"Mckinley,.Robin.-.Sunshine" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinley Robin)

There was no reason that this should make my eyes fill with tears. I was just tired. УI didnТt meanЧohЧthanks,Ф I said. I should have wanted him gone as soon as possible. I should have been longing for the sight of the sun touching the horizonЧat least once we got out of the trees. But I wasnТt. I was grateful that he was going to see me to my front door. Standing by the cabin and looking at the place my car should have been and wasnТt, I didnТt think I could do it without him.
I was glad he hadnТt fried.
We went down to the lake in our little connected duo. I had grown sort of used to being carried, and because it was such an odd thing to be doing at all, the crucial, fundamental oddness of our necessary proximity was less noticeable. Walking side by side with my hand tucked under his arm was much odder and more uncomfortable. I also found that it made me feel more lopsided. It was probably only a function of being so tired, but having the power exchange, or whatever it was, only going on through one hand made me feel dizzy. I leaned on him not very voluntarily.
The ground here was mostly dirt and moss with a little struggling grass or grasslike weeds, so my bare feet were not in much danger. When we got to the shore I chose the marshiest place I could findЧI knew where to look, there was a little inlet just east of the cabinЧ and made him sit down in it, and then rubbed bog slime and mud all over him, including his hair. He was so skinny my hands went thump thump thump down his ribs. He put up with all of this with perfect stoicism. He put one hand round my ankleЧso I would have both hands freeЧbut I told him to use both ankles for balance. My balance.
I was a little more artistic about my own ornamentation. I only had to look like someone who might be jiving with this freak in a nonmandatory way. So I rubbed mud into my hair and let it drip down one side of my face and over that shoulder. I primly kept the mud away from the cut on my breast. My motherТs rules of hygiene were very clear about preventing dirt from entering an open wound, and I didnТt have a Band-Aid to hand. It would have had to be several very large Band-Aids anyway. (I hoped mud on the vampireТs injured ankle wasnТt going to cause him any problems: that the clean-of-live-things trick was a general defense.) Besides, the slash was probably good added verisimilitude and we could use all the help we could get. Verisimilitude of what? My lip was still swollen but it had stopped bleeding hours ago, and the metal tang of blood was no longer in my mouth. Hooray. I wanted to feel as little like a vampire as possible. I didnТt like the sensation that the boundaries were getting a little blurry.
I had spent a lot of time sitting by this same inlet with my grandmother. In the fifteen years since then it had changed its course and silted up. When we had sat here you could hear the small pattering stream that had created the inlet, but it was silent now. All I could hear was my own breathing, and the splat of my handiwork. There werenТt even any birds.
The vampire insisted, if you could call it insisting, that he would carry me the last stretch of woods to the first streets of the town. Homogeneity, he reminded me, and blood spoor. And I remembered how much faster we went when it was only him walkingЧand that it was another twelve or fifteen miles to the edge of townЧand made no protest.
He carried me right up to the crumbling cement of the end of the last street, and let my legs drop down gently on the disintegrating curb. I didnТt have to pretend to lean on him to keep contact; I needed him to keep me upright. I put my arm through his and my hand on his wrist. We bumped gently at shoulder and hip. The power ripples sloshed a little as I adjusted to walking on my own feet again, but there was none of the sudden danger of losing my balance that there had been when IТd discovered the disappearance of my car. In fact the ripples now seemed to be slightly altering their shape and pattern to help me. The dizziness IТd felt when we walked down the inlet subsided.
I had just enough sense left to put the now-empty bottle of water in a city litter bin.
