“How I wish you and Jack were my parents!”
“Good Lord!” Sharon was standing in the kitchen. So astonished was she by Alli’s statement that she dropped the egg she was transferring from its carton to the heated pan. The yellow yolk burst like a water balloon, slowly threading across the stove top, through the clear, glutinous albumin.
She’d gone with her first instinct, which was to make Alli something to eat, so they had repaired to the kitchen, a room that always made her feel secure. If she was being honest with herself, Alli’s presence here unnerved her, though her nervousness had nothing to do with the fact that Alli was the president-elect’s daughter. It was all down to the fact that Alli had been Emma’s best friend. They were the same age, and though one would hardly be taken for the other, it was difficult for Sharon to look at Alli without seeing her own daughter. She was beset by a profound ache she thought she had put aside. The poisonous stone of Emma’s death was still inside her.
Mindlessly, she turned off the burner, began to sponge up the mess. “Why on earth would you say such an extraordinary thing?”
Sharon wrung the remains of the raw egg into the sink. She held the broken shell in her cupped palm. “But I’m sure your parents are wonderful people.”
“Excuse me, but all you know about my mom and dad is what you see on TV or read in magazine articles,” Alli said.
She stood with her back against the pass-through into the living room. She appeared to Sharon to be poised beyond her years—certainly more poised than Emma had ever been. What I wouldn’t have given for a child like this, a voice inside her wailed. And immediately she put a hand to her mouth, appalled at the thought. God forgive me, she moaned silently. But her quick prayer of penance made her feel no better, just dirty. She panicked for a moment; if prayers no longer worked for her, what would? The truth of it is that prayers are only words, she thought, and of what comfort are words at a time like this? Hollow things like the shell of an egg with the inside drained away.
“You’re right, of course,” she said, desperately trying to soothe her way back into normalcy. “Please forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive, Mrs.—Sharon.”
Alli came and took the glistening shell out of Sharon’s hand. In that moment, their hands touched and Sharon began to weep. It took only an instant for the dam to burst, for all the feelings, methodically and efficiently tamped down and squashed, to reassert their right to life. Father Larrigan’s assurances of “It’s God’s will” and “Emma’s death is part of God’s plan” crumbled beneath the weight of hypocrisy. Sharon, queen of denial, was quite unprepared for the abyss, so that the dam not only burst but disintegrated entirely.
She rocked back and forth with inconsolable sobs. Knowledge comes through suffering was one of Father Larrigan’s favorite bromides. But in a flash of knowledge, she saw that it wasn’t a bromide at all; it was yet another way for the Church to maintain control over its increasingly unruly flock. We all must suffer because of Eve’s First Sin, we all deserve to suffer in this life so we may be redeemed in Heaven. What better way to keep people yoked to the Church? Surely God didn’t mean these con artists to speak in His name. Oh, the insidious cleverness of it!
Now her sorrow was joined by her rage at being duped, her terror at life’s random cruelty. All was chaos, uncontrollable, unknowable. With this came the stark realization that Jack was right. Her newfound religion was nothing but a sham, another way to deny her feelings, to convince herself that everything would be all right. But deep down where she was afraid to look, she knew nothing would ever be right again because Emma had been snatched from her and Jack for no good reason. And then she thought, despairingly, what possible reason could justify her daughter’s death? None. None on earth or in heaven.
Gradually, she became aware of Alli holding her hand, leading her into the living room, where they sat quietly side by side on the sofa.
“Can I get you something?” Alli asked. “Some tea, a glass of water, even?”
Sharon shook her head. “Thank you, I’m feeling much better now.”
But what a bitter lie that was! In her mind’s eye, she could see the inside of her church, the gloomy atmosphere, the confessional, where priests heard and absolved your sins if you recited the canned blather of Hail Marys or Our Fathers. But Father Larrigan wasn’t full of grace, nor was any priest. The flickering candles mocked those whose prayers they carried in their flaring hearts, the paintings of Christ, bleeding, dying while angels fluttered like so many moths over his head. And the gold! Everywhere you looked were gold crosses tinted rose or moss green by the saints in the stained-glass windows. And old-lady tears, old-lady prayers, old ladies with nowhere else to go, their lives over, clustered in the doorway, complaining about their backs and their bladders. She was not an old woman! Her life wasn’t over. It wasn’t too late for her to have another child, was it? Was it?
