Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [126]
“Honey, the truth is I did what you did. I spent far less time with your mother than I should have. The truth is . . .” He looked away for a moment, at Aaron, who was watching him with a child’s disconcertingly piercing gaze. And it was this gaze that gave him the courage to continue. He smiled in gratitude at Aaron before he got on with it. “The truth is I couldn’t bear to see her in that state. She didn’t know me, didn’t respond to the songs we loved together. She didn’t even know where she was. She was locked away in a place that had no key.”
There were tears glittering in Claire’s eyes. “I spent so much time hating you, shutting you out . . .” She paused long enough to catch her tears with a slender forefinger. “I put you in the same horrid room where Mom was. I couldn’t bear to see either of you, I didn’t want Aaron to see his grandmother like that, to remember her only as . . .” She took a hesitant step toward him. “Now she’s gone and I realize that nothing can bring her back, nothing can bring back the days before . . .” She couldn’t help but glance at her son. “But here you are, Dad.” And then, rather defiantly, “Aaron is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“I can see that so clearly, so very clearly,” Paull said, meaning every word.
TWENTY-FIVE
“JACK, I’M sorry.” Alli turned her face into his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry about, honey. You had no way of knowing what would happen. And what if the two of you had died, have you considered that possibility?”
She shook her head mutely.
Jack’s heart constricted. He felt blindsided by Alli’s revelation. He didn’t blame her for her decision, he didn’t see it as a betrayal of her deep and abiding friendship with Emma, only a deep and abiding ache in his heart that she had been carrying this anguish around in addition to her terror at what Herr had done to her.
“Jack, please say something,” Alli said with a clear note of desperation.
It was no good wondering what would have happened if Alli had been behind the wheel the morning of Emma’s death, Jack knew; no one would ever know what it was that caused Emma to swerve off the road at speed and into the tree. He could ask Emma, of course, the next time she appeared, but he suspected that she didn’t know or couldn’t remember. And, in any case, she had already urged him to move on from his own guilt, and this set his mind, expanding outward to absorb the different points of view, on the right track.
He saw Annika standing beside Kharkishvili, watching them, and he turned Alli away from her to face him. “Listen to me, we’re both carrying guilt about the choices we made the morning of Emma’s death, and maybe that wound will never fully heal, but I can assure you that we’ll never know unless we let go of the guilt and stop punishing ourselves. That’s what Emma wants for us now, more than anything.”
Alli’s eyes were glittering with held-back tears. “I don’t know . . . I don’t know if I can.”
“You have to want to. Alli, so much has been taken away from you.” A dark flicker passed across her face and it seemed as if she might crumble in front of him. He continued, still calm but with a subtle underlayer of urgency. “It’s time you put things back inside yourself.”
She shook her head. “What do you mean?”
“I think you know.” He took a breath. “Did you think Herr was going to kill you, that you were going to die?”
“I want to go back inside.”
“No one’s stopping you.” Jack was careful not to take hold of her.
Alli looked away, chewing on her lower