"Kress, Nancy - Wetlands Preserve" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

"You don't have the right."

"I know. But I want to anyway. Carlo is my son."

"Only biologically. A hyena is a better father than you've been," Lisa said, and they were off again, the same old track, sickening her even before they really got rolling.

"Only because I had a more urgent job," Danilo said, apparently willing to go over it all yet once more. Lisa wasn't. He'd made his choices, and at the time Lisa had even seen why he'd made them, or thought she had. The fate of the planet over the fate of a single child, the human race itself at stake, global warming, depleted oceans, dangerous genetically engineered organisms released into the environment, deforestation, pollution, nuclear radiation, blah blah blah. Or, rather, not blah blah blah; she was preparing herself to work for the same ends, through scientific ecology. But it all looked different somehow when you had that actual single child with you day and night, dependent on you, needing your care and interrupting your sleep and clamoring for your love. You realized that there was no more urgent job.

There was no way to tell that to Danilo, no way that he would hear. Lisa said only, "I'll get Carlo. The woman next door takes care of him while I'm at work."

"Is she Е can she Е"

"She's had experience with disabled children." And then, cruelly, "She costs most of my grant and all of my scholarship, of course, between daycare and physical therapy. Nothing left to donate to good causes."

Danilo didn't answer. Lisa went next door to get Carlo.

It was one of his good days. He laughed and reached up for her, and she knelt by the wheelchair and hugged him. Undoing all the harnesses that kept him comfortable was a major undertaking. "Mommy! I drawed a picture!"

"He did, Lisa. Look," Mrs. Belling said, and held up a childish picture of a blue tree, green sun, and red structure that might have been a house or a car. "He's getting really good with his right foot, aren't you, Carlo?"

"I'm good," Carlo said, with such innocent grandiosity that Lisa wanted to weep. He was almost five. Next year he would start school. How long would he keep that pride around other people, people less kind than Mrs. Belling or Lisa's colleagues? Carlo was intelligent, happy, severely deformed. Both arms hung truncated at his sides, devoid of any nerves to transmit muscle impulses. His head lolled to one side. He would never walk. His radiant smile nightly filled her with fear for his future.

Danilo had left her, joined first Students Against Toxins and later Greenpeace, the day Carlo had been born. Carlo's father blamed the baby's condition on contaminated groundwater in the factory town where Lisa had grown up. Perhaps he was right. Lisa had gone into shock that Danilo could leave her now, leave her with a deformed infant, leave her unmarried and about to start graduate school and all but broke. Selfish! She had screamed at him. Necessary, he had replied, so more Carlos aren't born like this, and more, and more. She was the selfish one not to see that. It was no different than going off to war. He was disappointed in her that she couldn't see that.

The horrible thing was, she could. But she was still the one left with Carlo. Whom, now, she wouldn't trade for anything on Earth.

"Carlo," she said, after lavishing praise on his picture, "Uncle Danilo's here." Her one condition for letting Danilo see him at all: unclehood, not fatherhood. Fatherhood was something you did, and Danilo never had.

"Uncle Danilo?" The child frowned, trying to remember. It had been over a year since Danilo's last will-o'-the-wisp appearance.

"Yes, your Uncle Danilo. You'll remember him when you see him. Let's go, sweetie."

"Bye, Mrs. Belling!" Carlo called. "See you tomorrow!"

Lisa watched Danilo flinch when she wheeled in Carlo. Revulsion, or guilt? She hoped it was guilt. "Carlo, this is Uncle Danilo."

"Hi, Carlo."

"Hi! Mommy, he gots a bord!"

"A 'beard,' sweetie. He has a beard."

"Can I touch the beard?"

Danilo knelt by Carlo's chair. Lisa moved away, unwilling to stand that close to Danilo. But on the warm air she caught the scent of him anyway, bringing such a rush of visceral memory that she turned abruptly away. God, how long had it been for her Е and never like with Danilo.

Lisa Jackson and Danilo Aglipay. Salty working-class American and wealthy cultured Filipino. Ideological purists, committed activists, the sexual envy of an entire campus, with her blonde small-boned beauty and his exotic dark intensity. Except that the working-class salt-of-the-earth parents shoved Lisa out of the family when she took up with a "gook," and the wealthy Filipino swore he would never go home to the father who made his money exploiting the planet, and the blonde beauty swelled with pregnancy that ruined the activist plans so much that Danilo left, spouting speeches.

And out of that wreck I made a life, Lisa reminded herself fiercely. Graduate school, Carlo, the internship at Kenton. The alien animals. Talk about world-changing events! If Danilo knew about the aliens Е but he wouldn't. It was her knowledge, her life, and no whiff of masculine pheromones would ruin it for her. Not now, not ever.