"Lisa Goldstein - Cassandra's Photographs" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldstein Lisa)

sagging double bed, I noticed Cassie and Aurora come in. Cassie lay
on the floor next to me. In my sleep-fogged mind I thought the
sacks Aurora was carrying were her luggage.
Cassie and I were the last ones up. We went outside and found
the others at a restaurant down the street. None of them, it turned
out, knew Spanish, and they had ordered in gestures and pidgin
English. Despite all the warnings and jokes, each of them was
drinking a glass of Mexican water. I wondered how they thought
they were going to pay for the meal.
Aurora picked up one of the pillowcases scattered around her and
looked inside. “Damn,” she said. “One of the snakes escaped. I
wonder if it’s back at the hotel. Alan? Alan!” The poor kid’s eyes had
rolled up under his fluttering eyelids. “Well if you’re afraid of
snakes you should have said something when we started out.”
I hadn’t had any water, but I was sick for a week after we got
home. Lying in bed with a hundred-and-two-degree temperature I
had time to think about the trip, go over the details, figure out how
one thing led to another. I felt as though it had happened to
someone else, someone who had far less of a grip on reality than I
did.
That trip clarified things for me. Life just wasn’t lived that way,
the way Cassie and her family lived it. You didn’t just jump in a car
and drive to Mexico because you felt like it. What if I hadn’t been
there with my credit card? What if Aurora had gotten a concussion?
I wanted something more for my life—order, sanity. I wanted to
complete my studies, get my doctorate in math and get a job in
industry.
I recovered, got busy with fall classes and stopped calling her. I
didn’t consciously think that we had broken up, but I’d think of her
or her family from time to time with nostalgic regret. There was a
guy who hung around their house—I don’t know if he was part of
the family or what—who had been in films as a saxophone player.
The only thing was, he couldn’t play the saxophone. He just looked
like a saxophone player. So there’d be these close-ups of this guy
and someone else on the soundtrack. I used to watch him practice,
moving the saxophone this way and that without making a sound.
It was eerie.
 And I’d remember her great-uncle, asking Cassie to name some
part of a doorway in ancient Egyptian. Sometimes she’d know the
answer, and he’d beam with satisfaction. Other times she wouldn’t,
and he’d shake his head sadly from side to side and say,
“Cassandra, my pet, what will become of you?” Once I caught
myself shaking my head with regret just thinking of him.
I probably would have called her eventually, but one day my
office-mate’s sister came wandering into the office looking for him,
and I ended up taking her out for coffee. Her name was Laura, and
she was very sensible.
I was home, a few weeks after I’d started seeing Laura, when I
heard a loud pounding at the door. I set down the Journal of
Multivariate Analysis and got up. Once I’d unlocked the door to the