"Pat Murphy - Rachel In Love" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Pat)

By this point in the story, Rachel was usually asleep. But it didn't matter--she knew the ending. The
doctor, whose name was Aaron Jacobs, and the chimp named Rachel lived happily ever after.

Rachel likes fairy tales and she likes happy endings. She has the mind of a teenage girl, but the innocent
heart of a young chimp.

Sometimes, when Rachel looks at her gnarled brown fingers, they seem alien, wrong, out of place. She
remembers having small, pale, delicate hands. Memories lie upon memories, layers upon layers, like the
sedimentary rocks of the desert buttes.

Rachel remembers a blondehaired fairskinned woman who smelled sweetly of perfume. On a Halloween
long ago, this woman (who was, in these memories, Rachel's mother) painted Rachel's fingernails bright
red because Rachel was dressed as a gypsy and gypsies like red. Rachel remembers the woman's hands:
white hands with faintly blue veins hidden just beneath the skin, neatly clipped nails painted rose pink.

But Rachel also remembers another mother and another time. Her mother was dark and hairy and
smelled sweetly of overripe fruit. She and Rachel lived in a wire cage in a room filled with chimps and she
hugged Rachel to her hairy breast whenever any people came into the room. Rachel's mother groomed
Rachel constantly, picking delicately through her fur in search of lice that she never found.

Memories upon memories: jumbled and confused, like random pictures clipped from magazines, a bright
collage that makes no sense. Rachel remembers cages: cold wire mesh beneath her feet, the smell of fear
around her. A man in a white lab coat took her from the arms of her hairy mother and pricked her with
needles. She could hear her mother howling, but she could not escape from the man.

Rachel remembers a junior high school dance where she wore a new dress: she stood in a dark corner of
the gym for hours, pretending to admire the crepe paper decorations because she felt too shy to search
among the crowd for her friends.

She remembers when she was a young chimp: she huddled with five other adolescent chimps in the stuffy
freight compartment of a train, frightened by the alien smells and sounds.

She remembers gym class: gray lockers and ugly gym suits that revealed her skinny legs. The teacher
made everyone play softball, even Rachel who was unathletic and painfully shy. Rachel at bat, standing at
the plate, was terrified to be the center of attention.

"Easy out," said the catcher, a hardedged girl who ran with the wrong crowd and always smelled of
cigarette smoke. When Rachel swung at the ball and missed, the outfielders filled the air with malicious
laughter.

Rachel's memories are as delicate and elusive as the dusty moths and butterflies that dance among the
rabbit brush and sage. Memo-ries of her girlhood never linger; they land for an instant, then take flight,
leaving Rachel feeling abandoned and alone.

Rachel leaves Aaron's body where it is, but closes his eyes and pulls the sheet up over his head. She
does not know what else to do. Each day she waters the garden and picks some greens for the rabbits.
Each day, she cares for the animals in the lab, bringing them food and refilling their water bottles. The
weather is cool, and Aaron's body does not smell too bad, though by the end of the week, a wide line of
ants runs from the bed to the open window.