Chapter Nine
Farkas
The house in Dundee is set back from the street behind a row of bare elms. A two-story Tudor with steep gables and dark wood trim and a wide front porch. The lights are on in two windows on the ground floor. The driveway has been cleared of snow.
I park the van around the corner and walk back.
It's just past midnight. The neighborhood is quiet. The houses on either side are dark. A dog barks once at the end of the block and doesn't bark again.
I go around to the back. The yard is fenced with old wrought iron. The gate gives. The back of the house is unlit except for a single warm yellow square — the kitchen window. The light spills onto the snow in the yard.
I cross to the window and look in.
She's at the table.
The kitchen is large and warm. Tile counters. Copper pots hanging from a rack above the island. A breakfast nook in the corner with a round table and two chairs. The faint richness of garlic and sesame still hangs in the air from a dinner cooked hours ago.
She's in one of the chairs at the table, alone.
A mug of tea sits cooling in front of her.
She's wearing a long cardigan over a thin cotton nightgown and slippers.
Her dark hair is going gray at the temples and she hasn't bothered to tie it back.
She isn't reading, not doing anything, just sitting with her hands wrapped around the mug and looking at nothing.
Her face in profile is the face I've seen a hundred times now in other people's memories. The face Jenny will have in twenty years.
I linger at the window and look at her.
I go around to the back door.
The door has a screen and an inner door with a glass pane. The inner door is locked. The lock is old and stubborn but it gives in less than a minute under my hands.
I open the door slowly. The warm air rolls out into the cold. I step inside and close it behind me.
The kitchen is full of the smell that caught at the window. Garlic and sesame and soy and sugar. The smell of her mother's house. The smell, somewhere deep in Jenny's body, of home.
The woman at the table turns at the sound of the door.
She doesn't scream. Her eyes go wide and her mouth opens but no sound comes out. Her hands stay around the mug as if her body has frozen before the rest of her has caught up.
"Be still," I say. The voice that comes out of me is the voice I used with Tammy and with Dr. Reeves, the quiet voice with the low command in it. "Be still. I'm not going to hurt you."
Her hands loosen from the mug. The mug stays where it is.
"Who—"
I cross to the table and pull out the chair across from her.
She watches me sit. Her eyes don't leave my face.
She's intelligent. She's taking in everything about me with the slow careful attention of a woman who's decided that running won't help her, the same decision Dr. Reeves made in her kitchen in Lincoln.
She looks at my hands on the table. The long fingers. The claws. She looks at my mouth, which I keep closed. She looks at the blackness of my eyes.
"Are you—" she starts, and stops. She doesn't have the word she wants. There's no word for what I'm in the language she speaks, or in any other language. She has only the dread rising in her face as she begins to understand that what's sitting across from her isn't a person.
"I want to know about your daughter," I say.
The dread sharpens into something else. Fear, but not for herself. She pulls her hands from the mug and folds them in her lap.
"Jenny."
"Yes."
"Is she—"
"She's alive. She's safe. She's at home in her apartment in Millfield. I haven't hurt her."
"What do you want with her?"
"I want to know about her."
"From me."
"From you. You'll know things no one else knows."
She stares at me. Her mouth opens and closes. She's begun to shake but she's holding it down with a force of will that's impressive in a woman who's been awake for fifteen hours.
"Why."
I don't have an answer for her that she'll understand, or one for myself. I sit across from her in her warm kitchen and I look at her face and I can't explain to her why I'm here.
"I love her," I say.
The words come out before I've decided to say them. They aren't a lie. I don't know if they're a thing I have the right to say. But they're the only thing I have to give this woman who's sitting across from me waiting to find out if she's going to die.
She studies my face. Her hands have stopped shaking.
"Are you going to kill me."
"No."
"Are you going to kill anyone in this house."
"No."
"My husband is asleep upstairs."
"He won't wake up."
She nods, slowly. She looks down at her hands in her lap. She looks at the table. She looks at the ceramic salt shaker shaped like a strawberry that sits in the center of the table.
"What do you need me to do."
"Stay still."
She closes her eyes.
