Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [72]
“She’s not stupid at all,” Dyadya Gourdjiev felt compelled to say. “On the contrary.”
“Yes, on the contrary.” Batchuk opened the door, the empty hallway looming in front of him. There was a smear of blood there, too, too large for him to cover with his heel, or even his entire shoe. “And that, essentially, is the problem. She’s too smart for your own good.”
“My own good?” Dyadya Gourdjiev said, reacting to the warning.
“Yes,” Batchuk acknowledged as he stepped into the echoey hallway. “And hers.”
SIXTEEN
JACK AWOKE with the scent of Annika on him, and it was as if he were in another world, as if he’d eaten a bowl of peaches last night and now smelled of them. Nevertheless, opening his eyes, he immediately felt a kind of remorse. Not that he hadn’t enjoyed himself, because he had, immensely; what occurred to him were the consequences, because experience had taught him that there were always consequences from having sex with another human being, no matter what your partner claimed at the time. If you had any emotions they were bound to be stirred by intimacy of any sort. He’d known plenty of guys who hadn’t cared who they’d slept with—to a man they were either in loveless marriages or divorced. In any case, they still inhabited the same bars where, back in the day, they’d always scored. Now, however, they felt old, isolated from the feverish pace of a dating scene they no longer belonged to, or even understood.
Next to him, Annika was still asleep, her cruel scars rising and falling with her slow breathing. She turned, then, her head still burrowed in the pillow, facing him. For a moment, he did nothing but watch her, as if, in her sleep, she would tell him something about herself. But she remained resolutely a mystery, as, in fact, all women were mysteries, and he wondered now whether he knew her any better than he knew Sharon. On the face of it, an absurd notion, equating a woman he’d just met with the woman he had lived with for twenty-three years. But the truth was staring at him with Annika’s quiescent face, which held no expression, or perhaps just the hint of a smile, as if her dream were more real to her than the world around her, than Jack himself. It made him wonder whether it was possible for one person to know another. Weren’t there always surprises, like layers of an onion being peeled away only to reveal another person, one we scarcely knew, or had for years tried our best not to understand, preferring a manufactured reality that reflected the things we required?
This was what he’d done with Sharon, and now that the reality he’d manufactured had cracked and crumbled away he knew Emma was right: they’d never had a chance. And yet, in retrospect it was heartbreaking to see how one misstep had led to another, and another, and so on, small accretions of mistakes that had become a life less lived. It seemed odd to him, even ludicrous that he had once held her in his arms, that they had whispered intimacies to one another, that they could have said “I love you,” in any conceivable setting. That time had collapsed in on itself; it was the opposite of when you walked into a house you used to live in or a room you’d once known like the back of your hand and nothing had changed. Now that house, that room, that woman were all changed, unfamiliar to him, as if observed in another man’s life. He closed his eyes for a moment, wanting to completely uproot all the acrid memories and stark revelations cropping up in his mind like weeds after a soaking rain.
Lifting the covers, he rolled out of bed carefully enough not to wake her. Slipping into clothes, he opened the door and padded into the living room, where Alli, already awake, sat curled on the end of the chocolate velvet sofa directly beneath the mandala. She held a mug half filled with hot tea, which she handed to