“So is Needle your real name?”
“I have many names, most of which you could not speak even if you tried.”
The hairs at the back of my neck stood up. There was something strangely familiar about this speech.
I looked at her there on her rented hospital bed, and swore I saw her face change. Instead of a shrunken old woman, she became my younger mother—the mother from my childhood. The wrinkles disappeared, her cheeks filled out, her hair darkened. And then, for a split second, she became something else entirely. A creature with beady coal-black eyes, a pointed snout, large yellow incisors.
Olivia’s Rat King.
I jumped back, turned away.
When I made myself look again, she was my dying mother, wrapped in blankets, her scraped arm bandaged in gauze.
Of course she was.
The lack of sleep was getting to me. The nightmares. The stress of having her here. And the stupid rodent and Olivia’s story about the Rat King.
And Paul’s bizarre, frantic departure.
His crazy words:That’s not Mavis.
Get a grip, I told myself, closing my eyes tight.
This is what my mother does, I reminded myself.She tells lies. She fucks with my head. This was just my mother up to her old, cruel tricks.
“Needle Sivam,” I said, picturing the letters in my head. Years of writing backward for printmaking helped me see it right away, even in my mind. I opened my eyes and looked right at her. “Is Mavis Eldeen backward.”
She cackled. “Clever girl.”
“But why? Why have Olivia call you by your name spelled backward?”
Was it a game? A riddle? A test to see if Olivia could figure it out?
“Maybe because I’m what Mavis sees in the mirror,” she said.
I looked at her, this sick old woman, realizing that the very last thing I should be doing right now was going down the rabbit hole with her.
“What do you see when you look in the mirror, Alison?” she asked.
I brushed her question aside and asked her another. “You said you have other names?”
Were they riddles too? Puzzles to be solved?
She nodded. “Olivia calls me Needle,” my mother said, her voice a low hiss. “But you… you, Alison, may call me Azha.”
It was the voice I recognized from long-ago childhood nights when she’d crawl into my bed and whisper terrible things.
And didn’t I recognize the name?
Hadn’t I heard it before?
“I’m sorry… what?”
She clucked her tongue, shook her head. “Honestly, Alison. Do I have to spell everything out for you? Hold your hand? Walk you through every fucking step? It’s A-Z-H-A!”
I staggered back away from her, heart hammering, my jaw clenched, grinding my teeth together.
Her eyes were so dark they were nearly black.
