The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [80]
The room had hardwood floors, just like her father’s office, narrow boards with the tinted varnish of a basketball court, and she suddenly had one of those memories from before the chip, before the spider had been placed in her head. They were never as sure, as sharp, or as satisfying as the ones she retained after—Nada’s memory was much like that of a scrapbooker who hadn’t been given a camera until her thirteenth birthday—but they occasionally bubbled to the surface, usually for a reason, she liked to think. Recollections of her childhood only came to her when she needed to know.
An exclamation mark. A black scuff on her father’s floor shaped like an exclamation point. It had come from her mother’s high-heeled shoe, right around the time the troubles started in Nada’s head. There had been a fight in the office. She heard some of it and understood none of it. Nada now assumed her mother had found out about an affair, not Erica Liu, who was later, but maybe another. She had made the mark by stamping her foot, and Nada saw it the next day when she sneaked into her father’s office to play with the books and the globes and the instruments he displayed along one windowless wall.
Her mother. God. That woman was all exclamations. Nada wondered if she was in Chicago or if she had fled somewhere from the heat—Europe or Australia or South America. Hell, the Caribbean was cooler than Chicago right now. She knew she should call her. Even a bad daughter would call her bad mother after being away for so long.
Later.
She turned once more to the tiles, flipping the switch in her head again, and imaginary missing tiles returned, filling every blank space with a bad memory. This time, she saw Erica Liu’s lifeless body, her mouth slightly parted and filling with blood, an image taken by a police photographer from a height and angle that must have been similar to the height and angle at which her father had last glimpsed his lover, before he turned and walked away.
Nada remembered visiting her dad in jail. She hated that. Even before the spider was in and all her senses were heightened, the smell of the place was just about unbearable. She remembered asking him directly if he had done it. And he leaned forward and told her, “The wolf killed her. I just couldn’t stop the wolf.”
She figured it must be how he coped with what he’d done. How he cut away the part of himself that was capable of killing Erica Liu and gave it a name, as if it were a part of somebody else.
Horrible images came and went on the wall, and a long-dormant fear returned—that the crazy that had once consumed her father, the wolf, was finally coming for her.
26
THURSDAY, JULY 29
PETER TREMBLEY PICKED UP a Review-Journal every day on the way to work, so Wayne usually saved fifty cents and a tree farm conifer and read Peter’s copy before heading out to the casino floor. Mostly, he did it to annoy Peter, who every day wished out loud Wayne would just buy his own. Peter had two rules. Wayne couldn’t do the crossword, which Peter saved for his break. Also, Wayne was forbidden from reading any section until Peter had read it first. “Just give me the sports while you’re reading that,” Wayne would say, but Peter would insist that Wayne was going to “ruin it.” Peter seemed to think of real life as if it were a movie or mystery novel and so he kept the unread sections in a stack under his forearm, rationing them out when he was through.
Wayne could get the news on his computer, of course. Hell, he could get it along with stock quotes and sports scores and daily Sudoku puzzles on his tricked-out superphone. But it wasn’t the news he wanted so much as the ritual—picking up his coffee and turning the page and setting his