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

Running never used to turn her on, but then Matt is new in her life since the
fourth of July. When they started sleeping together, everything changed. Even
Crispin. Whenever Matt enters a room, Crispin leaves. It’s as if there isn’t room
enough in her head for the two of them. Maybe that’s because Matt is such a big
man. Solid as two refrigerators. He has a scraggly blonde beard and feral hair. Some
people find him scary. But Matt’s hands are soft and his voice wraps around Lisa
like a blanket. He makes her feel safe and sexy. Crispin has always made Lisa feel
exposed; she can’t relax if he’s following her. Especially if she’s making love. He
watched her very first kiss through the window of Tommy Falucci’s bedroom and
has observed all her desperate couplings in the twenty-some years since.
Is that the reason why she’s falling in love with Matt—because he chases
Crispin off ? It’s a thought that Lisa tries to block out by counting steps as she
chops Bride’s Hill. She read someplace that when you run, your feet strike the
ground between seventy and a hundred times a minute, each time with a force three
times the weight of your body. Her legs feel like logs but then she reaches the top of
the hill and turns, running in place as her hometown unfolds beneath her like the map
of her life. She watches Crispin laboring up Bride’s Hill Road, head down, arms
churning.
After Lisa had stopped believing in angels, she decided that Crispin must be
her imaginary friend. That lie got her well into eighth grade, which is when she first
saw the Jimmy Stewart movie where he’s an alcoholic and his best friend is an
invisible rabbit. Harvey. For a while she liked to pretend that her life was like that
movie, although she knew that was another delusion, since Jimmy Stewart was
always drunk but never fell down or slurred a single word. Lisa started drinking in
high school and went steady with vodka all through her twenties; she fell down with
stunning regularity. Her mother’s daughter. But Crispin didn’t seem to care whether
she lived or died. Imaginary or not, he was no friend to her.
Actually, Lisa isn’t sure she has ever had a friend, other than Matt. Of course,
she knows a lot of people. Dover is a small town, after all, and she’s lived in it all her
life. But as soon as she steps onto the path of intimacy, Crispin blocks the way. Lisa
imagines that friendship is about trust, but if she shares her secret, she is always
betrayed. It isn’t so much that people feel sorry for her or that they urge her to get
help. She understands that. Rather it’s that they can’t accept that she has tried
everything—twice—and nothing has worked. Ever. They act as if it’s somehow her
fault that there’s no cure for Crispin. Sometimes, even Matt....
“Never get there running in place, Schoonover.”
Lisa is startled. For a moment she thinks that Crispin has spoken, after a
lifetime of silence. But he’s still in front of her, just now cresting the hill, a line of
dark sweat defining his sternum. She turns and sees Coach Billy Ward giving her his
sly smile. His face looks drawn, even in the slant light. His legs are pale as eggs and
his quadriceps have wasted, making his knees even knobbier. Otherwise he seems fit
enough for a man who died of a heart attack six years ago. He’s wearing Reebok
Premiers and nylon shorts and the brown and gold wind shirt of the Memorial High
Running Badgers.
“I’ll get there,” Lisa says. “I just won’t set the record.” Coach is the only
dead person who talks to her. Lisa has never been able to get him to say anything
important, although she’s still trying. “How are you feeling, Coach?”
He shakes his hands loose in front of him as he marks time beside her. “You
know.”
Billy Ward was Lisa’s track and cross-country coach and he is one of the