A Family To Cherish. Carole Gift Page

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “Every day? You couldn’t take one day off to be with your own sister who comes to visit just once every few years?”

      “I was here in the evenings.”

      “When everyone was too tired to visit.”

      “All right, so I’m the bad guy. So what’s new? What do you want me to do about it?”

      “Nothing. It’s too late. Forget it.”

      Doug let his fork clatter on his plate. “Don’t play the sweet little martyr with me, Barb. You know you didn’t want to be out there running all over town with my sister and her kid, either.”

      “No, but I went anyway, didn’t I?”

      “No one twisted your arm.”

      “I went because she’s your sister, and someone in this family has to act like life is normal, no matter how skewed it really is.”

      A tendon tightened along Doug’s jaw. “We play this same record over and over again, don’t we, Barb? We keep going in vicious little circles. When will it ever end?”

      She speared a morsel of chicken, but had no desire to eat. Her stomach was in knots, her throat constricting. “If you think I like things this way—”

      They were both silent for a long miserable moment. Finally he asked coolly, “So how did it go with Janee?”

      “Janee?”

      “Yeah. The kid who makes Dennis the Menace look like an angel. Did she behave herself?”

      Barbara’s anger smoldered. Doug had an infuriating way of changing the subject whenever they got too close to painful truths. “If you must know, Janee drove me up a wall,” she replied. “She had me pulling my hair. I don’t think I could have tolerated that child in this house for one more hour.”

      “Come on, Barb. She couldn’t have been that bad.”

      “How would you know? You weren’t here. And she was asleep by the time you got home.”

      “From what I saw of her, she’s a spunky little tyke. Cute as a bug’s ear. Okay, maybe a bit too mischievous for my tastes.”

      “Are you kidding? Paul and your sister never discipline that child. She’s spoiled and impudent. Worst of all, they think everything she says and does is perfectly charming.”

      Doug’s expression softened. “Weren’t we that way, too, Barbie?”

      “No. Never. All right, almost never.”

      “So what did Janee do that was so bad?”

      Barbara inhaled sharply. “She spilled grape juice on our plush carpet. She trampled my flower beds picking roses for her mother. She ran up and down the stairs and slammed doors and did a Tarzan yell that rattled my eardrums and put her muddy shoes on my velvet sofa.” Barbara’s voice quavered with an onrush of emotion. “And she kept begging me to let her sleep in the ‘pretty room,’ as she called it.”

      “Maybe you should have let her,” said Doug under his breath.

      Barbara stared at him in astonishment. “You don’t mean that.”

      “Don’t I? Maybe it’s time we let it go, Barb. Stop making it a monument or a memorial or a shrine, or whatever you want to call it.”

      Barbara pushed her chair back from the table and stood up, her ankles wobbly. “I’m not hungry, Doug. Will you put the food away? I’m going to bed.”

      He stared at her, his brows knitting in a frown. “What about the dishes?”

      “Leave them. I’ll do them in the morning.”

      He bent over his plate, scowling, and muttered, “A lot of good it does, me coming home for dinner. You just walk off. Next time I’ll pick something up at the hospital.”

      “Fine. You’ll probably find better company there, too.”

      “Now that you mention it, I probably will.”

      She pivoted and, without a backward glance, marched out of the room, quickly ascending the stairs to the bedroom. She undressed and slipped into her most revealing negligee, perversely hoping to tempt her husband just so she could reject his advances. She hated herself for behaving this way, hated the terrible dead-end course their marriage had taken, but she felt powerless to change anything. It was as if she and Doug were actors on a stage, spewing words they didn’t mean, words forced upon them by circumstances beyond their control.

      Barbara had felt powerless since the day Doug had told her there was nothing they could do to save Caitlin. It seemed the only power she or Doug had these days was to inflict hurt on each other. It was what they were best at. What irony that the wounded had become so skilled at wounding one another. What hope was there for healing?

      Barbara was nearly asleep when she heard Doug come up to bed. She lay still, her back to him as he climbed in beside her and rolled onto his side, away from her. She felt the weight of his body on the mattress, heard the springs creak. She waited, her breathing slow and rhythmic, pretending to slumber. Would he touch her? What would she do if he did? Should she risk letting him know she was awake and needed his closeness?

      Barbara’s questions faded when she heard her husband’s deep, steady breathing. She lay in the darkness, listening, waiting. Doug was so close to her that she could feel his warmth as he lay stretched out beside her under the covers. And yet he had never seemed more distant. And she had never felt more alone.

      In the middle of the night the telephone rang, startling them both out of sleep. With a muffled snort, Doug sat up and grabbed the bedside phone. Barbara sat up, too, her mind still shrouded in the gauzy cobwebs of a dream. She turned on the lamp and tried to focus on what Doug was saying. By his tone she knew something was wrong. Terribly wrong.

      “Yes, this is Douglas Logan,” he was saying. “Nancy Myers? She’s my sister. What? When? Good Lord, no! Where did it happen? Are they—? Yes, I’ll be there. What hospital? All right. We’ll catch the next available plane.”

      He hung up the phone and looked at her, his face drained of color, the lines around his eyes taut, distorted with shock and fear. She knew that look; it was coldly, frighteningly familiar; she had seen it a thousand times in her memory. That look had shattered her life, turned her world upside down. And now it was happening again. Her heart pumped with dread. “What happened?” she demanded.

      His voice was tight, hushed. “That was the police. It’s Nancy. Their car crashed just south of San Francisco.”

      Her skin prickled with an icy foreboding. “Oh, Doug, no! Are they okay?”

      “They’re in the hospital. In some little rural town. A suburb south of San Francisco. We’ve got to go.”

      “Of course. I’ll throw a few things in a bag.”

      He nodded. “I’ll call the airline.”

      It was amazing how in sync she and Doug could be when an emergency demanded it, СКАЧАТЬ