Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

Batchuk’s eyes glittered; no one else on earth would dare speak to him that way. When he was certain Dyadya Gourdjiev was finished, he continued his own thought to prove to the old man how little he thought of what he’d said. “She’s like a spanner in the works. I don’t know what she’s been up to—I suspect you don’t, either, not that it matters, I know you wouldn’t tell me even if you did. But I know she’s not stupid enough to tell you.”

“She’s not stupid at all,” Dyadya Gourdjiev felt compelled to say. “On the contrary.”

“Yes, on the contrary.” Batchuk opened the door, the empty hallway looming in front of him. There was a smear of blood there, too, too large for him to cover with his heel, or even his entire shoe. “And that, essentially, is the problem. She’s too smart for your own good.”

“ My own good?” Dyadya Gourdjiev said, reacting to the warning.

“Yes,” Batchuk acknowledged as he stepped into the echoey hallway. “And hers.”

SIXTEEN

JACK AWOKE with the scent of Annika on him, and it was as if he were in another world, as if he’d eaten a bowl of peaches last night and now smelled of them. Nevertheless, opening his eyes, he immediately felt a kind of remorse. Not that he hadn’t enjoyed himself, because he had, immensely; what occurred to him were the consequences, because experience had taught him that there were always consequences from having sex with another human being, no matter what your partner claimed at the time. If you had any emotions they were bound to be stirred by intimacy of any sort. He’d known plenty of guys who hadn’t cared who they’d slept with—to a man they were either in loveless marriages or divorced. In any case, they still inhabited the same bars where, back in the day, they’d always scored. Now, however, they felt old, isolated from the feverish pace of a dating scene they no longer belonged to, or even understood.

Next to him, Annika was still asleep, her cruel scars rising and falling with her slow breathing. She turned, then, her head still burrowed in the pillow, facing him. For a moment, he did nothing but watch her, as if, in her sleep, she would tell him something about herself. But she remained resolutely a mystery, as, in fact, all women were mysteries, and he wondered now whether he knew her any better than he knew Sharon. On the face of it, an absurd notion, equating a woman he’d just met with the woman he had lived with for twenty-three years. But the truth was staring at him with Annika’s quiescent face, which held no expression, or perhaps just the hint of a smile, as if her dream were more real to her than the world around her, than Jack himself. It made him wonder whether it was possible for one person to know another. Weren’t there always surprises, like layers of an onion being peeled away only to reveal another person, one we scarcely knew, or had for years tried our best not to understand, preferring a manufactured reality that reflected the things we required?

This was what he’d done with Sharon, and now that the reality he’d manufactured had cracked and crumbled away he knew Emma was right: they’d never had a chance. And yet, in retrospect it was heartbreaking to see how one misstep had led to another, and another, and so on, small accretions of mistakes that had become a life less lived. It seemed odd to him, even ludicrous that he had once held her in his arms, that they had whispered intimacies to one another, that they could have said “I love you,” in any conceivable setting. That time had collapsed in on itself; it was the opposite of when you walked into a house you used to live in or a room you’d once known like the back of your hand and nothing had changed. Now that house, that room, that woman were all changed, unfamiliar to him, as if observed in another man’s life. He closed his eyes for a moment, wanting to completely uproot all the acrid memories and stark revelations cropping up in his mind like weeds after a soaking rain.

Lifting the covers, he rolled out of bed carefully enough not to wake her. Slipping into clothes, he opened the door and padded into the living room, where Alli, already awake, sat curled on the end of the chocolate velvet sofa directly beneath the mandala. She held a mug half filled with hot tea, which she handed to him as he sat down beside her.

“Have fun?” she said as he took a sip.

Jack tried to assess her tone. Was she disapproving, pissed, being ironic, or trying for casually adult? He came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter. Sitting beside her made him realize how foolish his brief stab of fear had been; he’d never be like those former acquaintances of his, not as long as he had Alli. “ She’s yours, Jack, for better or for worse ,” Annika had said last night.

“Did you?” he said at length.

She took back the mug of tea he offered her. “I didn’t even have to put my ear to the wall.” When he looked over at her, she added mischievously, “I heard everything.”

His face drained of blood. “I’m sorry you heard anything.”

“I didn’t.” She laughed. “But now I know what the two of you did.” Leaning over, she sniffed him. “Besides, you smell like a rutting animal.”

“Charming.”

She shrugged, utterly unconcerned. “Hey, we’re all animals when you come right down to it.”

“So you don’t disapprove?”

“Would you care?”

He considered for only an instant. “Yes, I think I would.”

She looked surprised, or perhaps a better word would be amused. “Thank you.”

Jack took the tea back from her. He was feeling both the warmth and the caffeine.

Watching him sip what was left of the tea, she said, “Now I want to hear all about the visit from Emma.”

Alli was the only one who believed that Emma had returned, or hadn’t actually gone away, he’d given up trying to figure out which. It was a relief being able to confide this aspect of his life, which was both eerie and joyous.

“And then you’ll tell me everything, right?”

Her face screwed up in a quizzical look. “About what?”

“You know about what, about what happened to you when you were with Morgan Herr.”

With the mention of her abductor’s name her expression changed subtly. Perhaps he was the only one who would have noticed, and a wave of regret washed over him, because the last thing he wanted was to alienate her. But he was trusting Annika now, trusting what she had said to him last night: “ She wants to tell you. ”

Alli cocked her head to one side, a bad sign, he knew. “Are you proposing a quid pro quo?”

“I’m asking—”

“Like a politician? Is that what you are now?”

“Forget it.” He closed his eyes. “I don’t want to know.”

“Why not?” Her voice changed suddenly, grown deeper and darker, as if with an adult’s disappointments and loss. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“It’s too late, it’s over, there’s nothing in the past except tears.”

The little sound she made caused him to look over, to see that she was crying, the tears overflowing her lids and rolling down her cheeks.

“Don’t take her away from me, I already miss her too much.”

“I’m not taking anything away from you,” he said as he gathered her into his arms, “least of all Emma.”

But it wasn’t just Emma she meant, he was certain of that, she was also saying, Don’t take away my chance to tell you. And now he knew for a certainty that Annika had been right. So he recounted word for word—a quirk of his dyslexic brain—his conversation with Emma last night, and when he was finished, she said: “Is it true what she said about you and Sharon?”

He nodded. “We were just fooling ourselves. There’s nothing left, because there was nothing to begin with, nothing but sex.”