Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [47]
For some reason, Alli didn’t think that was funny, and said so quite emphatically.
“So now we’re back to my original question: What’s your story?” Annika turned slightly, putting a further strain on the arm Alli was keeping dry. “It sure as hell isn’t your Graves’ disease, you got over that years ago.”
“How would you know that?”
“You talked about it without hesitation. But there’s something else, isn’t there? A kind of shadow hanging over you.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Alli saw Annika’s reflection shrug.
“It’s always possible, but I doubt it.” She tried to rotate her arm. “Hey, you know, I can’t wash my back.”
Alli cursed, unwound her towel and, drawing aside the curtain, put one foot into the shower. She took the soap Annika offered and used quick, circular motions to lather her back. Annika moved the showerhead up a bit and bent her head forward so some of the spray reached her back. There were a series of vertical scars down her back.
“What’re these?” Alli asked.
“Just what they look like,” was Annika’s laconic answer.
“You’re done.” Alli put the soap back in its dish and, maintaining the angle of Annika’s left arm, stepped out onto the tiles.
A moment later, Annika turned the shower off. The silence in the small room seemed deafening. Alli let go and Annika stepped out. Wow, she is smokin’ hot, Alli thought a moment before she handed the other woman a towel.
As Alli rewrapped herself, Annika said, “You have a beautiful body.”
“I don’t.”
“Who told you that?”
“I only have to look in the mirror.”
“Tell me, have you ever been with a boy?”
“Been with? You mean in the biblical sense? You mean have I been fucked.” Alli shook her head. “Christ, no.”
“Why Christ? What does Christ have to do with it?”
“It’s just an expression.”
Annika shook her head. “Americans and their religion.” She began to dry her hair. “You know, with your hair short you remind me of Natalie Portman.”
Alli scrutinized herself in the mirror. “Come on, what bullshit.”
“Why would I lie to you?”
“I can think of several reasons.”
“All of them leading to Jack, I suppose.”
Alli couldn’t help laughing, and then Annika was laughing, too. She saw that Annika was having difficulty drying her back. Without being asked she took part of the other woman’s towel and began to soak up the droplets of water.
“Don’t worry, they don’t hurt anymore.”
Nevertheless, Alli continued carefully patting dry Annika’s back. The scars set her thinking about cruelty, pain, dissolution, loss, and, inevitably, death. “I had a friend.” The words came out almost before she realized it. “Emma. She was Jack’s daughter. We were best friends at college. She was killed late last year. She drove her car into a tree.”
“That’s terrible. You weren’t with her?”
Alli shook her head. “I would have been killed, too.” She took a breath. “Or maybe if I’d been there I could’ve saved her.”
Annika turned around to face her. “So that’s it. You have survivor’s guilt.”
“I don’t know what the fuck I have,” Alli said in despair.
“Two days shy of my seventeenth birthday I was out partying with my boyfriend and my best friend. I drove us from party to party, we got drunker and drunker. And then on the way out to the car to go to yet another party I’d suddenly had enough. To this day, I don’t know what happened, it was like a switch had been thrown, as if I was seeing us from another perspective, as if I was floating above myself, dispassionately observing. All at once, I realized how stupid it all was, the partying, the drunkenness, vomiting and then drinking again. What was it all for? So I called it a night. My boyfriend agreed, no doubt because he didn’t want to miss an opportunity to climb all over me, but my best friend—Yuriy—he was always up for more, always, a real party animal, that’s the right phrase, yes?”
Alli felt a terrible foreboding in the pit of her stomach, a dreadful upwelling of dark and dangerous thoughts that contained the poisonous seeds of suicide.