Eric Lustbader - First Daughter

Sharon shook her head. "Thank you, I'm feeling much better now."

But what a bitter lie that was! In her mind's eye, she could see the inside of her church, the gloomy atmosphere, the confessional, where priests heard and absolved your sins if you recited the canned blather of Hail Marys or Our Fathers. But Father Larrigan wasn't full of grace, nor was any priest. The flickering candles mocked those whose prayers they carried in their flaring hearts, the paintings of Christ, bleeding, dying while angels fluttered like so many moths over his head. And the gold! Everywhere you looked were gold crosses tinted rose or moss green by the saints in the stained-glass windows. And old-lady tears, old-lady prayers, old ladies with nowhere else to go, their lives over, clustered in the doorway, complaining about their backs and their bladders. She was not an old woman! Her life wasn't over. It wasn't too late for her to have another child, was it? Was it?

Wrenching herself away from her pain, she smiled through her tears. "Anyway, never mind me." She patted Alli's knee, and there it was again, that astonishing electric sensation that had made her weep. She managed to hold back the tears this time, but it wasn't easy. "It's you we were speaking of. You live a life of such privilege, Alli. You're admired and envied by so many young women, sought after by so many young men."

"So what?" Alli said. "I hate that privilege means the world to my parents. It means nothing to me, but they don't get it, they don't get me at all."

Sharon regarded her sadly. "I never got Emma, you know. All that anger, all that rebellion." She shook her head. "There were times when I thought she'd surely burst from keeping so much from us."

"The secrets we keep."

Sharon clasped her hands together. "I think secrets deaden us in the end. It's like having gangrene. If you keep them long enough, they begin to kill parts of you, starting with your heart."

"Your heart is still beating," Alli said.

Sharon looked away, at the photo of Emma on a horse. She could ride, that girl. "Only in a medical sense, I'm afraid."

Alli moved closer to her. "You still have Jack."

"Seeing you here…" Sharon bit her lip. "Oh, I want my daughter back!"

Alli took her hand again. "Is there anything I can do to help?"

Sharon looked into Alli's eyes. How young she looks, she thought. How vulnerable, how angelic. She felt all of a sudden a great, an overwhelming desire for solace, for a peace inside her churning self. She wondered whether she possessed the strength to find it. The Church couldn't provide it, nor all the prayers spoken by all the faithful in the universe. In the end, there was only what she could summon up from inside herself.

"Yes, please," she said. "Tell me about Emma."

SHARON CONFOUNDED Jack utterly when he returned to the house.

"I have an idea," she said brightly, "why don't you and Alli spend the night here? Alli can have the spare bedroom, and this sofa is very comfortable. I can't tell you how many nights I've fallen asleep on it."

Jack, mindful of the Secret Service detail he'd left behind, his brain turning over the problem of how once and for all to track down Ronnie Kray, heedlessly said, "I don't think that would be a good idea."

Sharon's face fell. "But why not?"

Seeing her stricken face gave him pause. He saw her on the sofa next to Alli, both women, torsos twisted, turned toward him. It was their proximity to each other, as if they were intimates, as if they had been talking of intimate things when he walked in. There was something about Sharon's face, an expression he felt certain he'd never see again.

"It would be so nice," Sharon said, "all of us together."

Jack, his mind changing gears, thought she might be right. "Why don't we all go to my house? It's larger and-"

Seeing the change come over Sharon's face, he stopped in midsentence.

"Jack, come on. You know that house gives me the creeps."

What was the use? he thought. No matter what he said, she'd never agree to go there, let alone spend the night.

"Alli and I have to go," he said.

Sharon stood up. "Why, Jack? I know you're not comfortable here, but just this once, stay here with me."

Jack shook his head. "It's impossible, Shar. Alli's Secret Service detail is expecting her to be at the house."

"You mean you deliberately ditched them to bring her here?" The sabers were rattling again, the warhorse stamping its huge hooves.

"It was necessary," Jack said.

"As far as you're concerned, it's always necessary to break the rules."

"Not always." How easy it was to fall back into the old patterns. "Sometimes I bend them."

"Stop, please!" Alli cried.

They both turned in her direction.

"This isn't anything to fight about," she said. "You're just fighting for the sake of fighting."

"Alli's right," Sharon said. "Half the time I don't even remember what we're fighting about."

"Then come with us," Jack said. "Spend the night."

"I'd like to," Sharon said. "Really I would." She shook her head. "But I'm not ready, Jack. Can you understand that?"

"Sure," he said, though he didn't, not really. If it wasn't for the Secret Service detail, he would have consented to stay here tonight. What was it about Gus's house she despised so? He couldn't work it out. He'd asked her so many times without getting a satisfactory answer, he had no desire to go over that old turf again. Besides, like her, he was sick to death of fighting.

"I guess it's time for you to go, then." Sharon embraced Alli, and they kissed. She stood in the lighted doorway, watching them as they went down the walk to Jack's car, and she shivered, as if with a premonition, or a feeling of deja vu, as if she'd experienced this helpless moment of sadness and loss before.

THERE WAS, no question, a certain gloom about Jack's house, a fustiness manifested by huge odd-shaped rooms, old gas lamps gutted and wired for electricity, massive furniture, not a stick of it built after 1950. Perhaps it was all this Sharon objected to, why she had opted for predictable square rooms, low ceilings, modern furniture-a house gaily lighted but without charm.

But there was also history here-chaotic, warty, fascinating. It was, as Alli had recognized, the residence of an Outsider, past and present. Could that be why Emma liked it here and Sharon didn't? Jack asked himself as he climbed up the stairs with Alli. Sharon wasn't an Outsider-that kind of life, often in conflict with rules, regulations, even, sometimes, the law, both baffled and frightened her. She was comfortable only within the well-defined bounds of society. That was why she'd been so hell-bent on Emma going to Langley Fields, which was so Establishment. And it was why Emma had gotten into continuous difficulty there. A round peg in a square hole. Outsiders never fit in; you could never change them. But until the day Emma died Sharon hadn't given up hope.

Jack showed Alli into the guest room, which was next to his. In all these years, he'd never been able to sleep in Gus's bedroom. Years ago, he'd hauled the bed Gus had been murdered in out back and burned it. More recently, he'd turned the bedroom into a media room with an enormous flat-screen TV on which he watched James Brown concerts as well as baseball and films he bought on DVD. He felt certain Gus would've liked that.

"The bathroom's fully stocked," he said. "But if there's anything else you need, it'll be in this closet here."

After they said good night, he watched her go into her room, close the door behind her. He thought about what might be going on in her head, all the things she had told him, all the things she hadn't. In his room, he called Carson, told him all was well and that he was slowly making progress.