I rise from the chair. I move around the table. I crouch beside her and I take her face gently in my hand. Her skin is soft and warm. She's breathing carefully through her nose. Her eyes stay closed.
I tilt her head and find the place on her neck where the blood is closest to the surface. I open my mouth. She doesn't flinch. The bite is shallow.
The blood is warm and clean. I take only what I need to open the door. She sags against my hand. I lower her gently to the kitchen floor and I sit beside her and I take her wrist in my hand and I close my eyes.
Her memories open.
I've done this many times now. I know how to do it. I've learned the shape of moving through a stranger's mind, the way to find the threads that lead where I need them to lead.
I've never been ready for what's in this woman.
The first memory is the simplest one. Jenny at three years old, in a yellow dress, sitting on the kitchen floor with a wooden spoon and a metal mixing bowl.
She's hitting the bowl with the spoon and laughing.
The woman across from me — younger then, her hair black, her face unlined — is sitting on the floor with her and laughing too.
The sound of the spoon on the bowl is small and clear and it fills the kitchen and the mother in the memory thinks: she's musical.
I push gently. The memories shift.
Jenny at five, holding a tiny violin. A quarter-size.
The bow is too long for her arm and she's fumbling with it.
A man with a doctor's careful hands kneels in front of her and shows her how to hold it.
He's gentle. He's patient. He says, Like this, Jenny-ya.
Lift the elbow. Like this. And Jenny lifts the elbow.
Jenny at seven, playing a short piece at a recital hall. She's wearing a dress with a sash. The mother is in the audience. The father is in the audience. The father's face is the face of a man watching something he loves doing the thing she was made to do.
Jenny at nine, practicing in her bedroom, the door open, the sound of the violin coming down the hallway. The mother walking past, stopping, leaning her head against the doorframe to listen. The father's study door at the end of the hall is open too. He's listening. He always listens.
Jenny at twelve. A larger violin now. A real teacher. The mother driving her to lessons after school three days a week. The mother sitting in the car in the parking lot for an hour each time, reading or doing crosswords, glad to wait.
Jenny at fifteen, fighting with the father for the first time.
The fight is about a summer music camp. She wants to go.
The father wants her to take an AP Biology class instead.
The fight is short and the father wins. Jenny doesn't go to the camp.
The mother sits in the kitchen afterward with her hands on a cup of tea and doesn't drink it.
Jenny at sixteen. Another fight. Then another. The father has begun to talk about medicine. He's begun to talk about it as though it's been decided. The mother begins to notice that Jenny has stopped saying what she wants. The mother begins to notice that Jenny has begun to talk like her father.
Jenny at seventeen.
The senior recital.
The memory unfolds.
The auditorium is small but full. The piano is on the stage and the accompanist is at the piano. Jenny walks out from the wings in a dark dress that her mother bought for her at a department store three months ago. Her hair is pinned up. Her face is calm.
She lifts the violin to her shoulder. She nods to the accompanist.
The first notes come.
The Meditation from Tha?s. Massenet. The mother knows it because the father loves it.
The father has played it on the record player in the living room a thousand times.
The first time Jenny heard it she was four years old and she sat on the carpet in front of the speaker and didn't move for the entire piece.
The mother has the photograph somewhere.
Jenny on the carpet, looking up at the speaker. The father had taken the picture.
Jenny plays it now on the stage. She plays it like someone who has given herself entirely to it. The melody rises in the auditorium and the mother in the seat is crying without making a sound and the father beside her is gripping her hand so hard it hurts and his face is wet.
When it's over the audience is quiet for a long second. Then the applause comes. It doesn't stop. Jenny stands on the stage and she's glowing and she looks for her father in the audience and finds him and her smile breaks open the way it used to when she was small.
The father stands up. He's the first one in the audience to stand.
I pull back from the memory for a moment.
I'm still on the kitchen floor of her parents' house in Dundee. The woman is breathing slowly under my hand. Her wrist is loose in my grip. The kitchen is warm and quiet.
I push deeper.
The next memory is the spring of her senior year. The acceptance letters arrive in February and March. Three conservatories. Two state schools with pre-med tracks. The father takes the conservatory letters and puts them in a drawer in his study. He doesn't tell Jenny they have come.