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1、【英文文学】罗兰德之夜 Nights in RodantheAcknowledgmentsNights in Rodanthe, as with all my novels, couldnt have been written without the patience, love, and support of my wife, Cathy. She only gets more beautiful every year.Since the dedication is to my other three children, I have to acknowledge both Miles an
2、d Ryan (who got a ded-ication in Message in a Bottle). I love you guys!Id also like to thank Theresa Park and Jamie Raab, my agent and editor respectively. Not only do they both have wonderful instincts, but they never let me slide when it comes to my writing. Though I sometimes grumble about the ch
3、allenges this presents, the final product is what it is because of those two. If they like the story, odds are that you will, too.Larry Kirshbaum and Maureen Egen at Warner Books also deserve my thanks. When I go to New York, spending time with them is like visiting with my family. Theyve made Warne
4、r Books a wonderful home for me.Denise Di Novi, the producer of both Message in a Bottle and A Walk to Remember, is not only skilled at what she does, but someone I trust and respect. Shes a good friend, and she deserves my thanks for all she has doneand still doesfor me.Richard Green and Howie Sand
5、ers, my agents in Holly-wood, are great friends, great people, and great at what they do. Thanks, guys.Scott Schwimer, my attorney and friend, always watches out for me. Thank you.In publicity, I have to thank Jennifer Romanello, Emi Battaglia, and Edna Farley; Flag and the rest of the cover design
6、people; Courtenay Valenti and Lorenzo Dc Bonaventura of Warner Bros.; Hunt Lowry and Ed Gaylord II, of Gaylord Films; Mark Johnson and Lynn Harris of New Line Cinema; they have all been great to work with.Thanks, everyone.Mandy Moore and Shane West were both wonderful in A Walk to Remember, and I ap
7、preciate their enthusiasm for the project.Then there is family (who might get a kick out of seeing their names here): Micah, Christine, Alli, and Peyton; Bob, Debbie, Cody, and Cole; Mike and Parnell; Henrietta, Charles, and Glenara; Duke and Marge; Dianne and John; Monte and Gail; Dan and Sandy; Ja
8、ck, Carlin, Joe, Elaine, and Mark; Michelle and Lemont; Paul, John, and Caroline; Tim, Joannie, and Papa Paul.And, of course, how can I forget Paul and Adrienne?Chapter 1Three years earlier, on a warm November morning in 1999, Adrienne Willis had returned to the Inn and at first glance had thought i
9、t unchanged, as if the small Inn were impervious to sun and sand and salted mist. The porch had been freshly painted, and shiny black shutters sandwiched rectangular white-curtained windows on both floors like offset piano keys. The cedar siding was the color of dusty snow. On either side of the bui
10、lding, sea oats waved a greet-ing, and sand formed a curving dune that changed imper-ceptibly with each passing day as individual grains shifted from one spot to the next.With the sun hovering among the clouds, the air had a luminescent quality, as though particles of light were sus-pended in the ha
11、ze, and for a moment Adrienne felt shed traveled back in time. But looking closer, she gradually began to notice changes that cosmetic work couldnt hide:decay at the corners of the windows, lines of rust along the roof, water stains near the gutters. The Inn seemed to be winding down, and though she
12、 knew there was nothing she could do to change it, Adrienne remembered closing her eyes, as if to magically blink it back to what it had once been.Now, standing in the kitchen of her own home a few months into her sixtieth year, Adrienne hung up the phone after speaking with her daughter. She sat at
13、 the table, re-flecting on that last visit to the Inn, remembering the long weekend shed once spent there. Despite all that had hap-pened in the years that had passed since then, Adrienne still held tight to the belief that love was the essence of a full and wonderful life.Outside, rain was falling.
