The hand that has been tugging at her top has some strength left in it, after all. It pinches her side, and cruelly-when she takes the top off much later, in the motel room, she"ll see a bruise, a true lover"s knot.
"You..." Screamy breath. "Know..." Another screamy breath, deeper. And still grinning, as if they share some horrible secret. A purple secret, the color of bruises. The color of certain flowers that grow on certain (hush Lisey oh hush) yes, on certain hillsides. "You...know...so don"t...insult my...intelligence." Another whistling, screaming breath. "Or your own."
And she supposes she does know some of it. The long boy, he calls it. Or the thing with the endless piebald side. Once she meant to look up piebald in the dictionary, but she forgot- forgetting is a skill she has had reason to polish during the years she and Scott have been together. But she knows what he"s talking about, yes.
He lets go, or maybe just loses the strength to hold on. Lisey pulls back a little-not far. His eyes regard her from their deep and blackening sockets. They are as brilliant as ever, but she sees they are also full of terror and (this is what frightens her most) some wretched, inexplicable amus.e.m.e.nt. Still speaking low-perhaps so only she can hear, maybe because it"s the best he can manage-Scott says, "Listen, little Lisey. I"ll make how it sounds when it looks around."
"Scott, no-you have to stop."
He pays no attention. He draws in another of those screaming breaths, purses his wet red lips in a tight O, and makes a low, incredibly nasty chuffing noise. It drives a fine spray of blood up his clenched throat and into the sweltering air. A girl sees it and screams. This time the crowd doesn"t need the campus cop to ask them to move back; they do it on their own, leaving Lisey, Scott, and Captain Heffernan a perimeter of at least four feet all the way around.
The sound-dear G.o.d, it really is a kind of grunting-is mercifully short. Scott coughs, his chest heaving, the wound spilling more blood in rhythmic pulses, then beckons her back down with one finger. She comes, leaning on her simmering hands. His socketed eyes compel her; so does his mortal grin.
He turns his head to the side, spits a wad of half-congealed blood onto the hot tar, then turns back to her. "I could...call it that way," he whispers. "It would come. You"d be...rid of my...everlasting...quack."
She understands that he means it, and for a moment (surely it is the power of his eyes) she believes it"s true. He will make the sound again, only a little louder, and in some other world the long boy, that lord of sleepless nights, will turn its unspeakable hungry head. A moment later in this world, Scott Landon will simply shiver on the pavement and die. The death certificate will say something sane, but she"ll know: his dark thing finally saw him and came for him and ate him alive.
So now come the things they will never speak of later, not to others or between themselves. Too awful. Each marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. This is the dark heart of theirs, the one mad true secret. She leans close to him on the baking pavement, sure he is dying, nevertheless determined to hold onto him if she can. If it means fighting the long boy for him-with nothing but her fingernails, if it comes to that- she will.
"Well...Lisey?" Smiling that repulsive, knowing, terrible smile. "What...do...you...say?"
Leaning even closer. Into the shivering sweat-and-blood stink of him. Leaning in until she can smell the last palest ghost of the Prell he shampooed with that morning and the Foamy he shaved with. Leaning in until her lips touch his ear. She whispers, "Be quiet, Scott. For once in your life, just be quiet."
When she looks at him again, his eyes are different. The fierceness is gone. He"s fading, but maybe that"s all right, because he looks sane again. "Lisey...?"
Still whispering. Looking directly into his eyes. "Leave that smucking thing alone and it will go away." For a moment she almost adds, You can take care of the rest of this mess later, but the idea is senseless-for awhile, the only thing Scott can do for himself is not die. What she says is, "Don"t you ever make that noise again."
He licks at his lips. She sees the blood on his tongue and it turns her stomach, but she doesn"t pull away from him. She supposes she"s in this now until the ambulance hauls him away or he quits breathing right here on this hot pavement a hundred yards or so from his latest triumph; if she can stick through that last, she guesses she can stick through anything.
