Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

“What’re these?” Alli asked.

“Just what they look like,” was Annika’s laconic answer.

“You’re done.” Alli put the soap back in its dish and, maintaining the angle of Annika’s left arm, stepped out onto the tiles.

A moment later, Annika turned the shower off. The silence in the small room seemed deafening. Alli let go and Annika stepped out. Wow, she is smokin’ hot , Alli thought a moment before she handed the other woman a towel.

As Alli rewrapped herself, Annika said, “You have a beautiful body.”

“I don’t.”

“Who told you that?”

“I only have to look in the mirror.”

“Tell me, have you ever been with a boy?”

“Been with? You mean in the biblical sense? You mean have I been fucked.” Alli shook her head. “Christ, no.”

“Why Christ? What does Christ have to do with it?”

“It’s just an expression.”

Annika shook her head. “Americans and their religion.” She began to dry her hair. “You know, with your hair short you remind me of Natalie Portman.”

Alli scrutinized herself in the mirror. “Come on, what bullshit.”

“Why would I lie to you?”

“I can think of several reasons.”

“All of them leading to Jack, I suppose.”

Alli couldn’t help laughing, and then Annika was laughing, too. She saw that Annika was having difficulty drying her back. Without being asked she took part of the other woman’s towel and began to soak up the droplets of water.

“Don’t worry, they don’t hurt anymore.”

Nevertheless, Alli continued carefully patting dry Annika’s back. The scars set her thinking about cruelty, pain, dissolution, loss, and, inevitably, death. “I had a friend.” The words came out almost before she realized it. “Emma. She was Jack’s daughter. We were best friends at college. She was killed late last year. She drove her car into a tree.”

“That’s terrible. You weren’t with her?”

Alli shook her head. “I would have been killed, too.” She took a breath. “Or maybe if I’d been there I could’ve saved her.”

Annika turned around to face her. “So that’s it. You have survivor’s guilt.”

“I don’t know what the fuck I have,” Alli said in despair.

“Two days shy of my seventeenth birthday I was out partying with my boyfriend and my best friend. I drove us from party to party, we got drunker and drunker. And then on the way out to the car to go to yet another party I’d suddenly had enough. To this day, I don’t know what happened, it was like a switch had been thrown, as if I was seeing us from another perspective, as if I was floating above myself, dispassionately observing. All at once, I realized how stupid it all was, the partying, the drunkenness, vomiting and then drinking again. What was it all for? So I called it a night. My boyfriend agreed, no doubt because he didn’t want to miss an opportunity to climb all over me, but my best friend—Yuriy—he was always up for more, always, a real party animal, that’s the right phrase, yes?”

Alli felt a terrible foreboding in the pit of her stomach, a dreadful upwelling of dark and dangerous thoughts that contained the poisonous seeds of suicide. “Yes.”

“I had the only car, so Yuriy said he’d walk to the next party. I begged him not to but he insisted—it wasn’t far and, anyway, he said, the night air would sober him up enough to enjoy getting drunk all over again.”

Annika stood in front of the mirror as Alli had done moments before. “That was the last time I saw Yuriy alive. He was hit by a truck running at high speed. They said he was thrown twenty feet in the air. You can imagine what was left of him when he landed.” She shook her head. “What would have happened, I have asked myself endlessly, if I hadn’t gone back home, if I’d driven us to the next party? Wouldn’t Yuriy still be alive?”

“Or your car could have been struck by the truck and all of you killed.”

Annika stared hard at herself in the mirror. Then she nodded. When she turned around she saw that Alli was weeping openly, uncontrollably. After a time Alli regained her composure. When she moved to unwrap her shirt sleeve from around the bandage Annika stopped her.

“Don’t,” she said. “I want to wear it.”

ELEVEN

WHY ARE emotions—some of them, the deepest, most important ones—inarticulate or muddy, as if filtered through a fishing net or a sieve? This was the question that Jack asked himself as he sat on the lid of the toilet and, while the shower was running, punched in Sharon’s cell number. Midnight in Kiev, which meant it was five P.M. back home in D.C. No answer, which could mean anything, including her looking at his number coming up on her screen and deciding not to answer. That would be like Sharon, the Sharon that once was, the Sharon who over the past weeks had started to reemerge.

He tried the home number with the same result, didn’t leave a message. What was there to say? Already the sense of her was fading, as if she were made of celluloid exposed to sunlight. Emma, dead for five months, was clearer to him, so clear, in fact, they seemed to be on either side of a thin pane of glass, transparent but unbreakable.

He turned the phone off, put it on the edge of the sink, and stepped into the shower. He almost groaned aloud. The hot water felt so good on his aching muscles, the soap sluicing off the layers of sweat and grime. There was blood, dark as ink, under his fingernails. Prying out each crescent was like reliving each incident that had happened to him since leaving his hotel in Moscow on his crazy, quixotic mission to save Annika. Since then, he’d been nearly killed, had shot two men, come close to being picked up by the police, found a naked girl murdered in a truly bizarre fashion, been saved by a crow, and narrowly escaped from an SBU stakeout.

He put his face up to the spray, feeling the soft battering like a masseuse’s hands. There were a growing number of questions to be answered, such as why were the SBU on stakeout at Karl Rochev’s dacha? Had they already been inside and seen the murdered woman? Probably not, otherwise the house would have been crawling with crime scene investigators. So why were they there? Who were they waiting for? Rochev, a confederate, or, chillingly, Jack and Annika? But, if so, how had they known they’d be coming there—the only other person who knew where they were going was Dyadya Gourdjiev. It seemed absurd to suspect him; nevertheless, Jack filed the possibility away. And then there was the mystery of the SBU sharpshooter who had winged Annika: Why hadn’t he shot at them as they were driving away?

It wasn’t any one of these questions that nagged at him, but all of them, and all the while his unique brain was working on the whole picture as if it were a Rubik’s Cube, moving incidents around in order to see them in three dimensions and thus find their proper place in the puzzle he’d been presented.

He turned off the water. Pulling back the curtain, he reached for a towel and saw Emma sitting in the precise same spot where he had sat moments before, trying to call Sharon. Jack pulled the towel around him as if his daughter were still alive.

“ Hi, Dad. ” Emma’s voice was soft, almost like the sound the spray of water made shooting out of the showerhead. “ Mom’s not home. ”

“Emma.” He felt his knees weaken and he lowered himself onto the edge of the tub. “Emma, is it you or are you in my head?” Was this image of Emma merely a manifestation, a more concrete expression of that thought?

Emma, or the image of Emma, crossed one leg over the other. “ You’re in a dark place, Dad, so dark I can’t see. I don’t know whether I can help you here. ”