The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [117]
42
THERE WAS SOMEONE DOWNSTAIRS.
Nada hadn’t even digested everything she had learned from the mess of journals and documents she had organized into a neat circle around her, hadn’t really recovered from the shock of it. She had sorted and read—and resorted and reread—until it became too dark to see, and then she slept as best she could, rolled up in a ball on the carpet. At first light she was back at it, desperately trying to complete the puzzle of surprises Marlena had left behind, but now she had a person to deal with, a person she could follow as he walked quietly across the first floor, gently setting each foot down before shifting his weight onto it. She assumed it was a man, estimating his size by the creak of the floorboards and assessing the baritone behind his heavy breaths.
It could have been just a Realtor, but then Realtors usually weren’t so stealthy. She wondered if it could be the man from the coffee shop, still following her. Her first instinct was to hide in the secret room—the panic room or whatever it was—but then she’d be trapped there. Trapped was bad.
She grabbed her purse and stepped quietly across the carpet to the window. There was one more car on the street, but it looked empty. She lifted the sash and pulled out the screen and ducked onto the roof over the front porch. Scooting on her butt to the edge, she peered over and found a boxwood below. She maneuvered herself until she was over it and put both hands around the gutter, which pulled away from the house with a moan of stressed aluminum as she lowered herself to the ground.
Stumbling from the bush, scratches on her arms, Nada ran south through the wet heat, the answers to unasked questions now spawning new paths of inquiry, questions that multiplied and branched like a giant family tree, each question a sister or distant cousin to every other one.
She had been spooked by the intruder in Marlena’s house, but she was more afraid of the image she’d created on Marlena’s bedroom floor. A pair of tiles forming a partial but distinct picture. A picture intended, it seemed, specifically for her.
The eyes, the nose, the mouth. The ears. A glimpse of teeth bared.
She spotted a cab and waved for it and told the driver an address she had remembered but hadn’t used in more than five years. She hadn’t spoken it or written it on the front of a Christmas card or printed it on some emergency contact form.
The cab continued south.
“Are you to call on your mother?” Patrick had asked her.
A year or two after Solomon Gold’s death, Nada’s mother sold their Lincoln Park mansion and moved to a large apartment in the South Loop. As soon as she graduated from high school, Nada moved out and had never returned. Heading there now, she was breaking a promise she had once made to herself.
The cabbie was complaining about the outage and the gas he wasted driving to get gas, and the long lines at the pumps on the edge of the blackout zone. With the police force overtaxed, busy intersections had become lawless, honking fields of gridlock, especially the six-way crossings along the Lincoln and Milwaukee hypotenuses. On every block, slouching men and women remained tethered to stoops and porches, waiting to dash inside the minute the power returned.
South of Chicago Avenue, the lights were back on. At one time, Chicago Ave. separated the up-and-coming Near North neighborhood from the slums of Cabrini Green, and Nada wondered if the electric grid had been constructed specifically that way, like the Dan Ryan Expressway, to isolate rich from poor, white from black.
Of course, Cabrini had more Starbucks than tenements now. There were hardly any poor North Side neighborhoods anymore. Not really.
She was a trembling, exhausted, sweaty mess, but she couldn’t go back to Jameson’s yet, couldn’t go back to her room, to her lovely “night and nothing else.” There was too much she didn’t understand. She trusted no one, including her mother. But her mother was at least family, which might be the kind of shelter she