The Blue Hour
- Автор: Паркер Т. Джефферсон
- Серия: Merci Rayborn #1
- Год: 1999
- Язык: английский
- Год: Hyperion
- ISBN: 978-0-7868-6288-7
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «The Blue Hour». Краткое содержание книги:
This, she understood, was something that her will could not fail. She could take him, all of him, all his years and his exhaustion and his disease, all his desire and his dreams, and she could accommodate them. She could absorb and absolve. She could take in and transform. She could will the death right out, and the life right into him.
Power.
“Merci.”
“Keep your eyes closed.”
“It’s falling out, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
She reached over and turned off the lamp.
“Come on,” she said. “Follow me.”
At four in the morning Hess awoke to the sound of cats screeching somewhere out in the grove. Merci breathed deeply and didn’t move.
He lay still and remembered: fishing with his uncles, his dad making pancakes on Sunday mornings, the creases on the back of his mother’s blouse as she walked, Barbara’s expression as she came down the aisle in the church where they were married, his first dog, what the world looked like from the tail gunner’s position of a B-29 thirty thousand feet above Korea. He had no idea why he thought of these particular things. It felt like they were lining themselves up for his inspection. This is what we were.
Eight more years, he thought. Seventy-five years.
He set a hand on Merci’s back. He thought of standing in front of her bathroom mirror a few hours ago, looking at his new head. He remembered her hands kneading his scalp and the hair falling lightly onto his face, and later, the shower they took together when she shampooed it away by the handful.
It was a strange moment as he stood there, naked and still wet, newly bald and thoroughly exhausted, with Merci naked herself under a towel, this large and quite lovely woman who had just made love to him, dark moles on creamy skin, the strands of black wet hair on her shoulders, crowded right up close in the steamy little bathroom to look in the mirror with him. She had actually smiled. He had felt the heat of her on his skin, through the towel. They had shaved off the remnants. Eyebrows gone, too. He looked like a giant baby.
Hair or not, it seemed too good a thing for him to be here now, still alive in the world, still touching and touched by it all. And he was thankful for it in a way he could not express.
He got up and walked through the warm old house, looking through the windows to the dark groves and the moonless sky littered with stars. The floorboards creaked under his feet and a clock ticked echoes across the living room at him.
He sat for a while and wondered how he could use the rest of his life in the best way possible. He had no specific ideas, but the general concept of using his years to live well was a good place to start. It was certainly a new concept, that much was for certain. Use the years to live well.
He made coffee and took a cup back to the bedroom. He stood beside the bed and looked down at Merci Rayborn as she slept. Her hair was tangled with shadows and her face was pale as cream against the darkness. He saw the rise of her hip under the sheet, the way her fists came together at her chin. He wondered what might have happened if he could have met her forty years ago.
In the kitchen he turned on the light over the stove, got out his blue notepad and pen and wrote Merci a letter about what he was feeling at four-thirty in the morning in her house in the orange grove. Hess considered himself a clear but dull writer, and as he composed the letter to her he read it quietly to himself. It was clear and dull. That was okay, he thought: the purpose wasn’t to entertain or divert. The purpose was just to tell her how much she meant to him and how she had inspired him enough to write her about it. It came off sounding like a thank-you card, but he was thankful. So what?
Dear Merci,
I wish we’d have met when we were both young. But you weren’t born then and I would probably have been too witless to do you right anyway. I feel happy now and blessed by the years, by circumstance and by you.
Sincerely,