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

in. Because you have unfinished business, too."
"But I can never finish it now," he said.
"Can't you?" she answered. "I married Barry. I had my boys. Then
Tonio came back and gave them the last thing they needed. You, now.
You could marry, you know. Have more children. Fill that house with
life and love again. Your wife and baby, they'll step back, like
Tonio did. But they won't be gone. Someday maybe you'll be alone
again. Big empty house. And they'll come back. Don't you think?
Selena -- such a lovely name -- and your baby Diana. Just in the
next room. Around you all the time. Reminding you when you were
young. Only by then Diana might not need to be a baby anymore. It
won't be toys she leaves around, it'll be schoolbooks. Hairbrushes.
And the long hairs you find on your pillow won't be Selena's color
anymore. It'll be grey. Or white."
He hadn't told her about still finding Selena's hair. She simply
knew.
"You can go on with your life without letting go," said Wanda.
"Because you don't really lose them. They're just out of reach. I
look around Greensboro and I wonder, how many other houses are like
mine? Haunted by love, by unfinished love. And sometimes I think,
Tonio isn't haunting us, we're the ones who are haunting him.
Calling him back. And because he loves us, he comes. Until we don't
really need him anymore."


They talked a little more, and Tim went home, and everything was
different, and everything was gloriously the same. It wasn't madness
anymore. They really were just out of reach, he really had just
missed them. They were still in the house with him, still in his
life.
And, knowing that, believing it now, he could go on. He visited
Wanda a couple of times a week. Got to know each of her sons on
their visits. Became friends with them. When Wanda passed away, he
sat with the family at the funeral.
Tim went back to work, not at the company where he and Selena had
met, but in a new place, with new people. Eventually he married,
they had children, and just as Wanda had said, Selena and Diana
faded, but never completely. There would be a book left open
somewhere, one that nobody in the house was reading. There would be
a whiff of a strange perfume, the sound of someone humming a tune
that hadn't been current for years.
Right along with his new family, he knew that Diana was growing up,
in a house full of siblings who knew about her, loved the stories of
her childhood that he told, and who came to him, one by one, as the
years passed, to tell him privately that once or twice in their
childhood, they had seen her, the older sister who came to them
during a nightmare and comforted them, who whispered love to them
when friends at school had broken their hearts, whose gentle hand on
their shoulder had calmed them and given them courage.
And the smiling mother who wasn't their mother but there she was in