The year of the Lucy
- Автор: Маккефри Энн
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «The year of the Lucy». Краткое содержание книги:
Lord, she couldn't remember which hotel Steve was staying at, or if he'd have left for Cleveland, or what? But she had to reach him. She must make him understand, too, how wickedly cruel that accusation was. The ring of the phone stabbed like a knife through her mind to her roiling stomach.
"Mirelle, Dad's had a heart attack," Steve said with no preamble.
"I know. I just got a wire from Ralph."
"Well?"
"Well what? Or do you think it's my fault, too?"
"Your fault?" Steve sounded shocked and angry. "What on earth do you mean by that, Mirelle? How could it be your fault? But you might at least act sorry."
"I AM sorry! I like your father, even if your mother and I can never see eye to eye. But let me quote you Ralph's wire." And she did.
"That's ridiculous and I hope you realize it," Steve said, his tone gentler.
"How could Ralph think I'd be satisfied that a nice old man has had a heart attack?" Mirelle was close to tears.
"Honey, don't cry. Ralph's not rational but can't you see how he'd think that? Mother and Dad were upset by what happened here."
"You think I'm not? But was it my fault? Because Roman should never have been allowed to serve papers at all. Because he might possibly hurt himself and, of course, he did. After two years without so much as a fall off his bike…"
"Mirelle, get a hold of yourself. You've never flown off the handle like this before."
"I've never been so desperate before, Steve. And I've never been so unjustly accused before."
"Mirelle, please. Get a hold of yourself," Steve sounded upset now, too.
"It's not a bad stroke, is it? Your father'll be all right, won't he? I mean, did Ralph tell you any details?"
"Yes, he did. It's not a serious seizure: more of a warning. Dad told me that he'd been advised to take it easier. Get away from the heavy winters. That's why they went south. It's just unfortunate… Well, I don't imagine Mother helped matters any on the trip down. Or at Ralph's. Now look, Dad's at the Orange Memorial Hospital in Orlando. Send flowers, will you?"
"I will. I will. I'm sorry." While Steve had talked, she'd tried to calm herself but the viciousness of Ralph's accusation rankled too deeply.
"Mirelle, honey?"
"Yes, Steve."
"It'll all work out all right, believe me? Ralph was scared. You know he's much closer to Dad than I am."
"Oh, come home, Steve. Please come home to me."
"I will, Mirelle, I will."
He'll come home, he'll come home! The words did a gavotte in Mirelle's mind. Steve had to come home. And yes, he was right that Ralph would be scared. Ralph scared easily. He didn't have the guts that Steve did. Ralph certainly couldn't have told his mother to leave, that he never wanted to see her again. Maybe Marian Martin was afraid of her, too.
The notion consoled Mirelle tremendously and she chose not to weaken the idea with any qualifiers. People are afraid of people who are different, and she was certainly different from the girl Marian Martin had intended her precious second son to marry. Nancy Randolph indeed! Mirelle Martin scares Marian Martin! Mirelle chanted it to herself. Ralph Martin is also scared stiff of Mirelle Martin.
For Arthur Martin she felt pity. She'd always liked him. She picked up the phone and called the floral service, putting her name first when she gave the donors. She intended to keep the upper hand with her mother-in-law. Then she fixed dinner for the kids.
She tried again to reach Sylvia but the line was busy. That was an improvement on no answer.
She wandered into the studio, digging her fingers aimlessly into the plasticene in its barrel. Finally she scooped out a handful and slapped it on a plywood base. At random, she worked in more and more, globs here and there, formless. Then she began to shape what she gradually realized were hands, fingers, joints, messes of hands, grubby fingered, skeletal jointed, fat palms, stiff thumbs, crooked fingers, the hands of her nightmares - masses of fingerlike snakes and jagged claw-nails.
Although she was absorbed by the process of creation, she didn't at all like what she was doing. The hands and disjointed fingers were repellent, disgusting, verging on the obscene. She raised her fist purposefully to smash this tangible form of the nightmare back into anonymity.
"You always sculpt with love," Sylvia had said.
"Not always," Mirelle said softly. And lowered her destroying hand for some obscure, perverse reason.
She covered the obscenity and shoved it up high on the shelf where the shadows would hide it. Then she went to bed. She worried about Dad Martin until she fell asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Monday MORNING SHE forced herself to get her usual chores done before going to the studio. She'd put another color coat on the head first, she decided. Just then the door opened abruptly. For a fleeting, hopeful moment she thought it might be Sylvia and started to the stairwell, staring up at James Howell in surprise.
"Well, whom were you expecting?" he asked. "I even knocked."
"I thought… well, I'd half hoped it might be Sylvia," she said with devastating honesty, and giggled at the collapse of his haughty expression.
"Hah!" He recovered himself promptly. "Don't you remember giving me gracious permission to come leer at you on Monday? I thought I'd finally succeeded in making an impression on you. Now I find that you'd prefer the company of some mere female. I'm leaving."
"Oh, Jamie, no, please!" She ran up the steps, half convinced that he was really offended. "I didn't forget you were coming. But you didn't specify when, and you caromed in just the way Sylvia does. And I haven't heard from her. I'm worried…"
She was level with him now and he put his hands on her shoulders and gave her a little shake to silence her.
"What else has been dumped on you, Mirelle?"
"Oh, Jamie, everything, I think." She leaned gratefully into his comforting embrace.
"All right then, I want to hear the whole miserable saga," he said, leading her by the hand to the couch in the studio. He sat at the other end, prepared to listen.
The incidents around Roman's accident came tumbling out, including Steve's disclosure at the hospital.
"Petty, petty, petty," Jamie said in a growl, when Mirelle recounted Ralph's call and the telegram.
"I'm sorry to unload on you, Jamie," she felt obliged to say. "But it all goes round and round in my mind, and I can't set things into any sort of perspective."
"That's why confession is so good for the soul."
"You're not the father confessor type."
He grinned at her. "No, I'm not. And ordinarily I would eschew the confessional as I would the plague. But the sort of trivia that's been dumped on you is best out in the air, shaken and thrown away for the sheer dross that it is." His tone was fierce, startling her, but his expression was half-amused, as he regarded her through half-closed eyes. "I have the strong urge, my dear, to take you on my lap and cuddle you, the way I used to do with Margaret when she was hurt."
"I've not been hurt…"
"Not physically, no. However," he went on briskly, "my intentions towards you are not the least bit paternal…"
"I can't imagine you ever cuddling Margaret," Mirelle said in a tart tone because she wanted to evade the reason for Jamie's visit as long as possible.
"No?" he asked, his expressive eyebrows raised. "I made a lousy husband, I know, but I've been a most exemplary father. Margaret tells me so repeatedly. She compares notes with her college friends, and they'd all prefer me ten to one."
Mirelle laughed at his smug expression before she realized that he had been subtly prodding her out of her self-pity.