"picoult, jodi, mercy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Picoult Jodi)

"To tell you the truth," Mia said, "I'm not entirely sure."
Allie glanced at the row of funeral baskets. It was very likely her own fault that Mia hadn't had any time to find accommodations. She thought of Maggie MacDonald and knew that the last thing she wanted was even a moment alone by herself. "Why don't you stay with me, for the night? Cam isn't going to be home until late, and it'll be nice to have some company."
Mia smiled. "I'd like that." Then she bit her lip. "I have a cat out in my car."
Allie waved her hand. "It can't possibly do anything to the house that Cam hasn't already done." She picked up a broom and began to sweep the cuttings into a pile, concentrating, with a stroke that bordered on violence so that her mind would not wander. She raked the heavy bristles across the wooden floor, over and over and over, until the scrape of the raffia against the polyurethane rang like a scream in her ears.

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She stopped sweeping, balancing her forearm on the knob of the broom, taking deep breaths so that she would not break down in front of this woman she hardly knew.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Mia's voice came softly from behind.
Allie shook her head, letting her throat close with tears. "I don't know what's the matter," she said, trying to smile. "I guess I just keep thinking how much you'd have to love a person, to be able to do something like that for her." She wiped her eyes on the shoulder of her shirt. "It's a horrible thing to imagine."
"Maybe," Mia said quietly. "Maybe not."
1\ /l"ia Townsend believed in love, she really, truly did. She knew it L fl could strike certain people like a stray line of lightning, leaving them prostrate and burning and gasping for breath. After all, this had been the case with her parents. She had grown up surrounded by their consuming love, constantly in its presence, but always on the outskirts. In fact when she thought of her childhood, she imagined herself standing in the snow, her nose pressed to a small, cleared ring of glass on an icy windowpane, watching her parents waltz in circles. She pictured the circles getting tighter and smaller and warmer, until her mother and father converged into one.
So when asked if she believed in love, Mia said yes--without hesitation---but she did not count herself as a participant. She thought of it as the chemical reaction it was, and saw herself not as part of the equation but as the by-product you sometimes find after the combustion.
Allie MacDonald had driven her to the small Colonial she'd lived in for five years with Cam. She'd made tea and soup and told Mia the stories behind certain objects in the house: the old oak trunk with the bullet stuck in the center, the basket-hilted sword hung over the fireplace, the red tartan blanket that Mia was beginning to recognize as the Carrymuir MacDonald plaid. Then she'd tucked embroidered sheets around the cushions of the living room couch and had given Mia two pillows and one of the blankets and told her to sleep well.
Mia fell asleep with Kafka, the cat, tucked under her arm, and almost immediately started dreaming of her strongest childhood memory: the time her parents had left her behind.

Jodi Picoult
Mia had been four years old when they went for that walk in the woods. She had trailed behind them, passing in front when her parents stopped for several minutes to kiss in a copse of bushes. Knowing it would be a while, Mia had wandered off to listen to the trees. She was sensitive to sounds--she could hear blood running through veins or buds opening on flowers. So while her parents moaned in each other's arms, she flopped down on her belly in the moss and waited for the telltale hum and stretch of bark as the branches sought out the afternoon sun. When she remembered to look up, her parents were gone.
She had tried to listen very carefully for the traces of their laughter on the breeze, or of her father's fingers brushing her mother's neck, but the only sound she could distinguish was her own unsteady breathing.
Mia had sat down and hugged her knees to her chest. It wasn't on purpose, she told herself. It wasn't their fault. It wasn't that they didn't love her either; it was simply that they loved each other more.
After about three hours, she had wandered to a road, and a driver she did not know took her to the closest police station. Mia could remember, even now, certain things about the officer: how nice he was when he helped her climb into the chair behind his desk; how his hair smelled of peppermint and did not wave in the wind. He had driven her home in a police cruiser and they walked in through the unlocked door. She poured him a glass of milk while they waited in the kitchen for her parents to appear. Mia had sat very quietly at the table, wondering if it was only she who could hear through the ceiling the rush of her mother's breath, the square pressure of the big four-poster on the bedroom floor, the pound and ache of her parents' love. . . .
Mia woke up when she heard the first tumblers in the lock giving way. Quiet footsteps traced their way into the living room. Blinking, she let her eyes adjust to the darkness. She sat up to see Cameron MacDonald raise his arms over his head, stretch with an animal grace, and turn in her direction.
His first thought was that Allie had been waiting up for him, and had fallen asleep on the couch. But he had talked to her at dinnertime; told her she'd best go to sleep. Years of instinct had him reaching for a gun belt he'd removed in the kitchen, so his hand was riding on his hip when he realized he knew the woman on the couch.