"I"m so hot," he says. "If only I had a piece of ice to suck..."
"Soon," Lisey says, not knowing if she"s promising rashly and not caring. "I"m getting it for you." At least she can hear the ambulance howling its way toward them. That"s something.
And then, a kind of miracle. The girl with the bows on her shoulders and the new sc.r.a.pes on her palms fights her way to the front of the crowd. She"s gasping like someone who has just run a race and sweat is running down her cheeks and neck, but she"s holding two big waxed paper cups in her hands. "I spilled half the f.u.c.king c.o.ke getting back here," she says, throwing a brief, baleful glance over her shoulder at the crowd, "but I got the ice okay. Ice is ni-" Then her eyes roll up almost to the whites and she reels backward, all looseygoosey in her sneakers. The campus cop-oh bless him with many blessings, huh-yooge batch of orifice and all-grabs her, steadies her, and takes one of the cups. He hands it to Lisey, then urges the other Lisa to drink from the remaining cup. Lisey Landon pays no attention. Later, replaying all this, she"ll be a little in awe of her own single-mindedness. Now she only thinks Just keep her from falling on top of me again if she faints, Officer Friendly, and turns back to Scott.
He"s shivering worse than ever and his eyes are dulling out, losing their grasp on her. And still, he tries. "Lisey...so hot...ice..."
"I have it, Scott. Now will you for once just shut your everlasting mouth?"
"One went north, one went south," he croaks, and then he does what she asks. Maybe he"s all talked out, which would be a Scott Landon first.
Lisey drives her hand deep into the cup, sending c.o.ke all the way to the top and splooshing over the edge. The cold is shocking and utterly wonderful. She clutches a good handful of ice-chips, thinking how ironic this is: whenever she and Scott stop at a turnpike rest area and she uses a machine that dispenses cups of soda instead of cans or bottles, she always hammers on the NO ICE b.u.t.ton, feeling righteous-others may allow the evil soft drink companies to shortchange them by dispensing half a cup of soda and half a cup of ice, but not Dave Debusher"s baby girl Lisa. What was old Dandy"s saying? I didn"t fall off a hayrick yesterday! And now here she is, wishing for even more ice and less c.o.ke...not that she thinks it will make much difference. But on that one she"s in for a surprise.
"Scott, here. Ice."
His eyes are half-closed now, but he opens his mouth and when she first rubs his lips with her handful of ice and then pops one of the melting shards onto his b.l.o.o.d.y tongue, his shivering suddenly stops. G.o.d, it"s magic. Emboldened, she rubs her freezing, leaking hand along his right cheek, his left cheek, and then across his forehead, where drops of c.o.kecolored water drip into his eyebrows and then run down the sides of his nose.
"Oh Lisey, that"s heaven," he says, and although still screamy, his voice sounds more with-it to her...more there. The ambulance has pulled up on the left side of the crowd with a dying growl of its siren and a few seconds later she can hear an impatient male voice shouting, "Paramedics! Let us through! Paramedics, c"mon, people, let us through so we can do our jobs, whaddaya say?"
Dashmiel, the southern-fried a.s.shole, chooses this moment to speak in Lisey"s ear. The solicitude in his voice, given the speed with which he jackrabbitted, makes her want to grind her teeth. "How is he, darlin?"
Without looking around, she replies: "Trying to live."
7.
"Trying to live," she murmured, running her palm over the glossy page in the U-Tenn Nashville Review. Over the picture of Scott with his foot poised on that dopey silver shovel. She closed the book with a snap and tossed it onto the dusty back of the booksnake. Her appet.i.te for pictures-for memories-was more than sated for one day. There was a nasty throb starting up behind her right eye. She wanted to take something for it, not that sissy Tylenol but what her late husband had called head-bonkers. A couple of his Excedrin would be just the ticket, if they weren"t too far off the shelf-date. Then a little lie-down in their bedroom until the incipient headache pa.s.sed. She might even sleep awhile.
