, and indeed he preferred to wait until the following day to sit with her and discuss what the tests had revealed, after he had more time to review the results. But although Bibi was twenty-two, no longer a ward of her parents, the doctor wished to speak with them first, and at once, “to determine,” as he put it, “the kind of girl she is.”