دانلود رمان انگلیسی “دختر در دریاچه”

There was something wrong with the trees on the East Coast. There were too many of them. They crowded out the sky. They seemed to be running down to the lake in some desperate suicide pact to drown with their own reflections. As a kid, Kate Willis had loved summers in Massachusetts. She’d loved the thick heat, which lay heavy on the afternoons like a damp beach towel. She’d loved the green swells of shaggy hillsides, the narrow thread of footpaths through the trees, the urgent chorus of tree frogs in the evening, the moths that battered the screen door after dark. Now the woods seemed to her claustrophobic. The roads whiplashing between them—dizzying, disorienting, like the long tail of an undulating snake. Sheffield, Massachusetts, which she’d remembered fondly from camp hiking trips to Bartholomew’s Cobble nature preserve, looked as if it had been struck by paralysis, frozen somewhere in the deep past, like a deer standing before headlights. Her cell phone service wavered, sputtered, and cut out. She found herself wishing for the smooth, democratizing landscape of Virginia: its highways and superstores, fast-food franchises and parking lots, the reassuring big-box buildings, the tidy rows of modern town houses, the stately brick mansions on their mantles of green. In Virginia—at least in the Martha Jefferson neighborhood of Charlottesville, where she’d lived for fifteen years, ever since she’d landed a position in the University of Virginia’s Psychology Department—the trees knew their place. Moored at tidy intervals around the neighborhood, or pinioned in decorative postures on even-keeled lawns, the trees were as harmless, as meek, as inoffensive as any houseplant. They did not seem, somehow, to be alive in the same way as the trees in Massachusetts.