Читать книгу The Coffins of Little Hope - Timothy Schaffert - Страница 25

It’s my fault,” Daisy, still crying, told Abby. She sat on the bed with her knees up, rocking, and she twisted the string around and around her ankle.

“You can tell me about it,” Abby said. “Or not. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

Daisy looked at Abby. “I have a little girl,” Daisy said, slowly, as if confessing.

“Oh?” Abby said. “Oh?” she said again. She laughed a half laugh. “Then where is she? Your little girl?”

Daisy pulled her legs in tighter and pressed her forehead against her knees, whimpering. “I don’t know,” she said.

Abby had been imagining for Daisy nothing much more than some banal downward spiral of all-night liquor and squabbling. She’d pictured herself spending an afternoon braiding Daisy’s hair, lending her a sensible dress, the husband showing up, sheepish, his very best cowboy hat held in his hands, and Daisy accepting his apology, but only after she’d made a handful of weepy, weak protestations.

But the suggestion of a lost girl hit Abby hard. Abby and the reverend had been trying for two years to have a child. And that child that wasn’t, that might never be, took the blame, in Abby’s imagination, for any minute too many of silence at dinner, or any terse word or spark of anxiety. Comfort her, Mrs. Most. That Mrs. Most at the end of his command—as if she were nothing more than a piece of him—certainly had as its source, at least partly, Abby’s failure to get pregnant. Didn’t it? Why else had things changed so much for them so quickly?

“Wait here,” Abby told Daisy.

Abby walked down the hall and only halfway down the stairs. “We’ll need to call the police,” Abby said to the room of elders. And she stood there waiting, explaining nothing, until one of the men made a movement toward the phone in the kitchen. “Tell them there may be a missing child,” Abby said then.

Abby returned to the bedroom, closing the door, and that was when Daisy first told the story she would tell again and again in the coming weeks—of Lenore under the table with the string from the mop, of Elvis on the farm, of his reading to them the counterfeit Miranda-and-Desiree he’d bought from the black market of Hong Kong, his airplane, the cider, the old pickup on blocks, his illicit baby talk, the new dress with the daisies on it, Lenore and Elvis nowhere in the morning.

And the Board of Elders, when told, chose to believe it all. They couldn’t have worried more about Lenore if she’d been one of their own.