"Kress, Nancy - Philippa's Hands" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

Which was funny, because there was no noise.
Twenty-two dead children: babies with their skulls crushed before the soft spots had closed, toddlers carrying . . . whatever toys toddlers carried in Marrakesh.
She picked up the knife and cut off her left index finger at the first joint.

Much later, the doorbell rang. Tuesday -- the weekly grocery delivery. Philippa sat weak and sick in the old rocker with the bottom rung missing, her head thrown back against a tied-on cushion. The grocery boy wouldn't come in; he would leave the groceries on the porch and take away the check made out to Hall's Superette, as he always did.
She had not put a check out on the porch.
The bell rang again. Philippa tried to think but the pain still wouldn't let her. She sat pressing several folds of a bed sheet to the amputated joint; as the outer folds reddened she had moved onto a different section. Much of the sheet was red, and the air swelled with the rich, metallic scent of blood. But Philippa knew she would not lose enough blood to die, would not get gangrene in the amputated tissues, would not even faint from shock. So many things that never happened. She sat pressing the blood-sodden sheet to her maimed left hand with the thumb and one whole finger of the right, and listened to the doorbell ring
A schoolbus crash in Calgary, a cholera epidemic along the Indus River, a dam burst in Colorado, a political massacre in El Salvadore.
Could the grocery boy see through the dingy curtains covering the front window?
And the two she hadn't believed, the first times: the bridge collapse in Florida, the crop failure in a Chinese province she couldn't pronounce.
The curtains bad a hole, just above the window sill nearest the door, the fabric had been clawed through by a cat that had run away the day after Jim's funeral. Jim's cat. If the grocery boy stooped, he could peer through the hole. Philippa tried to inch her rocker in the other direction, but the effort just made her dizzy. it would be a few hours yet before she could eat anything, clean up the bedroom, change the quilt. She was running out of quilts.
The doorbell stopped ringing, and the knob rattled. Philippa made a small noise; from the rocker she could see that the chain was off. But the door was locked, she was sure of that, she'd locked it last night.
The door heaved twice, the first heave curving the wood gracefully inward like a the bow of a violin, the second springing it back on its hinges and bouncing it so hard against the faded wallpaper that the doorknob punched a round hole in the plaster board beneath. A hand caught the door on the rebound. It wasn't the grocery boy from Hall's Superette but Sam Hall himself, walking into the room with the deliberate, shambling step Philippa knew since high school. He wore his mechanic's coveralls, boots leaving sloppy snow on the carpet and grease at the knees in splotches like the outlines of distant countries.
Philippa glared at him, furious and embarrassed. He gazed mildly around the room and she had the idea that he missed nothing, saw it all through to the buckling bones: her mother's clock ticking heavily in the corner, the piles of newspaper furred with dust, the ashtray from Niagara Falls killed with paper clips and pennies and thread, the rounded corners of the overstuffed sofa tufted with dangling buttons, the unwashed curtains and scrupulously washed ceramic Madonna, with its beautiful draperies and foolish simper. Saw it all, as if it were the engine of a truck he were taking apart behind the Superette, removing one part after another in his slow way, running a careful thumb over each to feel its essential soundness under the necessary grease. Then he looked again at Philippa, at the bloody sheet and four healed stumps, and behind his eyes moved something that she didn't like.
"Philippa, you oughtn't be doing that to yourself here."
She meant to say furiously, "And you oughtn't be breaking and entering into people's houses, Sam Hall!" but those weren't the words that came. Instead she heard herself say, "There wasn't anything else I could do," and after that the mortifying tears -- in front of Sam Hall! -- rolling hot and stinging on her dry skin, spraying outward when she swiped at her dripping nose, turning pink where they fell on the bloody sheet in her hands.
They talked about it only once. Sam Hall took her to Mass on Sunday, Mass at a reasonable 10:00 a.m., and he didn't assume the $5 he put in the collection plate was for both of them. Philippa liked that. When women she hadn't seen since the funeral rushed up afterward to exclaim over her hands and gawk at Sam, he took Philippa firmly by the elbow and guided her back towards his truck. After church came a movie in Carter Falls, a thing neither of them found funny, about people chasing and killing each other over something that fit inside a computer. The movie was redeemed by a drive by the lake on an afternoon bursting with lilacs. Then came a dinner at the Apple Tree in Carter Falls, and another one with Sam's grown daughter home from college in Plattsburgh. The daughter never mentioned Philippa's hands. Another movie, only this one was funny, another dinner out, a political picnic for John Crane, who had gone to school with Philippa and Sam and Jim and now was running for county sheriff. And all those weeks they talked about it only once, in Sam's truck, parked in Philippa's driveway just before she went inside and he started the long drive back to town.
Philippa said abruptly out of one of their long comfortable silences, "Do you believe in aliens?" The word sounded foolish there in the cab of the pick-up, so she added, "Like in the movies?"
"Nope," Sam said.
"Ghosts?"
"No."
"Angels?"
"In Bible times."
"Not now?"
"No."
Philippa nodded. "I wanted to be a nun, after Jim died. Can you imagine? I got books to study, and I wrote to the convent at Plattsburgh."
"What did they say?"
"They said they were a teaching order, and I wasn't a teacher."
Sam slapped at a mosquito above his collar. A moth lit on the windshield: ghostly pale wings translucent in the light from the porch. He said, "People do weird things sometimes. From loneliness."
He glanced at her hands. Philippa laid them defiantly on the dashboard, side by side. "It wasn't from loneliness." That was true.
He considered this. She breathed in the smell of his shirt, cigarettes and 30-weight oil and fabric softener. Finally he said, "You needed rescuing."
Rescuing! Hysterical laughter rose in her, heady as whiskey. Rescuing! Her! When it was she who had saved . . . single-handedly . . . single-handedly . . . Philippa put her palm over her mouth and leaned forward against the dashboard. As soon as she shifted, the moth flew towards the porch light.
"Philippa," Sam said, "Philippa -- " She knew then it was all he would ever say, all he would ever ask, and that she didn't have to answer. It was all right if she never answered. She shifted the other way, to lean against his shoulder.
"Sometimes there just isn't any choice," she said.
"Uh huh," he agreed and laid his hand on her breast, and she heard the sudden laughter in his slow voice.

