"Orson Scott Card - Missed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Card Orson Scott)

in the back yard, if he took just a few steps he'd see them.
When he thought about it, of course, he knew it wasn't true, they
were dead, gone, their life together was over before it was half
begun. But for that moment when he first walked into the room and
saw the evidence with his own eyes, he had that deep contentment of
knowing that he had missed them by only a moment.
Now the madness had finally lurched outside of the house, outside of
his lost and broken family, and shown him a newspaper from before he
was born, delivered by a boy from another time, on the driveway of a
stranger's house. It wasn't just grief anymore. He was bonkers.


He went home and stood outside the front door for maybe five
minutes, afraid to go in. What was he going to see? Now that he
could conjure newspapers and paperboys out of nothing, what would
his grief-broken mind show him when he opened the door?
And a worse question was: What if it showed him what he most wanted
to see? Selena standing in the kitchen, talking on the phone,
smiling to him over the mouthpiece as she cut the crusts off the
bread so that Queen Dee would eat her sandwiches. Diana coming to
him, reaching up, grabbing his fingers, saying, "Hand, hand!" and
dragging him to play with her in the family room.
If madness was so perfect and beautiful as that, could he ever bear
to leave it behind and return to the endless ache of sanity? If he
opened the door, would he leave the world of the living behind, and
dwell forever in the land of the beloved dead?
When at last he went inside there was no one in the house and
nothing had moved. He was still a little bit sane and he was still
alone, trapped in the world he and Selena had so carefully designed:
Insurance enough to pay off the mortgage. Insurance enough that if
either parent died, the other could afford to stay home with Diana
until she was old enough for school, so she didn't have to be raised
by strangers in daycare. Insurance that provided for every
possibility except one: That Diana would die right along with one of
her parents, leaving the other parent with a mortgage-free house,
money enough to live for years and years without a job. Without a
life.
Twice he had gone through the house, picking up all of Diana's toys
and boxing them, taking Selena's clothes out of the closet to give
away to Goodwill. Twice the boxes had sat there, the piles of
clothes, for days and days. As one by one the toys reappeared in
their places in the family room or Diana's bedroom. As Selena's
dresser drawers filled up again, her hangers once again held
dresses, blouses, pants, and the closet floor again was covered with
a jumble of shoes. He didn't remember putting them back, though he
knew he must have done it. He didn't even remember deciding not to
take the boxes and piles out of the house. He just never got around
to it.
He stood in the entryway of his empty house and wanted to die.
And then he remembered what the old woman had said.