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

vulnerability of which she knows so intimately), even strangers in the mall, in the
grocery store, not exactly smiling or looking peaceful, generally, but also not
freaking out, and I think, oh, but they are. Everybody is freaking out and just
pretending that they aren't.

I take up smoking again. Even though I quit twenty years ago, I find it amazingly
easy to pick right back up. But it doesn't take away the strange hunger I've
developed, and so far resisted, for the bloodstones safely stored in the shoebox
under my bed.

When I visit my mother it is with an invigorated sense of dread. Though I grill her
several times, I cannot get her to say anything that makes sense. This leaves me
with only my dad.

"Now, let me get this right, Mom believed that if she buried the bloodstonesтАФare
you supposed to bury just one, or all of them?тАФthen that meant Tony would die,
right, and there would never be another war?"

"He had to die over there, see? In Vietnam. He had to be a soldier. It didn't matter
when he died in California; that didn't have anything to do with it, see?"

"But why not?"
"How should I know?" He taps the side of his head with a crooked finger. "She was
nuts already way back then. Want my opinion it was his dying that did it to her, like
the walnut tree."

"What's a walnut tree have to do withтАФ"

"You remember that tree in front of our house. That was one magnificent tree. But
then the blight came, and you know what 'caused it? Just this little invisible fungus,
but it killed that giant. You see what I'm talking about?"

"No, Dad, I really don't."

"It's like what happened with тАж It was bad, all right? But when you look at a whole
entire life, day after day and hour after hour, minute after minute we were having a
good life, me and your mom and you kids. Then this one thing happened and, bam,
there goes the walnut tree."

That night I dream that my mother is a tree or at least I am talking to a tree in the
backyard and calling it Mom. Bombs are exploding all around me. Tony goes by on a
bicycle. Robbie walks past, dressed like a soldier but wearing ice-skates. I wake up,
my heart beating wildly. The first thing I think is, What if it's true? I lean over the side
of the bed and pull out the shoebox, which rattles with stones. I lick my lips. What if
I could save the world?

I open the lid, reach in, and pick up a stone, turning it in my fingers and thumb,
enjoying the sensation of smooth. Then I let it drop back into the box, put the lid on,
shove it under the bed, and turn on the bedside lamp. For the first time in my entire
life, I smoke in bed, using a water glass as an ashtray. Smoking in bed is extremely