"Fielding, Joy - Lost" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fielding Joy)

"Mother "

Julia spun around on her heels and disappeared into the bathroom at the
end of the hall, slamming the door behind her.

(Flashback: Julia, a chubby toddler, her Shirley Temple curls framing
dimpled, chipmunk cheeks, burrowing in against her mother's pregnant
belly as Cindy reads her a bedtime story; Julia, age nine, proudly
displaying the fiberglass casts she wore after breaking both arms in a
fall off her bicycle; Julia at thirteen, already almost a head taller
than her mother, defiantly refusing to apologize for swearing at her
sister; Julia the following year, packing her clothes into the new
Louis Vuitton suitcase her father had bought her, then carrying it
outside to his waiting BMW, leaving her childhood-and her mother22
behind.) Later Cindy would wonder whether these images had been a
premonition of disaster looming, of calamity about to strike, whether
she'd somehow suspected that the glimpse she'd caught of Julia
disappearing behind the slammed bathroom door was the last she would
see of her difficult daughter.

Probably not. How could she, after all? Why would she? It was far
too early in the day to be mindful of the fact that great calamity,
like great evil, often springs from the womb of the hopelessly mundane,
that defining moments rarely have meaning in the present and can be
seen clearly only in retrospect. And so the morning of the day Julia
went missing was rightly perceived by her mother as nothing more than
one in a long string of such mornings, their argument only the latest
installment of their ongoing debate. Cindy thought little of it beyond
that which was obvious her daughter was giving her a hard time, what
else was new?

Julia .... Mother .... Checkmate.

TWO met this great guy."

Cindy stared across the picnic table at her friend. Trish Sinclair was
all careless sophistication and ageless grace. She shouldn't have been
beautiful, but she was, her face full of sharp, competing angles, her
Modigliani-like features further exaggerated by the unnatural blackness
of her hair, hair that hung in dramatic swirls past bony shoulders,
toward the ample cleavage that peeked out over the top buttons of her
bright yellow blouse.

"You're married," Cindy reminded her.

"Not for me, silly. For you."

Cindy lowered the back of her head to the top of her spine, lifting her
face to the sun and inhaling the faintest whiff of fall. A month from