I"m still thinking of it as our bedroom, she mused, going to the stairs that lead down to the barn, which was now not really a barn at all but just a series of storagecubbies...though still redolent of hay and rope and tractor-oil, the old sweet-stubborn farm smells. Still as ours, even after two years.
And so what? What of that?
She shrugged. "Nothing, I suppose."
She was a little shocked at the mumbly, half-drunk sound of the words. She supposed all that vivid remembering had worn her out. All that relived stress. There was one thing to be grateful for: no other picture of Scott in the belly of the booksnake could call up such violent memories, he"d only been shot once and none of those colleges would have sent him photos of his fa- (shut up about that just hush) "That"s right," she agreed as she reached the bottom of the stairs, and with no real idea of what she"d been on the edge (Scoot you old Scoot) of thinking about. Her head was hanging and she felt sweaty all over, like someone who has just missed being in an accident. "Shut-upsky, enough is enough."
And, as if her voice had activated it, a telephone began to ring behind the closed wooden door on her right. Lisey came to a stop in the barn"s main downstairs pa.s.sage. Once that door had opened upon a stabling area large enough for three horses. Now the sign on it simply said HIGH VOLTAGE! This had been Lisey"s idea of a joke. She had intended to put a small office in there, a place where she could keep records and pay the monthly bills (they had-and she still had-a full-time moneymanager, but he was in New York and could not be expected to see to such minutiae as her monthly tab at Hilltop Grocery). She"d gotten as far as putting in the desk, the phone, the fax, and a few filing cabinets...and then Scott died. Had she even been in there since then? Once, she remembered. Early this spring. Late March, a few stale stoles of snow still on the ground, her mission just to empty the answering machine attached to the phone. The number 21 had been in the gadget"s window. Messages one through seventeen and nineteen through twenty-one had been from the sort of hucksters Scott had called "phone-lice." The eighteenth (this didn"t surprise Lisey at all) had been from Amanda. "Just wanted to know if you ever hooked this d.a.m.n thing up," she"d said. "You gave me and Darla and Canty the number before Scott died." Pause. "I guess you did." Pause. "Hook it up, I mean." Pause. Then, in a rush: "But there was a very long time between the message and the bleep, sheesh, you must have a lot of messages on there, little Lisey, you ought to check the d.a.m.n things in case somebody wants to give you a set of Spode or something." Pause. "Well...g"bye."
Now, standing outside the closed office door, feeling pain pulse in sync with her heartbeat behind her right eye, she listened to the telephone ring a third time, and a fourth. Halfway through the fifth ring there was a click and then her own voice, telling whoever was on the other end that he or she had reached 727-5932. There was no false promise of a callback, not even an invitation to leave a message at the sound of what Amanda called the bleep. Anyway, what would be the point? Who would call here to talk to her? With Scott dead, the motor was out of this place. The one left was really just little Lisey Debusher from Lisbon Falls, now the widow Landon. Little Lisey lived alone in a house far too big for her and wrote grocery lists, not novels.
The pause between the message and the beep was so long that she thought the tape for replies had to be full. Even if it wasn"t, the caller would get tired and hang up, all she"d hear through the closed office door would be that most annoying of recorded phone voices, the woman who tells you (scolds you), "If you"d like to make a call...please hang up and dial your operator!" She doesn"t add smuckhead or s.h.i.t-for-brains, but Lisey always sensed it as what Scott would have called "a subtext."
Instead she heard a male voice speak three words. There was no reason for them to chill her, but they did. "I"ll try again," it said.
There was a click.
Then there was silence.
8.
