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

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told him in a fairly cool manner that Cat was sleeping, that he didn't need to hurry over.
"I took the day off work tomorrow, too," she said. "I'll be here." It sounded more like a threat to him
than a favor to Cat.
"How is she?"
"How do you think?"
"Hey, Jesus, Laney, you're acting like I pushed her down the stairs or something. This was my child,
too."
"I know that, Theo."
"Don't you think I wish I was there when it happened? But I still couldn't have done anything about it.
The doctor said so."
"Nobody's blaming you, Theo."
But it sure didn't sound like that.
He stood in the living room after he had hung up, staring at the clutter untouched since the night before,
the residue of normal lives suddenly interrupted by disaster and entombed like Pompe├╝. She had been
sitting just there, watching television when the really bad cramps came. She had bumped the table
getting up тАФ a glass was still lying on the floor, a ghost-stain of spilled diet cola visible on the shaggy,
seen-better-days carpet. Was there blood before she reached the bathroom? He started to follow her
track, then caught himself. It was too sick, too horrible. Like examining a murder scene.
Only three hours of sleep, but he was buzzing like he was full of bad speed. He turned the television on.
The images were meaningless.
Where did my life go? How could something so small тАФ it wasn't even really a baby yet, whatever she
says тАФ how could it change everything so much? But what kind of life was it, really, when you were
only alive playing music, but you couldn't ever seem to find the right place to do that, the right people to
do it with?
Things came too easy for you, his mother had told him in a resigned way a few years back. You were so
good at things when you were a little boy, the teachers made so much of you. That's why you never
developed any ambition.
Right now he needed to find something, anything, to keep himself busy. He wished Johnny were around
so he could bum a cigarette off him, several of them, sit and smoke and drink cold beers and talk about
bullshit that didn't matter. But he couldn't bear to call him and have to explain this weird, miserable
thing, not right now.
Cat's face was so paleтАж ! Like it was her heart that came out of her, not a little dead baby.
He stood up and moved into their bedroom. They had boxes of things stacked there, waiting until he
cleared out the spare bedroom тАФ his practice room, as he sometimes called it, although he could count
on one hand the times he'd actually spent in there with his guitar. The practice room was going to be the
baby's room, and all those things would be the baby's things. Would have been. Now she wouldn't want
to see them when she came back, the first few symbolic baby-clothes purchases, the books and stuffed
toys she had picked up at a garage sale.
"It doesn't count if you buy it used," she had told him, only half-joking. Or maybe not joking at all. "It
doesn't jinx the baby."
But it had. Or something had тАФ Theo felt like he had been the jinx, somehow, although he couldn't say

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why, was drenched in guilt that he couldn't explain, like a mysterious stain on his clothes. In any case,