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

Cat's eyes found his face, struggled to focus. A parched whisper: "TheoтАж ?"
"My God, my God, what happened? Are youтАж ?"
Her throat convulsed so powerfully he thought she was going to vomit тАФ he had a terrible image of
blood gushing out of her mouth like a fountain. The ragged sound that leaped from her instead was so
horribly raw and ragged that he could not at first understand the words.
"IlostitIlostitIlostitтАж !"
He was down on his knees in the sopping fingerpainted mess of the bathroom floor, the slick, sticky


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scarlet тАФ where had it all come from, all this red wetness? He was trying to help her up, panicking, an
idiot voice telling him Don't move her, she's an accident victim, but he didn't know what had happened,
what could have possibly have happened, did someone get inтАж ? Then suddenly he understood.
"I lost it!" she moaned, more clear now that there was almost no air left in the cry. "Oh, Jesus, I lost the
baby!"
He was halfway across the house to the phone when he realized his own cell phone was in his pocket.
He called 911 and gave them the address while simultaneously trying to wrap towels around the outside
of her bathrobe, as though she were some immense wound that needed to be held together. She was
crying, but it made almost no sound.
When he had finished he held her tightly against him, waiting to hear the sound of the paramedics at the
door.
"Where were you?" Her eyes were shut and she was shivering. "Where were you?"
Hospitals were like T. S. Eliot poems, somehow тАФ well-lit wastelands, places of quiet talk that could
not quite hide the terrible things going on behind the doors. Even when he went out to the lobby to
stretch his legs, to walk off some of the horrible, helpless tension, he felt like he was pacing through a
mausoleum.
Cat's blood loss had not been as mortal as Theo had felt it must be. Some of the mess had been amniotic
fluid and splashed water from the hot bath she had taken when the cramps first started becoming painful.
The doctors talked calmly to him of premature rupture of membranes, of possible uterine abnormalities,
but it might have been Byzantine religious ritual for all his poleaxed brain could make of it. Catherine
Lillard slept most of the first ten hours, face pale as a picture-book princess, IVs jacked into both arms.
When she opened her eyes at last, she seemed like a stranger.
"Honey, I'm so sorry," he said. "It wasn't your fault. These things happen."
She did not even waste her strength responding to such vacuities. She turned her face away and stared
toward the dark television screen angled out from the wall.
He went through Cat's phone book. Her mother was there by breakfast, unhappy that Theo hadn't called
earlier; her best friend Laney showed up just after. Both women wore jeans and work shirts, as though
they were planning to roll up their sleeves and cook a church dinner or help build a barn. They seemed
to draw a sort of curtain around his pale, silent girlfriend, an exclusionary barrier Theo could not cross.
After an hour of manufacturing errands for himself, fetching coffee and magazines from downstairs, he
told Catherine that he was going to go home and try to get a little sleep. Cat didn't say anything, but her
mother agreed that was probably a good idea.
He was only able to sleep three hours, tired as he was. When he got up, he realized he hadn't called
anyone in his own circle of friends and family. It was hard to imagine who to call. Johnny? Theo knew
what his friend's response would be, could even imagine the exact tone: "Oh, Thee, wow. That's such a
bummer, man." He would run out of things to say in moments and then the inadequate guy-talk would
hang, lame and awkward. Johnny would be sincere in his sorrow, of course тАФ he really was a good guy
тАФ but calling him just seemed so pointless. And the idea of telling any of the other guys in the band was