First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [111]
"They're making you feel that way?"
Alli shrugged. It was clear she wasn't yet ready to talk about what happened, even with him. Jack knew he needed to take another tack altogether.
"Alli, there's something only you can help me with. It's about Emma."
"Okay."
Was he mistaken, or did her eyes light up?
"Don't laugh, but there have been moments during the past few weeks when I could swear I've seen Emma. Once at Langley Fields, then in the backseat of my car. Other times, too. And once I felt a cool breath on the back of my neck."
Alli, walking silently, stared at her feet. Jack, sensing that she'd had enough urging recently, chose to let her be. He listened, instead, to the wind through the bare branches, the distant complaints of a murder of crows, crowded onto the treetops like a bunch of old ladies at a funeral.
At length, Alli lifted her head, regarded him curiously. "I felt the same thing. When you were holding me, when that snake—"
"You saw the snake?"
"I heard it."
"I didn't realize."
"You were busy."
The words stung him, though that was hardly her intent. The wound his inattention had inflicted was still as raw as on the day he'd held Emma's lifeless body in his arms. There wasn't anything that could prepare you for the death of your child. It was unnatural, and therefore incomprehensible. There was no solace. In that light, perhaps Sharon's turning to the Church was understandable. There came a time when the pain you carried inside you was insupportable. One way or another you needed to grope your way toward help.
They had reached the heart of the maze, a small square space with a stone bench. They sat in silence. Jack watched the shadows creeping over the lawns and gardens. The treetops seemed to be on fire.
"I felt her," Alli said at last. "Emma was there with us in that horrible house."
And it was at that moment, with the utterance of those words, that Jack felt them both brushed by the feathers of a mystery of infinite proportions. He felt in that moment that in entering the boxwood maze, in finding their way to its center, they had both touched a wisdom beyond human understanding, and in so doing were bound together in the same mysterious way, for the rest of their lives.
"But how is that possible?" He spoke as much to himself as he did to her.
She shrugged. "Why do I like Coke and not root beer?" she said. "Why do I like blue more than red?"
"Some things just are."
She nodded. "There you go."
"But this is different."
"Why is it different?" Alli said.
"Because Emma's dead."
"Honestly, I don't know what that means."
Jack pondered this a moment, then shook his head. "I don't either."
"Then there's no reason why we shouldn't feel Emma's presence," she said.
"When you put it that way . . ."
With the absolute surety of youth, she said, "How else can it be put?"
Jack could think of any number of alternatives, but they all fell within the strict beliefs of the skeptics, scientific and religious alike.
And because he felt the wingtips of mystery still fluttering about them, he told her what he'd never been able to tell anyone else. Leaning forward, elbows on knees, his fingers knit together, he said, "After Sharon and I broke up, I started to wonder: Is this all there is? I mean life, the world that we can see, hear, smell, touch."
"Why did it come up then?" Alli asked.
Jack groped for an answer. "Because without her, I became—I don't know—unmoored."
"I've been unmoored all my life." Alli sat forward herself. "Sometimes I think I was born asking, Is this all there is? But for me the answer was always, No, the world is out there beyond the bars of your cage."
Jack turned to her. "Do you really think of your world as a cage?"
She nodded. "It's small enough, Jack. You've been in it, you ought to know."
"Then I'm glad Emma came into it."
"For such a short time!"
The genuine lamentation broke Jack's heart all over again. "And she had you, Alli, though it was only for a short time."
It was growing cooler as the shadows extended their reach across the vast lawns, hedges, and flower beds.