"Murphy, Pat - The Falling Woman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Pat)

Chapter Two: Diane Butler

I pressed my forehead to the window of the jetliner and watched the plane's shadow ripple over the brown land below. The plane jerked a little, bucking like a car on a rough road. We were flying through turbulence, and I felt sick to my stomach. My hands were shaking.
Still, I felt no worse than I had for the past two weeks. Not much better, but no worse. At least I was moving. I turned away from the window and rubbed my eyes. They felt gritty and sore from crying and lack of sleep. When was the last time I had slept? Three days ago, maybe. Something like that. I had tried to sleep but when I went to bed I lay awake, my eyes open and staring at nothing. I rubbed my eyes again and covered them with my hands for a moment, shutting out the light. Maybe I could get some sleep now. Maybe.
"Excuse me," said a man's voice. "Are you all right?"
Someone touched my arm and I jumped, moving my arm away.
I had not really looked at the man when he had taken the seat beside me. He was Mexican, a few years younger than I was-maybe in his mid-twenties. Dark hair, high cheekbones.
"Fine," I said. My voice was hoarse and I cleared my throat. "Just tired." I tried to smile to reassure him, but my face was stiff and uncooperative.
"I thought you were sick." He was watching me with concern.
I knew I looked pale. I felt pale. I felt half dead. "Fine," I said. I could think of nothing more to say. My father is dead, I could say. I just broke off a bad love affair and quit my job as a graphic artist. I could tell him that. I'm on my way to meet a mother I have not seen in fifteen years. And I think I might be going crazy. Then I would burst out crying and hide my face in the shoulder of his sport coat and leave a big damp spot. He looked very earnest and very sympathetic. "I'm fine," I said and turned back to the window.
"Are you going to be spending much time in Mщrida?" he asked. "If you are, I can suggest some good restaurants."
I smiled politely, a plastic smile, a Barbie doll smile, a curve of the lips with no intent behind it. "Thanks, but I'll be on an archaeological dig outside Mщrida. I don't plan to spend much time in the city."
"You must be going to Dzibilchalt·n," he said and smiled when I nodded.
"How did you know?"
He shrugged. "Mщrida is not so big. That's the only archaeological dig nearby. I have heard about Dr. Elizabeth Butler, the woman leading the excavation."
"What have you heard?"
"She writes books."
I smiled despite myself. "That, I know." I had read all my mother's books, buying the hardcover editions as soon as they came out.
"How long will you be there?"
"Hard to say."
I leaned back and closed my eyes against further questions. For once, the world inside my head was dark and quiet. The plane was taking me south and there was nothing I could do to speed it up or slow it down. No action was required of me now. I could not stop even if I had wanted to.
My memories of the past two weeks were hazy, but some moments stood out clearly. I remember the night before my father's funeral. I could not sleep, and at some point, around about midnight I think, I got the bottle of Scotch from my father's liquor cabinet, and I started drinking.
The liquor did not stop the noise in my head, but the buzz of the alcohol helped drown out the nagging voices that told me about how badly I was behaving, about how ashamed my father would be to see me. I turned on the television and idly flipped from station to station, never lingering beyond the first commercial, until only one station remained on the air, playing old movies until dawn.
I sat in my father's easy chair and watched a pretty blond actress argue with a craggy-faced man. I knew, without seeing the rest of the movie, that the argument would come to nothing. Sooner or later, the craggy-faced man would sweep the blonde into his arms and she would allow herself to be swept, forgetting all past disagreements. I knew that by the end of the movie they would kiss and make up. They always kissed and made up in old movies.
My mother and father had fought, but somehow they never got around to kissing and making up. When they fought, they never shouted-but even when my mother kept her voice down, her words had a bright sharp intensity, like the touch of alcohol on an open cut. And my father was stubborn too-he would not give an inch. I remember the time that he told me that my mother was crazy. There was a hard edge of reproach in his tone, as if somehow her insanity had been her own fault.
A commercial came on, and I downed the rest of my Scotch. I left the television talking to itself and wandered out onto the balcony. My father's house was perched on the edge of a hill, and the balcony offered a panoramic view of Los Angeles, a carpet of twinkling lights, freeway interchanges glittering like distant mandalas, neons flashing, streetlights, houselights, headlights. I stood at the railing, looking down at the city and thinking about my mother. In a moment of sudden dizziness, I closed my eyes.
I opened them to darkness and silence. No lights, except for the pale crescent moon that hung low over the dark valley. No freeways, no houses, no neon. The cool breeze that fanned my face carried the scent of distant campfire smoke. I could hear an owl hooting in the distance and the rapid beating of my own heart.
I clutched the railing with both hands, fighting a wave of vertigo. Panic came over me: I feared I would tumble over the railing and fall into the black void beyond the balcony, plummeting forever in endless darkness. I closed my eyes against the vision and when I opened them I saw the lights of Los Angeles, distant and cold, but infinitely reassuring.