She was wearing one of Allies nightgowns and her hair was in even greater disarray than it had been when he'd first seen her in the flower shop. Her hands clutched at a MacDonald plaid and her eyes were wide and bright.
He tried to move, and couldn't.
Then she smiled at him, and with an instinct he could only consider self-protection, Cam whirled and ran up the stairs.
A Hie was asleep on her back, wearing a fine lawn nightgown blued by the light that was ribboning through the bedroom window. She was snoring. Cam held his breath and eased down beside her on the bed. He untied the laces at the throat of the nightgown and gently peeled the fabric away, so that Allies breasts lay exposed like an offering.
He bent his head to her nipple, running his tongue along the edge until her hand came up to his hair. She made a small sound in the back of her throat and tried to sit up. "No," Cam whispered. "Just stay there."
He pulled off his shoes and socks and uniform, tossing them across the room. His badge hit the corner of the dresser with a metallic ping. He stood naked in front of her, watching her eyes darken and her nipples peak harder, knowing that he did not even have to touch her to get her started.
When he brushed his lips down Allie's ribs, she tried to sit up again. Cam shook his head. "But I want to," Allie whispered. "I want to touch you."
"Not now," Cam said. "Not tonight." He turned toward her again, making love with a methodical rhythm, as if he was cataloging each inch of her somewhere in his mind. By the time he moved up to look in her eyes, he was heavy. He tried to push away the churning thoughts of Jamie MacDonald in the holding cell, of Maggie's body lying in the yellow light of the embalming room, but he found himself thinking instead of the woman downstairs on the couch.
With his head pounding, Cam buried himself in Allie, moving more roughly than he'd ever intended to. When it was over, he rolled her onto her side, noting the red abrasions of his beard stubble on her neck and her breasts; the bite he'd left on her shoulder.
Jamie MacDonald had murdered his wife more gently than Cam had made love to his own.
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THREE
T Te didn't so much mind the dying.
A. X That surprised him a little; at twenty-five, he still pictured his life like the long ribbon of a river, spread out farther than the eye could see in twists and gullies that caught one unaware. He'd been fighting to protect what was his for nine years now, and he'd certainly accepted the fact that one careless moment, one running sword, could kill him. But the odds had never seemed quite so bad.
The sleet and rain sluiced beneath the folds of his plaid, and the wet ground of the moor rooted his feet. Suddenly the mist parted, revealing a flash of a gold button here, a fluttering standard there, the steaming breath of a mounted soldier's horse.
He looked to his left, and to his right, but for the first time in his life he did not know the men who were fighting beside him. His own men, his tenants and tacksmen and cousins, would be on the road to Carrymuir by now.
Like him, they had seen the sea of ten thousand sassenachs, heard the rolling cannons, listened to the conflicting commands given to the Highland army. They had seen the zealousness on Prince Tearlach's smooth face and had known that they simply could not win.
When, in the wee hours of the dawn, he had gone to strike his bargain with the Duke of Perth, he knew that his argument was purely a matter of logistics. He had agreed to lead his men, he told Perth. That did not mean he himself would be fighting.

Jodi Picoult
It was a technicality; any oath he'd made would naturally imply he'd be fighting alongside, since no laird would expect his clan to do what he himself would not. But in this case, he was willing to bend the truth to protect the others. And he knew when he offered the commander the choice of a ragtag band from Carrymuir or his own skill in combat, it wouldn't be much of a choice at all.
He wondered, as he slogged across the moor for the third time, his leg bleeding from a lucky round of Sassenach grapeshot, whether any of these fools realized he did not want to be here at all. He didn't want to face one more bloody English soldier, or step on the still-heaving backs of Scots fallen four deep.
He wondered what God was like. He hoped that heaven resembled Scotland.
He murmured the paternoster over and over to hear the sound of his own voice. Seeing a Sassenach just turning his way, he lifted his left arm high in the air. He brought the sword down at the man's neck, cleaving it wide, feeling the hot blood melt the sleet on his chest.
Cameron MacDonald sank to his knees and vomited; tried to remind himself that he had given his word to fight to the death. He did not much relish dying, but aye, it was a fair trade. He loved the people of his town too much to see them suffer.
And had he the chance, he'd do the same all over again.