The Innocents. Laura Lippman
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Название: The Innocents

Автор: Laura Lippman

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература

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isbn: 9780007453290

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СКАЧАТЬ Sean and Go-Go. Gwen was supposed to get a turn at some point, but she didn’t, not that day, and not often in the days ahead. The game evolved into something more like football or rugby or dodgeball, with complicated rules about tackling and catching. We became attuned to the noises of the street, the sound of approaching cars and trucks, and learned to time the action of the game around the traffic. We fought sometimes, went home early, yet came back together the next day, or the day after if there was rain. We suspended the games during the heart of the winter, but started playing again long before spring. The Halloran boys were baffling to the girls. Sometimes they presented as a unified front, sometimes it was every man for himself, and, most often, it was two against one, with Go-Go, the baby, the odd one out. And Go-Go was easy for the girls to gang up on as well, so it was just as often four on one. Every group needs its goat, and Go-Go was the inevitable choice in ours.

      We were having a four-on-one day in late April, a cranky, frustrating day in which all the gains of spring seemed to have been lost. The sky was gray, the air had a real chill in it, and the things that had budded and bloomed over the past month looked miserable. Daffodils and tulips bent their heads, beaten down. On the way to the field, Go-Go jumped on one of Tally Robison’s flowerbeds with both feet, irritating the rest of us, who understood our freedom came at a price. If we gave adults any reason to complain about us, we knew we would lose privileges.

      But Go-Go became only more intolerable when we tried to explain to him why he shouldn’t jump on flowers. He pinched the girls, he pulled at their clothes, he flailed at his brothers. Finally, in frustration, Mickey threw the red rubber ball over his head, into the street. Later, she said it wasn’t on purpose, which would fit with her general incompetence on the playing field, yet it had seemed deliberate to the rest of us, an exaggerated, high, arching throw that would have soared over anyone’s head, but especially over little Go-Go’s. There’s no doubt that she said: “Go get it, you moron.”

      Which Go-Go did, despite the rumbling noise that we all knew to heed. He dashed into the road after the bouncing ball just as one of the huge mill trucks came around the curve, going much too fast, but we all knew the mill trucks went too fast and it was our responsibility to be careful. The rest of us watched, frozen, mesmerized. We were going to see someone die. We watched the truck bearing down on the boy and the ball, saw the ball disappear under its wheels, heard terrible noises—honking, brakes squealing. But Go-Go seemed to change the rules of physics, accelerating so that he reached the other side of the road just before the truck passed by. We were amazed to see him, upright and laughing, after the long truck had passed.

      Tim was the first to speak.

      “Screw you, Go-Go,” he said. “The ball is ruined.” But his tone was admiring, almost reverential, his voice shaking.

      The ball had been split by the truck’s wheels. We looked at the flattened red mass. “That could be Go-Go’s head,” Gwen said. We all nodded. He could be like one of the squirrels we saw in the road, a red smear with hair sticking out of it. We weren’t to touch the squirrels, or any other roadkill, lest we risk rabies.

      Sean ran across the road and grabbed his brother by the arm, shaking him violently, angrily.

      “Don’t ever do that again.”

      “But Mickey said—”

      “Mickey’s not the boss of you.”

      “No one’s the boss of me,” he countered, pushing out his lower lip.

      Without a ball, kickball was over. We couldn’t get a new ball unless we told a grown-up what had happened, and no one thought that was a good idea. And, although it was hard to envision on such a cold, gray April day, summer was coming, and not even our odd brand of kickball/dodgeball/rugby could fill those longer, emptier days. We needed a new game. Mickey suggested an explorer’s club. Sean and Tim said it was babyish, yet the next day we all ended up following her deeper and deeper into the woods, marveling at the things we found. Abandoned campsites, downed trees. Beer cans, garbage. “Teenagers did this,” Go-Go would say solemnly, as if Tim and Sean were not already teenagers, Mickey and Gwen both about to turn thirteen that autumn. Teenagers were fearsome creatures to Go-Go.

      And then we met the man who lived in the woods.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      “What’s the point of this charade?” Karl asks Gwen the morning after Go-Go’s funeral as she arrives with only minutes to spare before Annabelle awakens and comes down to breakfast.

      The question catches her short, her mind snagging on his choice of word, charade. What, exactly, is a charade? Where is the pretense? She puzzles through this as she sets breakfast in motion. She isn’t pretending to Annabelle that she spends the nights here. Her daughter knows that Gwen is staying at her grandfather’s house while he heals, but that she still wants to be here for meals, bedtime, and off-to-school. The charade, to use Karl’s word, is pretending that the household will return to normal after her father’s situation has been normalized.

      Charade. The mothers had played charades that night, first with their husbands, then alone after the men left. How innocent they had seemed in the candlelit living room, making the familiar, exaggerated gestures. Paging through a book, running a movie camera, flipping channels. She and Sean had watched them from the steps, feeling more akin to them than they did to the others by that point. They—well, she—honestly believed that they would get married, that they would one day be a couple among other couples, laughing and clowning. They—again, maybe just she—had been preternaturally attracted to adulthood, eager for it, in a way that Tim, Mickey, and Go-Go weren’t. They were the normal ones, trying to grow up, be typical teenagers.

      “I’m not sure what you mean,” she says, trying to be careful with Karl’s feelings but also her words. She doesn’t want to be drawn into making promises she can’t keep. But his eyes are sad and hurt. He clearly wants to ask other, softer, more vulnerable questions. Why did she leave? Doesn’t she love him? Doesn’t she want to be with him? But these are not the kind of questions that Karl will ask out loud because Karl does not know the answers and Karl never admits he doesn’t have answers. “That’s a surgeon’s personality,” her father, Karl’s onetime professor, told Gwen early in their courtship. “He’s used to being in charge, having authority.” Like most people in love, she ignored any observation that didn’t serve her vision of her romance.

      “Aren’t you running late? Go save lives,” she says now, not meaning to be cruel, only factual. But Karl takes offense.

      “It’s not—” he begins, then stops because Annabelle has entered the kitchen, frowning at the morning, slow and cranky, quite unlike both of them. Gwen is a morning person, while Karl, like many hyperachievers, permits himself no more than four or five hours of sleep.

      Annabelle, by contrast, is a night owl who fights bedtime and treats morning as a personal offense. Another reason for Gwen to be here for bedtime every night. Karl would never have the patience to cajole Annabelle through her nighttime routine. There are circles under Annabelle’s eyes, bigger and darker than usual. Gwen wonders if Karl knows that Annabelle sometimes creeps down to the kitchen with the earbuds from her little MP3 player and then watches the television on the counter, standing all the while. Once Gwen found her with her chin resting on the counter, asleep on her feet, while an infomercial touted the miracle of mineral makeup. She wonders at the secrets of her daughter’s DNA. Were her parents night owls? How had they coped? Given the remote orphanage where Annabelle spent the first eleven months of her life, her parents were almost certainly farmers. Did they frown at sunrise, did they stay up late, despite knowing the price they would pay come morning? Did they abandon their daughter to strike СКАЧАТЬ