"Mary Rosenblum - California Dreaming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenblum Mary)

 No answer.

Ellen lit the little white-gas camping stove, set the pot of oatmeal on to boil.

“They wouldn’t let me go,” Beth spoke up suddenly. She sat rigidly straight,
hands tucked beneath her thighs, eyes fixed on her knees. “I saw her one afternoon,
but she was outside the fence and she didn’t see me. When I told them, they said
she was dead, that she’d died in our building. They said I’d have to wait for my
father to come. He’d never let me go back to Mom. Never. The firemen told me
they’d help me find Mom, but they lied. They just took me to that place.” She
looked at Ellen at last. “The man at the gate hit me, when I tried to run after her.”

Such terrible eyes, dark as the Quake-storm yesterday. They were full of
desperate need. Full of power. Power to tear apart the landscape of reality, to
reshape it like the Quake had reshaped the hills? A hissing startled Ellen and she
snatched her gaze away from those depthless eyes, grabbing a potholder. Sticky
oatmeal foamed over the lip of the pot and bubbled down the side.

Oh, yes, she understood the power of need. Ellen stirred the boiling cereal,
Rebecca’s absence a gaping wound in her heart.

“Grandpa won’t let Dad take me,” Beth went on in a flat monotone. “He
won’t let them take Mom. We’ll be safe there. We’ll be happy. They want to take
her away.” Beth’s voice cracked suddenly, became the cry of a frightened child.
“They can’t!”

“Honey, it’s all right.” Ellen’s arms went around her. She knew that terror, had
felt it every dark, post-Quake night, as she waited to hear from Rebecca. It had
seeped into the marrow of her bones and would never go away. “It’s all right,” she
murmured. Beth was sobbing, her thin body shaking as Ellen held her close.

Nothing was all right. The Quake had shattered the earth. It had shattered
buildings and freeways, it had buckled lives, smashed them into ruin. So much
power, but it was an innocent power; destruction without choice or anger. The sky
had absorbed some of that power, had transformed it into the wild, unseasonable
storms that were battering the coast. Children were such sponges. They absorbed
experiences so easily . . . .

Beth’s sobs were diminishing. Ellen stroked her hair back from her damp and
swollen face. “Why don’t you ask your morn if she wants honey or canned milk on
her cereal,” she said.

“She puts milk on it.” Beth hiccoughed. “And brown sugar.”

“I think I have a little brown sugar left.” How did Julia DeMarco like her
oatmeal? Ellen fished in the cupboard, found a plastic bag with a few brown lumps
left in it. It didn’t matter, she thought as she crumbled rock hard lumps onto the
steaming cereal. Beth’s mother had liked brown sugar on her oatmeal and Beth
needed her mother. Desperately. With all the power of the Quake.