The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [128]
Sleep and presumably Valium had dulled the previous night’s headache but not vanquished it, and she could feel the pain waking, too, now, sitting up and stretching behind her eyes. A light blanket over her shoulders immodestly covering her underwear and T-shirt, she walked out into the hall and called for her mother. No answer.
The puzzle was getting more complicated, not less, like a Rubik’s Cube unwinding, every turn taking her farther away from the solution. And now the horrible news about Bea. David. Wayne, Jesus. None of it could be true, and yet there was the previous day’s Sun-Times, still on the coffee table, proving it was.
And there was also the unknown man who had followed her into Marlena’s house.
She found her purse, still on the floor next to the bag with her sweaty clothes from the day before. She felt for the two tiles inside and set them next to each other on the counter. A dog. A dog’s snout. Blood on the teeth and on the gray hair around the mouth.
She wiped her eyes and turned away, toward the photo of her playing poker. She picked up the frame, flipped it over, tried to imagine her mother shopping at Target. Almost laughed at the thought.
The world was small and uncomplicated when she played poker, never bigger than the table, population never more than nine, each of the players alike except for the cards. There was only one puzzle to solve at a poker table—what was in the other guy’s hand. Nada was so good at solving it that on a prop bet she once played a guy heads up at the Bellagio without looking at her own cards. Of the hands she didn’t fold, she won seventeen out of twenty.
The world was even smaller when she played blackjack. Her and the cards and the dealer—not really a person, an automaton—and his cards. That was it. All the possibilities of existence limited by combinations of fifty-two. The choices narrowed to four: hit, stay, double, split.
Next, the photo of her father and her mother. Life was uncomplicated then, too. For Nada anyway. Living with her must have been hell. Part of her wanted to forgive her mother for being bad at a difficult job, but her father had managed it. Her father had loved her unconditionally. Had wanted to make her life better, more than she even knew until yesterday. He had given her the gift of her spider, and even if she couldn’t see what he’d wanted her to see—it, everything, “the wires, the gears, the oil, the pistons, each part linked to the next all the way from here to the One”—it had saved her life nevertheless. She had been someone else before the operation, an impossible someone else, utterly lost and incapable of being found.
She touched the photo with a finger. Mo. That’s what her mother used to call him. Sometimes Big Mo, after his beloved Mozart. And Loopa. He used to call her Loopa. She now realized she didn’t know why. Or if she had once, before the spider, she didn’t remember now. An itch in her head, the itch that was always making connections, was telling her it was important, though.
Wait. Not Loopa. Lupa.
She went to her mother’s tiny laptop, anachronistically set on a Federal card table under the window. She found Google, typed the word, found a few references in a few languages, Czech, Indonesian, Finnish. No, no, no. Latin. Italian. That was more like her father.
Wolf.
Feminine for wolf.
She backed away from the computer, over to the tiles, and looked at them again.
Not a dog. A wolf.
Weird.
“Are you to call on your mother?” Patrick had said.
She retreated to the kitchen and poured a cup of lukewarm coffee and surveyed the apartment that had once been her home. It had always been like this, minimalist and immaculate. She would live here for a few weeks or months, padding around in her stocking feet so as not to scuff the slivers of hardwood that presented themselves between area rugs,