"Steven Gould - Jumper 02 - Reflex" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gould Stephen Jay)

Then he was tumbled into the ambulance, facedown on the floor, and it was accelerating. He felt
fingers on his wrist, then something stabbed deep into his left buttockтАФHey!тАФrousing him almost
enough to visualize the library in Stanville, Ohio.

Then the ambulance took a turn and kept turning, spinning, like a top, and the lights went
completely away.




THREE
"Where is your husband?"



"I know Joe loves me, but, Christ, the things he does sometimes. Last night it was the laundry
thing, again."

Millie was working through lunch, trying to make up as many of her missed appointments from
the day before as possible. What she really wanted to do was run around in circles screaming but she
couldn't see any way that would help.

Sheila McNeil was thirty-five and having problems with her husband after four years of
marriage. From everything Millie had heard in the past two months, a large part of the problem was
Joe's: a fear of intimacy that drove him cyclically between approach and avoidance. Sheila's attempts
to get Joe to come in for some joint sessions had been unsuccessful to-date, so Millie's current
strategy was working on Sheila's coping skills and reducing the woman's tendency to obsess on her
husband's actions instead of dealing with her own.
 Millie made an encouraging "I'm listening" sound in her throat.

"It's just as you said. I was trying to get him to talk about his feelings again, why he didn't want
to see somebody, and, pow, instant argument because I left a load in the washing machine for two
days and now it was getting mildewed."

Millie nodded. "How did you handle it?"

"I told him I'd take care of the laundry but he was avoiding the real issue."

"And?"

"He stormed out and started doing the laundry."

At least he was still in the house. In the early years of Millie's marriage, when Davy had
stormed out of an argument, he was usually thousands of miles away.

"How did you feel about that?"

"Angry. Hurt. Pissed off. Then it struck me as funny, but I decided that laughing at him wasn't
going to improve things."