Page 37 of Hunger

I need more time. I need to know her better before she sees me. I need to come into her room with the kind of certainty that doesn't let me hesitate or doubt or hurt her.

I need her mother.

The thought is steady when it arrives. I've been moving toward it for days without naming it. The mother is the last well. The professor gave me the playing, the audition, the conversation. The mother will give me everything before that. The mother will give me the child.

I get back in the van.

I drive east. The road unspools through the dark fields. Omaha is forty-five minutes away and the night is young.

I have an address. I have had it for two days. I haven't used it.

I'm using it tonight.

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 thecorner 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.