Eric Lustbader - First Daughter

It occurred to him that he was hungry. He held the sugar cookies from the All Around Town bakery in his hand, but he didn't eat them.

Instead, he methodically checked out the environment. He was looking for another Dark Car. No word yet from Bennett on who had sent out the first one. He didn't know whether that was good news or bad news. He was almost too tired to care.

Finally, he admitted to himself that what he really wanted to do was look in the backseat to see if Emma had magically appeared once more. A flicker of his eyes told him that he was alone in the car. He set the sugar cookies on the seat beside him. An offering or an enticement?

"Emma," he heard himself say, "are you ever coming back?"

He was appalled at the sound of his own voice. Frightened, too. What was happening to him? Was he cracking up? Surely he hadn't seen Emma, surely he hadn't heard her voice. Then what had he seen, what had he heard? Was it all in his head?

All of a sudden, these questions were too big for him. He felt that if he sat with them any longer, his head would explode. He started the car, headed for Sharon's. She lived in a modest house, one of many identical in shape and size, in Arlington Heights. It took him thirty-five minutes to get there. During that time, he had ample opportunity to make sure an Audi or a Mercedes hadn't taken the place of the gray BMW.

The lights were on when he pulled into the driveway, and now that he thought about it, he didn't know whether that was a good or a bad thing. Before he left the car, he checked to see if the cookies had been eaten. They lay against the crease where the seat met the back. They looked sad, forlorn, as if they knew no one would enjoy them. Jack, halfway out of the car, licked his forefinger, picked up a small constellation of crumbs that had formed around the cookies, let them melt on his tongue. He could feel the tears well hotly, so close did he feel to Emma.

He rang the bell, his heart hammering in his chest. Sharon pulled the door open. The scent of chicken and rice wafted out with her, making his mouth water. She regarded him with an unreadable expression. She wore a skirt that clung to her thighs, a sleeveless blouse that showed off her beautiful golden shoulders. Nina would have appeared pale and wan beside her, anorectic instead of willowy. She said nothing for a moment.

"Jack, are you okay?"

"Yeah, sure, it's just that I can't remember the last time I had a decent meal."

"You were on your own so long, I often wondered why you never learned to cook for yourself."

"The tyranny of shopping makes me anxious."

She gave him a tentative smile as she moved aside so he could enter.

Jack closed the door behind him. He took off his overcoat, slung it over the back of the living room sofa. Unlike the old house with its familiar creaking he'd moved into when they split, Sharon preferred a modern place. She had busied herself repainting walls in colors she chose, picking out warm carpets, filling each room not only with furniture but accessories as well-scented candles, a log cabin quilt hanging on the wall, small dishes filled with lacquered shells and gaily striped marbles. No unicorns, thankfully, but a variety of other knickknacks and souvenirs, along with keepsakes and photos of Emma and Sharon as a child in handmade frames. None of this, however, made up for the house's complete lack of character. Unlike his house, it was a two-story box to live in, nothing more. He found being here disorienting and overwhelming. He'd never get used to Sharon living here, living without him.

What did he have of Emma's? He thought of her iPod, pushed to the back of his ATF locker. One night he took it home and couldn't sleep. Then again, he must have because at one point he started up from a horrific dream of standing paralyzed and mute as Emma's car hurtled into the tree. He could hear the crack of the wood, the explosion of glass, see the twists of metal spiraling inward. The car door snapped open, and a shape already curled in death shot out, struck him full in the chest. Then he was sitting up in bed, screaming and shivering, sweat pouring off him like rain. He spent what was left of the night commiserating with Nick Carraway in the pages of his beloved, tattered copy of The Great Gatsby , and was never so glad to see the first blush of dawn turn the darkness gold.

IN SHARON'S new digs, he picked up one of the photos of Emma, but the image seemed flat and empty, a shell of what once had been a vibrant and mysterious girl. As for photos of other people in Sharon's life, he knew there would be none.

Sharon had no past, and so couldn't understand what appeal it could possibly hold for Jack. She had parents, but she never saw or spoke to them. A brother, as well, in Rotterdam, where he was an international lawyer. For reasons he'd never been able to fathom, Sharon had cut herself off from her family, her past. When they were dating, she told him that she had no family, but after they were married, he found photos in the trash, spilled out of an old cigar box. Her mother, father, and brother.

"They're dead to me," she'd said when he'd confronted her. She'd never allowed the subject to come up again.

Did that mean, he often wondered, that Sharon didn't dream? Because he dreamed only of his past, iterations of it with intended outcomes, or not, bizarre twists and turns that he often remembered after he awoke, and laughed at or puzzled over. It seemed to him that there was a richness in life that came with the years, that only your past could provide. It was unbearable to him to think, as Schopenhauer had written, that no honest man comes to the end of his life wanting to relive it. But it seemed possible to him that Sharon believed just that, that her erasing of her past was an attempt to relive her life.

He put the photo back, turned away, but his mood didn't improve. The house's aggressive homeyness produced a hollowness in the pit of his stomach. As for his heart, it had gone numb the moment she appeared at the door.

Below her short skirt, Sharon wore little pink ballet slippers with teeny bows and paper-thin soles. They made her movements around the house elegant and silent, even on the hard tile of the kitchen floor. No matter which way you looked at them, her legs were magnificent. Jack tried not to stare, but it was like asking a moth to ignore a flame.

Sharon opened a glass-fronted cabinet over the sink, stretched up to reach a pair of stemmed glasses. Her figure was highlighted in such a way that Jack felt the need to sit down.

She uncorked a bottle of red wine, poured. "Fortunately, I made enough food for two."

"Uh-huh," was all he could muster because he'd bitten back one of his acerbic replies.

She brought the glasses over, handed him one. "What?"

"What what?"

She pulled a chair out, sat down at a right angle to him. "I know that look."

"What look?" Why all of a sudden did he feel like a felon?

"The 'Baby, let's get it on' look."

"I was just admiring your legs."

She got up, took her wineglass to the stove. She stirred a pot, checked the chicken in the oven. "Why didn't you say that when we were married?" Her voice was more rueful than angry.

Jack waited until she paused to take a sip of wine before he said, "When we were married, I was embarrassed by how beautiful you are."

She spun around. "Come again?"

"You know how you see a hot movie star-"

Her face grew dark. "Where do you live, Beverly Hills?"

"I'm talking about a fantasy figure, Shar. Don't tell me you don't have fantasies about-"

"Clive Owen, if you must know." She took the bird out, set it aside to allow the juices to settle. "Go on."

"Okay, so I'm alone with… Scarlett Johansson."

Sharon rolled her eyes. "Dream on, buddy."