A Song in the Daylight. Paullina Simons

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СКАЧАТЬ later he walked into his house. Emily had missed her game and was sitting at the kitchen table crying. Asher was in the den watching TV and Michelangelo was coloring on the floor near the dog. As Jared looked closer, he saw his younger son wasn’t coloring near the dog, he was coloring the dog. Taking the markers (were these even washable?) away from the boy, he patted Emily’s back.

      She bucked away from his hand like a wild horse. “Don’t touch me! Where’s Mom?”

      “I don’t know,” said Jared. “I just got home. But don’t be mad at me. I’m sorry you missed your game.”

      “You should’ve called me back, Dad. I called you so many times.”

      “I was at work. I was busy.” Jared felt a stab of guilt. He was at work, and he was busy part of the time, but really, he could’ve called back an hour earlier, and didn’t. Larissa took care of home things; he never had to worry.

      He called Maggie. “She’s not with me, Jared,” said Maggie. “I haven’t seen her since Tuesday. Maybe with Bo? Evelyn? Or call my husband. He’s working late tonight. Researching materialism or immortality or something. On a Friday night, too.” She scoffed mildly. “Maybe she’s at the theater. Saint Joan opens next week. They’re rehearsing every day.”

      “Materialism and immortality, they’re not one and the same?” Jared said jokingly before hanging up.

      “Nah, I haven’t seen your wife, man,” said Ezra when Jared reached him. “She didn’t come in today for rehearsals. Which is disturbing since not only do we open next Thursday but we finally did the run-through without the epilogue, as she expressly wanted, and she wasn’t even here for it. What be up?”

      “Did she call?”

      “Didn’t. Maybe she’s gone out?”

      “Yeah, with someone who has a car.”

      “Weird,” said Ezra. “But I did have lunch with her two days ago, and though she was pretty chill, have you noticed your wife’s lost a ton of weight?”

      “You think?” Jared had lost interest in the conversation. “She keeps denying it.”

      “Oh, yes. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes, she says.” Ezra grunted. “Hey, listen, Lar and Maggie are doing a beer run tomorrow to get ready for the party Monday, but are we still on for tomorrow night?”

      “Yeah, sure, why not? Let me find her first, though, ’kay?”

      “Like I said, she’s melted away.” Ezra chuckled. “She’s disappeared before our very eyes.”

      “Till tomorrow, dude. She can’t have lost that much weight.”

      Jared called Bo, who hadn’t spoken to Larissa since the week before.

      Evelyn finally picked up. “I’m bathing all five kids at once, Jared,” she said. “I can’t leave them for long. What’s up?” She hadn’t heard from Larissa since her birthday dinner the month before. This surprised Jared. Larissa always made an effort to keep in touch with Evelyn, her college friend.

      Six o’clock became seven.

      The kids were hungry. Jared ordered pizza from Nina’s, then sat in the kitchen with them while they ate. For some reason he didn’t feel like eating. Finally he went upstairs to get changed, put on shorts, a T-shirt; he opened the bathroom, he opened her closet. Everything was neat, orderly, put away. On the bed were seven of his white shirts, still in sheaths of dry cleaner plastic; according to the ticket, picked up for him by her just this morning. The house was quiet. He looked inside Larissa’s closet again. Peculiarly, he looked inside her jewelry box. What was he looking for? She had many beautiful things. He ambled around the bedroom. Bed was made, patted down, hospital-cornered; clothes were in the closet; shoes in their boxes; books on the shelves. Diamond earrings he gave her for their fifteenth wedding anniversary, which she loved and never went anywhere special without. Everything was in its place.

      Everything except Larissa.

PART I

       THE STONEMASON

      How small of all that human hearts endure,That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

       Samuel Johnson

Chapter One

       1

       Things Trains Bring

      One sunny afternoon, on the dot of 12:45, from west to the east, after all the leaves had gone and the ground was frozen, into the concrete well of the Summit train station a shiny, stainless, steel-and-blue locomotive rolled in, the doors opened, and a smatter of people alighted.

      Train tracks run through Summit, wind through it like the everflowing Passaic River. The station itself is brick and mortar, well kept, maintained by well-to-do people in a well-to-do town. You buy your ticket in a little office with white sash windows and red flowers on the sills, where a woman who wanted to retire ten years ago glares at you from behind the glass and her glasses as she sullenly sells you a one-way to Venice or a round trip to visit your lonely mother in Piermont.

      To get to the train, you have to walk down forty concrete steps to the embankment where the train arrives and swishes open its doors for a few minutes. Neither the train nor the tracks can be seen from the road. Clearly this was the intent of the designers. Perhaps so that traffic wouldn’t crawl to a stop in a town of twenty thousand people every twenty minutes. But another reason could be that the train tracks, unlike a river, were not deemed by the architects and engineers to be aesthetically pleasing enough and were deliberately hidden below the cobblestoned street, remaining invisible to the town except for a small white-and-black RR sign on Maple Street, pointing that way. You could live your whole life in Summit, New Jersey, and not ever know your town had a train station that took people away—and brought people in.

      And yet it did bring people in, every day, and this day also.

      Today it discharged a friendly woman with a baby carriage, two bags and a small girl; an older woman with a wheeled suitcase whose gray unsmiling husband was tensely waiting for her on the platform, as if distressed by her arrival; a young man with a ratty duffel bag, a leather jacket, a baseball cap.

      The young man strolled out clacking the pavement with the metal heels of his black riding boots, looked around, squinted, pulled down his sunglasses and whistled for the conductor to open the oversize hold compartment, from which he rolled out a motorcycle.

      “Some bike you got there,” the conductor said, sliding closed the doors. “Like a stallion. But why’d you store it when you could’ve ridden it cross country?”

      “Bike’d СКАЧАТЬ