"Kate Wilhelm - Sleight of Hand(2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

Adele's voice sounded strained and husky when she answered her phone, hesitant when Barbara asked if they could get together later that day.
"Maybe another time, after a day or two? I don't think I'm up to much right now. I just found out I've lost a dear friend. I think I'll knock off early and go home to the consolation of a stiff drink or two."
"I'm sorry," Barbara said. "I saw the center mentioned in the article about Connie Wilkins. That's what I wanted to ask about."
"She's the friend," Adele said. She sounded as if she were choking. "God, why her?"
"Let me pick you up and we'll go somewhere quiet and talk. It might do you some good, and I'll ply you with the drink or two and see that you get home safely. Think how many others you've advised to talk about it, whatever it is."
"I can't leave. The staff is ready to melt down. What would that do for our clients, to see the support team in worse shape than they're in?"
"Later," Barbara said. "Put on a brave face for them, buck them up, do whatever you have to. I'll pick you up at four-thirty and you can let go then. Okay?"

Adele Wykoph had a perennial New Year's resolution: this year she would lose ten to fifteen pounds. Her doctor had advised twenty, but she had decided that was being fanatical. She was a large woman, comfortable, comforting and, at the same time, decisive and very capable at keeping the center operating efficiently and seeing to it that her clients were well served. She usually wore long skirts and over blouses that reached her hips. Hers was an impressive figure.
That late afternoon she looked tired and despondent. "It's the pits," she said by way of greeting when she got into Barbara's car, and then not another word until they were seated in Sweet Waters Restaurant, by a broad window overlooking the Willamette River. No river sound reached them through the glass.
"Gin and tonic," Adele said to the waiter who had appeared instantly. Barbara ordered coffee. She would have wine with dinner, she added.
They both gazed at the silently rushing river until the drinks were served and the waiter departed. Then Barbara said softly, "Tell me about Connie." She understood that this was the long path to what she really wanted to talk about ЧJay Wilkins Чbut it was a path that had to be taken. They would get to him.
Adele began slowly but soon her words were tumbling out haphazardly in a discursive ramble. Later Barbara would sort it out and form a narrative with a beginning, middle and end; at the moment she simply listened attentively.
Adele had met Connie and David Laramie soon after they arrived in Eugene with their infant son. David had assumed his uncle's duties at the radio station when his uncle retired. As soon as the child, Steven, was in day care Connie started doing volunteer work that included time spent at Adele's women's center. Her gentle smile, a vivacious personality and a charming Southern accent captivated everyone she worked with.
Now and then Adele's voice broke. She paused to gaze at the river. Tears filled her eyes, overflowed, and she talked on. She finished her drink and Barbara held up the glass for another. Adele was oblivious.
They had a fairy-tale marriage, Adele said. Inseparable. They adored each other, and they both worshiped their son.
Then the accident happened.
She turned to gaze at the river, longer this time, and when she spoke again, her voice was lower, duller. "She had a cold and they decided it would be best if she didn't go skiing that weekend. David wanted to postpone the trip altogether, but she insisted that he and Steve had been looking forward to it too much, they should go on without her.
"They were hit by a truck and David and Steve were both killed." Adele stopped and drank deeply. "She died, too," she said after a moment. "A living death. She was stunned and disbelieving, then paralyzed by shock, grief and guilt. She blamed herself for urging them to go. She became a zombie."
Her sister came to help her, but after a month she had to go home to her own family. Friends had tried to help. They took turns visiting her, taking meals, sitting with her, but she didn't respond to anything they said, and sometimes didn't seem to notice them at all.
"She wanted to die," Adele said. "Then the housekeeper got in touch with her lawyer and told him bills were piling up, she had not been paid for three months, and something had to be done. He got in touch with her family and her brother came to stay for a few weeks. He got her accounts straightened out, made arrangements for automatic payments and he tried hard to get her to go back to Virginia with him. She refused to leave her house.
"I talked to him," Adele said. "He said there were papers she had to sign, and she never even glanced at them, never read them. He said sign here, and she signed. That alarmed him. Then Jay entered the picture."
Barbara signaled to the waiter. Now she would have a glass of wine. This was, finally, what she had been waiting for. She pointed to Adele's glass and ordered antipasto for two. "We'll order dinner after that comes," she said and picked up her menu.
"Whatever you're having," Adele said indifferently without glancing at the menu. Several egrets were skimming the river, inches away from the flashing ripples. She appeared to be hypnotized by them.
