The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [160]
The third floor might be twenty more feet up. Or fifty.
The hunting knife he had taken from Denny’s truck was in his teeth. There was muffled commotion from all around—shouts and barked orders and a siren on the street outside. He could hear the kid in the kitchen moaning in pain, which at least meant he was still alive. He could hear the cook in the polyester whites sobbing with guilt. He heard a car alarm from somewhere distant.
He pulled on the fraying rope and hoisted himself another few inches, a few inches toward Nada, the wound in his side opening up in a scream, a monster making its presence known, pushing itself out with every step, every squeeze, every foothold, every pull.
Then he felt the gun slip from his pocket and he heard a terrible bang and an awful rattle as it struck the tin floor below.
65
SOMETHING CHANGES inside you when you bite another human’s flesh, when you sink your teeth clean through and tear a part of someone away, when you split a person into two parts. She even knew the name for the catalyst of that change, could still find the word adrenaline somewhere in her head, which made her think that maybe she wasn’t completely gone. But she quickly knew that wasn’t true. Nada Gold had been turned off with her spider and she had left behind a brain full of truths and trivia and fuzzy memories, the same way Marlena had left some trace of herself in her notebooks and journals. Nada was as far gone as Marlena was, replaced by anger. Rage resided in Canada’s head now; fury was calling the shots.
She reached up and grabbed the IV bag from its little metal coat stand, bit into that too until the stuff inside squirted out, tasting of medicine and formaldehyde and mint, and she stood over the doctor and squeezed the bag in front of his terrified face, half covered with his hands, but the liquid didn’t seem to be stinging his wound like she wanted, so she spun around and saw a bottle of a familiar shape, wide at the top and bottom, skinny in the middle, and she unscrewed the top and poured it over the doctor’s head, waterboarded him with its contents, as he gasped and screamed, and she remembered the name of this catalyst, too—isopropyl alcohol.
When the last of it had bubbled from the bottle, she dropped it in his lap and the anger searched the room for something else it could use to reduce this doctor the way he had reduced her, to whittle him away until there was nothing left but pain and fury.
She found it on the mantel.
She found matches, long fireplace matches in a box like a carton of cigarettes, and as she struck one and stood over him, the anger stared at the flame and it played back one of Canada’s memories, of that summer before the spider, when her father was in jail and she and her mother were up at the Michigan lake house and Nada was hiding behind the garage with Solomon’s cigarette lighter in her hand. It was broad and heavy, like her dad. Silver-topped, also like him. Nada brushed its wheel with her palm and the flame appeared.
She had wondered that day what life would be like if the jury convicted her father. The rest of her life would be a lot like the last year of it, since the day they took him away, and the last year of it had been terrible, between the horrible truth of her father’s crime and the unrelenting scrutiny of the media. She and her mother had lived life not so much under a microscope as under a magnifying glass, with the media’s heat directed into a laser that burned them relentlessly every day.
She flipped the lighter’s lid closed with her thumb.
What would life be like alone with her mother? Weird. Impossible. Cold. The two of them would be like that clacking thing on her science teacher’s desk with the five metal spheres on wires—“Newton’s cradle,” he called it. The balls on the ends were constantly going at one another, taking a hit and then hitting back, always in conflict, constantly in opposition, but never directly connecting with one another.
That