"Oates, Joyce Carol - In Shock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)

"Ma'am, we didn't see any boy. Maybe he did just walk away?"

"No! Damn it, he was hurt. He was unconscious. His lips were blue. I was afraid he'd stopped breathing."

This was met with respectful silence.

Rachael said, pleading, "Why won't you tell me what happened to him? I don't understand this."

"Ma'am, don't excite yourself. We'll take care of it. We'll check out there on Pine Ridge, and see."

Rachael said, trying to remain calm, "He was a boy of about ten. He'd ridden his bicycle over a fallen, live wire, and collapsed...and I tried to help him. That's all I remember." Her voice trailed off into silence. Suddenly, she was exhausted. Like a swimmer who has struggled to shore, reaching now for another's outstretched hand but too weak to take hold of it, to save herself.

WARNING SYMPTOMS FOLLOWING TRAUMA prolonged headache/neckache prolonged nausea/vomiting dizziness/vertigo rapid/erratic heartbeat sleeplessness depression/mood shifts lack of appetite difficulty in concentrating difficulty in seeing pupil of one eye larger than the other

If one or more of these symptoms are experienced by the patient within five days of trauma, contact a physician immediately.

She lay still while the electrocardiogram was administered by a nurse. Her heart had ceased beating for a few seconds as she'd lain helpless on the road unaware of the road or of her misbehaving heart but now (Rachael was certain) she was fully recovered, and her heart calmly beating at the core of her body had no secrets to reveal. The boy? The boy died. That's why they were lying. Something to do with malpractice. Unless the boy recovered. Walked away and left her. Rode away on his bicycle, as a boy would. Forgot her, as a child might. Maybe the boy had played a prank? Ran Rachael down on his bicycle? The boy with the cruel, crude face. A dog-boy, those jaws. Those eyes. But no: a child so young, an innocent. What had they done with his body?

The nurse was standing over Rachael, with a look of concern.

"Miss De Long? I'm going to run this test again."

And so she did, and Rachael was informed that her heart showed no abnormalities, and she said, politely, "I didn't think it did. But thank you."

Nature abhors, aborts her errors. You must see it's for the best.

Rachael was not a woman given to morbid brooding, she saw the logic of optimism.

There was her ex-husband L--. This man who'd devoured her heart. Approaching her as in panicked fury she stammered, "You! Get away from me! I don't know you! Why are you here! Don't touch me."

She was calm enough to make a telephone call. In one of the waiting interims between tests. Telling friends in Philadelphia she'd be late for a dinner they'd planned, possibly she wouldn't make the evening at all, she was so sorry. When her friends asked what was wrong Rachael said with the cheerful evasiveness that was Rachael's usual style that it was nothing, her car seemed to be having engine trouble, and was being repaired. And if I almost died this morning in a ridiculous accident, that's my secret. It was mid-afternoon when finally she was discharged from the hospital. After having been a captive for hours. Unless it was days. Noting the date on a calendar: April 13. The strangeness of this fact struck Rachael who'd never before given it a moment's thought. Numbered days!

April 13. The answer to a riddle.

When first Rachael had been carried into the ER in her dazed, disoriented state, a woman with bluish stiffened lips and a slow, erratic pulse, gauzy white curtains had been drawn briskly shut around her, and when she'd tried to sit up, she was restrained; her heartbeat examined, her blood pressure taken, and a nurse with a blurred moonface tested her mental acuity by asking her the date. Rachael murmured with her stiff, numbed mouth that felt like cotton batting she knew it was April...a month called April. The month of Easter...(But what was "Easter"? She hoped she wouldn't be asked.) But the specific date eluded her. Next, the nurse asked Rachael if she knew the year and after some hesitation Rachael said, "Is it...2000 yet? I think it is." (Not that she knew what "2000" meant. It seemed to her the height of human vanity, to attempt to measure time.) The nurse smiled as if Rachael had at last said something clever, and made a notation on her chart.

She was free to leave.

She was declared free of injury and free, at least for the time being, of symptoms, and so she was free to leave. Touching a live wire in the road, were you mad? Suicidal? When they'd been married, L-- would have accused her. For anything that befell Rachael, an intelligent woman admired by friends and colleagues yet a woman not without problems, a woman fully human, her occasional illnesses, accidents, professional crises, any misfortune, L-- seemed at once to blame her for.

Why? I love you so much, that's why.

Any hurt or offense to you, I resent.

It was a three-mile taxi ride back to 88 Pine Ridge Road. Into the wooded hills above the aging industrial city where, in residential neighborhoods, storm damage was most evident. There were badly ravaged and split trees, toppled trees, fallen branches, flotillas of withering leaves, puddles glittering like ice. Clean-up crews were working noisily, grinding debris. Rachael was relieved to see electric company repairmen. It was four P.M. and the sun had shifted in a sky partly mottled with cloud, still there was blinding, blazing light; Rachael shielded her eyes. How chill and astringent the air, how refreshing! As after a cataclysm. Pine Ridge Road was partly cleared of debris. It looked to Rachael both familiar and unfamiliar like a scene in a film she'd seen long ago and could remember only in patches. But I am here, alive. I am back. For a confused moment Rachael wondered if she were someone else, in the taxi, returning to another house: the Chatham house, across the street from the De Long house.

Maybe L-- was here already. Awaiting her?

She asked the driver to drive a little farther, to turn around in the cul-de-sac. She stared hard at the stretch of road where, that morning, she'd suffered a shock from a broken, weirdly humming wire...where the boy had bicycled, and fallen. I heard him cry out in pain. I did!