"Karen Robards - Walking After Midnight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robards Karen)

ISBN 0-440-21590-0

Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press

Printed in the United States of America

Published simultaneously in Canada

November 1995

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 This book is dedicated, as always, with much love to the men in my life:
Doug, Peter, and Christopher.
It also commemorates two family weddings: my sister Lee Ann Johnson to
Sammy Spicer on February 8, 1993, and my brother Bruce Hodges Johnson to
Susan Wearren on June 12, 1993.
1.

"Why can't the dead die!"

-Eugene O'Neill

She hanged herself from a plant hook.
One of those white, faux wrought-iron things that screw into the ceiling.
It was guaranteed to support up to one hundred pounds. If she had weighed
more than ninetyeighty pounds soaking wet, the darned thing never would
have held and she would be alive today.
That was almost funny, considering that she had had a phobia about getting
fat-she was only five feet tall-and had spent her entire adult life on a
rigorous diet to keep her weight under a hundred pounds.
But then, such is life.
Life. The spirit-for she was a spirit-dreamily contemplated it. As she did,
she felt a tingling within, like the slow awakening of a blood-starved
limb.
Did she want to be alive again? The spirit pondered.
How it had felt to be alive was hard for her to remember. It was as though
she were viewing life from the perspective of an underwater swimmer, as
though life were a bright day seen through a distorting veil of water. The
underwater world was so much more real to her now that she was part of it.
She was content here, in this
2 Karen Robards

floating, dreaming, distorting netherland that had been her abode for-how
long?
She didn't know. Time had no meaning for her now. Simply, she had been here
since she died.
Since the night when her stockinged feet had rested on a cool metal desktop
and a length of nylon rope had been looped around her neck. Since the night
when she had choked and kicked and fought, fought, fought to breathe . . .