Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

TWENTY-FIVE

“JACK, I’M sorry.” Alli turned her face into his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry about, honey. You had no way of knowing what would happen. And what if the two of you had died, have you considered that possibility?”

She shook her head mutely.

Jack’s heart constricted. He felt blindsided by Alli’s revelation. He didn’t blame her for her decision, he didn’t see it as a betrayal of her deep and abiding friendship with Emma, only a deep and abiding ache in his heart that she had been carrying this anguish around in addition to her terror at what Herr had done to her.

“Jack, please say something,” Alli said with a clear note of desperation.

It was no good wondering what would have happened if Alli had been behind the wheel the morning of Emma’s death, Jack knew; no one would ever know what it was that caused Emma to swerve off the road at speed and into the tree. He could ask Emma, of course, the next time she appeared, but he suspected that she didn’t know or couldn’t remember. And, in any case, she had already urged him to move on from his own guilt, and this set his mind, expanding outward to absorb the different points of view, on the right track.

He saw Annika standing beside Kharkishvili, watching them, and he turned Alli away from her to face him. “Listen to me, we’re both carrying guilt about the choices we made the morning of Emma’s death, and maybe that wound will never fully heal, but I can assure you that we’ll never know unless we let go of the guilt and stop punishing ourselves. That’s what Emma wants for us now, more than anything.”

Alli’s eyes were glittering with held-back tears. “I don’t know . . . I don’t know if I can.”

“You have to want to. Alli, so much has been taken away from you.” A dark flicker passed across her face and it seemed as if she might crumble in front of him. He continued, still calm but with a subtle underlayer of urgency. “It’s time you put things back inside yourself.”

She shook her head. “What do you mean?”

“I think you know.” He took a breath. “Did you think Herr was going to kill you, that you were going to die?”

“I want to go back inside.”

“No one’s stopping you.” Jack was careful not to take hold of her.

Alli looked away, chewing on her lower lip, then nodded in a jerky motion. “At one point I was absolutely sure I wouldn’t survive.”

“That’s when it happened,” he said, “a little death, a partial death, your mind preparing itself for oblivion.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re both alive and dead.” Jack moved closer to her as he lowered his voice. “Something in you died, or at least grew critically ill, during that week with Herr.”

“You’re wrong, you’re wrong!” she cried.

“If you can see yourself from this perspective, everything you say and do makes perfect sense. You’re full of rage, contempt, spite, then you turn around and become the most warm and loving creature imaginable. You have trouble sleeping, and when you do sleep, you’re beset by nightmares. You adore Emma but are also terrified of her, terrified Emma will somehow seek vengeance for what you see as your betrayal of her—walking away from her when, in hindsight, Emma needed you most.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I want to die now.”

“Is it comforting to say that, because I don’t think you really mean it.”

Anger flashed in her teary eyes. “Don’t tell me what I—”

“Alli, stop this.” His voice was stern but not unkind. “You know, I was really pissed off at you when you showed up on the plane. I was going to send you back, but your mother more or less coerced me into taking you. But during the few days you’ve been with me I’ve seen something in you—a determination, as well as a fierce will to survive—so don’t tell me that you want to die because I know it’s only something you’ve gotten into the habit of saying or thinking. It isn’t real, you know it isn’t.”

Alli seemed calmer now, or at least better able to listen to what he had to say. She was still in shock, so he understood that it would take her some time to digest their conversation, to allow her thoughts and emotions to find the equilibrium from which she could definitively move on.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded, put her head against his chest, leaning heavily against him as if she were exhausted.

Having walked slowly in their direction, Annika apparently decided it was now more or less safe to approach them. “Jack, Alli’s violent reaction was my doing.”

“You’re going to have to explain that.”

And Annika did. She told him about the conversation she’d had with Alli, how it had become more abrasive, more contentious, how she had been trying to force Alli out of her debilitating shell.

“What were you thinking?” He put his arm protectively around Alli’s shoulders, holding her close.

“I forced her to look at herself,” Annika said softly. “She had to get to this place, she had to sink so far down the only way to go was up.”

“And what if she had jumped off the cliff?”

She put her hand tenderly on the back of Alli’s head. “She’s not suicidal, Jack. If she had been she’d have killed herself before this.”

Jack looked at her and knew what she said was true. He looked around then as if suddenly aware of their surroundings and saw Kharkishvili standing at some remove, watching them with a mixture of pity and forbearance. The oligarch called his wolfhounds, who bounded toward him, and he turned with them at his heels, heading back to the estate at a quickened pace.

“We’d better follow him,” Jack said, eyeing the rapidly darkening sky. The wind had picked up, gusting in off the water, and the sudden dampness foretold the coming rain.

DEPUTY PRIME minister Oriel Batchuk was waiting outside Dyadya Gourdjiev’s building when Gourdjiev returned home. He lurked in the doorway like a wraith, wrapped in his leather trench coat, which was both sinister and absurd. He had a thirties-style fedora pulled low on his forehead. He looked like he was auditioning for The Thin Man or Five Graves to Cairo , and in another time and another place the sight might have tickled Gourdjiev’s funny bone. As it was he felt only a deep sense of fate having its way with him.

As he approached, Batchuk stepped out of the doorway, but he brought his own shadows with him.

“I received your burnt offering,” he said, referring to the sacrifice of Boronyov, whose still warm corpse Gourdjiev had laid at his agents’ feet, “but this time I’m afraid it’s insufficient.”

Gourdjiev stood his ground, trying his best to appear unperturbed. “Meaning?”

“This time Annika has gotten in the shit too deep, beyond even my ability to cover for her.”

Gourdjiev let go of a sudden spurt of anger, deep-seated and long-simmering. “Is that what you’ve done? I wasn’t aware that you’ve ever done anything for her—”

“Contrary to your peculiar delusion of omniscience you don’t know everything.”

“Please. You’ve been too busy doing things to her.”

The two men stood staring at each other with such malevolent intensity that it was possible to entertain the incredible notion that they were trying to destroy one another with their minds.

“I understand and sympathize with your frustration,” Batchuk said at length. “Only Annika and I know what happened. She won’t tell you and I certainly won’t.”

“She was only five, only a child!”

“She certainly didn’t act like a child.” Batchuk’s smile was both smug and contemptuous. “You see, you never really knew her, you never suspected what she was capable of, you missed the point of her entirely.”