Stir Me Up. Sabrina Elkins
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Название: Stir Me Up
Автор: Sabrina Elkins
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Детская проза
isbn: 9781472071064
isbn:
She goes through her freshly-opened door and then turns and waits for me to leave so she can do her business in privacy. It’s kind of cute, but I’m too tired to care. I leave her to do her thing and crawl back into bed to sleep for another hour. After I get up again later, I take a fast shower, change and make my way back into the kitchen, where I find Estella hovering over the stove.
“Morning,” she says. “Coffee?” She’s staring at the little espresso pot and clearly fighting back tears.
Poor Estella. She’s a wreck over this. “He’ll be fine,” I say, realizing this is probably zero comfort to her. “They have state-of-the-art care for our soldiers now.”
Suddenly I’m in a hug. I try to hug her back. But the truth is I was raised mostly by a man and I’m not used to being touched by anyone other than a boyfriend or maybe my aunts the few times I’ve met them. But Estella, I know, is very touchy-feely. Thankfully she pulls away from me pretty quickly. “Sorry, I’m a bit of a disaster.”
“I understand,” I tell her, and suddenly the coffee explodes, boiling over and leaking through the seal. Estella reaches for it with a bare hand.
“No, don’t!” I move her aside, shut off the stove and realize, looking at her, that Estella is barely hanging on. She’s a woman on the verge of a complete meltdown.
“I can’t do this,” she says mostly to herself.
My guess is she thinks her nephew is either dead or on the verge of death and they’re not telling her. Poor Estella. Poor Julian. I glance at the table and see an open photo album there, next to a water glass. She must have just been looking at it. “Are those pictures of him?”
“Yes.”
I go over and take a look. To be honest, I was expecting to see baby pictures, or pictures of him as a little kid, but these must have been taken only a few years ago. Julian looks about my age in the first picture. He’s lounging on the grass in a T-shirt and jeans, all straight nose, cheeks and angular jaw. His toast-brown hair is tinged with blond. There’s a devilish curve in his upper lip. His eyes seem amused—and annoyed. “Wow.”
Estella smiles, obviously pleased by this reaction. “My sister was a knockout. Julian looks just like her.” She turns the page. “See, here he is with his date for prom his senior year.”
The girl is blond, several shades lighter than my own light brown hair, and with eyes far bluer than my gray ones. Also, unlike me, she doesn’t have freckles. “She’s extremely pretty.”
“Yes, his girlfriends always are.”
I feel a stab of something, I’m not sure what. “Was she a cheerleader?”
“Actually, this one wasn’t,” says Estella.
We look through more pictures of Julian during his senior year, the year I’m about to begin. He was in varsity basketball. There are lots of shots with friends and with Estella’s son Brandon. Several are from Brandon and Claire’s wedding. Brandon has Estella’s dark features whereas his wife, Claire, is much lighter, with a round cherub face and short blond hair, so they’re like opposites and look very cute together. I want to ask Estella what happened to her sister, how she died, and how old Julian was when he came to live with her, but now’s not the time. I just keep complimenting how great everyone looks and then Estella puts the photo album away.
Chapter Three
The minute the album is out of sight, Estella’s stress level multiplies by a factor of about a hundred, particularly when Julian’s arrival date is moved up a day, and Estella’s non-changeable flight is therefore set for the morning after Julian will be there. Ultimately, we’re able to convince her that Julian will probably not be conscious or aware when he first arrives anyway—and no, she shouldn’t just pay for new flights or take the car and drive all the way down to Maryland to be there for him when he first arrives. The morning we have to leave, she’s still a mess about the delay, and about the trip in general. She can’t remember if she packed her socks or travel alarm. She can’t find her keys.
“Have a safe trip,” Dad says to her. “Call me when you get there.” He gives her an embarrassingly long hug and kiss goodbye and then turns to me and tells me—in French—to be as helpful as possible. Like this message is so important it requires his native language for added emphasis.
“I will.”
We finally make it into the shuttle van and to the airport and then there’s the stress over the tickets and whether to check or carry on the bags. This, of course, is really all about Julian and how worried she is for him, and nothing I do or say makes her feel any better. I only hope when she sees him, she’ll feel slightly more reassured.
Estella’s going to have a nervous breakdown before we even reach the hospital, I text Luke. But I have to power down my phone for takeoff before he can text me back.
Estella spends the whole flight memorizing maps of the area surrounding the hospital and then shredding her cocktail napkin into tiny little pieces and floating them in her ice water.
“We’ll be landing soon,” I say encouragingly to her. She blinks and nods but doesn’t really answer.
We carried on the bags, so without delay Estella hits the cab line and gets us from the airport to our hotel. There are a lot of hotels within a few miles of the hospital. Estella’s picked out one of the ones within walking distance.
“Let’s just check in, drop off the bags and head right over,” she says. She seems definitely on edge now, almost cranky.
The hospital is just under a mile away, so still a fair distance. The bags hit the room and I just have time to use the bathroom before she’s hurrying me back out again. When she wants to, Estella can really move. I’ve never been left in the dust so quickly outside of a running track before in my life. I have to pretty much jog to keep up with her, and the fact that I’m slowing her down seems to make her bad mood even worse.
“I wish you’d hurry!” she snaps.
Good grief. “Did you hear some news about Julian that has you more worried?” I ask.
Estella glares at me in response. All I meant was did a call come in I don’t know about that has her particularly in a rush. But I don’t bother to explain and she doesn’t care to stop to listen. Then all at once she turns to me when we reach an intersection and are forced to wait for the light.
“Look, Cami. I appreciate your father’s concern for me,” she says. “But this really isn’t the kind of thing you need to be exposed to.”
Oh, so that’s it. She’s still upset I’ve been sent on the trip with her, whereas I’ve pretty much made my peace with it. “I’m just here to help,” I tell her. “What if Julian could use a fresh blanket or a hot meal? I can run out and fetch those things for you. I can go back to the hotel and get something for you, whatever you might СКАЧАТЬ