False Memory полностью

Quickly sorting through a stack of magazines, finding nothing published by any cult more nefarious than the Time-Warner media group, Dusty said, “I’ll tell you later. We don’t have time for it now.”

“You are exasperating.”

“It’s a gift,” he said, leaving the magazines and books for a quick look through the small kitchen.

“Don’t leave me alone here,” she pleaded.

“Then come along.”

“No was;” she said, obviously thinking about knives and meat forks and potato mashers. “No way. That’s a kitchen.”

"I’m not going to ask you to cook.”

The combination kitchen and dining area was open to the living room, all one big California floor plan, so Martie was in fact able to see him pulling open drawers and cabinet doors.

She was silent for half a minute, but when she spoke, her voice was shaky. “Dusty; I’m getting worse.”

“To me, babe, you just keep getting better and better.”

“I mean it. I’m serious. I’m on the edge here, and sliding fast.” Dusty wasn’t finding any cult paraphernalia among the pots and pans. No secret decoder rings. No pamphlets about Armageddon looming. No tracts about how to recognize the Antichrist if you run into him at the mall.

“What’re you doing in there?” Martie demanded.

“Stabbing myself through the heart, so you won’t have to.”

“You bastard.”

“Been there, done that,” he said, returning to the living room.

“You’re a cold man,” she complained. Her pale face squinched with anger. “I’m ice,” he agreed.

“You are. I mean it.”“Arctic.”

“You make me so angry.”

“You make me so happy,” he countered.

Squinch became startled realization, and her eyes widened as she said, “You’re my Martie.”

“That doesn’t sound like another insult.”

“And I’m your Susan.”

“Oh, this is no good. We’ll have to change all our monogrammed towels.”

“For a year, I’ve treated her like you’re treating me. Jollying her along, always needling her out of her self-pity, trying to keep her spirits up.”

“You’ve been a real bitch, huh?”

Martie laughed. Shaky, one tremble away from a sob, like those laughs in operas, when the tragic heroine pitches a soprano trill and lets it fall into a contralto quaver of despair. “I’ve been a bitch and a sarcastic wise ass, yeah, because I love her so much.”

Smiling, Dusty held out his right hand toward her. “We’ve got to be going.”

One step out of her corner, she stopped, unable to come farther. “Dusty; I don’t want to be Susan.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to… fall that far down.”

“You won’t,” he promised.

“I’m scared.”

Rather than follow her customary preference for bright colors, Martie had gone to the dark side of her wardrobe. Black boots, black jeans, a black pullover, and a black leather jacket. She looked like a mourner at a biker’s funeral. In this stark outfit, she should have appeared to be tough, as hard and as formidable as night itself. Instead, she seemed as ephemeral as a shadow fading and shrinking under a relentless sun.

“I’m scared,” she repeated.

This was a time for truth, not for jollying, and Dusty said, “Yeah. Me, too.”

Overcoming the fear of her imagined homicidal potential, she took his hand. Hers was cold, but touching was progress.

“I’ve got to phone Susan,” she said. “She was expecting me to call last night.”

“We’ll phone her from the car.”

Out of the apartment, along the common hail, down the stairs, across the small foyer where Skeet had penciled the name FARNER under CAULFIELD on his mailbox label, and out of the building, Dusty felt Martie’s hand warming in his and dared to think he could save her.

A gardener early to work, was bundling hedge trimmings into a burlap tarpaulin. A handsome young Hispanic with eyes as dark as mole sauce, he smiled and nodded.

Lying on the lawn, near him, were a small pair of hand clippers and a large pair of two-hand shears.

At the sight of the blades, Martie let out a strangled cry. She wrenched her hand free of Dusty’s and ran, not toward those makeshift weapons but away from them, to the red Saturn that was parked at the curb.

“Disputa?” the gardener asked Dusty sympathetically, as if he himself had a regrettable amount of experience arguing with women.

“Infinidad,” Dusty replied as he hurried past, and he was all the way to the car before he realized he had meant to say enfermedad, meaning “illness,” but had instead said “infinity.”

The gardener stared after him, not frowning with puzzlement, but nodding solemnly, as though Dusty’s wrong word choice were in fact an indisputable profundity.

Thus are reputations for wisdom raised on foundations flimsier than those of castles built on air.

By the time Dusty got behind the wheel of the car, Martie was in the passenger’s seat, doubled over as far as the dashboard would allow, shuddering, groaning. Her thighs were pressed together, trapping her hands as though they itched with the desire to make mayhem.

When Dusty pulled his door shut, Martie said, “Is there anything sharp in the glove box?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it locked?”

“I don’t know.”

“Lock it, for God’s sake.”

He locked it and then started the engine.