"Robert R. McCammon - Mine" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

The sound roused her from a dream about a castle on a cloud, and set her
teeth on edge. It had been a good dream, and in it she'd been young and slim
and her hair had been the color of the summer sun. It had been a dream that
she'd hated leaving, but the baby was crying again. Sometimes she regretted
being a mother; sometimes the baby killed her dreams. But she sat up in bed
and slid her feet into her slippers because there was no one else to take care
of the child.
She stretched, popping her joints, and stood up. She was a big, heavy
woman with broad shoulders, and she was six feet tall. Amazon Chick, she'd
been called. By whom? She couldn't remember. Oh, yes; it came to her. By him.
It had been one of his pet names for her, part of their secret code of love.
She could see his face in her mind, like a blaze of beauty. She remembered his
dangerous laugh, and how his body felt hard as warm marble atop hers on a bed
fringed with purple beads. . . .
_Stop_. It was torture; thinking of what used to be.
She said, "Hush, hush," in a voice raspy with sleep. The baby kept
crying. She loved this child, better than she'd loved anything for a long
time, but the baby did cry a lot. He couldn't be satisfied. She went to the
crib and looked at him. Tears were rolling down his cheeks in the dank light
from the Majik Market across the highway. "Hush," she said. "Robby? Hush,
now!" But Robby wouldn't hush, and she didn't want to wake the neighbors. They
didn't like her as it stood. Particularly not the old bastard next door, who
knocked on the walls when she played her Hendrix and Joplin records. He
threatened to call the pigs, and he had no respect for God, either.
"Quiet!" she told Robby. The baby made a choking sound, nailed at the
air with fists the size of large strawberries, and his crying throttled up.
She picked up the infant from his crib and rocked him, while he trembled with
baby rage. As she tried to soothe his demons, she listened to the noise of
eighteen-wheelers rushing past Mableton on the highway that led to Atlanta.
She liked it. It was a clean sound, like water flowing over stones. But it
made her sad, too, in a way. Everybody was going somewhere but her, it often
seemed. Everybody had a destination, a fixed star. Hers had burned brightly
for a time, flared, and dwindled to a cinder. That was a long time ago, in
another life. Now she lived here, in this low-rent apartment building next to
the highway, and when the nights were clear she could see the lights of the
city to the northeast. When it rained, she saw nothing but dark.
She walked around the cramped bedroom, crooning to the baby. He wouldn't
stop crying, though, and it was giving her a headache. The kid was stubborn.
She took him through the hallway into the kitchen, where she switched on the
light. Roaches fled for shelter. The kitchen was a damned mess, and anger
burst in her for letting it get this way. She swept empty cans and litter off
the table to make room for the child, then she laid him down and checked his
diaper. No, it wasn't wet. "You hungry? You hungry, sweetie?" Robby coughed
and gasped, his crying ebbing for a few seconds and then swelling to a thin,
high keening that razored her skull.
She searched in vain for a pacifier. The clock caught her eye:
four-twelve. Jesus! She'd have to be at work in little more than an hour, and
Robby was crying his head off. She left him flailing on the table and opened
the refrigerator. A rancid smell drifted from it. Something had gone bad, in
there amid the cold french fries, bits of Burger King hamburgers, Spam,