"Mary Rickert - Don't ask" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rickert Mary)

тАЬOkay. So, right. YouтАЩre protecting your children by worrying about me
and my frigginтАЩ cigarette?тАЭ He shakes his head, laughing a little jagged
laugh, and then, without further comment, turns and walks out the fire exit
door.

We should have just let him walk away. We should have gone home.
But instead, we followed him, through the icy white streets of our town.

He walks down the cold sidewalk (neatly shoveled, only occasionally
patched with ice) beneath the yellow street lamps, hunched in his flimsy
jean jacket, hands thrust in his pocket, acrid smoke circles his head. We
cannot see his face, but we imagine the nasty, derisive curl of his lips, the
unruly eyebrows over slit eyes, the unshaved chin stubbled with small black
hairs as though a minuscule forest fire raged there.

We walk on the cold white sidewalks, beneath the blue moon and we
breathe white puffs that disappear the way our sons did. We keep our
distance. We are sure he does not realize we have followed him, until,
suddenly, he leaps over the winter fence (meant to discourage errant sleigh
riding from this dangerous hill) into the park. A shadow passes overhead,
just for a second we are in darkness, and then, we are watching the shape
of a lone wolf, its long tail down, its mouth open, tongue hanging out, loping
across what, in spring, will be the baseball diamond. We all turn, suddenly,
as if broken from some terrible spell, and, careful because of those
occasional patches of ice, we run home where our lost boys wait for us. (Or
so we like to think.) We find them sprawled, sleeping, on the kitchen floor,
draped uncomfortably across the stairs, or curled, in odd positions, in the
bathroom. We donтАЩt wake them. Any sleep they find is sorely needed and
any interruption can keep them up for days, running in circles and howling at
all hours. The doctors have advised us to give them sleeping pills but we
are uncomfortable doing so; we understand that their captors often
drugged them.

тАЬItтАЩs not the same thing,тАЭ the experts say.

Well, of course not. The experts are starting to get on our nerves.

And now, we realize, as we stand in the dark rooms of our miracle
lives, we have been consulting the wrong professionals all along. We donтАЩt
need psychologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, or the famous lost boy.
We need a hunter, someone who knows how to kill a wolf.

****

We find her on the Internet and pool our resources to pay her airfare
and lodging at the B & B downtown. We wish we had something more
appropriate, fewer stuffed bears and fake flowers, more hunting lodge, but
we donтАЩt.

When she arrives we are surprised at how petite she is, smaller than