They came at dawn, three days before Philippa's wedding. The window was open, and the room smelled of a heavy rich August night too warm for dew. Three glowing nebulous figures at the foot of the bed, welling with rosy tears. Philippa woke and her spine went rigid.
The one on the left laid the newspaper clipping on the bed. The bedspread was new, a frivolous green quilted in shiny squares and edged with six inches of eyelet ruffle. Sam was painting the bedroom green. Through the outlines of the wailing women Philippa could see the outlines of the paint cans, both ghostly against the bare plaster Sam had already stripped and washed.
This time the clipping was large, more than half a page, the headline in thick black letters. Right and left edges were clean, top and bottom torn. The top, Philippa thought: where the name of the newspaper would be. She never would find out what it was called. Against the bright shiny green of the bedspread the paper looked unnaturally white, like someone about to faint.
_no no no no no no_
Philippa's feet slid out of bed. The carpet had been rolled up for the painting. Bare wide-planked hardwood floor was cool enough to make her toes curl under. The newspaper felt light and dry in her hand, even lighter than paper should feel. Without turning on the light, Philippa carried the clipping across the room to the window, where there was just barely enough light to read it.

TWA JET CRASHES IN BOSTON HARBOR
FATALITIES FEARED HIGH
BOSTON -- A TWA 707 jetliner failed to take-off at Logan Airport late last night and plumetted into Boston Harbor, killing at least 257 people. The plane, Flight 18 from Boston to Washington, achieved take-off speed but failed to leave the ground at the end of the runway, which ended at the Harbor. The plane sped forward and sank in the 63-degree water.
The jetliner remained two-thirds submerged in the water, enabling at least 9 passengers and airline personnel to escape through the two doors they managed to open.
"There was this roar and then a huge splash," said Elizabeth Brattle, who witnessed the crash from the deck of her sailboat moored in the Harbor. "Waves rolled in, nearly swamping the boat. You could hear people screaming. It was horrible."
By twenty minutes after the disaster, diving teams were on the scene to assist in the recovery. Divers are expected to remain on the scene throughout the night.
The cause of the plane's failure to lift into the air is unknown. TWA spokesperson Richard Connington expressed shock and concern but cautioned against speculation that
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