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?

“Let’s talk about this another time,” he told Alli. “We’re all exhausted.”

“But—”

“Questions later.” He pulled her up with him as he rose to his feet. “Right now it’s time to rest.”

_____

AT THE doorway to the master bedroom, Jack paused, watching Alli pad into her room and softly close the door. Then he turned to Annika, but before he could say anything she beat him to it.

“Come in,” she said. Her smile widened. “I didn’t bite last night, did I?”

He smiled. “I think Alli is right about you.”

“Me being a psycho-bitch or wanting to get you into bed?”

He laughed, but the truth was that in these surroundings and this close to her he felt a frisson, an erotic charge that made him momentarily short of breath.

On his way to the bed he passed close enough for his hip to brush against her, where she sat, her legs crossed at the knee. Her wrists, which perched on her knee, were delicate, so thin they looked eminently breakable. He knew better. His gaze inevitably dropped to her legs, long, powerful, and gleaming in the illumination from the bedside lamps she must have put on when she’d entered the bedroom.

“You know you have this obsession to protect everyone,” she said.

He came and sat down on the bed next to her. “Is that such a bad thing?”

“I didn’t say it was bad.”

“Why did you ask me in here?”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Last night . . . our connection . . .” She looked away for a moment. “I don’t want to be alone. I’m tired of being alone.”

“What about Ivan?”

She snapped back into focus. “Are you trying to insult me? Ivan was an assignment.”

He nodded. “I won’t sleep with you, if that’s what you’re angling for.”

“I’m not angling for any damn thing. My arm hurts and I need some rest. We all do.”

“All right then.” He slapped his thighs and, rising, went to the doorway. “I’ll be right outside on the sofa.”

As he was about to cross the threshold, she said: “I know who the girl is.”

Her timing was impeccable. He turned and stared at her.

“I know she’s the American president’s daughter.” She cocked her head. “Do you take me for a fool?”

“You told me you knew nothing about affairs outside your line of work.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t know you then, I didn’t know whether I could trust you, so I thought it better to lie. The truth is, I can’t bear to be the victim of ignorance. Besides, it seemed important for you to keep your secret, changing her hair, her appearance, whatever, and since then I’ve wanted to help you keep that secret. I would keep it now, even if we were captured, even if the FSB hurt me.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said flatly.

She shrugged again.

“Why would you do it—protect Alli—if it came to that?”

“You know why. When I look in her eyes, when I listen to her voice, I see myself.”

“Even when she calls you the psycho-bitch?”

“Especially then, because her high emotion betrays her.”

Jack took a step back into the bedroom. “How do you mean?”

“That look in her eyes, the sound of her voice when the anger engorges her throat, when it seems as if she’s strangling on emotion, I know that look; I saw it every day when I looked at myself in the mirror. And that sound . . .” She shuddered. “The news stories were vague, even the so-called in-depth articles, but something very bad happened to her.”

“Yes,” he said as he sat beside her, “it did.”

“You saved her from whoever abused her. I can see that, too, in her eyes when she looks at you.”

Now it was his turn to look away. “She was abducted, bound to a chair and brainwashed, perhaps more, I don’t know. She won’t talk about it to anyone.”

“She’ll tell you.” Annika’s voice was as soft as a caress as she laid a hand over his. “She needs time, that’s all.”

Jack turned to look at her face. “How can you be sure?”

“Because she wants to tell you, she needs to tell you. I think she’s coming to grips with the realization that she can’t move on until she does. I believe that’s why she wanted so badly to be the one to talk to Milla Tamirova.”

Jack frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Milla Tamirova has certain . . . equipment, shall we say, that I think drew Alli.”

Jack was growing alarmed. “What kind of equipment? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Milla Tamirova is a professional mistress—that is to say she has a dungeon in her apartment.”

A chill sped through his system and he shivered. “Why in the world would she want to revisit—”

“To relieve herself of the terror, to conquer it. The only way to exorcize it is to demythologize it, to see it in the light of day, to understand that once she overcomes her terror she’ll no longer be its victim.”

Jack sat bent over, elbows on knees, hands clasped loosely in front of him as if in rumination or, maybe, prayer. Then he looked up. “I had no idea. I should be with her.”

Annika’s hand clasped his and he felt her steely strength. “Leave her alone for the moment. Allow her to regain her innate power. She needs to think about what Milla Tamirova must have shown her. If you interfere now, she’ll move away from both you and the hard work that lies ahead of her.”

Sighing deeply, Jack covered his face with his hands and lay back on the bed. Annika, turning, regarded him with empathy and perhaps a bit of pity.

“She’s yours, Jack, for better or for worse.”

“It’s all for the better,” he said, “believe me.”

“I do.” She hitched herself fully onto the bed, keeping off her left arm as she did and, before he had a chance to say another word, lay down on top of him. “There, that isn’t so bad, is it?”

ALLI, FULLY clothed, lay on the bed. She was staring at the ceiling, but in fact she was seeing the restraint chair in the center of Milla Tamirova’s dungeon. In her mind’s eye she sat in that chair, felt the restraints, hard, twisted, and nasty, against the insides of her wrists. She felt little electric shocks go through her, as if sparks launched from a nearby fire were singeing her, burning off the pale, almost transparent hair on her arms.

The demonically handsome face of Morgan Herr, whose pseudonyms Ronnie Kray, Charles Whitman, Ian Brady were all notorious serial killers, hovered over her, whispering in her ear. He told her things about herself—intimate things that she was certain only she could know, including private conversations she’d had with Emma, everything they’d discussed in their dorm room at school—as if he’d crawled inside her head and insidiously appropriated the details of her life.