After the platter of antipasto, wine and another gin and tonic were in place and the dinner order given, knowing they would be left alone for a time, Barbara said, "What about Jay?"
Adele looked at her new drink, then moved it aside. She picked up a piece of salami. "Connie's brother asked me about him. Jay had known Connie and David for years. They moved in the same circles or something. Anyway, he had dropped in on her a few times. I don't know how this came about, but apparently Jay said he'd help Connie sell the sailboat and the place on the coast, and eventually, when she was ready, help sell her house. He offered to look after her, and her brother was relieved. He just wanted to know if Jay was okay, not a child molester or something." She smiled bitterly.
"God knows she needed someone to look out for her. Most of her friends had given up. If they don't want to be helped, there isn't much you can do. You must find that in your practice as often as I do at the center."
Barbara nodded. "Unreachable, untouchable, unteachable."
"That's it. I never dreamed that a man like Jay would get through to her," Adele said.
"You knew him?"
"I grew up with his first wife, kindergarten through high school, all the way. She's a good friend. I knew Jay."
Pay dirt, Barbara thought, prepared to ask some questions. But before she could voice even one, Adele was off on another ramble.
Five months after Connie's brother left, satisfied that she was being looked out for by a respectable businessman, Connie and Jay were married. Everyone who knew her was stunned by the news, no one more so than Adele.
"I waited for several weeks, hoping Connie would give me a call. She didn't."
Adele had gone to Jay's house to see Connie, but he had met her at the door and said that Connie was resting. She tried again a week later and was turned away. Then Jay had arrived at her office at the center to talk to her.
"He said he had talked to her doctor and they both agreed that she was making good progress, but every time someone from her past life appeared, it sent her back to her previous state of despair and depression. He asked me to leave her alone until she was really well."
Now when she lapsed into her silences, it was to pick up another tidbit from the platter and attack it almost savagely.
She had been a fool to believe Jay, but she had wanted to believe him. And the weeks passed, with her growing more uneasy until she decided she had to see for herself how Connie was faring.
She picked a time when Jay would be at the dealership and she had been aghast at Connie's condition.
"I've been running the center a long time," Adele said, "and I know an addict when I see one. She was addicted to something. Tranquilizers? Sedatives? I went to her medicine cabinet and had a look. My God, it was a pharmacy! I tossed everything in a bag and called Joan Sugarman. I told her I was bringing in an emergency case and I stiff-armed Connie out of the house and to her office."
Barbara knew Joan Sugarman, the volunteer doctor on call for the center. She was available for emergencies at all times.
Joan had wanted to sign Connie into a detox center immediately, but Connie had refused. Jay was taking care of her. They were taking care of each other. In the end, Joan simply rewrote the prescriptions, reducing the dosage. It would have been too dangerous to stop abruptly. Adele had taken Connie home, and replaced the old medications with the newly filled prescriptions. She told Connie not to mention the matter to Jay, but she knew that was unnecessary. Connie was not up to initiating anything.
For weeks that was the routine she followed. Joan kept a close watch on Connie and kept reducing the medications carefully.
"It was like watching someone emerge from a coma," Adele said. "First a finger twitches, or a toe. The flutter of an eyelid. It took months before she was clean."
The platter was empty and their dinners arrived, grilled halibut steaks, pesto mashed potatoes, salads.
In spite of herself, Barbara had been drawn into the drama of Connie's grief, marriage, addiction. "Didn't you talk to her? You could see the pattern, the isolation, separation from her friends, the whole works."
"Early on it wouldn't have done any good. She was an addict," Adele said dryly. "You ever try to reason with an addict?" She didn't wait for an answer. "Later, I tried, but she wouldn't have it. As the drugs left her system, the grief flooded back. She was not yet done with grieving. It had been put on chemical hold. She was passive, silent, unquestioning, just accepted pain and guilt as her due. And she would not hear a word about Jay. He had been trying to help, she insisted. She had needed him, and he needed her."
She snorted. "She said he understood what she was going through because his first wife had abandoned him and deprived him of all visitation rights to his two children. They were dead to him, just as much as her child was dead to her. She had the impression that the daughter was a hopeless psychotic locked up in a state institution, and the son had turned to a gay lifestyle and had cut all ties to both parents. I asked if Jay had told her that and she didn't know. It was what she believed. I asked if she'd like to meet her stepchildren."

Chapter 10