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

seeing things yourself lately, haven't you?"
So he told her what he'd told no other person, about Selena and Baby
Di, about how he kept just missing them. By the end she was nodding.

"Oh, I knew it," she said. "That's why you could see the paper.
Because the wall between worlds is as thin for you as it is for me."

"I'm not crazy?" he asked, laughing nervously.
"How should I know?" she said. "But we both saw that paper. And it's
not just us. My kids, too. See, the -- what do we call it? Haunting?
Evidences? -- it didn't start till they were grown up and gone.
Barry Lear was busy having his stroke and getting downright eager to
shed his old body, and I was taking care of him best I could, and
all of a sudden I start hearing the radio playing music that my
first husband and I used to dance to, big band sounds. And those
newspapers, that paperboy, just like it was 1948, the year we were
happiest, the summer when I got pregnant, before the baby miscarried
and our hearts broke and just before Christmas he found out about
the cancer. As if he could feel Barry getting set to leave my life,
and Tonio was coming back."
"And your kids know?"
"You have to understand, Barry provided for us, he never hit anybody
or yelled. But he was a completely absent father, even when he was
home. The kids were so hungry for a dad, even grown up and moved
away they still wanted one, so when they came home for their
father's funeral, all three of them saw the same things I was
seeing. And when I told them it was happening before Barry died,
that it was Tonio, the man who wasn't their father but wanted so
badly to be, the man who would have been there for them no matter
what, if God hadn't taken him so young -- well, they adopted him.
They call him their ghost."
She smiled but tears ran down her cheeks. "That's what he came home
for, Tonio, I mean. For my boys. He couldn't do it while Barry was
here, but as Barry faded, he could come. And now the boys return,
they see his coffee cup in the dish drain, they smell his hair oil
in the bathroom, they see the newspapers, hear the radio. And they
sit there in the living room and they talk. To me, yes, of course,
but also to him, telling him about their lives, believing -- knowing
-- that he's listening to them. That he really cares, he loves them,
and the only reason they can't see him is because he just stepped
out, they only just missed him, he's bound to be in the next room,
he can hear every word they say."
Tim nodded. Yes, that's how it was. Just how it was.
"But he's fading now." She nodded. "They don't need him so much. The
hole in their lives is filled now." She nodded again. "And in mine.
The love of my life. We had unfinished business, you see. Things not
done."
"So why did I see it? The paperboy, the newspaper -- I never knew
Tonio, I'm not one of your sons."
"Because you live like I do, on the edge of the other side, seeing