I donТt ever want to have another journey like those last fifteen or so miles across town. I know I keep going on about how tired I was, but that last exhaustion was like a mortal illness, and I felt I could see my death a few hundred feet down the street ahead of us. IТm a pretty good walker, but IТm talking about normal life: Mel and I might hike fifteen miles around the lake looking for animals and trying to stay out of the way of Supergreens, but we would take all day at it, have several rest stops and a long halt for lunch, and go home tired and pleased with ourselves. We would also be wearing shoes. This was fifteen miles on top of all that had gone before, and IТd been running on empty for a long time already. It wasnТt only my death I was seeing; I was beginning to hallucinate pretty badly. Lots of people get sort of gray, ferny, cobwebby mirages around the edges of their vision when they get overtiredЧand IТd had them before occasionally when we were shorthanded at the coffeehouse because everyone was sick but Charlie and me, and we were working sixteen-, eighteen-hour days day after dayЧbut this was the first time the ferns and cobwebs had things moving around in them, not to mention the new, full-color palette. It was not an enjoyable experience. I did recognize what was going on, and went on peering through the fringes of my private picture show, and making out which way we should be going out there in the real world. I knew the layout of my city pretty well even if I didnТt know all its details, and even at this final personal frontier I kept my sense of direction. It was, however, just as well that I was so numb I was barely aware of my poor feet. And it was a good thing that blood spoor was no longer an issue.
The sun was by now moving quickly toward setting, which should have been a good thing; the pair of us were going to be less grisly-looking in twilight. No one accosted us. We saw a few people, but either they were already totally lit and away and having much better private screenings than mine (which several of them were animatedly discussing with themselves) and couldnТt care less about us, or they took one look and crossed to the other side of whichever street we were on, and kept their eyes averted. I thought of asking the vampire if he was doing anythingЧif vampires can persuade, can they repel too?Чbut it was still daylight, if barely, so this didnТt seem likely. Maybe my power-ripples were doing something. Maybe that was part of the adjustment theyТd made at the edge of town. Maybe we were just lucky.
In the middle of all this I had a fierce implausible longing for my grandmother, who could have explained to me what I was doingЧI was sureЧand how I was doing it. As I started to slip over some kind of definitive last line, as I began to feel that the power-ripples were soon going to be all there was left of me, that my own personality was weakening, thinning, would blow away like the spidery gray stuff over my eyes, I suddenly, passionately, wanted to know what I was doing.
It wasnТt the vampire the people were avoiding, though. It was me. I was the one reeling and mumbling and off my head and probably dangerous.
I was fading with the daylight. I had stretched myself too far.
I got us to the edge of the park at about the moment that twilight turned into darkness, and he picked me up again without so much as a break in his stride, and plunged under the trees, into the night that was his element. I could feel the power-ripples moving faintly through me even though I no longer needed them for a sun-parasol. I thought, mistily, maybe theyТre trying to keep me alive. Nice of them. He must be trying too. Funny sort of thing for a vampire to doЕ
It was all darkness around us, darkness and trees, and the vampire speeding through it. Feebly I murmured, УI have no idea where we are any more.Ф
УI do,Ф he said. УI can smell your house.Ф
Perhaps I fell asleep. That would explain the dreams: that I was flying, that I was dead, that I was a vampire, that I was standing by the lake with my grandmother, and I had just opened my closed hands, but instead of a flower or a feather or a ring, blood welled up and spilled over the edges of my hands, and welled up and welled up, as if my hands were a fountain. But a fountain of blood.
The vampire came to a halt. I blinked my eyes open and saw lights twinkling through a few trees, and made out the shape of my house. My house. We were on the far side of the garden. I could see the pale lavender of the lilacs by YolandeТs sitting-room window. She was the sort of old lady who had a sitting room instead of a living room. And the lights on in it meant she was still awake, although usually she went to bed as early as a person who gets up at four a.m. to go make cinnamon rolls does. I wondered what time it was.
The vampire said, УYou will need a key to open your door.Ф
He could leave me here. I could ask him to let me down, and then he could go. I could knock on YolandeТs door, and, once the fright of having a derelict on her doorstep had worn off, after she had recognized me, she would let me in with her spare key. She would be appalled and sympathetic. She would call the coffeehouse and the doctor and the police. She would run me a hot bath and help me into it, and cluck over my wounds. She would not ask me any questions; she would know I was too tired, and she would recognize the signs of shock. She would give me hot sweet tea and orange juice, and human warmth and company and understanding.
I couldnТt face her.
