Page 20 of Hunger

She's known Jenny longer than anyone at the mall has known Jenny. She's watched her play. She's tried to keep her. She's failed.

I get up from the table. I cross to the room with no windows. I sit on the floor with my back against the wall and I wait for the sun to set.

* * *

The drive to Lincoln takes an hour and ten minutes in the van. The roads are clear and the night is sharp with cold. I keep to the speed limit. I don't draw attention. I haven't drawn attention from a state trooper in forty years and I don't intend to start now.

Havelock is on the north side of Lincoln, a neighborhood of old houses on streets lined with bare trees. The bungalow on North Forty-Second Street has a porch light on. The light in the front room is on. There's a thin column of smoke from the chimney. The Volkswagen Rabbit is parked in the driveway with snow piled along its hood.

I park the van two blocks away. I walk back.

The house has a side gate that leads to a backyard. I let myself through the gate. The yard is mostly empty — a clothesline, a covered grill, a wooden bench beneath a maple tree. The back door of the house is white. There's a glass storm door over it and inside, through the glass, I can see the kitchen. A light is on over the sink. A woman is moving in the kitchen. She's small and gray-haired and she's wearing a long cardigan. She's holding a kettle.

I wait until she turns away from the door.

I open the storm door. I open the back door. Both are locked but neither is locked well. The back door swings inward without sound.

The kitchen is warm. The smell of tea and old paper.

Dr. Reeves turns.

She sees me. Her face goes through the same three expressions Craig's face went through, but in a different order. Confusion. Recognition that something's wrong. Fear, but notthe same kind of fear. The fear of a woman who's lived alone for six years and who's thought about this moment in the abstract and who's suddenly having it.

She doesn't scream. She doesn't move. She stares at me with her hand still on the kettle.

"Be still," I say, the same way I said it to Tammy. "I'm not going to hurt you."

"Who—"

"Sit down."

She doesn't sit. She's very still. Her eyes don't leave my face. I can see her trying to understand what I am, and I can see her failing, and I can see the moment when she decides that running won't help her.

"What do you want?" she asks. Her voice is steady.

"To know about a student of yours."

"What student."

"Jenny Lin."

Her eyes change. The fear doesn't leave. But something else enters with it — a complication, a tenderness, a small flicker of grief.

"Jenny," she says. "I haven't seen Jenny in two years."

"I know. Sit down."

She sits. She lowers herself slowly into one of the chairs at the kitchen table. I move around the table and sit beside her. I keep my hands on the surface where she can see them. The claws look worse against the white painted wood than they do in the dark. She looks at them and she swallows.

"What do you want to know," she says.

"I want to remember her the way you do."

She doesn't understand. The understanding isn't necessary.

I reach across the table. My hand closes around the back of her neck, gentle as I can make it. She doesn't fight. I pull her forward until her head rests against my shoulder. I open my mouth at her throat.

The blood is older than the others have been. Slower. She tastes of tea and salt and something I've learned to recognize as the particular flavor of a body that's been alone a long time. I don't take much. I don't need to.