This is a much nicer present, she thinks, but knows it"s neither past nor present; it"s just a dream. She was lying on the big double bed in the (our our our our our) bedroom, under the slowly paddling fan; in spite of the one hundred and thirty milligrams of caffeine in the two Excedrin (expiration date: OCT 07) she took from the dwindling supply of Scott-meds in the bathroom cabinet, she had fallen asleep. If she has any doubt of it, she only has to look at where she is- the third-floor ICU wing of the Nashville Memorial Hospital- and her unique means of travel: she"s once more locomoting upon a large piece of cloth with the words PILLSBURY"S BEST FLOUR printed on it. Once more she"s delighted to see that the corners of this homely magic carpet, where she sits with her arms regally folded beneath her bosom, are knotted like hankies. She"s floating so close to the ceiling that when PILLSBURY"S BEST FLOUR slips beneath one of the slowly paddling overhead fans (in her dream they look just like the one in their bedroom), she has to lie flat to avoid being whacked and cracked by the blades. These varnished wooden oars say shoop, shoop, shoop over and over as they make their slow and somehow stately revolutions. Below her, nurses come and go on squeaksoled shoes. Some are wearing the colorful smocks that will come to dominate the profession, but most of these still wear white dresses, white hose, and those caps that always make Lisey think of stuffed doves. Two doctors-she supposes they must be doctors, although one doesn"t look old enough to shave-chat by the drinking fountain. The tile walls are cool green. The heat of the day cannot seem to take hold in here. She supposes there is air-conditioning as well as the fans, but she can"t hear it.
Not in my dream, of course not, she tells herself, and this seems reasonable. Up ahead is room 319, which is where Scott went to recuperate after they took the bullet out of him. She has no trouble reaching the door, but discovers she"s too high to get through once she arrives. And she wants to get in there. She never got around to telling him You can take care of the rest of this mess later, but was that even necessary? Scott Landon did not, after all, fall off a hayrick yesterday. The real question, it seems to her, is what"s the correct magic word to make a magic PILLSBURY"S BEST carpet go down?
It comes to her. It"s not a word she wants to hear emerging from her own mouth (it"s a Blondie word), but needs must when the devil drives-as Dandy also said-and so...
"Freesias," Lisey says, and the faded cloth with the knotted corners obediently drops three feet from its hoverpoint below the hospital ceiling. She looks in the open door and sees Scott, now maybe five hours post-op, lying in a narrow but surprisingly pretty bed with a gracefully curved head and foot. Monitors that sound like answering machines queep and bleep. Two bags of something transparent hang on a pole between him and the wall. He appears to be asleep. Across the bed from him, 1988-Lisey sits in a straight-backed chair with her husband"s hand folded into one of her own. In 1988-Lisey"s other hand is the paperback novel she brought to Tennessee with her-she never expected to get through so much of it. Scott reads people like Borges, Pynchon, Tyler, and Atwood; Lisey reads Maeve Binchy, Colleen McCullough, Jean Auel (although she is growing a bit impatient with Ms. Auel"s randy cave people), Joyce Carol Oates, and, just lately, Shirley Conran. What she has in room 319 is Savages, the newest novel by the latter, and Lisey likes it a lot. She has come to the part where the women stranded in the jungle learn to use their bras as slingshots. All that Lycra. Lisey doesn"t know if the romance-readers of America are ready for this latest from Ms. Conran, but she herself thinks it"s brave and rather beautiful, in its way. Isn"t bravery always sort of beautiful? The last light of day pours through the room"s window in a flood of red and gold. It"s ominous and lovely. 1988-Lisey is very tired: emotionally, physically, and of being in the South. She thinks if one more person calls her y"all she"ll scream. The good part? She doesn"t think she"s going to be here as long as they do, because...well...she has reason to know Scott"s a fast healer, leave it at that.