Slowly I moved, to pull the knife-key out of my bra. The vampire knelt, holding me in his lap. I leaned against him, closed my hands round the small heavy bit of worked metal. I called on the power of daylight. It came from a lifetime away, but it came. I felt something snap, as if my stomach had parted company with my small intestine, or my liver from my spleen; but when I opened my hands again, there was the key to my front door.
The vampire picked me up again, gently. He walked round the garden. He went silently up the porch steps, which I could not have done. The steps all creaked and the porch itself creaked worse. He drifted, dark and silent as any shadow, to my door, and, still in his arms, I twisted the key in the lock, turned the handle, pushed the door a tiny way open, and whispered, УYes.Ф
He carried me upstairs and through the door at the top and into my front room, and laid me on the sofa. I didnТt hear him stand up or move away, but I heard my refrigerator door open and close, and then he was kneeling beside me again. He slid an arm under my head and shoulders and raised me and stuffed pillows under me till I was half sitting, and said, УOpen your mouth.Ф
He dribbled a little of the milk into my mouth and made sure I could swallow it before he held the carton up steadily for me to drink. He cupped the back of my head with his other hand. What did he think he was, a nurse? I would have asked him but I was too tired. He got most of the carton of milk down me, eased my head back onto the pile of pillows and then started feeding me something in small scraps. After the first few, more of my senses came back from nowhere and I recognized one of my own muffins, left over at the end of that last day at the coffeehouse, several centuries ago. He was tearing off small bits and feeding them to me slowly, so I wouldnТt choke. The muffin was still pretty good but three days old to a baker counts as over. I think he may have fed me a second one, still scrap by scrap. Then he held up the carton of milk again till I finished it. Then he pulled the pillows back out, except for one, and laid me down with my head on it.
I donТt remember anything more.
I woke up I donТt know how many hours later with the light streaming through the windows. It had finally reached the sofa where I was lying, and touched my face. I couldnТt remember where I wasЧ no I was at homeЧno, not my old childhood bedroom, this had been my apartment for nearly seven yearsЧthen why wasnТt I in my own bedЧwhy did I remember sleeping on a floorЧno, that had been a dreamЧno, a nightmareЧdonТt think about itЧdonТt think about itЧ and at the same time I knew I had overslept and should have been down at the coffeehouse hours ago and Charlie would kill meЧno he wouldnТtЧwhy hadnТt one of them called to find out where I was?
I tried to sit up and nearly screamed. Every muscle in my body seemed to have seized up, and I didnТt think there was a single nerve end that hadnТt shouted NO when I moved. I ached all over, inside and out. And furthermore I feltЕI felt as if all my insides, the organs, the organ systems, all that stuff you studied in biology class and promptly forgot again, all those murky, semiknown bits and pieces, no longer had the same relationship to each other that they had beforeЕbeforeЕsilly sort of thing to feel, I must be delirious. My mind would keep drifting backЧdonТt think about itЧbut how was I to make sense of where I was, at home, sleeping on the sofa, in broad daylight? And so sore I couldnТt move. IfЧall thatЧwas a nightmare, what had happened to me?
I tried to sit up again and eventually succeeded. There was a blanket laid over me, and it fell off, and onto the floor.
I was wearing a filthy, stained, dark cranberry-red dress that clung round me at the top and swirled out into yards and yards of hem at my ankles. I was barefoot, and my feet were in shreds, scratched and abraded and bruised and swollen. I had mud all over me (and now all over the sofa and the floor as well) and a long, curved ugly slash across my breast that had obviously bled and then clotted. Its edges ground against each other and throbbed when I tried to move. My lower lip was split and that side of my face felt puffy.
I started to shiver uncontrollably.
