Dying Breath. Wendy Corsi Staub

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СКАЧАТЬ perusing this week’s bargains.

      She and Pop always got by on fast food, sandwiches, and free pub fare provided to the band and the drummer’s daughter, affectionately referred to as a pint-sized roadie. It wasn’t until college that Cam learned to like “real food,” and she craved it once she left the dorms behind.

      So she determinedly taught herself how to cook, thanks to the red-and-white-checked Betty Crocker Cookbook someone gave her at her bridal shower. These days, she finds puttering in the kitchen therapeutic. She even welcomes the challenge of planning ahead, creating menus based on sale items…

      As she turns a page of this week’s D’Agostino’s flier, something flutters to her lap.

      Scooping it up, she sees that it’s one of those small blue and white fliers that arrive with the weekly circulars.

      A young boy with dark hair and eyes smiles up at her beneath the headline HAVE YOU SEEN ME?

      The answer, to Cam’s utter shock, is yes.

      Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

      Yes, she’s seen him. Absolutely.

      According to the flier, his name is Paul Delgado, and he disappeared on a Boy Scout hike out in the Sierra Nevadas, just six weeks earlier.

      Six weeks?

      But…

      This is the same boy who had cowered, bound and gagged, in an abductor’s car trunk in one of Cam’s visions almost a year ago.

      He’s real.

      The comprehension is so stunning, so devastating, that Cam finds herself gasping for air. Panic wells within her, propelling her upward, and she sways to her feet.

      She staggers to the kitchen, instinctively seeking to tamp back the frantic barrage of emotions erupting within.

      Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

      She frantically looks around, for who knows what—and spots…something.

      A bottle of vodka.

      It’s stashed on top of the fridge, covered in a layer of dust, leftover from a Halloween party.

      Cam finds herself blindly reaching for it on pure whim.

      It will numb her—that’s all she knows.

      With a violently shaking hand, she dumps some into a glass and raises it to her lips, already looking around for her pack of cigarettes.

      Where did I put—

      Glimpsing a prescription bottle of prenatal vitamins, she suddenly remembers.

      The baby.

      For God’s sake…

      She lowers the glass in disgust. Or is it dismay?

      You’re pregnant.

      Of course there are no more cigarettes in the apartment; she quit smoking eight months ago.

      Liquor is out of the question as well.

      Still trembling, Cam dumps the vodka into the sink.

      “Help me,” she whispers into thin air, clinging to the counter.

      What is she supposed to do now? Now that she knows she doesn’t have hallucinations after all. Nor daydreams.

      She has premonitions.

      Because that boy…Paul…he’s real.

      He actually exists somewhere in this world.

      And if he does…

      Then all the others—the anonymous children who have populated the bizarre visions in her head all these years—must exist as well.

PART I: MAY

      Chapter One

      Fourteen years later

      Hearing a door slam somewhere downstairs, Cam is startled from her prenap stupor.

      “Mom?” a voice calls up from the foot of the stairs in the foyer. “Are you here?”

      She opens her eyes. Tess is home. Can it possibly be three fifteen already?

      She turns her head to look at the bedside clock, and sees that it is, indeed, three-fifteen.

      “Be right down,” she calls to her daughter, and sits up groggily.

      So much for catching a much-needed afternoon nap. Somehow, the better part of a Tuesday morning and afternoon seems to have escaped her.

      Then again, she accomplished quite a bit today. After getting Tess off to school this morning, Cam belatedly switched over her own drawers and closet from winter to summer. Then she made the usual suburban rounds: pharmacy, bank, dry cleaner, post office, supermarket. Back home, she threw together a pot of homemade chicken soup—an odd craving for an unseasonably hot and humid late-May afternoon. She left it simmering, wearily climbed the stairs, lay down…and here she is.

      Cam stretches. Sleep will have to wait till bedtime. She swings her legs over the edge of the mattress, half-expecting her feet to encounter a pair of Mike’s shoes cluttering the floor beside the bed.

      Then she remembers.

      Old habits die hard.

      The first thing Mike always did every night after work was sit on the bed, take off his shoes, and leave them where they lay. It drove her crazy from the start, but he couldn’t seem to remember to pick them up, and she stubbornly refused to be that kind of wife. Instead, she grew accustomed to stepping over and sometimes on his shoes.

      Not anymore.

      These days, Mike’s shoes occupy another bedside about twenty miles away from Upper Montclair, New Jersey. His new place is, ironically, a stone’s throw from their old newlywed apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where they spent the happiest time of their lives.

      These days, real estate in that neighborhood is booming and the narrow old streets are crawling with hipsters. Who could have foreseen that?

      Who could have foreseen any of this?

      Not even me, Cam thinks grimly.

      How bitterly ironic that Camden Hastings—who once upon a time could foresee the bitter fates of strangers—was ultimately blindsided by her own.

      Mike moved out in mid-March.

      For all she knows, some other woman is sharing his new bed in his new place in his new life.

      If not now, then probably soon.

      Mike won’t be alone for long. And when he finds someone new, he’ll go for someone who’s the opposite of Cam.

      That’s СКАЧАТЬ