First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [86]
He rang the bell, his heart hammering in his chest. Sharon pulled the door open. The scent of chicken and rice wafted out with her, making his mouth water. She regarded him with an unreadable expression. She wore a skirt that clung to her thighs, a sleeveless blouse that showed off her beautiful golden shoulders. Nina would have appeared pale and wan beside her, anorectic instead of willowy. She said nothing for a moment.
"Jack, are you okay?"
"Yeah, sure, it's just that I can't remember the last time I had a decent meal."
"You were on your own so long, I often wondered why you never learned to cook for yourself."
"The tyranny of shopping makes me anxious."
She gave him a tentative smile as she moved aside so he could enter.
Jack closed the door behind him. He took off his overcoat, slung it over the back of the living room sofa. Unlike the old house with its familiar creaking he'd moved into when they split, Sharon preferred a modern place. She had busied herself repainting walls in colors she chose, picking out warm carpets, filling each room not only with furniture but accessories as well—scented candles, a log cabin quilt hanging on the wall, small dishes filled with lacquered shells and gaily striped marbles. No unicorns, thankfully, but a variety of other knickknacks and souvenirs, along with keepsakes and photos of Emma and Sharon as a child in handmade frames. None of this, however, made up for the house's complete lack of character. Unlike his house, it was a two-story box to live in, nothing more. He found being here disorienting and overwhelming. He'd never get used to Sharon living here, living without him.
What did he have of Emma's? He thought of her iPod, pushed to the back of his ATF locker. One night he took it home and couldn't sleep. Then again, he must have because at one point he started up from a horrific dream of standing paralyzed and mute as Emma's car hurtled into the tree. He could hear the crack of the wood, the explosion of glass, see the twists of metal spiraling inward. The car door snapped open, and a shape already curled in death shot out, struck him full in the chest. Then he was sitting up in bed, screaming and shivering, sweat pouring off him like rain. He spent what was left of the night commiserating with Nick Carraway in the pages of his beloved, tattered copy of The Great Gatsby, and was never so glad to see the first blush of dawn turn the darkness gold.
IN SHARON'S new digs, he picked up one of the photos of Emma, but the image seemed flat and empty, a shell of what once had been a vibrant and mysterious girl. As for photos of other people in Sharon's life, he knew there would be none.
Sharon had no past, and so couldn't understand what appeal it could possibly hold for Jack. She had parents, but she never saw or spoke to them. A brother, as well, in Rotterdam, where he was an international lawyer. For reasons he'd never been able to fathom, Sharon had cut herself off from her family, her past. When they were dating, she told him that she had no family, but after they were married, he found photos in the trash, spilled out of an old cigar box. Her mother, father, and brother.
"They're dead to me," she'd said when he'd confronted her. She'd never allowed the subject to come up again.
Did that mean, he often wondered, that Sharon didn't dream? Because he dreamed only of his past, iterations of it with intended outcomes, or not, bizarre twists and turns that he often remembered after he awoke, and laughed at or puzzled over. It seemed to him that there was a richness in life that came with the years, that only your past could provide. It was unbearable to him to think, as Schopenhauer had written, that no honest man comes to the end of his life wanting to relive it. But it seemed possible to him that Sharon believed just that, that her erasing of her past was an attempt to