She shuddered so deeply that her torso came off the bed as if through a bolt of electricity. She felt the familiar, horrific nausea rising in her, and she fought to stay where she was, held at bay the urge to flee to the bathroom and kneel beside the porcelain bowl to puke up her guts.

No, she told herself in a remarkably steady voice, you no longer need to do that. Morgan Herr is dead, there’s nothing more he can do to you. Whatever is happening, you’re doing it to yourself.

And yet, once again, as she’d felt in Milla Tamirova’s dungeon, she was paralyzed, completely powerless, as if she had once again been stripped of conscious volition.

“Whoever did this to you, whoever abused you will have won.” Milla Tamirova had smiled. “We can’t have that, child, can we?”

But Milla Tamirova didn’t know, because Alli didn’t dare tell her, the other reason for her feeling powerless. The urge to cut herself open, to have the secret spill out with her guts, left her shaking and drenched in cold sweat. She could feel the bed vibrating beneath her, or was it her own body that was making the bed quiver?

“You’re a coward,” Morgan Herr’s voice echoed in her head. “You’re a little, sniveling bitch, and who paid for your cowardice? Tell me, who paid?”

Racked with sobs, she lay back down on the bed and, turning on her side, pulled the coverlet over her. Sometime later she was plunged into a sleep where, in dreams, she strode across the leafy campus of Langley Fields. Emma, whispering beside her, had the sun on her face, so her eyes, usually as transparent as lake water, were hidden in the glare. Then Alli passed into the cloud of shade thrown by a pear tree, and as she turned to Emma, she screamed and screamed, and could not stop screaming.

JACK PUSHED Annika off him, not roughly but firmly, so that there would be no question of his intent.

Part of him felt as if he should be thinking of Sharon, but Sharon was far away in every manner imaginable; she was lost to him in the way he’d been afraid he’d lost Emma. He realized now that from the moment he’d first met Sharon, from the instant of their first incandescent coupling, they were headed toward dissolution, like a body that sinks beneath the waves and, in a split instant, becomes nothing more than a reflection, a reminder of what was or, possibly, what might have been. But, in any event, it was losing its coherence, if it had any to begin with, as it plunged headlong into oblivion.

Emma had been their only chance to stay together, but, really, that was a false hope. For a moment he forced himself to imagine his life had Emma not died, and the inescapable conclusion was that as far as he and Sharon were concerned nothing would be different. From the moment Emma was born, they disagreed on everything concerning their daughter, a dangerously scattershot method of child-rearing, but they were both blinded by their immaturity. It was the wrong moment for them to become parents, and they didn’t handle it well, taking their fundamental differences into a more public arena.

The other part of him was both hard and on fire. Though he fought against it, his breath came in short, hot pants, as if he were nearing the end of a long, grueling race. He knew the thoughts of Sharon and dissolution were meant as a distraction from his current situation, but his mind refused to stay thrust back in time, returning again and again to the seductive stimuli his five senses brought in.

He drank in Annika’s scent, felt the warmth of her body, heard the soft soughing of her breath, like wind through the treetops. He could not help but savor the taste her lips had left on his, the first bite into a fresh peach.

He turned his head to see her lying on her right side, facing away from him. Her body was curled up slightly, lending her a more vulnerable appearance, as if she were already asleep, but he could tell by her breathing that she was still awake.

Her blouse, or what was left of it, had ridden up, revealing her bare back. The sight of the scars took his breath away. They must be from the eighteen months she had been incarcerated. The abuse she had suffered had been extreme, or one manifestation of it had been extreme. How extreme had Alli’s abuse been, how profound her terror and her suffering? How deeply was Morgan Herr embedded in her psyche? “The terror dissolves like dreams when we wake up and go about our daily routine,” she had said, which set him wondering. At the moment when Annika’s scars lay revealed to him, when it crossed his mind to touch them, to ask her how she had come by them, it occurred to him that there was something voyeuristic, even obscene about poking around in a person’s sordid past. That’s what people did these days, however, and the more sordid the deeper the urge to pry, to learn why, when logically the opposite should apply. But there was nothing logical about the reflex to stare at a car wreck, to watch, spellbound, as bodies were pulled from the wreckage, to think: How badly hurt are they? Are they alive or dead? Thank God I’m here, safe and sound, passing by this disaster, but, hang on, slow down, I want to see more, blood and all.

Without a clear understanding of what he was doing or the consequences that might ensue he reached out. As he curled his hand over her hip she emitted a sound that was neither a sigh nor a moan, but contained the essence of both. That sound acted like a trigger, releasing him from whatever safety mechanism that had short-circuited what he had been feeling ever since he’d crossed the threshold of the bedroom.

“Forget it,” she said in a voice partially muffled by the pillow or perhaps her arm. “I don’t want you now.”

Laughing softly he removed his hand and turned off the second lamp, enveloping them in twilight. And yet it seemed to him that he’d been plunged into darkness so absolute it was possible to lose his bearings, as if he were at sea beyond sight of all land. He wondered whether he should go or remain on the opposite side of the bed, trying to find a place comfortable for himself, at which point she turned around as lithely as a gymnast, folded her arms around him, and pressed her soft, half-open lips to his. He could feel her panting breath as his mouth closed over hers.

Their bodies moved in concert, in a back-and-forth rhythm not unlike the tide that rules the seas. They were like engines revving up, yearning to be released, longing for the fury that only a vehicle at speed and slightly out of control could generate, summoned like a genie or a djinn from shadows where no one looked.

Lost inside her he became unmoored from a sense of either place or time, dimly aware that in plummeting toward oblivion he sought an end to the dissolution of his life.