Jake felt his heart hitch a beat. Then a second time. Jeremy had his ex-friend who lived in the floor. The floor back at his old man’s house. Jeremy had called him Bud. Jake thought about laying it all out on the table, but there was no way a psychiatrist was going to help solve this. Not now. Not in a day. This was going to take a strong stomach and federal resources. What he needed from Sobel was information. “Does he know what happened to the nurse who looked like my mother?” It was a valid question. Maybe he had heard the other nurses talking.

Sobel raised an eyebrow. “She did look like your mother, didn’t she?”

Jake nodded. “A little.”

Sobel shrugged. “I know none of the staff would tell him. And I haven’t heard anyone gossiping. We had two reporters come by this morning but security escorted them from the building pretty fast. So I don’t think he knows. How could he?”

Jake was thankful for that, at least. “Yesterday he didn’t recognize me once during the three times I was here. He’s come apart a little. Maybe this man of blood is just the rantings of a scared old man who made a lot of mistakes in his life. The man of blood could be—” He stopped and triangulated the past few days. Blood man. Blood. Man. Bloodman. Only a three-year-old would say it differently, wouldn’t he? He wasn’t saying Bud, man. He was saying Budman. Bludman. Bloodman.

Bloodman.

Sonofabitch.

Sobel’s face shifted. “Something’s going on inside your father, Jake. Something one part of him wants to verbalize and another desperately wants to keep suppressed. He has opposing emotions about this man of blood—whatever that is.”

Jake thought about the text that covered his skin, about the Canto, about the men of blood that Dante had described. The violent, the viscous, the dangerous. Kept in a lake of fire and blood where their screams echoed and their souls were tortured. Was his old man talking about them? “All you seem to be telling me is that my father may or may not be in the early-to-mid stages of Alzheimer’s—”

Sobel shook his head, held up his hand. “If this talk about the blood man is just a misnomer for something—or someone—that he’s afraid of, it could be that he’s just over-compartmentalized his life in order not to have to face whatever it is that’s scaring him. And he is scared, Jake. The man inside is hiding from something.”

“He’s been doing that since my mother died.” Skinned, the little voice hissed.

“That was the summer of ’78, right?”

Jake nodded. “June sixth.”

Sobel made a note on the chart. “Jesus, how time flies. I’m sorry about your mother, Jake. Besides having a killer backhand, she was a lot of fun. Elegant. Every woman at the club was jealous of her.”

“I remember that. Living with her was like living with Jackie Kennedy. She could make an egg-salad sandwich and a Coke look refined.”

“Could this have anything to do with your mother? Her…accident was never solved, was it?”

Jake shook his head.

“So could it?”

Jake shook his head and shrugged at the same time. “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes. No. All of the above. I’ll figure it out.”

“If all of this is tied in somehow, maybe your father is afraid of something out of his past. Maybe it’s just a flashback to her death. Bad memories coming back.”

“I don’t think so. After my mother’s death, Dad never talked about it. Never seemed to react.” Liar. He sat in front of her car every night with a bottle of booze and wept until he fell asleep.

“The memory is a peculiar place, Jake. It functions under different basic tenets than the rest of the mind. Maybe he is being plagued by ghosts you don’t know about.”

Jake thought about the blank bloody face that he had splattered on the hospital room wall and realized that Sobel had to be partially right. “Maybe he’s had a real struggle,” the psychiatrist added. “Maybe his accident wasn’t an accident at all.”

“Are you saying that he burned off his hands on purpose?”

Sobel’s head clicked from side to side but the grimace refused to be shaken loose. “On purpose is a little strong. Sometimes we do things for reasons we’re not aware of. Maybe your father wanted to leave the house. Maybe a part of him knew that it wasn’t safe for him because of exactly the same reasons you cited—he opened the fridge and saw sod and keys and he couldn’t understand why they were there. The rational part of his brain realized that the environment wasn’t good for him. Maybe he had an accident so he could leave. And maybe the blood man is just his way of lumping his feeling of insecurity into a neat package. I think that something has your father very frightened. Something he’s calling the blood man.”

The receptionist was jammed into her office chair, scowling over the Day-Timer, crossing out appointments with a red marker, the phone pressed to her ear. “Yes, that’s right, Mr. O’Shaunnesy, we have to recalibrate with the storm. I don’t know when we’ll be back but you will be at the head of the line. Of course. Of course. At least four days…”

Jake nodded a thank-you as he walked past her desk.

The little girl was still folded into the lotus position under the coffee table and by now the two-foot-by-five-foot surface was armored with a layer of candies, laid out in a brightly colored mosaic. From beside the receptionist’s desk, Jake saw the wrappers at an angle, a shelf of color. The girl was staring straight ahead, her hand dipping into the bowl like a metronome counting time, not missing a beat. As before, one candy would be placed in an empty slot at the far upper-left-hand corner of the table, the next somewhere in the middle, as if she had a pattern laid out in her head and was merely illustrating it for her mother—but the woman was still engrossed in her shitty book.

Jake’s head swiveled as he passed the girl, scanning the pattern on the table. The mother didn’t lift her eyes from the novel and the little girl kept dipping her hand into the bowl and laying out the candies as single pixels in a digital image.

Jake was almost on top of her when he stopped.

She had laid out a copy—a nearly exact copy, limited by the size of the surface she had to work on and the colors at her disposal—of the cover of her mother’s book. Jake froze in midstep. Two beautiful candy people embraced, a cubist mansion in the background, a tree line behind. The Bluebloods of Connecticut spelled out in cursive sweets.

Each candy was a component.

A speck of color.

A single pixel.

Like Chuck Close’s work.

“She does that all the time,” her mother said in a thick Long Island accent.

Jake looked up, saw the book folded in her lap. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

The mother shrugged. “I s’pose. I try not to get annoyed but it’s hard sometimes. She’ll do this with anything. Playing cards. Scraps of paper. Dead leaves. Thumbtacks—but I try to keep her away from them. She even does it with bits of food. Can’t give her no Froot Loops or nothin’ with color or she’s makin’ pictures of faces and stuff. When you scrape dried raisins off the car seat for the fifth time in a week it gets old real quick.”

Jake was trying to listen but the image of the Chuck Close painting back at the beach house wouldn’t leave him. He saw the sliced-out eyes, the pixilated image of his father’s face staring out of the huge canvas. He thought about the dreary little paintings stacked up in the studio, random nothings that seemed meaningless and incomplete. He thought about the whole often being greater than the sum of its parts.

And suddenly he knew what the canvases stacked in the studio were.