"Severna Park--The Breadfruit Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Severna)

She touched the keys, dialing her mother's number twice, like a spurt of code from a sinking ship.
She laid the receiver on the sideboard, off the hook, and went back into the kitchen.
"You know," he said as she forced the rest of the sandwich into her mouth, "you never got a chance
to clear out your room before your mother took you away. You've still got toys and books and all sorts
of things up there."
She shrugged.
"Well," he said, "could you pack up the stuff you want? I'm thinking about renting out the house."
As if, she thought, and resisted the urge to ask who else might want an alien-proof fort to call their
own.
"I could stand to live in a smaller place," he said. "Further out in the country. You know? I'll give you
some boxes and you can pack up tonight before you go to bed."
Jesus Christ, she thought. He's not going to tell me anything. We're just going to vanish.

Upstairs the windows were unblocked. The pinkish haze of the night sky and the snow at least gave
the illusion of normality. Lisa sat on the bed and waited for him to stoke up the wood stove which had
never been in her room before. It was an immense cast-iron thing and took up most of one wall. A
couple of logs and the room would be so hot, she'd have to open the window. The best thing was to
pretend that she wouldn't bolt for the main road as soon as he looked away. Even if she fell off the roof,
the drop wasn't far enough to really hurt. She fallen out of the trees half a dozen times, and only needed
stitches once.
She wanted to know what made this the right night for her to be kidnapped, but there was no point
in asking. He would tell her he'd gotten secret messages through the fillings in his teeth, or he'd had the
most amazing dream, or worse, act wounded.
Bob closed the stove's iron door over the hot, roaring sound of the fire and eased down next to her
on the bed. "Don't you miss being home?" He meant here. Not her mother's new apartment with the
automatic dishwasher and cable TV.
He pointed at the wooden shelves littered with the things she'd left behind a year ago. "You didn't
even take your art." He meant her colored-pencil drawings of flowers and birds. Bob had told her about
Darwin, given her a copy of The Voyage of the Beagle to read, hoping, she supposed, that it would
inspire her to think "outside the box" or maybe to Take a Stand on her own, but what she'd been
fascinated by were the engravings of the exotic animals and plants, the foreign flowers, so lush and
strange and improbable. The pictures spoke to her in a way Darwin didn't and during the summer she
would collect blossoms and feathers from deep in the surrounding woods and copy them in colored
pencil in the cool shade of the attic eaves.
She'd left behind everything that reminded her of him. "That's just stuff for kids."
He put his hands on his knees and frowned at the floor. It was his position of confession. She'd seen
it often enough when her mother would demand to know what'd happened to his paycheckтАФwhen he
was workingтАФand he would have to tell her that he'd ordered more motion detectors, or a telescope, or
a special camera lens which could filter out reality and pick up the presence of ghosts.
When she was very young, Lisa couldn't understand why her mother would get so angry. Bob's
fantasy world was much more interesting than hers. The problem was, his was threatening and solid
enoughтАФto Bob, at leastтАФto be shot at.
"I know your mom doesn't think much of me," he said, "but I still love her. You know? I love you
both. She thinks that I think she owes me for pulling her out of Guatemala when things got bad down
there, but I don't. I never have. I love her for who she is. It's never been anything less than that."
Her feet were starting to get warm. The bread and cheese, which had formed a hard, lardish lump
in her stomach, began to soften, but she didn't say anything. He'd tried this angle before. He'd made her
cry hard and honestly, but afterwards she'd felt his feelings and opinions squeezing out what she'd been
certain of before. When her mother talked about him later, Lisa heard his words cutting their way out of
her own mouth. He'd twisted her into a weapon before, so this time she concentrated on the heat from