"M. Rickert - Anyway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rickert Mary)

Anyway
by M. Rickert


"What if you could save the world? What if all you had to do was sacrifice your son's
life, Tony's for instance, and there would be no more war, would you do it?"

"Robbie's the name of my son," I say. "Remember, Mom? Tony is your son. You
remember Tony, don't you?"

I reach into the cabinet where I've stored the photograph album. I page through it
until I find the picture I want, Tony and me by his VW just before he left on the
Kerouac-inspired road trip from which he never returned. We stand, leaning into
each other, his long hair pulled into a ponytail, and mine finally grown out of the pixie
cut I'd had throughout my single-digit years. He has on bell-bottom jeans and a
tie-dyed T-shirt. I have on cut-offs and a simple cotton short-sleeved button-down
blouse and, hard to see but I know they are there, a string of tiny wooden beads,
which Tony had, only seconds before, given to me. I am looking up at him with
absolute adoration and love.

"See, Mom," I point to Tony's face. She looks at the picture and then at me. She
smiles.

"Well, hello," she says, "when did you get here?"

I close the book, slide it into the cabinet, kiss her forehead, pick up my purse, and
walk out of the room. I learned some time ago that there is no need for
explanation. She sits there in the old recliner we brought from her house, staring
vacantly at nothing, as if I have never been there, not today, or ever.

I stop at the nurse's station, hoping to find my favorite nurse, Anna Vinn. I don't
even remember the name of the nurse who looks up at me and smiles. I glance at
her name tag.

"Charlotte?"

"Yes?"

"My mother asked me the strangest question today."

Charlotte nods.

"Do the patients ever, you know, snap out of it? Have you ever heard of that
happening?"

Charlotte rests her face in her hand, two fingers under the rim of her glasses,
rubbing her temple. She sighs and appraises me with a kind look. "Sometimes, but
you know, they тАж"

"Snap right back again?"