Painfully I picked up the blanket again, and wrapped it round me, and made my way into the bathroom by feeling along the walls, and turned the hot water on in the bath. The hot water was going to hurt, but it was going to be worth it. I poured in about four times as much bubble bath as I usually use, and breathed the sweet lily-of-the-valley-scented steam. Even my lungs hurt, and my breathing seemed funny, there was something about the way I breathed that was different fromЕWhile I waited for the bath to fill, I groped my way into the kitchen. I ate an apple, because that was the first thing I saw. There was an empty carton of milk on the counter by the sink. I didnТt think about this. I ate another apple. Then I ate a pear. I moved into the light pouring through the kitchen window and let it soak into me while I stood staring out at the garden. In the welcoming, restorative sunlight, trying to keep my mind from thinking anything at all, I felt the tiny, laborious stirring of a sense of well-being: the convalescentТs rejoicing at the first hint of a possible return to health. I would have a bath, and then I would call the coffeehouse. I didnТt have to tell anyone anything. I could be too traumatized. I could have forgotten everything. I had forgotten everything. I was forgetting everything right now. My feet and my face and the gash on my breast would stop anyone from pressing me too hard to remember something so obviously terrible. Yolande must be out; otherwise she would have heard the bathwater running, and have come upstairs to find out if I was all right. She would have known that IТve been missing, that on a normal day I would have been at the coffeehouse hours ago, not up here running bathwater.
That IТve been missing.
That IТve beenЕ
I didnТt have to remember or think about anything. I could just stand here and let the sun heal me. I was relieved that Yolande wasnТt here, asking questions, being appalled and sickened. Reminding me by her distress. I was relieved that no one would disturb me till I had finished forgetting.
The bath should be full by now. Now that the sunlight had begun to do its work I wanted to be clean. I might have to use every bar of soap I had, and bring the scouring pads in from the kitchen. I was going to burn this dress, wherever it came from. It was nothing IТd have ever chosen. I couldnТt imagine why I was wearing it. When I was completely clean again, and wearing my own clothes, I would call the coffeehouse, tell them I was home again. Home and safe. Safe.
As I turned away from the window a square of white lying on the kitchen table caught my eye. It was my notepad, which usually lived beside the phone. On it was written:
Good-bye my Sunshine.
Constantine

PART TWO
It might not have been too bad, afterward, except for two things. The nightmares. And the fact that the cut on my breast wouldnТt heal.
ThatТs nonsense, of course. If IТd been able to face being honest, there was no way it wasnТt going to be bad.
I suppose I didnТt realize how rough I was that first morning. After I had one bath I had another. (Bless landladies with absurdly huge water heaters.) I washed my hair three times during that first bath and twice during the second. Hot water and soap and shampoo hurt like blazes, but it was a wonderful, human, normal, this-world sort of hurt. Getting dressed wasnТt too difficult because my wardrobe specializes in soft, well-worn, and comfortable, but finding shoes and socks that didnТt feel like they were scarifying my poor feet with steel wool was hard. Then I drank a pot of very strong tea and on the caffeine buzz I almost half convinced myself that I felt almost half normal and if I felt half normal I must look half normal.
Wrong.
At the last minute I didnТt burn the dress. I put it in the sink with some handwash stuff and then hung it in a corner with a bowl under it to drip dry. It leaked thin bloody-looking water and this made me so queasy I almost screwed it up to be burned anyway. But I still didnТt.
I did burn the underwear IТd worn. It was like I had to burn something. I took it outЧnearly on tiptoe, clinging to the shadows, as if I was doing something illicit I might be caught atЧand stuffed it into the ashes and wood chips on YolandeТs garden bonfire heap. My hands shook when I struck the match, but that might have been the caffeine. It burned surprisingly well for a few scraps of cloth, as if my eagerness to see something go up in smoke was itself inflammatory.
I stuck that note in a drawer so I didnТt have to see or think about it. Or about who had written it.
The house key that had been a jackknife lay on top of a pile of books next to the sofa. It had been one of the first things IТd seen when IТd managed to lever myself upright. I had done all of this other stuffЧwash, rewash, inject caffeine, set fire to thingsЧwhile not deciding what to do about it. It wasnТt that an extra house key was an enormous problem. But it was a house key that had been a pocket-knife. Was supposed to be a pocketknife. And I missed my knife. I wanted it back. And there was only one way to get it back, which would remind me of all that stuff I was working on forgetting. I had returned to the world where I made cinnamon rolls and was my motherТs, not my fatherТs, daughter, and I wanted to stay there.