"Tad Williams - The War of the Flowers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Tad)

here he was and there stood three big grocery-store boxes full of things that would make her cry when
she got home. He could do something with them тАФ that would be something useful he could manage.
He could put them in the garage where she wouldn't have to see them right away, wouldn't have to walk
in on her first day home and find a cute little stuffed dog looking back at her with button eyes.
It wasn't all that easy to find a place for the baby things in the garage, where Theo's boxes of secondhand
science-fiction books and other miscellaneous crap stood in tottering piles like the ruins of an ancient
city, where unused exercise equipment and unbuilt packaged bookshelves left so little room for Cat's car
that once the warm weather came for good she wouldn't even attempt the difficult task of parking in
there again until late autumn, at which point all the new crap that had found its way in during the
summer would have to be relocated so the car would fit in the garage again.
As he was trying to squeeze the last box onto the narrow shelf above the workbench it toppled over and
caught him a good shot on the temple; when he reached up, he came away with a spot of blood on his
finger. The children's books had spilled out onto the steps leading down from the kitchen. Theo's head
hurt. He lowered himself onto the bottom of the short stairway like a geriatric case so he wouldn't have
to bend as he picked them up from the floor тАФ old, well-thumbed and clearly loved copies of the Pooh
stories, of Dr. Seuss and Where the Wild Things Are, all bought secondhand to fall within Cat's
exemption. He picked up his own contribution, one that he'd bought new in a store just because he
couldn't imagine raising a baby without it, and because even though he never made it up early enough
Saturday mornings for Cat's garage-sale runs, he had wanted to contribute.
Was I the one who jinxed it? In his bleak state, he couldn't even laugh the thought away. He flicked the
book open. The strange, flat images, crude and almost childish at first glance, caught him up as they
always did. Had his mom really read this to him? It seemed impossible to believe now that he'd had a
mother who held her child in her lap and read him Goodnight Moon, but the words were as familiar as a
catechism, the little rabbit in his great green room saying goodnight to all the familiar nursery objects, to
the mittens and kittens, the comb and the brush, and of course, strangest of all, to "nobody."
Goodnight nobody. He had never understood that тАФ in one way it was the most magical part of the
book, and in another, the most frightening. All the other pictures, the rabbit-child in pajamas, the fire,
the old lady rabbit reading, all made sense. The catalog of items, chairs and cats and socks, goodnight,
goodnight, then just that blank page and "goodnight nobody." But who was Nobody? It was childhood
zen. Sometimes he had thought in his little-boy way that he might be the book's Nobody, Theo himself,
an anonymous presence тАФ that the book knew he was out there watching the bunny get ready for bed,
looking into the warm, cozy room from outside, as through a window. His mother had contributed to
that: whenever they reached that part of the book, she had always said, "Goodnight, nobody. Say
goodnight." And Theo had done so. Perhaps she had only meant for him to say goodnight to the little
someone known as Nobody. But he had always believed she was calling him Nobody, telling him it was
his turn to say goodnight now, and so he had dutifully obeyed.
In this last winter, since the pregnancy test had come back, Theo had sometimes imagined a little girl
sitting on his lap тАФ Cat had been certain from the first that it was a little girl, even though they hadn't
had an ultrasound exam yet тАФ her head against his chest as they leafed through the book together. In his
offhand dreams he had never quite been able to imagine what she looked like, had pictured only a head
of soft curly hair, a warm little body pressed against him. Nobody. She had looked like Nobody. And
that was who she had turned out to be.

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He flicked through the pages, the drawings with their strange, dreamlike perspective. Then at the end,
the final little catechism, saying goodnight to the last things тАФ the stars, the air, and to noises
everywhere.