Last Snow

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. “Sure. That Smashing Pumpkins song is five-starred on your iPod.”

“ ‘There’s no more need to pretend cause now I can begin again.’ ” Her voice, lost in time and space, was a haunting soprano as she sang the lines from the song.

“What are you saying?”

“What if my death was only the end of the beginning?”

Jack, his heartbeat quickening, turned more toward her, or the darkness where she now dwelled. “Can that be true?”

“I’m saying that your guilt is still eating you alive. I’m saying that the thing you’re fixated on is over and done with.”

“That moment I lost you and for months afterward the terrible past seemed interminable, repeating itself like a virus, but then later it’s as if it happened in a millisecond, so quickly that I never had the chance to take action or even make the right choices.”

“I don’t think about that, and neither should you.”

He shook his head. “I wish I could understand.”

“I know it’s confusing, Dad, but think of it this way: Maybe I’m here now because I’m still disobedient, even in death.” Her laughter rolled over him like gentle surf. “I don’t know, I have as little experience with this as you do. I know you want answers, but I don’t have them. I have no idea where I am or what I’ve become—although it seems likely I’m what I’ve always been, right? I do know there’s no point in trying to figure it out. What it boils down to is faith and acceptance. Faith that I’m really here, acceptance that for some things there is simply no answer.”

“I don’t want you to fade away, like everything else. Emma—” and he gave a little cry, aching with despair and, yes, she was right, guilt.

“Jack?”

He turned his head sharply at the sound of Alli’s voice.

“What are you doing?”

And then, as he looked at her blankly, she sat down beside him. “She’s here, isn’t she?” Her breath seemed to catch in her throat. “Emma’s here!”

He was about to answer her when he saw Annika standing in the doorway to one of the bedrooms, observing them. How long had she been there? Had she overheard his conversation with Emma—at least his side of it, which would have sounded absurd to her?

“Let’s talk about this another time,” he told Alli. “We’re all exhausted.”

“But—”

“Questions later.” He pulled her up with him as he rose to his feet. “Right now it’s time to rest.”

_____

AT THE doorway to the master bedroom, Jack paused, watching Alli pad into her room and softly close the door. Then he turned to Annika, but before he could say anything she beat him to it.

“Come in,” she said. Her smile widened. “I didn’t bite last night, did I?”

He smiled. “I think Alli is right about you.”

“Me being a psycho-bitch or wanting to get you into bed?”

He laughed, but the truth was that in these surroundings and this close to her he felt a frisson, an erotic charge that made him momentarily short of breath.

On his way to the bed he passed close enough for his hip to brush against her, where she sat, her legs crossed at the knee. Her wrists, which perched on her knee, were delicate, so thin they looked eminently breakable. He knew better. His gaze inevitably dropped to her legs, long, powerful, and gleaming in the illumination from the bedside lamps she must have put on when she’d entered the bedroom.

“You know you have this obsession to protect everyone,” she said.

He came and sat down on the bed next to her. “Is that such a bad thing?”

“I didn’t say it was bad.”

“Why did you ask me in here?”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Last night . . . our connection . . .” She looked away for a moment. “I don’t want to be alone. I’m tired of being alone.”

“What about Ivan?”

She snapped back into focus. “Are you trying to insult me? Ivan was an assignment.”

He nodded. “I won’t sleep with you, if that’s what you’re angling for.”

“I’m not angling for any damn thing. My arm hurts and I need some rest. We all do.”

“All right then.” He slapped his thighs and, rising, went to the doorway. “I’ll be right outside on the sofa.”

As he was about to cross the threshold, she said: “I know who the girl is.”

Her timing was impeccable. He turned and stared at her.