The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [119]
“He didn’t tell you?”
“No. I asked. He wouldn’t say.”
“He didn’t mention Burning Patrick?”
“What? Who?”
“Patrick Blackburn.”
Her mother looked at the ceiling, gathering patience the way she had when Nada was a child. “Who’s Patrick Blackburn?”
Nada caught something in her mother’s face just as she asked the question. “Patrick is what I’m doing here, Mom.”
“Riddles,” her mother said with indifference, her eyes, between blinks, glancing up and to the left. “Another boy?” Her mother said it as if she thought there had been too many in Nada’s life, although Elizabeth Gold hadn’t the slightest idea what that number was. There were almost certainly more lovers in her mother’s resentful imagination than there had been in Nada’s bed.
Nada compressed the courage inside her the way you might press on a spring and then she let it out: “I know Dad had a spider.”
“The sports car?”
“No,” Nada said, suppressing an unwanted chuckle. She did the shorthand, tapping her collarbone. “A brain pacemaker. A neurostimulator. Like me. He got it six months before.” Although she and her mother hadn’t spoken in years, their special mother-daughter code didn’t need to be reexplained. Before meant before the murder of Erica Liu. Before everything changed forever.
Elizabeth Gold expelled an angry breath. “Awful thing. How did you find out?”
“I’m more interested in why you didn’t tell me.”
Her mother began speaking quickly, as if relieved. “He got it for his back pain. Then he insisted that you should get one. I didn’t want either of you to get the damn things, but you know once something got in your father’s head—” She stopped to laugh at the unintended joke.
“He didn’t get it for back pain, Mom. Or arthritis, which he didn’t have.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That was what Dr. Falcone’s phony paperwork actually said. Arthritis. I saw it.”
Nada watched her mother recalculate and her mask of a face changed dramatically. “Where did you see this? What do you think you know, Nada?”
“I know a lot. I just don’t know how it adds up yet.”
“Tell me.” The eye twitch again.
“I don’t know why Dad got the implant, but I know arthritis was just a smoke screen. And I know something happened to him after he got—”
“He went crazy, dear.”
“No.”
Elizabeth halted production of the sandwich and pressed both palms against the counter. “What do you call the affair with that … that girl? What he did to her? And then what he did to her?” The last part was said in something like a controlled shriek, her voice increasing in urgency and disgust but not volume.
“I’m not talking about that. He thought the spider could help me. And it did.”
“Everyone who got those things went crazy. Including your father. Including you. Listen to yourself.”
“He saw something. He told Marlena he was like an ‘engineer peering inside a massive machine.’ That he could ‘follow the wires, the gears, the oil, the pistons, each part linked to the next all the way’—and this is what he said—’from here to the One.’”
Elizabeth made an exaggerated show of disgust, rolling her eyes, waving her arms, leaning dramatically into the counter for support. “Your father and that crazy idea. The Unity. It wasn’t a religion. I don’t know what it was.”
“Burning Patrick had a spider and he told me he could see almost the same thing.”
“Who is this Burning Patrick again?”
Nada ignored the question, only partly because she thought her mother was playing dumb. “After Dad got his spider, he wanted Marlena to give one to me. The same one he had. She told him she couldn’t. She said something about not having the ‘votes.’”
Elizabeth stared at her blankly, betraying nothing, but not displaying confusion, either.
“What does acusmatici mean?” Nada asked.
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“They were holding it up somehow. The acusmatici. Are they some medical group? I don’t know. But then Dad told them—I guess he must have been in jail at this point—Dad told them he wouldn’t let them see something—these acusmatici—unless they allowed my surgery to go forward.”
“Who