She dared not climb the stairs to take the dog by the collar and escort him down. Once on the balcony, she would be only a few feet from the front door of the apartment. Too close.
Frustrated, Bibi paced the courtyard, glancing up repeatedly at Olaf but never at any of the three windows. The sun made mirrors of those panes of glass, so that she couldn’t see anyone even if he might be standing inside, watching. Nevertheless, she did not rest her gaze directly on any window.
She went into the bungalow and, from a tin in the pantry, took two of the carob cookies that the retriever couldn’t resist. In the courtyard once more, she held a treat in each hand, arms raised above her head, letting Olaf smell his delicious reward for obedience. She knew that he caught the carob scent, for even from the courtyard she could see his wet black nose twitching between the balusters.
The cookies had always worked before, but not this time. After a few minutes, Bibi retreated to the back porch of the bungalow and sat on a wicker sofa with thick cushions upholstered in a palm-leaf pattern.
Olaf liked to lie there beside her, his head in her lap, while she stroked his face, scratched his chest, and rubbed his tummy. The porch roof blocked her view of the apartment windows, but she could just still see the lower part of the balcony railing and the dog with his snout between two balusters. He was watching her, all right.
Bibi brought one of the carob treats to her nose, smelled it, and decided that it would not be offensive to the human tongue. She bit the cookie in half and chewed. It didn’t taste bad, but it didn’t taste fabulous, either. Carob was supposed to have a flavor much like that of chocolate, which dogs couldn’t eat, but it would never put Hershey out of business.
From his perch on the apartment balcony, Olaf had seen half of his treat brazenly consumed. His chin no longer rested on the bottom rail of the balustrade. His snout poked between two balusters a foot below the top rail, which meant that he’d gotten to his feet.
Bibi waved the remaining half of the cookie back and forth in front of her nose, back and forth, raising her voice to express her unqualified approval of that delicacy. “Mmmmm, mmmmm, mmmmm.”
Olaf bolted down the stairs from the balcony, across the brick courtyard, and onto the porch. He bounded onto the sofa, landing with such force that the wicker crackled and creaked in protest.
“Good boy,” said Bibi.
With his soft mouth, he took the half cookie from between her thumb and forefinger. She fed him the second cookie whole, and while he chewed it with noisy pleasure, she said, “Don’t go up there again. Stay away from the apartment. It’s a bad place. It’s terrible. It’s evil.”
After he finished licking his chops, the dog regarded her with what she took to be solemn consideration, his pupils wide there in the shadows of the porch, his golden irises seeming to glow with an inner light.
Nancy told herself to chill out, gel, to sideslip through the moment, ride out the chop, to just sit in one of the visitor chairs and wait for Bibi to be brought back from the CT scan. But even when she had been an adolescent surf mongrel learning the water, she had never been a Barbie with the placidity of a doll. When on a board, she had always wanted to shred the waves, tear them up, and when the waves were mushing and the land had more appeal than the ocean, she had always nonetheless pumped through the day with her usual energy.
And so when Murph turned the corner from the first ER hallway into the second, Nancy was pacing back and forth outside the cubicle from which Bibi had been wheeled away on a gurney. She didn’t see him immediately, but intuited his arrival by the way a couple of nurses did double takes and smiled invitingly and whispered to each other. Even at fifty, Murphy looked like Don Johnson in the actor’s Miami Vice days, and if he had wanted other women, they would have been hanging off him like remora, those fish that, with powerful suckers, attached themselves to sharks.
Murph still wore a black T-shirt, a Pendleton with the sleeves rolled up, and boardshorts, but in respect for the hospital, he had stepped out of sandals and into a pair of black Surf Siders with blue laces, worn without socks. Newport Beach was one of the few places in the country where a guy dressed like Murph would not seem out of place in a hospital or, for that matter, in a church.
He put his arms around Nancy, and she returned his hug, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Didn’t need to speak. Needed only to cling to each other.
When they pulled back from the embrace and were just holding hands, Murph said, “Where is she?”
“They took her for a CAT scan. I thought they would have brought her back by now. I don’t know why they haven’t. It shouldn’t take so long—should it?”
“Are you okay?”
“I feel like I’ve been hammered, fully prosecuted,” she said, both terms surfer lingo for wiping out and getting brutally thrashed by a killer wave.