14、 Listening to the gentle tapping against the glass, she was thankful for its steady sense of familiarity. Remembering those days always aroused a mix-ture of emotions in hersomething akin to, but not quite, nostalgia. Nostalgia was often romanticized; with these memories, there was no reason to make
15、 them any more romantic than they already were. Nor did she share these memories with others. They were hers, and over the years, shed come to view them as a sort of museum ex-hibit, one in which she was both the curator and the only patron. And in an odd way, Adrienne had come to believe that shed
16、learned more in those five days than she had in all the years before or after.She was alone in the house. Her children were grown, her father had passed away in 1996, and shed been di-vorced from Jack for seventeen years now. Though her sons sometimes urged her to find someone to spend her remaining
17、 years with, Adrienne had no desire to do so. It wasnt that she was wary of men; on the contrary, even now she occasionally found her eyes drawn to younger men in the supermarket. Since they were sometimes only a few years older than her own children, she was curious about what they would think if t
18、hey noticed her staring at them. Would they dismiss her out of hand? Or would they smile back at her, finding her interest charming? She wasnt sure. Nor did she know if it was possible for them to look past the graying hair and wrinkles and see the woman she used to be.Not that she regretted being o
19、lder. People nowadays talked incessantly about the glories of youth, but Adrienne had no desire to be young again. Middle-aged, maybe, but not young. True, she missed some thingsbounding up the stairs, carrying more than one bag of groceries at a time, or having the energy to keep up with the grandc
20、hildren as they raced around the yardbut shed gladly exchange them for the experiences shed had, and those came only with age. It was the fact that she could look back on life and realize she wouldnt have changed much at all that made sleep come easy these days.Besides, youth had its problems. Not o
21、nly did she re-member them from her own life, but shed watched her children as theyd struggled through the angst of adoles-cence and the uncertainty and chaos of their early twen-ties. Even though two of them were now in their thirties and one was almost there, she sometimes wondered when motherhood
22、 would become less than a full-time job.Matt was thirty-two, Amanda was thirty-one, and Dan had just turned twenty-nine. Theyd all gone to college, and she was proud of that, since thered been a time when she wasnt sure any of them would. They were honest, kind, and self-sufficient, and for the most
23、 part, that was all shed ever wanted for them. Matt worked as an accountant, Dan was the sportscaster on the evening news out in Greenville, and both were married with families of their own. When theyd come over for Thanksgiving, she remembered sit-ting off to the side and watching them scurry after
24、 their children, feeling strangely satisfied at the way everything had turned out for her sons.As always, things were a little more complicated for her daughter.The kids were fourteen, thirteen, and eleven when Jack moved out of the house, and each child had dealt with the divorce in a different way
25、. Matt and Dan took out their ag-gression on the athletic fields and by occasionally acting up in school, but Amanda had been the most affected. As the middle child sandwiched between brothers, shed always been the most sensitive, and as a teenager, shed needed her father in the house, if only to di
26、stract from the worried stares of her mother. She began dressing in what Adrienne considered rags, hung with a crowd that stayed out late, and swore she was deeply in love with at least a dozen dif-ferent boys over the next couple of years. After school, she spent hours in her room listening to musi
27、c that made the walls vibrate, ignoring her mothers calls for dinner. There were periods when she would barely speak to her mother or brothers for days.It took a few years, but Amanda had eventually found her way, settling into a life that felt strangely similar to what Adrienne once had. She met Br
28、ent in college, and they married after graduation and had two kids in the first few years of marriage. Like many young couples, they strug-gled financially, but Brent was prudent in a way that Jack never had been. As soon as their first child was born, he bought life insurance as a precaution, thoug
29、h neither ex-pected that they would need it for a long, long time.They were wrong.Brent had been gone for eight months now, the victim of a virulent strain of testicular cancer. Adrienne had watched Amanda sink into a deep depression, and yester-day afternoon, when she dropped off the grandchildren
30、after spending some time with them, she found the drapes at their house drawn, the porch light still on, and Amanda sitting in the living room in her bathrobe with the same vacant expression shed worn on the day of the funeral.It was then, while standing in Amandas living room, that Adrienne knew it
31、 was time to tell her daughter about the past.Fourteen years. Thats how long it had been.In all those years, Adrienne had told only one person about what had happened, but her father had died with the secret, unable to tell anyone even if hed wanted to.Her mother had passed away when Adrienne was th
32、irty-five, and though theyd had a good relationship, shed al-ways been closest to her father. He was, she still thought, one of two men whod ever really understood her, and she missed him now that he was gone. His life had been typi-cal of so many of his generation. Having learned a trade in-stead o
33、f going to college, hed spent forty years in a furniture manufacturing plant working for an hourly wage that increased by pennies each January. He wore fedoras even during the warm summer months, carried his lunch in a box with squeaky hinges, and left the house promptly at six forty-five every morn
34、ing to walk the mile and a half to work.In the evenings after dinner, he wore a cardigan sweater and long-sleeved shirts. His wrinkled pants lent a di-sheveled air to his appearance that grew more pronounced as the years wore on, especially after the passing of his wife. He liked to sit in the easy
35、chair with the yellow lamp glow-ing beside him, reading genre westerns and books about World War II. In the final years before his strokes, his old-fashioned spectacles, bushy eyebrows, and deeply lined face made him look more like a retired college professor than the blue-collar worker he had been.
