Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [25]
“Morgan Herr is dead, Alli. You know that.”
“And yet I feel him close to me, breathing against my neck, whispering horrible things in my ear.”
Jack put his arms around her. “What kind of things?”
“Things from my past—people and places, things that only Emma and I knew, and sometimes not even Emma; things I’m deeply ashamed of, things I’d rather not remember, but he won’t let me forget. It’s like he crawled inside my head and somehow, I don’t know how, he’s still there, living and breathing, whispering to me, whispering . . .”
Her last words dissolved into racking sobs. She pushed her face into his chest and he rubbed her neck in order to soothe her and, in another sense, soothe himself because he felt her pain almost as if it was his own, a twin, two melancholy trains running along the same track, which led to Emma, perhaps only a memory of her, perhaps not; best friend to one, daughter to the other. But part of him wasn’t sympathetic at all. He sensed that a good deal of her persistent anxiety stemmed from pushing down those very incidents in her past, because the more she turned away from them the more they tore at her, exacerbating her anxiety, stoking her fear. For the moment, at least, it was easier for her to believe that Morgan Herr was instigating those thoughts, rather than admit to herself that it was her own mind struggling to work through the most emotionally devastating days and nights of her past.
“I wish Emma were here,” she said in her soft little girl’s voice.
Jack stroked her hair absently. “Me, too.”
“Sometimes I can’t believe how much I miss her.”
Alli said it, but it might just as well have been Jack. “She’s in our memory, Alli, which is what makes memory so precious.” He detached himself from her so that he could look her in the eye, to confirm to her, if she didn’t already know, that they were traveling along the same track. “It’s this same memory that holds your dark days—Emma’s, too, for that matter, as well as mine—and I think you can figure out for yourself that it’s all one, the dark days and the bright, shining ones. Of course we both want to remember Emma, and we do, but for you the cost of holding your dark days at bay has become too great. If you push them away then you risk losing Emma as well.”
“It can’t work that way—”
“But it does, Alli. Whatever’s happened to you is a part of you; you can wish it hadn’t happened, but you can’t deny that it did.”
“But every time I think about the dark days I break out into a cold sweat, I start to shake, and I hear a screaming inside myself I can’t silence, and then I’m sure I’m losing my mind, and the fear starts to build until I can’t stand it anymore, and I think . . .”
True to her word, she had started shaking, tiny beads of sweat appearing at her hairline. Jack held her close again. “I know what you think, honey, but you’re never going to act on that thought. You understand that, don’t you? You’re not going to kill yourself, there’s far too much life inside you.”
He waited until he felt her nod wordlessly against him before going on. “Whatever happened to you, you’re still who you always were. Morgan Herr didn’t have the power to take that away from you. In fact, it was in those dark days that you found your own courage, you found out who you are.”
“But he programmed me. I did what he wanted me to do.”
She looked up at him, a little girl again, stripped of her tough young woman’s armor, her smart mouth, her arrow-swift rejoinders learned in a culture that grew its children into adults before their time, a culture that moved far too swiftly, becoming fixated on the glossy surface of things. He saw her as her father never would, an unspeakable tragedy that Jack, a man who had lost his only child, was struck by more deeply than most.
“No one knows the future,” he said, “we all accept that, but we don’t really know the past very well, either. We know only what happened to us, not what happened to those around us. We have no idea, for instance, how what they