I quit drinking. I did not sleep, but I quit drinking. And in the small hours before dawn, I decided to find my mother. The need to find her seemed linked to my drunken vision of falling and to the restlessness that had plagued me even before my father's death.
I shifted uneasily in my seat, listening to the reassuring hum of the jet's engines. I tried to imagine my mother's face, building it out of the darkness. A thin face, dominated by restless blue eyes. Short and unruly hair, brown with streaks of gray, the color of an English sheepdog. A slight woman whose clothes were too large for her, whose hands were always moving, whose eyes were bright and curious. The picture of my mother that formed in my mind was static, frozen, but I remembered my mother as being constantly in motion: walking, cleaning, cooking.
When I was a child, I had daydreamed about my mother constantly. I dreamed that she would come home. How and why she came changed with each dream. She drove up in a jeep to take me away to an archaeological dig. She roared up on a motorcycle and took me to live with her in Berkeley. She rode into town on a black horse and we galloped away into the sunset. Details changed: she wore khaki, jeans, Mexican costume, ordinary dress. But always the dreams were bright and clear, and always the ending was happy. Fifteen years ago I stopped dreaming.
It was Christmastime. The air had been scented with burning pine; the wine had sparkled in my mother's glass. I was fifteen years old, and 1 sat on the carpet by the fireplace. Robert, my father, sat in an easy chair beside me. My mother sat alone on the love seat, an ugly antique with
carved wooden arms and upholstery of heavy tapestry cloth. She had flung her left arm carelessly across the back of the love seat and the sleeve of her shirt, a baggy shirt that was a little too large for her, had fallen back to show the white scars that marked her wrist. Her skin was tanned around the scars.
Robert and my mother were talking politely. "Are you staying in town?" Robert asked.
"At the Biltmore," she said. "I'll be heading back to Berkeley tomorrow. I've been in Guatemala for two months now, and I have much too much to do."
At the time, I wondered what my mother could possibly have to do. She seemed out of place in my father's house, but I could not imagine where she would be in place. She seemed a little nervous, glanced at the clock on the mantel often.
"Where were you in Guatemala?" I asked.
"Near Lake Izabal," my mother said. "Excavating a small site. A trading center. We found some pottery from Teotihuacсn, up by Mexico City, some from farther north." She shrugged. "We'll be arguing for months about how to interpret our findings." She grinned at me-a brilliant, open smile very unlike the polite smile with which she had greeted Robert. "After all, archaeologists need to do something in the winter."
"Would you like some more wine?" Robert asked, cutting off my next question. He moved quickly to refill her glass.
He changed the subject then, talking about the house, his business, my schoolwork. When my mother finished the glass of wine, we exchanged presents. Her package for me was wrapped in brown paper, and she apologized for the wrappings. "The Guatemalan market offers a limited choice in wrapping paper," she said in a dry tone that seemed to imply that I had been to Guatemala and knew the market quite well.
I unwrapped a shirt made of a heavy cloth woven of burgundy and black thread. On the pockets and back, a stylized bird surrounded by an intricate border was woven into the cloth. "You can watch the women weaving these shirts in the market," my mother said. "That's a quetzal bird, the symbol of Guatemala. It's called a quetzal shirt."
I pulled the shirt on over my T-shirt. It was loose on my shoulders, but I pulled it tight around me. "It's great," I said. "Just great."
"It's a little large," Robert said from his seat by the fire.
"I'll grow into it," I said, without looking at him. "I'm sure I will."
There was more polite conversation-I couldn't remember it all. I remember Robert congratulating her for her second book-just out and getting good reviews. My father said good-bye at the door. I walked my mother to the car. It had rained that day and the streets were still wet. A car passed, its tires hissing on the pavement. The Christmas lights that my father had strung along the front porch blinked on and off: red and blue and green and gold.
I stood beside my mother's car. When she opened the front door, the interior light came on and I caught a glimpse of the clutter on the backseat: two more packages wrapped in brown paper and tied with ribbon, a dirty canvas duffel bag adorned with baggage tags, a straw hat with a snakeskin band that held three brilliant blue feathers. My mother sat in the front seat and closed the door.
"Where are you going to spend Christmas?" I asked her. "I'll spend Christmas day with friends," she said. "I'll be driving back to Berkeley the day after." I heard the click of metal on metal as she slipped the key into the ignition.
"Can I come?" I asked quickly. "I won't be any trouble. I thought maybe ..." I stopped, caught in a tangle of words.
The colored lights flashed on her face: red, blue, green, gold, red, blue. I have a clear memory of her face, frozen like a snapshot. The air around us seemed cold.
"Come with me? But your father ..." She stopped. "You'll be spending Christmas with your father."