Wrenching herself away from her pain, she smiled through her tears. “Anyway, never mind me.” She patted Alli’s knee, and there it was again, that astonishing electric sensation that had made her weep. She managed to hold back the tears this time, but it wasn’t easy. “It’s you we were speaking of. You live a life of such privilege, Alli. You’re admired and envied by so many young women, sought after by so many young men.”
“So what?” Alli said. “I hate that privilege means the world to my parents. It means nothing to me, but they don’t get it, they don’t get me at all.”
Sharon regarded her sadly. “I never got Emma, you know. All that anger, all that rebellion.” She shook her head. “There were times when I thought she’d surely burst from keeping so much from us.”
“The secrets we keep.”
Sharon clasped her hands together. “I think secrets deaden us in the end. It’s like having gangrene. If you keep them long enough, they begin to kill parts of you, starting with your heart.”
“Your heart is still beating,” Alli said.
Sharon looked away, at the photo of Emma on a horse. She could ride, that girl. “Only in a medical sense, I’m afraid.”
Alli moved closer to her. “You still have Jack.”
“Seeing you here …” Sharon bit her lip. “Oh, I want my daughter back!”
Alli took her hand again. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Sharon looked into Alli’s eyes. How young she looks, she thought. How vulnerable, how angelic. She felt all of a sudden a great, an overwhelming desire for solace, for a peace inside her churning self. She wondered whether she possessed the strength to find it. The Church couldn’t provide it, nor all the prayers spoken by all the faithful in the universe. In the end, there was only what she could summon up from inside herself.
“Yes, please,” she said. “Tell me about Emma.”
Sharon confounded Jack utterly when he returned to the house.
“I have an idea,” she said brightly, “why don’t you and Alli spend the night here? Alli can have the spare bedroom, and this sofa is very comfortable. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve fallen asleep on it.”
Jack, mindful of the Secret Service detail he’d left behind, his brain turning over the problem of how once and for all to track down Ronnie Kray, heedlessly said, “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
Sharon’s face fell. “But why not?”
Seeing her stricken face gave him pause. He saw her on the sofa next to Alli, both women, torsos twisted, turned toward him. It was their proximity to each other, as if they were intimates, as if they had been talking of intimate things when he walked in. There was something about Sharon’s face, an expression he felt certain he’d never see again.
“It would be so nice,” Sharon said, “all of us together.”
Jack, his mind changing gears, thought she might be right. “Why don’t we all go to my house? It’s larger and—”
Seeing the change come over Sharon’s face, he stopped in midsentence.
“Jack, come on. You know that house gives me the creeps.”
What was the use? he thought. No matter what he said, she’d never agree to go there, let alone spend the night.
“Alli and I have to go,” he said.
Sharon stood up. “Why, Jack? I know you’re not comfortable here, but just this once, stay here with me.”
Jack shook his head. “It’s impossible, Shar. Alli’s Secret Service detail is expecting her to be at the house.”
“You mean you deliberately ditched them to bring her here?” The sabers were rattling again, the warhorse stamping its huge hooves.
“It was necessary,” Jack said.
“As far as you’re concerned, it’s always necessary to break the rules.”
“Not always.” How easy it was to fall back into the old patterns. “Sometimes I bend them.”
“Stop, please!” Alli cried.
They both turned in her direction.
“This isn’t anything to fight about,” she said. “You’re just fighting for the sake of fighting.”
“Alli’s right,” Sharon said. “Half the time I don’t even remember what we’re fighting about.”
“Then come with us,” Jack said. “Spend the night.”
“I’d like to,” Sharon said. “Really I would.” She shook her head. “But I’m not ready, Jack. Can you understand that?”
“Sure,” he said, though he didn’t, not really. If it wasn’t for the Secret Service detail, he would have consented to stay here tonight. What was it about Gus’s house she despised so? He couldn’t work it out. He’d asked her so many times without getting a satisfactory answer, he had no desire to go over that old turf again. Besides, like her, he was sick to death of fighting.
“I guess it’s time for you to go, then.” Sharon embraced Alli, and they kissed. She stood in the lighted doorway, watching them as they went down the walk to Jack’s car, and she shivered, as if with a premonition, or a feeling of déjà vu, as if she’d experienced this helpless moment of sadness and loss before.