15 A WHITE FEDORA

15

A WHITE FEDORA

Although eleven months have passed since José Nochelobo died, the visit by Deputy Nash Deacon is connected to that tragedy. Vida is not surprised by this. Since that horrific afternoon in front of the courthouse, everything that happens in her life is intimately related to that cruel event. The consequences of José's death arrive in little ripples and big waves, and she expects a long time will pass before the last of them washes over her, allowing something good and clean to come her way. Life always eventually offers us a lamp to press back the darkness humanity brought into it so very long ago, a lamp if we are able to see it and seize it; so said her uncle, who had seined her from the sediment of the city.

As the last light of day fades beyond the open kitchen window, she enjoys Parmesan-dusted fettuccini and peas in butter sauce, with a mound of the morels that are among the tastiest of all mushrooms.

In her current mood, Mozart's G Minor Symphony no. 40 is the ideal accompaniment to dinner. She wonders what Lupo thinks of the music if he is nearby in the night and contemplating a visit.

After dinner, she retreats to the library. She wants no more of Moby-Dick right now. She returns it to the shelves, perhaps forever, and takes down Emily Bront?'s Wuthering Heights , which she's read twice, though she has no illusions that the character of Heathcliff can prepare her for the likes of Nash Deacon. She understands the deputy and is well prepared for him.

During chapter 13, she falls asleep in the armchair and dreams of Lupo. She is in Kettleton, where fog has invaded like a portent of a sea that will rise here following a cataclysmic change in the contours of the planet's crust. But for the pale candescence of a full moon, which the fog veils but also transmits faintly into every street and dismal alley, no light burns in the town. All is quiet, as if the residents have been washed away from here and to a mass grave in some terrible abyss. She wants desperately to be in the warmth and safety of her stone house, but the layout of the town isn't as she remembers, and in fact this Kettleton is an inconstant maze that's being continuously reconfigured. She almost cries out for her uncle to help her, to guide her, but she is stricken by the idea that if he answers her and appears, this will prove that she is as dead as he is and can never escape this place. Instead, she hears herself whisper, "Lupo." Before she can repeat his name at greater volume, he manifests out of the fog, his lantern eyes aglow with the warmest light she has ever seen.

Wuthering Heights slips off her lap and falls to the floor of the library as she wakes and sits forward in the armchair. He's nearby. She knows, without knowing how she knows, that he's nearby.

She steps into the kitchen, where she has left the window open, but Lupo is not there. She waits. She speaks his name. Still he does not appear.

When he visits, he seems to seek only companionship. He likes to listen to her voice. He will submit to her touch. Sometimes he accepts food, but not always. There have been nights when he sleeps at the foot of her bed for a while, though he's always gone in the morning, as if he was never there.

He seems to know when she is lonely and is aware of those rare moments when anxiety afflicts her, as it does now. Some would say that she anthropomorphizes his behavior, attributing to him human emotions and intentions that he doesn't possess. Those are people who see only the surface of the infinite layers of our laminated reality.

In the hallway, convinced that Lupo waits on the porch, Vida hesitates with her hand on the knob of the front door. If he's out there, she has a special and timely task for him.

She turns to the closet to the left of the door and plucks the white fedora off the shelf above the rod on which her coats hang. She had found it after the fact, when she'd disposed of everything else. She should have thrown it out or burned it. However, there's nothing about the hat that obviously connects it to Belden Bead; it's stylish, yes, in his signature way, but it's not the only one of its kind in the world. No doubt there's DNA on it—loose hairs, sweat, skin oils—that might be damning in a courtroom. Until now, Vida has thought she kept it as a kind of totem, a symbol of her triumph, here to remind her, in times of anxiety, that she is brave and competent in a crisis. Now she wonders if she kept it because she had an unconscious, prescient recognition that a time would come when she would need it as she needs it now. Experience has taught her signs and portents are to be taken seriously.

When she opens the front door, Lupo is on the porch.