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

“Okay.” The girl looked up at Ellen, her eyes dark and fierce. “She’ll be all
right. I love her.”

She’ll be all right. I love her. That incantation hadn’t saved Rebecca. Ellen
swallowed. “What’s your mom’s name, honey?”

“Laura Sorenson.” The girl dipped the folded washcloth into the water.
“She’ll get well. She has to.”

Her hands were trembling as she wiped her mother’s face. Ellen groped for
reassuring words and found only emptiness. “I’ll be back in a little while,” she said.

CLOUDS WERE boiling up over the horizon again by the time Ellen returned to the
house. The wind gusted on-shore, whipping the waves, snatching wisps of spume
from the gray curl of the breakers. There had been a lot of storms lately, as if the
Quake’s terrible power had been absorbed into the atmosphere, was being
discharged in raging wind and waves.

“Jack called the relief people up in Eureka.” Ellen flinched as the wind
slammed the screen door behind her. “They’ll send the helicopter for your mom,
just as soon as it gets back in.” If the weather didn’t stop it. She closed the wooden
door against the building storm. “How is she?”

“Asleep.” Beth hovered protectively in the bedroom doorway. “Better, I
think.”

Ellen edged past her and bent over the bed. She was worse, struggling to
breathe, burning with fever. The woman’s eyelids fluttered and Ellen shivered. There
was a disinterested glaze to her eyes; as if the woman was on a boat, watching a
shoreline recede into the distance. She is dying, Ellen thought and shivered again.
“Beth?” Distract her. “Come have something to eat, okay? I don’t want you getting
sick, too.”
 “If you want.” Beth sat reluctantly at the kitchen table. “What a pretty
woman.” She nodded at the watercolor on the wall. “Did you paint it?” she asked
with a child’s transparent effort to be polite.

“No.” Some art student had painted it, years ago. Rebecca was smiling, head
tilted, one hand in her dark, thick, semitic hair that had just been starting to go gray.
The student had caught the impatience, the intensity that kept her up all night
working, sent her weeping into Ellen’s bed in the dawn, full of exhaustion and
triumph and doubts. Tell me it’s not awful, she would whisper. God, El, I need you.
“It’s a picture of my friend.” Ellen busied herself peeling back shrink-wrap and
slicing the yellow block of salmon-boat cheese. “Is a cheese sandwich all right?”

“Fine.”

Silence. The rasp of the dying woman’s breathing filled the kitchen. “She was
an artist,” Ellen said too loudly. “She did collages. When they started selling, I quit
my job and we moved out here.” You supported me, Rebecca had said, grinning.