Soon she"ll go back to the motel and try to rent the same room they had earlier in the day (Scott almost always rents them a hideout, even if the gig is just what he calls "the old inout"). She has an idea she won"t be able to do it-they treat you a lot different when you"re with a man, whether he"s famous or not-but the place is fairly handy to the hospital as well as to the college, and as long as she gets something there, she doesn"t give a smuck. Dr. Sattherwaite, who"s in charge of Scott"s case, has promised her she can dodge reporters by going out the back tonight and for the next few days. He says Mrs. McKinney in Reception will have a cab waiting back by the cafeteria loading dock "as soon as you give her the high sign." She would have gone already, but Scott has been restless for the last hour. Sattherwaite said he"d be out at least until midnight, but Sattherwaite doesn"t know Scott the way she does, and Lisey isn"t much surprised when he begins surfacing for brief intervals as sunset approaches. Twice he has recognized her, twice he has asked her what happened, and twice she has told him that a mentally deranged person shot him. The second time he said, "Hi-yosmuckin-Silver" before closing his eyes again, and that actually made her laugh. Now she wants him to come back one more time so she can tell him she"s not going back to Maine, only to the motel, and that she"ll see him in the morning.
All this 2006-Lisey knows. Remembers. Intuits. Whatever. From where she sits on her PILLSBURY"S BEST magic carpet, she thinks: He opens his eyes. He looks at me. He says, "I was lost in the dark and you found me. I was hot-so hot-and you gave me ice."
But is that really what he said? Is it really what happened? Or was that later? And if she"s hiding things-hiding them from herself-why is she hiding them?
In the bed, in the red light, Scott opens his eyes. Looks at his wife as she reads her book. His breath doesn"t scream now, but there"s still a windy sound as he pulls air in as deeply as he can and half-whispers, half-croaks her name. 1988-Lisey puts down her book and looks at him.
"Hey, you"re awake again," she says. "So here"s your pop quiz. Do you remember what happened to you?"
"Shot," he whispers. "Kid. Tube. Back. Hurts."
"You can have something for the pain in a little while," she says. "For now, would you like-"
He squeezes her hand, telling her she can stop. Now he"ll tell me he was lost in the dark and I gave him ice, 2006-Lisey thinks.
But what he says to his wife-who earlier that day saved his life by braining a madman with a silver shovel-is only this: "Hot, wasn"t it?" His tone casual. No special look; just making conversation. Just pa.s.sing the time while the red light deepens and the machines queep and bleep, and from her hoverpoint in the doorway, 2006-Lisey sees the shudder-subtle but there-run through her younger self; sees the first finger of her younger self"s left hand lose its place in her paperback copy of Savages.
I"m thinking "Either he doesn"t remember or he"s pretending not to remember what he said when he was down-about how he could call it if he wanted to, how he could call the long boy if I wanted to be done with him-and what I said back, about how he should shut up and leave it alone...that if he just shut the smuck up it would go away. I"m wondering if this is a real case of forgetting-the way he forgot that he"d been shot-or if it"s more of our special forgetting, which is more like sweeping the bad s.h.i.t into a box and then locking it up tight. I"m wondering if it even matters, as long as he remembers how to get better."
As she lay on her bed (and as she rides the magic carpet in the eternal present of her dream), Lisey stirred and tried to cry out to her younger self, tried to yell that it did matter, it did. Don"t let him get away with it! she tried to yell. You can"t forget forever! But another saying from the past occurred to her, this one from their endless games of Hearts and Whist at Sabbath Day Lake in the summertime, always yelled out when some player wanted to look at discards more than a single trick deep: Leave that alone! You can"t unbury the dead!
You can"t unbury the dead.
Still, she tries one more time. With all her considerable force of mind and will, 2006-Lisey leans forward on her magic carpet and sends He"s faking! SCOTT REMEMBERS EVERYTHING! at her younger self.
