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.He said it was… damaged….”“It wasn’t… his,… then.”I could not see his face; I would not open my eyes to see his face.“No.This was… right after we left camp….”After a long silence, he said, “Did you want it, Thay?”I nodded my head, feeling the hot tears roll again down my cheeks.“I wanted it more than anything.More than anything.I’d never have let them take it, no matter what, but the doctor said… he said I needed hydrating and he put a needle in my arm and when I came to it was… just gone.And then I got an infection and I was awfully sick for a long time and after I got well I found out I couldn’t… not anymore….”“And all this time I was calling and your mother was telling me you didn’t want to see me and that you’d moved away.Your mother…”“I guess so.”“May God damn her to hell,” Nick said without any inflection.“Aengus didn’t care,” I sobbed.“He said we’d adopt.And I didn’t think I’d ever see you again….”I looked at him then.His face was contorted with pain, and tears ran down his brown face.I could not bear his pain.It was worse by far than any I remembered feeling.He took my robe from the hook on the back of the bathroom door and slid it around me.I turned into his arms and simply laid myself against him, letting him take my full weight.I wanted to absorb this pain, all of it… the tears; the anger….I wanted them to seep back into my body from his.I wanted his grief for that child that never was to come back into me.I thought, I cannot let him hold the pain of a child that wasn’t and my own pain, too.He can’t carry that.He still held me closely, but I could feel that his muscles had gone slack and heavy.“I’m mostly over it,” I said into his neck.“I do all right with it now.”“Oh, God, sweetheart,” he whispered, “I am so sorry.” He picked me up and carried me into the bedroom and put me down on the bed and pulled the covers over me.He sat down beside me.“We’ll have a baby, you and I,” he said softly, smiling at me.It was his old smile, slow and full.“There are more ways than one, you know.But you’ll have to decide what you want before we can… I’m sorry, baby, but that will have to happen.”I began to shake my head back and forth, in sheer fatigue.“I don’t expect you to decide tonight, but it’s something that you’ll have to settle with yourself.Do you think you’ll be able to do that? I can walk away from you if I have to.If that’s what you want.But I can’t come back again if I do.You know that, don’t you?”“I know that.”“You go to sleep then.I’ll stay right here beside you till morning.I have to be in Macon by noon to get a project started….It’s a big one or I’d cancel, but I’ll be back late tomorrow night and you don’t have to see him until Saturday, do you? I’ll come back tomorrow night and stay….”I could feel sleep taking me down like a riptide.I put out my hand and he took it and I whispered, “Thank you,” and he whispered back, “Sleep tight, baby,” and I slid far down where nothing but his breathing could reach me.CHAPTER 19The light from the skylight beat directly down on my face when I woke.I knew that it was mid-morning.I knew, too, eyes still shut tight, that Nick had been here beside me all night.I reached over and touched the bedcovers on the other side of the bed; they were rumpled.If I looked over it would be the imprint of his body that I saw.I sat up and looked around the room.Everything was in order; even the clothes that I had worn to the amphitheater last night had been put away.There was no sign of anyone, not even me.But the entire room pulsed with Nick.We had not made love, however; I remembered that.Not yet, he had said.Was I sorry?Yes.Could I make the choice he had told me I needed to make? No.Not yet.Dear God, not yet.Then when? Ever?I was suddenly sick of it all.I wanted my ordinary life back.I needed normalcy as I needed food to eat and water to drink.I am not going to think about any of this until tomorrow, at least, I thought.I am going to clean the house and go into work this afternoon and maybe call Lily and see what she and Goose have been doing.Maybe I’ll even ask them up over the weekend.That way I won’t have to talk to Aengus about anything much, at least for a while, and maybe by then I’ll know what I need to do next.I think it’s a pretty safe bet we aren’t going to the beach, though.In the meantime, I’ll call Carol and see if she’d like—Then I stopped.Carol would know about last night by now.About Chris and Ben, half-naked and gilded with paint in homemade chariots, holding up severed heads that dripped fake blood onto the stage before five hundred people.And about Aengus, keening to the sky about gods with their hair afire, who had led them there.I doubted that Carol would be eager to talk to me
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