"James Patrick Kelly - Don't Stop" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

DON’T STOP
by James Patrick Kelly

The author’s latest venture is James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod on
Audible.com www.audible.com/jim kelly , which features Jim reading fifty-two
of his own stories for downloading to MP3 players. He’ll be reading “Don’t
Stop” on the StoryPod in the fall. Of this story, he says, “I was captain of my
high school cross-country and track teams and have been running ever
since.”
****
Lisa Schoonover is the only one who can see Crispin and the dead people. If
she lets herself think about this, it still scares her, even though Crispin has been
following her since she was six. On her worst days, Lisa calls in sick to the DVDeal,
closes the closet door behind her and sits on her running shoes to get away from
him. Mostly she pretends he isn’t there, although she worries that it isn’t healthy. If
he isn’t real, then she must be as crazy as everyone in town thinks she is. She’d ask
him about it, but he doesn’t talk.
Of course, Crispin isn’t someone you would pick out in a crowd, even if you
could see him. He has grown up with Lisa and now looks to be about her age, or at
least in his late thirties. Eyes gray, a full head of chocolate brown hair. Just south of
six feet tall and plain as white socks. Except he’s in shape. A runner like her. That’s
the one thing that Lisa knows for sure about Crispin. Today he’s wearing blue
microfiber pants with mesh insets down the sides and a gray Fila long-sleeve tee
against the fall chill. Lisa has already described Crispin’s outfit for her journal. Since
she began keeping a record three years ago, she has become convinced that he has
never worn the same running outfit twice. Recently she’s been puzzling over this.
Maybe some kind of fashion communication? His Air Pegasus trainers are this
year’s model, dazzling just-out-of-the-box white with black highlights and the red
swoosh. From watching him run, Lisa guesses that he’s a slight underpronator with
high arches.
Lisa wears the Brooks Trance NXTs that Matt bought her last week. They
ease the stress on her flat feet, although they do nothing at all to help with the stress
of deciding what to do about Matt. She steps off the sidewalk, settles on the grass in
Kearsarge Park and begins her stretches. Hamstring, quads, hip. She has to be more
careful than she was back when she was running cross country for Coach Ward in
high school. She had problems with both of her Achilles tendons last year. Couldn’t
jog for most of April. Crispin is stretching about a dozen yards away, doing wall
pushups against the Spanish War monument.
Actually, Lisa doesn’t really know what his name is.
When six-year-old Lisa came home from the hospital after the car crash that
killed her father, she told her mother about the weird boy in gray sweats and black
Keds nobody else could see. He was following her around, sometimes even into the
bathroom. Annette Schoonover would smile and pretend to believe in Crispin for her
daughter’s sake. He must be Lisa’s guardian angel, her mother said, sent by God to
watch over her now that Daddy was in heaven. It was the best explanation her
mother could come up with. And it was less bother than therapy, although Lisa
didn’t realize that until years later. To reassure her daughter, her mother had decided
that they should give Lisa’s guardian angel a name. She thought Crispin was
appropriately holy. The name of a famous saint or maybe one of King Arthur’s
knights; she wasn’t sure. Her mother was often hazy about details after cocktail