Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [125]
“Hello, Aaron,” he said, his heart in his mouth, and then despite what he’d said to Benson, he added eagerly, almost avidly, “Mom may have told you that I’m ill, but I’m not.” He found that he could finally smile. “I’m perfectly fine.”
“Dad,” Claire said, “is that true?”
But Paull remained mute, entranced by his grandson. It was difficult to know whether he even heard her.
She turned to Benson, her face flushed with anger and resentment. “Is this true, Mr. Benson? You said my father was terminal.”
“Yes, well, that was something of an untruth.”
“Something of an untruth?” Claire echoed. “Good God, man!”
She was leaning forward at such an angle that she was forced to take a step toward him, an aggressive step, it seemed to Paull, who had come out of his near-trance, a threatening step, as if it were a prelude to an assault. Benson faced her like the ex-military man he was, ramrod straight, but his eyes were filled with battlefield humiliation.
“You lied to me and my son, added to our anguish and . . . My mother just died, you unspeakable toad!”
Benson held his ground, but made no reply because there was nothing he could say, no excuse he could fabricate in the face of her wrath—and wrath was the right word, Paull thought, because there was something old-fashioned, unfashionably traditional about her anger, and this made him proud of her. And it was precisely in that moment when the faded and fragile image he had of her collided with the Technicolor force of her actual presence and became concrete, past and present dissolving into each other and, by some mysterious alchemical process, leading him home.
He turned to Benson now and said, “My family and I would like some time alone.”
Benson opened his mouth, possibly to reiterate that time was of the essence, but between the looks on both Paull and his daughter he ended up keeping his mouth shut.
After Benson departed, Paull was alone with the ghosts and demons that had bedeviled him even as he valiantly and vainly tried to push them far down into his subconscious.
“So,” Claire said, her voice once again thin and terribly strained, “you’re okay, you’re well.”
He nodded, suddenly unable to speak.
“But how is it that you’re here, what do these people want?”
“I don’t know yet.” Paull felt safe talking about Benson and Thomson.
“These are important men.”
“Well, they were,” he acknowledged. “Perhaps they still are, who knows. They kidnapped me, more or less, and once I was here told me that I could see you and Aaron if I listened to them.”
“I notice you didn’t listen to them.”
“I turned the tables on them, instead.”
“That’s so you, Dad.”
He cleared his throat, wished he had a glass of water to hide his question behind. “Are you . . .” He felt a fresh rush of terror, as if he was entering a haunted house, or the lair of a dangerous animal. “Are you married?”
“No, I’m not.” It was a simple, declarative statement, devoid of ruefulness or self-pity. “Lawrence never came back, he hasn’t seen Aaron. I wouldn’t want him to.”
“I see.” He had been right about that privileged bastard.
This flow of information was followed by a self-conscious silence during which Aaron looked from one to the other, his brow furrowed in a distinctly unchildlike manner, as if he were trying to parse the currents and undercurrents of emotions swirling around him.
“It must have been tough those last months with Mom,” Claire said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get to see her more often.”
“That’s all right, I—” He stopped in mid-sentence. It would be so easy to keep, and even embellish on, the fantasy she had of him spending time with Louise when he hadn’t. Guilt and remorse were powerful