"Duncan,.Lois.-.Summer.Of.Fear" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Lois)

"Rachel, dear," Mother said, "I know how upset you are, but you mustn't say such things. Julia has been through grief too, you know, a far worse grief than this. She's a brave, wonderful girlЧ"
"She's hateful!" I spat out the word. "She's a horrid, hateful witch! I bet she killed Trickle herself byЧoh, doing something. Maybe she put poison in his water bowl!"
"Rachel!" Mother's face went white.
"She could have done it!" I cried. "She's bewitched all of youЧPete and Bobby and you and Dad and CarolynЧand Mike. Even Mike! That's why Trickle bit her! Dogs can judge people better than anyoneЧthey know when somebody is horrid!"
The storm broke within me and the flood of tears came, pouring down my face, running salt into my mouth, and I turned and started back into the house, planning to run up to my room and throw myself across the bed and weep it all out until I could think clearly again. Then I remembered that the room was no longer my own. I could not possibly go into it with Julia there, and where else was there? I was locked out of my own house as truly as Trickle had been.
Whirling on my heel, I stumbled blindly in the other direction, out the garage door into the yard, and flung myself face down in the grass beside the body of my dog. I did not touch him now, for the shape that lay beside me was no more the real Trickle than a stuffed animal, and I buried my face in my arms and let the sobs come until I was too exhausted to cry any longer.
I don't know how much time passed before I heard Bobby's voice saying, "Rae?"
I lifted my head, and he was standing over me, his light brows drawn together in a solemn look that might have been, funny in another time, under other circumstances.
"Rae," he said, "do you want me to bury him for you?"
"No," I said sharply. The finality of placing Trickle in the ground and covering him over with dirt was more than I thought I could bear.
"We've got to," Bobby said practically. "It's summer, and you know how it is in the summer. We could have a funeralЧremember the way we did for my turtles?"
"I don't want a funeral," I said. "I'll bury him myself." And then, seeing Bobby's face, I realized that he was almost as upset as I was. Next to me, he had probably loved Trickle more than anybody in the family had.
"You can dig the hole," I told him.
So he got a spade and dug a grave in the corner of the yard out by the rose bushes, and I went in and got a box which had once contained darkroom equipment. It wasn't a real funeral, but as he covered over the box Bobby said, "Don't you think we should say a prayer?"
"I guess so," I said, so we recited the Lord's Prayer very softly, and then I broke a rose off the bush nearest the grave and sprinkled the petals over the loose earth, and it was over.
When we went back to the house the whole family including Julia was in the living room. They seemed to be having some sort of conference, for I could hear Mother saying something about "Чterribly upset, of courseЧ" and Dad saying, "Чhas to learn to face these realities, no matter how distressing they are."
I passed the door without pausing and went up to my room. Even when she wasn't in it, the room held the feeling of Julia's presence. Her bed was neatly made, as compared to mine, still a shambles from my restless night and early rising.
On impulse I went to the closet and pulled open the door. My pink dress was there on a hanger on Julia's side of the closet. Angrily I snatched it up and transferred it to my side, but it looked bright and strange and unlike any of my other clothes. I knew that I would never wear it. The essence of Julia clung to every fold of the material; somehow in one wearing she had claimed it for her own.
"Witch!" I whispered. "Witch!"


Nine

My birthday is at the beginning of July.
I have always loved birthdays. I have a chain of birthday memories that run ail the way back to the year I was three, although Dad insists that no one can remember that far. I got a doll for that birthday; she had real hair, not the painted kind, and was dressed in a ballet skirt, and when I took her out of the box I thought she was alive.
So, you see, I do remember.
Later there was a circus birthday when I saw my first elephant and ate my first cotton candy. And there was the bicycle birthday, and the tennis racket birthday, and when I was twelve there was the birthday that brought Trickle.
But this particular birthday, the one on which I turned sixteen, there was no air of festivity. This was my own fault, for my parents wanted to give me a party.
"Sixteen is such a special age," Mother kept saying. "Don't you want to invite some people to celebrate? Or if you'd prefer to have it just family, we could go out for dinner someplace nice and then maybe to a play."
"No," I told her. "I really don't feel like doing anything. I've outgrown that sort of thing."
The truth, of course, was that I would not share my birthday with Julia.
Julia, Just the sound of her name was enough to make me feel slightly sick. When I heard my Mother speak it, her voice filled with warmthЧ"Julia, dear, you really must do some posing for me. It's a waste to have a beautiful niece and not to use her for a model"Чmy stomach churned.
"Julie," my father called her. Every time he saw her his face brightened, as though she were the second daughter he had always longed for.
I held myself apart from them all and watched, and it was a strange feeling, as though I were a visitor from another planet observing something of which I was no part. I watched Julia smiling at my father and calling him "Tom." I watched her helping Mother in the kitchen, moving deftly about with a pan or a dish towel, taking over chores that formerly were mine. I watched Bobby tease her into a game of dominos and saw Peter's eyes follow her about with a kind of hopeless adoration.
But worst of all was watching her with Mike. For the first time in my life I wished that he did not live next door to us, for it made it much too easy for him to wander over after work, for no special reason, to sit on the porch steps and chat. He was as nice to me as he always wasЧnicer, reallyЧfor lie no longer tossed me playful insults or called me silly nicknames. He was politely formal and very kind.
"You look really nice today," he would say. "I like your hair like that," although my hair was no different from what it had always been, "Is that a new outfit?" when I was wearing the same tired pair of denim shorts and faded plaid shirt that I had worn all summer the year before.
But he was not kind enough to try to hide his reason for coming.
"Is Julia around?" he would ask, avoiding my eyes. And Julia always was.
"You're not mad, are you, Rae?" she asked me. "It wasn't as though I could help it. These things do sometimes happen."
"You made it happen," I said bitterly. "You knew Mike was mine."
"He wasn't yours," Julia said in a reasonable way. People don't own other people. You told me yourself the first day I was here that you weren't going steady. I didn't break anything up. Mike says you were just good friends, that you've always been like a little sister to him."
"That's not true." I tried to speak with dignity. "He may say that now, but he wouldn't have said it a month ago."
"Things change," Julia said with a shrug.
This could not be denied. Things did change, and the thing that seemed to have changed the most was Julia herself. When I think back now, it is hard for me to decide exactly whom to picture when I say the name "Julia." There were three JuliasЧall different. There was the Julia who arrived with my parents that first day, hesitant and frightened, the haunted, tight-faced girl who stood uncertainly in the doorway in the shadow of my father, and held out her hand to me and said, "Hello." Then there was the later Julia, relaxed and self-confident, the quaint touch of the hills gone from her speech. This was the Julia who plucked her eyebrows so that they no longer hung like bushes over her huge eyes and used my lip gloss to widen her mouth and make her thin lips fuller and warmer. This Julia laughed and chattered and used Albuquerque slang and went with Carolyn to the hair dressers' and had her thick mane cut and styled into a long shag.
"She's copied Carolyn," I remarked to Peter, who immediately bristled as though he had been personally insulted.
"You're jealous," he said. "You've turned into a real cat since Mike threw you over."
"Threw me over!" True though they were, the words cut me to the core. I could not believe that my brother had said them. "What about you? Do you feel thrown over?"
"I never went with Julia."
"But you would have if you could," I said cruelly. "You fell for her like a ton of bricks, and you know it. And you're not over it either."
"So?" Peter said. "That's why I understand how Mike feels about her. No guy in his right mind could help falling for a girl like Julia, and she's got a right to choose anybody she wants. It burns me up to hear you run her down just because she has something that you haven't."