Название: Overheard in a Dream
Автор: Torey Hayden
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
isbn: 9780007370832
isbn:
“I stood my ground. I was almost thirty by then. Old enough to understand you can only go so far in fulfilling other people’s dreams, no matter how much you want to make them happy. But I lost a lot while learning that lesson. My relationship with my dad never did recover. And Fran and I only lasted about a year more. Then she met someone else and that was that. Which gutted me, because I had three gorgeous little girls and I hardly got to see them after that.
“So it was a lot different this time around. I went into this marriage with my eyes open and have really tried to avoid making the mistakes I made the first time out.”
“How did you meet Laura?” James asked.
Unexpectedly, Alan laughed. “I ran over her foot at the gas station!” And he laughed again, a deep, full-throated guffaw. “Really. I did. I’d stopped at this place out on the Pine Ridge reservation for gas. She was already there, but she’d driven up on the wrong side of the pump. So she was trying to pull the hose around to her gas tank. I was thinking, ‘Stupid woman driver’, because she’d blocked the way to the other pump. I tried to squeeze my truck by and I ran over her damned foot.”
James’s eyes widened.
“Broke it too,” he said cheerfully. “So it only seemed gentlemanly to ask her out to dinner.”
“It’s surprising she went after you did that!”
He laughed again. “Yeah, I thought so too. But she did. Whatever else you might say about her, she’s a good sport, is Laura.”
A small, wistful silence drifted in. “I can still remember our first date, that night I took her out to dinner. We went to this place called the Mill. She had the cast on her foot, so we couldn’t dance or anything. We just had a meal and talked, but it was really noisy in there, so I said, ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’ I was thinking of the Bear Butte Lounge over on the highway, because that’s a nice quiet spot, but when we got in the car, Laura says, ‘Let’s go out to the Badlands.’ That sounded a pretty strange idea to me, but I thought, ‘What the hell? Why not?’ It was a nice spring night. All starry. So, we went out past Wall and we parked at one of the overlooks and just sat in the car and talked.
“We talked and talked.” His smile grew inward. “And you want to know what happened? We actually talked all night long. About the Black Hills mostly. I remember telling her about the ranch and my cattle, and she started telling me all these stories about how the land where the ranch was had been sacred ground to the Sioux. She was working out on the reservation at the time, so she was really well-informed on all this Indian stuff. And Laura can be such a fantastic storyteller, if you get her going.”
He laughed. “I was bowled over. All I could think of was that here was somebody who thought about the land just like I did, who loved this country, you know, right into her soul. So we talked and talked and never did anything else. Never even kissed that night. Not once, which makes us sound like a couple of real squares, but it was so good to talk like that with someone.
“Anyway, next thing I knew, it was five thirty in the morning and we were still sitting at the overlook in Badlands, and I thought, ‘Oh my god, what the hell am I going to say to Patsy?’ Patsy’s my middle daughter, and she was home from college for the Easter break and staying at the ranch with me. I just knew she was going to go back and tell my ex-wife I was staying out all night with women! I didn’t get home until after eight, because the Badlands are a good ninety minutes away from the ranch, and there’s Patsy in the kitchen when I came in. ‘Good date?’ she asks. And I said, ‘It’s all right, Pats, it’s not what it looks like.’ And she laughs. I could tell she didn’t believe a word I said. She says, ‘Don’t worry, Dad. I understand.’ But I knew she didn’t.
“I felt protective of Laura. I didn’t want Patsy to think Laura was the kind of woman you’d just take out and get it off with on the first date. So, I said, ‘Pats, if you’re going to tell your mother about all this, you might as well know I’m going to marry her. You can tell your mother that too.’” Alan laughed heartily. “So, that’s the point when I decided I was going to make Laura my wife, although it was almost two more years before I informed Laura of it!”
“It sounds as if your attraction was pretty instantaneous,” James said.
“It was. I just knew it was the right thing. Straight off.” Alan looked over at James. “So now I keep asking myself: how did it all go so wrong?”
Conor’s strange relationship with speech made James think of Laura, as he watched the boy moving around the room. Wind Dreamer’s eerie world still haunted James, hanging like cobwebs in the quiet corners of his mind to catch his thoughts at unexpected moments, pulling them back into the ghostly realm of the Badlands and the young man’s quest experiences. Interesting, James thought, how she could create something so powerful with words alone. Interesting, likewise, that Conor seemed to find words so dangerous that he confined himself to naming things, describing their obvious physical characteristics or repeating things that others had already said.
While doing his usual circumnavigation of the playroom, Conor had stopped at a large basket of Lego on the floor. He paused and pushed the cat’s nose into it. Reaching in, he then picked up a little Lego person. He studied it carefully. “Here is a man. With black hair and yellow shirt.” Putting the man into the same hand as the stuffed cat, he bent down and looked into the box again.
“Garden things!” he cried with unexpectedly delighted surprise. He lifted up some Lego flowers.
“You sound happy that you have found some flowers,” James said.
Conor bent back over the box. “And trees. Flowers and trees. Things for a garden.” He rooted energetically through the basket.
Astonished by Conor’s sudden animation, James leaned forward to watch.
“Many trees. See?” Conor said. He didn’t make eye contact but he was definitely interacting with James. As he took them from the basket, he set them up on the edge of the bookshelf.
“Yes, there are lots of trees in there and you are finding them.”
“There are trees on the moon,” Conor replied.
This was said with equanimity, slipped in quickly as if it were nothing more than another descriptor. “Three trees on the moon.”
As the toy trees ran out, Conor’s cheerfulness waned. He pawed through the Lego, just in case one had been missed but said nothing more.
Finally he straightened up and began arranging the ones he’d found in a very straight line along the bookshelf. He counted them, not aloud, but with his finger.
“What’s this?” he asked. It was the plastic road sheet, folded up on the shelf where he was lining up his trees.
“That’s the plastic sheet with roads drawn on it,” James said. “Remember? We’ve looked at it before. When it’s laying out on the floor, children often like to drive toy cars along the roads or make houses from Lego and create neighbourhoods.”
Clutching СКАЧАТЬ