Ashley Bell: A Novel Read Free Page A

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