"Nina Kiriki Hoffman - Courting Disasters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Nina Kiriki)

He turned his head. Rachel sat in a chair nearby, her dark hair raying out around her head, the freckles
stark on her thin, pale face, her green eyes sunken. She wore a bronze-green Indian-print dress with dots
of gold on it.
“Rae?” he said. He tried to reach for her, but his hand was taped to the railing. He wanted her. He
remembered why he had run away from her. “What are you doing here?”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Obviously it’s a hospital,” he said, once again secure in the fortress of his skull, all input from below the
neck reduced to proper second-class status. “No one has seen fit to inform me of its name or location. I
never expected to see you again.” His voice seemed raspy, and talking hurt.

She leaned forward and gave him a strained smile. “Same Simon,” she said.

“No,” he said, staring up at the ceiling. Stranger-thoughts had been passing through his brain. After two
breaths, he looked at her.

She clasped the fingers of her left hand in her right.

“Then you know?”

He had never seen the skull so clearly beneath her skin before.

“Know? Oh, you mean the foot?” He heard his own detachment, then felt his stomach churn. He tasted
bile, and felt a sinus ache around his eyes. The foot. One of his selves had recognized that his right foot
was gone, but somehow it hadn’t mattered to that self. Simon closed his eyes and tried to keep back
tears. He had not cried since he was eight, the last time he had given his father any satisfaction during a
whipping.

—It doesn’t really hurt, having it replaced. First the jack, then a violation of the place under the hood
where you hide the spare; but then you’re back in business.—

Simon smiled, heard a gasping laugh come from his throat.

“Simon?” Rachel reached for his free hand. “Are you all right? Can I get you anything?”

He swallowed, wadded up the pain and put it away. Years of practice made it easy. “Information.
Where am I? How long since the accident? What are you doing here?”

“You’re in a town called Hoodoo. You were in intensive care a week, then they moved you in here three
days ago. They found my phone number in your stuff, Simon. They couldn’t find any other addresses or
phone numbers except the apartment you stayed in, in Menlo Park. The landlady couldn’t give them any
information. They called me. I came up. Is there anybody you want me to call?”

“No,” he said. “Nobody out there to wonder.”

“Except me. How come you didn’t say good-bye? The landlady didn’t even know you were gone. Said
you were paid through the end of the month. I called Express Communications and they said you had
finished up and left. How could you?”