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

That should go on the baby's gravestone, except there would be no stone, no grave. Cat was going to
have a D C, as the doctors so artlessly called it, to remove anything that hadn't already come out. Any
thing. There would be nothing to bury. Polly, Rose, all the names they had played with, taking their time
because after all there had been no hurry, months to wait, and now she wouldn't be any of them. She was
Nobody.
Goodnight Nobody.
Sitting on the stairs with a box of books on his lap, he cried.
Her face was still pale, framed by the straight lines of her uncombed, unstyled, dark red hair. She had
told him that the D C had been all right, not too bad тАФ she had insisted he go back to his delivery job
that day, that she didn't need any hand-holding тАФ but it looked like something more than just now-
useless flesh had been scraped out of her.
"How's the pain?"
She shrugged. Her skin seemed paper-dry, as though she had lost some essential vitality. Her mother
handed her a cup of ice.
Laney was gone, but both of Cat's parents had arrived for a post-operative visit. Earlier her dad had
made chitchat with Theo in the hall while the nurse helped Cat with the bedpan, Mr. Lillard doing his
comradely best in the current air of circle-the-wagons emergency to obscure the fact that he had never
been that thrilled with his semi-son-in-law. Theo appreciated the gesture, but Cat's dad and his yachting
sweater had never been a real stumbling block, anyway: his wife and only daughter treated Tom Lillard
as though he were a graceless but acceptably familiar sundial in the middle of a flower bed they were
gardening. When Cat had wanted him to approve of Theo, or at least pretend to, she had enlisted her
mother's help and there had been dinners, family outings. He was a figurehead тАФ an aging CEO of his
own family who only showed up for the board meetings and wondered how so much got done without
him.
"Can I talk to Theo for a minute, Mom?"
Her mother rose and drew her father by the hand to the door. "We'll just go down and look at some
magazines in the gift shop," she said. "I'll bring you back a People."
"Thanks." When they had left, Cat closed her eyes for a long moment and let her head slump back
against the pillow.
"IтАж I didn't think it would hurt so much," Theo said. He suddenly wanted her to know that he was
grieving too, although other than the tears on the garage stairs, he wasn't completely certain that was
true. "When you get home, weтАж did they say when we can try again?" Was that an insensitive thing to
say? Maybe she would think he was talking about sex. "I mean, when you're ready inside, too. In your
head, I mean."
Her eyes came open in her dry white face, slowly, like something in a horror movie. She took a deep
breath. "I'm not coming home, Theo. Not like that. It's not going to be likeтАж like that."
He stared, puzzled, but he could already feel the tide sucking away what he had thought was firm sand
beneath his feet. "NotтАж ?"


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"I'm going to stay with my parents for a few weeks. Mom wants to cook for me, you know, fuss over
me."
"Well, that'sтАж that's fineтАж"
"And when I come backтАж" She sighed, someone bravely picking up a heavy burden. "When I come
back, I want to live by myself."
It felt like the time he had been hit in the back of the head with a pool cue, the innocent victim of a
violent argument that he didn't even know had started behind him. For a long stupid moment after the