The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [137]
“He won’t come anywhere near her. I promise.”
“Same way you said you could turn the power back on whenever you wanted?”
Myra said, “We can’t have people living in the park. Right outside our home!”
“We’ve prepared for this. It won’t be long.”
“What about Canada?” Elizabeth now. “How much will she remember?”
Jameson sighed. “We couldn’t have known what she’d find at Marlena’s. A panic room? Son of a bitch. Between our people and the police, that house had been swept a dozen times.”
“I can’t wait for that awful thing to be out of her head. It’s been between us all these years. Keeping me from my daughter. A ‘spider,’ she calls it. Did you know that?”
“We’ll do both things tonight. The surgeon is ready. The room is sanitary; it’s controlled. The place will be locked down and everyone will be there, including Ng. We’ll do Canada before the concert and we’ll do Ng just after.”
Her mother let out a long breath. “The Viola in My Life Two, is that right?”
“Yes, and some of Ng’s original pieces. I think you’ll be impressed.”
“I’d better be,” her mother said.
Cheerily, Jameson said, “It’s exciting. This ensemble has never performed outside China. Some say the violinist, in particular, might be the best in the world.”
“Who says?” Myra said it with the sloping tone of a straight line.
“Well. The Chinese.” Everyone laughed, even Elizabeth.
The dining room was paneled in oak and lined with more Finsters and square abstract canvases, the effect of which, regardless of the perhaps revolutionary intentions of the artists, only made Nada feel underdressed even in this smart outfit she couldn’t remember. The last thing she remembered clearly was walking down the street, trying to decide where to go, what to do. Whether there was anyone she could trust anymore. Bea was dead. Wayne was coming after her. Maybe to kill her. And then her mother, sitting right here at the table, her own mother, a murderer. Her father innocent all along. She was convinced of it now, although she couldn’t really prove it, even if she wanted to. She’d left any evidence on Marlena’s bedroom floor. All the people she trusted were dead. Except Patrick. She needed to go see Patrick. To find out what he knew about her mother. She’d been trying to remember where she had left her car, and that was when the pin had gone through her brain.
The sensation had been immediate and crippling, all down the right side of her body, different from the last time she’d collapsed, in Hugh and Molly’s kitchen. This was worse. This was painful. There was something wrong, but she couldn’t see. She couldn’t feel. She didn’t even know if she was standing or sitting or lying on the sidewalk. She had hardly any sensation at all, and then she had the sense that she was flying, or maybe being carried, and then somehow she’d ended up here.
“We should never have let her leave the house,” her mother said.
“You know we couldn’t make her a prisoner,” Jameson said. “We had to give her the illusion that she was free to come and go. We watched her everywhere she went.”
The pain in her head had subsided, but except for the sandwich at her mother’s house, she hadn’t eaten in a day. Nada tried to take a bite of bread and eggs, but they kept sliding off her fork before she could lift it to her mouth.
Nada tried to speak. “How come I don’t get them? These visions. Wes Woodward had them. Patrick Blackburn has them. Dad had them. I have the same spider as they had. How come I don’t see it? The Everything? How come I don’t have an art?” Nada tried to frown. She had to admit she was jealous. Not of the going-batshit part, of course, but she had always hoped her spider served some purpose. That it compelled her to do something huge, something great. Something like Burning Patrick was doing. “Gary, he’s for real. That’s what I was trying to tell you. Patrick Blackburn is for real.”
No one answered her.
Hugh arrived with a second egg for her. “From your mother’s recipe,” he said.
She had no more success eating