36、There was a peacefulness about her father that shed al-ways yearned to emulate. He would have made a good priest or minister, shed often thought, and people who met him for the first time usually walked away with the impres-sion that he was at peace with himself and the world, He was a gifted listen
37、er; with his chin resting in his hand, he never let his gaze stray from peoples faces as they spoke, his expression mirroring empathy and patience, humor and sadness. Adrienne wished that he were around for Amanda right now; he, too, had lost a spouse, and she thought Amanda would listen to him, if
38、only because he knew how hard it really was.A month ago, when Adrienne had gently tried to talk to Amanda about what she was going through, Amanda had stood up from the table with an angry shake of her head.“This isnt like you and Dad,” shed said. “You two couldnt work out your problems, so you divo
39、rced. But I loved Brent. Ill always love Brent, and I lost him. You dont know what its like to live through something like that.”Adrienne had said nothing, but when Amanda left the room, Adrienne had lowered her head and whispered a sin-gle word.Rodanthe. While Adrienne sympathized with her daughter
40、, she was concerned about Amandas children. Max was six, Greg was four, and in the past eight months, Adrienne had no-ticed distinct changes in their personalities. Both had be-come unusually withdrawn and quiet. Neither had played soccer in the fall, and though Max was doing well in kindergarten, h
41、e cried every morning before he had to go. Greg had started to wet the bed again and would fly into tantrums at the slightest provocation. Some of these changes stemmed from the loss of their father, Adrienne knew, but they also reflected the person that Amanda had become since last spring.Because o
42、f the insurance, Amanda didnt have to work.Nonetheless, for the first couple of months after Brent had died, Adrienne spent nearly every day at their house, keep-ing the bills in order and preparing meals for the children, while Amanda slept and wept in her room. She held her daughter whenever Amand
43、a needed it, listened when Amanda wanted to talk, and forced her daughter to spend at least an hour or two outside each day, in the belief that fresh air would remind her daughter that she could begin anew.Adrienne had thought her daughter was getting better. By early summer, Amanda had begun to smi
44、le again, infre-quently at first, then a little more often. She ventured out into the town a few times, took the kids roller-skating, and Adrienne gradually began pulling back from the duties she was shouldering. It was important, she knew, for Amanda to resume responsibility for her own life again.
45、 Comfort could be found in the steady routines of life, Adrienne had learned; she hoped that by decreasing her presence in her daughters life, Amanda would be forced to realize that, too.But in August, on the day that would have been her sev-enth wedding anniversary, Amanda opened the closet door in
46、 the master bedroom, saw dust collecting on the shoul-ders of Brents suits, and suddenly stopped improving. She didnt exactly regressthere were still moments when she seemed her old selfbut for the most part, she seemed to be frozen somewhere in between. She was neither de-pressed nor happy, neither
47、 excited nor languid, neither in-terested nor bored by anything around her. To Adrienne, it seemed as if Amanda had become convinced that moving forward would somehow tarnish her memories of Brent, and shed made the decision not to allow that to happen.But it wasnt fair to the children. They needed
48、her guid-ance and her love, they needed her attention. They needed her to tell them that everything was going to be all right. Theyd already lost one parent, and that was hard enough. But lately, it seemed to Adrienne that theyd lost their mother as well.In the gentle hue of the soft-lit kitchen, Ad
49、rienne glanced at her watch. At her request, Dan had taken Max and Greg to the movies, so she could spend the evening with Amanda. Like Adrienne, both of her sons were wor-ried about Amandas kids. Not only had they made extra efforts to stay active in the boys lives, but nearly all of their recent conversations with Adrienne had begun or ended with the same question: What do we do?Today, when Dan had asked the same question again, Ad