"Charles de Lint - Make a Joyiful Noise" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

might be filled with old memories, but none of them were of him.

“Can you help me?” he asked.

“Help you with what?”

“With…you know. Getting her to remember me.”

“Why is it so important?”

“How can I die and go on if no one remembers that I was ever alive?”

“Lots of people don’t remember me,” I said, “and it doesn’t bother me.”

He chuckled, but without any humour. “Yeah, like that’s possible.”

“No, it really doesn’t.”

“I meant that anybody would forget meeting you.”

“You’d be surprised.”

He held my gaze for a long moment, then shrugged.
“So will you help me?”

I nodded. “I can try. Maybe it’s not so much that your mother should remember you more, but that she
should remember your sister less. The way it is, there’s no room inside her for anything else.”

“But you’ll try?”

Against my better judgment, I found myself nodding.

He did a slow fade and I was left alone in the living room. I sat for awhile longer, looking at the place
where he’d been sitting, then got down from the coffee table and walked back into the hall. There were
two closed doors and two open ones. I knew one led into the old lady’s bedroom, the other into a
bathroom. I went to the first closed door. It opened into a room that was like stepping inside a cake, all
frosty pinks and whites, full of dolls and pennants and trophies. Madeline’s room. Closing its door, I
continued down the hall and opened the other one.

Both rooms had the feel of empty places where no one lived. But while Madeline’s room was bright and
clean–the bed neatly made, the shelves dusted, the trophies shined–the boy’s room looked as though the
door had been closed on the day he died and no one had opened it until I had just this moment.

The bedding lay half-on, half-off the box spring, pooling on the floor. There were posters off baseball
players and World War II planes on the wall. Decades of dust covered every surface, clustering around
the model cars and plastic statues of movie monsters on the book shelves and window sill. More planes
hung from the ceiling, held in flight by fishing lines.

Unlike the daughter, he truly was forgotten.