Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [59]
“Dad, I’m here.”
The door swung open and he stepped into the apartment. While the others went about their business, he looked for his daughter—his dead daughter.
“No, Dad, over here.”
At that moment, his cell phone rang. It was Sharon, and he took the call.
“Hello, Jack,” she said in a cool, preternaturally calm voice, “do you know yet when you’re coming home?”
He closed his eyes. “I don’t, Sharon, I told you—”
“Then I’ll leave the key under the doormat.”
His eyes flew open. “What?”
“I’m leaving, Jack. I’ve had enough of you not being here.”
And all at once he understood that they had returned to square one, to the point they’d been at immediately following Emma’s death, when she’d blamed him for not taking Emma’s call, for not somehow intuiting that their daughter was in mortal peril, that her car was about to veer off the road into a tree. Months later, Sharon had sworn to him that she’d put her anger and bitterness behind her, but he saw now that she hadn’t. Perhaps she’d been telling him the truth, or the truth as she understood it at the moment, but then she’d been fooling herself or, more accurately, hiding from herself, which every human being did from time to time.
He didn’t blame her for that failing, how could he? But he blamed her for not telling him the truth now, because she knew the truth. It wasn’t his job or the fact that he was overseas, far from her at the moment, it wasn’t that he couldn’t tell her when he’d be home again. What she meant was, I can’t forgive you for not being there when Emma needed you, I can’t forgive you for not preventing her death.
He said nothing into the phone because there was nothing to say. She’d had a revelation or maybe her mother had forced the revelation on her. But for the first time he realized that it didn’t matter. The truth was the truth; it did no good to fight it.
“Good-bye, Jack.”
He said nothing, not even then, he merely folded the phone away, and looked around the apartment as if trying to find his bearings, or an answer for what had just happened, though he knew perfectly well where he was and that he was now alone.
At the far end of the sofa, directly below the painting of the Tibetan mandala, was a shadow of a deeper substance, curled like a cat. Curious, because Jack could remember reading something about the mandala in the writings of Carl Jung. What was it? Jung believed the mandala, which in Sanskrit meant both completion and essence, to be the perfect manifestation of the human unconscious.
As he walked to the sofa and sat down near the curled shadow, he wondered whether this was what he was looking at now: a manifestation of his unconscious.
“Hello, Dad.”
That was what everyone else but Alli believed, that this manifestation of Emma came from deep inside himself, but he knew that she was something more. He knew it as surely as he knew he was sitting here on a brown velvet sofa in this unexpectedly homey fourth-floor apartment in Kiev.
“Hi, honey.” He squinted into the shadows. “I can’t really see you.”
“Don’t worry, that’s normal.”
He laughed under his breath. “There’s nothing normal about this, Emma.”
“We’re both Outsiders, Dad, so for us it is normal .”
He shook his head helplessly. The truth was he’d been an Outsider for so long that he didn’t know what the word “normal” meant, if he ever had.
“Your mother—”
“I know. Don’t be sad, it was inevitable.”
“You sound so grown-up.”
“You and Mom, it never worked, not really.”
“There certainly was heat.”
“Heat isn’t enough. There was nothing solid, ever.”
Jack put his head back. “No, I suppose not.” Tears leaked out of his eyes.
Then he felt a stirring beside him, as if someone had opened a window. A cool breeze kissed his cheek.
“You’ve got to stop dwelling on it, Dad.”
“Your mother? No, I—”
“The car crash.”
She was right about that, too. He supposed death might give you a unique perspective on what had gone before, a form of omniscience not unlike that of an immortal.
“You remember ‘The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning’?”
He nodded.