Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

FOURTEEN

“ DAD —”

There were people, Jack knew, who confused the word “haunt” with memory. Since Emma had appeared to him, spoken to him, answered his questions and asked some herself, there were people—Sharon among them—who were absolutely certain that he had confused haunted with memory, that what he had mistaken for an encounter with his dead child was nothing more than his memories of her resurfacing, asserting themselves in order to ensure that she wouldn’t be completely lost to him, that she would remain with him until his own dissolution, whenever that might come, years from now, or tomorrow.

“ Dad —”

Jack knew they were wrong. Emma remained, some essential part of her that death could not touch or even alter. She remained because their relationship was, in some essential way, incomplete, their time together, though cut short, had not ended. Her will survived the car crash that had stolen her life away in brutal fashion, before she could feel the joy and pain of adulthood.

“ Dad —”

Jack heard Emma as they returned to Igor Kissin’s apartment.

“ Dad, I’m here .”

The door swung open and he stepped into the apartment. While the others went about their business, he looked for his daughter—his dead daughter.

“ No, Dad, over here .”

At that moment, his cell phone rang. It was Sharon, and he took the call.

“Hello, Jack,” she said in a cool, preternaturally calm voice, “do you know yet when you’re coming home?”

He closed his eyes. “I don’t, Sharon, I told you—”

“Then I’ll leave the key under the doormat.”

His eyes flew open. “What?”

“I’m leaving, Jack. I’ve had enough of you not being here.”

And all at once he understood that they had returned to square one, to the point they’d been at immediately following Emma’s death, when she’d blamed him for not taking Emma’s call, for not somehow intuiting that their daughter was in mortal peril, that her car was about to veer off the road into a tree. Months later, Sharon had sworn to him that she’d put her anger and bitterness behind her, but he saw now that she hadn’t. Perhaps she’d been telling him the truth, or the truth as she understood it at the moment, but then she’d been fooling herself or, more accurately, hiding from herself, which every human being did from time to time.

He didn’t blame her for that failing, how could he? But he blamed her for not telling him the truth now, because she knew the truth. It wasn’t his job or the fact that he was overseas, far from her at the moment, it wasn’t that he couldn’t tell her when he’d be home again. What she meant was, I can’t forgive you for not being there when Emma needed you, I can’t forgive you for not preventing her death.

He said nothing into the phone because there was nothing to say. She’d had a revelation or maybe her mother had forced the revelation on her. But for the first time he realized that it didn’t matter. The truth was the truth; it did no good to fight it.

“Good-bye, Jack.”

He said nothing, not even then, he merely folded the phone away, and looked around the apartment as if trying to find his bearings, or an answer for what had just happened, though he knew perfectly well where he was and that he was now alone.

At the far end of the sofa, directly below the painting of the Tibetan mandala, was a shadow of a deeper substance, curled like a cat. Curious, because Jack could remember reading something about the mandala in the writings of Carl Jung. What was it? Jung believed the mandala, which in Sanskrit meant both completion and essence, to be the perfect manifestation of the human unconscious.

As he walked to the sofa and sat down near the curled shadow, he wondered whether this was what he was looking at now: a manifestation of his unconscious.

“ Hello, Dad .”

That was what everyone else but Alli believed, that this manifestation of Emma came from deep inside himself, but he knew that she was something more. He knew it as surely as he knew he was sitting here on a brown velvet sofa in this unexpectedly homey fourth-floor apartment in Kiev.

“Hi, honey.” He squinted into the shadows. “I can’t really see you.”

“ Don’t worry, that’s normal .”

He laughed under his breath. “There’s nothing normal about this, Emma.”

“ We’re both Outsiders, Dad, so for us it is normal .”

He shook his head helplessly. The truth was he’d been an Outsider for so long that he didn’t know what the word “normal” meant, if he ever had.

“Your mother—”

“ I know. Don’t be sad, it was inevitable .”

“You sound so grown-up.”

“ You and Mom, it never worked, not really .”

“There certainly was heat.”

“ Heat isn’t enough. There was nothing solid, ever .”

Jack put his head back. “No, I suppose not.” Tears leaked out of his eyes.

Then he felt a stirring beside him, as if someone had opened a window. A cool breeze kissed his cheek.

“ You’ve got to stop dwelling on it, Dad .”

“Your mother? No, I—”

“ The car crash .”

She was right about that, too. He supposed death might give you a unique perspective on what had gone before, a form of omniscience not unlike that of an immortal.

“ You remember ‘The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning’ ?”

He nodded. “Sure. That Smashing Pumpkins song is five-starred on your iPod.”

“ ‘ There’s no more need to pretend cause now I can begin again .’ ” Her voice, lost in time and space, was a haunting soprano as she sang the lines from the song.

“What are you saying?”

“ What if my death was only the end of the beginning? ”

Jack, his heartbeat quickening, turned more toward her, or the darkness where she now dwelled. “Can that be true?”

“ I’m saying that your guilt is still eating you alive. I’m saying that the thing you’re fixated on is over and done with .”

“That moment I lost you and for months afterward the terrible past seemed interminable, repeating itself like a virus, but then later it’s as if it happened in a millisecond, so quickly that I never had the chance to take action or even make the right choices.”

“ I don’t think about that, and neither should you .”

He shook his head. “I wish I could understand.”

“ I know it’s confusing, Dad, but think of it this way: Maybe I’m here now because I’m still disobedient, even in death. ” Her laughter rolled over him like gentle surf. “ I don’t know, I have as little experience with this as you do. I know you want answers, but I don’t have them. I have no idea where I am or what I’ve become—although it seems likely I’m what I’ve always been, right? I do know there’s no point in trying to figure it out. What it boils down to is faith and acceptance. Faith that I’m really here, acceptance that for some things there is simply no answer. ”

“I don’t want you to fade away, like everything else. Emma—” and he gave a little cry, aching with despair and, yes, she was right, guilt.

“Jack?”

He turned his head sharply at the sound of Alli’s voice.

“What are you doing?”

And then, as he looked at her blankly, she sat down beside him. “She’s here, isn’t she?” Her breath seemed to catch in her throat. “Emma’s here!”

He was about to answer her when he saw Annika standing in the doorway to one of the bedrooms, observing them. How long had she been there? Had she overheard his conversation with Emma—at least his side of it, which would have sounded absurd to her?