دانلود رمان انگلیسی “همه به جز خودم”

IN THE MOMENT IT’S HAPPENING, a panic attack can convince you of nearly anything. That night, I believed there was a very real possibility I would die, even though I was safe inside my home in Northern California, my two healthy boys sleeping just down the hall. My husband, Mando, was in Dallas, doing the work of a twenty-first-century traveling salesman for a large winery. I’d taken a shower, hoping to calm myself, but it hadn’t worked. I was thirty-eight years old, and I was scared to turn off the lights. I paused in the doorway between my bathroom and bedroom: face scrubbed clean, teeth brushed, wet hair dampening my pajama T-shirt. My left hand rested on the bathroom light switch, but I was too frightened to flip it and plunge the room into darkness. I hesitated for another long moment before giving up and leaving it on. I stepped across the room, the wood floor creaking below my feet, the halogen bulbs from the vanity still lighting the space at a brightness I’d typically deem intolerable for sleep. I pulled aside the fluffy duvet in its white cover; I parted the cool sheets and shakily arranged my pillows. I completed all these small, methodical movements that marked the close of another day while I tried desperately to get a grip. My heart thumped violently in my rib cage. My breath came in short, shallow spurts. I tried to lengthen the inhales, to take a full, smooth breath, but succeeded only in chaining them together: shoo-shoo-shoo. I was trying to soothe myself just as I had soothed the boys when they were small, nearly including the gentle bounce that becomes second nature to most new parents, lodging so deeply inside us that my mom once found herself bouncing a plastic baby doll. Tears made tracks down my cheeks as I tucked myself into my side of the king bed I shared with my husband of sixteen years. I was alone. I put my hand on my chest, using the pressure to try to smooth the breaths from the outside. I tried to convince myself I wasn’t dying. My two sons slept in their rooms just across the hall, so close that I heard one of them shift in his bed. I could picture the outline of their sleeping bodies. Nolan was eleven. Conscientious and precocious, a child who loved nothing more than to obliterate a comfortable silence, he always slept on his stomach with his head turned to the right, his hands nestled underneath his pillow. Eli was nine and slept on his side, legs tucked up, one arm likely dangling over the edge of the bed. The glasses he’d worn since age two were placed on his shelf next to his latest LEGO creation, a mug full of his favorite pens, and an odd-shaped clay duck he made in kindergarten. Eli was fun, easygoing, and occasionally overconfident, the yin to his brother’s yang. My husband and I orbited around them, these two suns that anchored our galaxy. I attempted to calm myself by considering the boys, their bodies peaceful and at rest. I tried in vain to ground myself in the familiar noises of our home, but instead, I flinched at the sounds that typically comforted me, like the gentle clicking of the leaves of the birch tree that grew just outside our bedroom window.