First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [55]
A chair creaked, and Alli knew that he had sat back. A whisper of cloth told her that he'd crossed one leg over the other. I can see, she thought, without seeing. She was grateful to him for having kept the light off, grateful for the opportunity he'd given her to sharpen her senses. For the first time since she'd known Emma McClure, she had stepped outside herself—the self, as Kray had so accurately said, that had been created for her.
As if divining her thoughts, Kray said, "You exist at the pleasure of your father. The Alli Carson the country—the world—knows is a confection, a Hershey bar: an all-American girl, with all-American values, all-American ideals. When have you ever been allowed to say what's really on your mind? When have you been allowed to voice your own opinion? Your lot in life has been to further your father's political career."
She heard his voice, and only his voice.
"Isn't that right, Alli?"
The darkness made it grow in power, until she could see it glowing like a jewel in her mind.
"You have your own opinions, don't you?"
For a long moment she said nothing, though she felt the answer fizzing in her throat, clamoring to be exposed, to have its own life at last. Still, she bit it back, afraid. She realized just how familiar this fear was, how she had been afraid for years to say what was really on her mind, as opposed to what her father's handlers had insisted she say publicly. Only Emma had known her real mind, only Emma could have taught her how to be fearless, but Emma was dead. She lowered her head and felt a great sob welling up in her breast, and hot tears leaked out of her eyes, ran down her cheeks, dropped onto the backs of her hands. It was so cruel, so unfair that her one true friend had been taken from her. . . .
"Focus, Alli," Kray said in the manner of a professor to an inordinately bright student with ADD. "It's important that you focus your mind, that you shake off the dullness of the old automaton Alli Carson, that you hone your mind to a diamond edge. Now, tell me, do you have your own opinions?"
"I do," Alli said, her throat unclogging as the words she'd been wanting to say flew out. She felt herself transported back to campus, walking with Emma, who had more or less asked her the same question: Do you have your father's opinions, or are they your own?
He sighed, it seemed to her with pleasure.
"Then perhaps there's a chance I can reach the real Alli Carson. There's a chance I can undo what's been done to you."
The creak of the chair. "You wish to speak."
How did he know that? she wondered. What marvelous power he possesed!
"You have my permission."
"Why are you doing this?" she asked.
"Because I have to."
He said it in a way that shook her. She didn't know why yet, she was too stunned by her own reaction, but she was beginning to have faith now that she would come to understand what was happening to her, and why.
She felt him lean in to her, felt the aura of his warmth as if she held his beating heart in her hands.
"I want to share something with you, Alli. I have absolute faith in what I'm doing. Beyond that, I'm a patriot. This country has lost its way. There's a shadow over democracy, Alli, and its name is god—the Christian god in whose name so many ethnic people have been attacked, decimated, or destroyed: the Aztecs, the Inca, the Jews of Spain, the caliphs of Constantinople and Trebizond, the Chinese, blacks, our own American Indians. Sinners all, right?"
She could hear his breathing, like the bellows fanning a fire, expelling a hard emotion with each word. This emotion was familiar to her; she understood it without being able to define it. And she felt Emma close beside her, whispering in the nighttime dorm room in Langley Fields, so far away now, so very far. She began to weep again, silently—for Emma, absolutely, but also for her own fractured self, for the life she had been forced to live, for everything she had missed: friends, laughter, goofing around, being