And for a wild moment she thinks she"s getting through...knows she"s getting through. 1988-Lisey twitches in her chair and her book actually slides out of her hand and hits the floor with a flat clap. But before that version of herself can look around, Scott Landon stares directly at the woman hovering in the doorway, the version of his wife who will live to be his widow. He purses his lips again, but instead of making the nasty chuffing sound, he blows. It"s not much of a puff; how could it be, considering what he"s been through? But it"s enough to send the PILLSBURY"S BEST magic carpet flying backward, dipping and diving like a milkweed pod in a hurricane. Lisey hangs on for dear life as the hospital walls rock past, but the d.a.m.ned thing tilts and she"s falling and
9.
Lisey awoke sitting bolt-upright on the bed with sweat drying on her forehead and underneath her arms. It was relatively cool in here, thanks to the overhead fan, but still she was as hot as a...
Well, as hot as a suck-oven.
"Whatever that is," she said, and laughed shakily.
The dream was already fading to rags and tatters-the only thing she could recall with any clarity was the otherworldly red light of some setting sun-but she had awakened with a crazy certainty planted in the forefront of her mind, a crazy imperative: she had to find that smucking shovel. That silver spade.
"Why?" she asked the empty room. She picked the clock off the nightstand and held it close to her face, sure it would tell her an hour had gone by, maybe even two. She was astounded to see she had been asleep for exactly twelve minutes. She put the clock back on the nightstand and wiped her hands on the front of her blouse as if she had picked up something dirty and crawling with germs. "Why that thing?"
Never mind. It was Scott"s voice, not her own. She rarely heard it with such clarity these days, but oboy, was she ever hearing it now. Loud and clear. That"s none of your business. Just find it and put it where...well, you know.
Of course she did.
"Where I can strap it on," she murmured, and rubbed her face with her hands, and gave a little laugh.
That"s right, babyluv, her dead husband agreed. Whenever it seems appropriate.
III. Lisey and The Silver Spade
(Wait for the Wind to Change)
1.
Her vivid dream did nothing at all to free Lisey from her memories of Nashville, and from one memory in particular: Gerd Allen Cole turning the gun from the lung-shot, which Scott might be able to survive, to the heart-shot, which he most certainly would not. By then the whole world had slowed down, and what she kept returning to-as the tongue keeps returning to the surface of a badly chipped tooth-was how utterly smooth that movement had been, as if the gun had been mounted on a gimbal.
Lisey vacuumed the parlor, which didn"t need vacuuming, then did a wash that didn"t half-fill the machine; the laundry basket filled so slowly now that it was just her. Two years and she still couldn"t get used to it. Finally she pulled on her old tank suit and did laps in the pool out back: five, then ten, then fifteen, then seventeen and winded. She clung to the lip at the shallow end with her legs trailing out behind her, panting, her dark hair clinging to her cheeks, brow, and neck like a shiny helmet, and still she saw the pale, long-fingered hand swiveling, saw the Ladysmith (it was impossible to think of it as just a gun once you knew its lethal c.u.n.tish name) swiveling, saw the little black hole with Scott"s death tucked inside it moving left, and the silver shovel was so heavy. It seemed impossible that she could be in time, that she could outrace Cole"s insanity.
She kicked her feet slowly, making little splashes. Scott had loved the pool, but actually swam in it only on rare occasions; he had been a book, beer, and inner-tube sort of guy. When he wasn"t on the road, that was. Or in his study, writing with the music cranked. Or sitting up in the guestroom rocker in the broken heart of a winter night, bundled to the chin in one of Good Ma Debusher"s afghans, two in the morning and his eyes wide-wide-wide as a terrible wind, one all the way down from Yellowknife, boomed outside-that was the other Scott; one went north, one went south, and oh dear, she had loved them both the same, everything the same.
"Stop it," Lisey said fretfully. "I was in time, I was, so let it go. The lung-shot was all that crazy baby ever got." Yet in her mind"s eye (where the past is always present), she saw the Ladysmith again start its swivel, and Lisey shoved herself out of the pool in an effort to physically drive the image away. It worked, but Blondie was back again as she stood in the changing room, toweling off after a quick rinsing shower, Gerd Allen Cole was back, is back, saying I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias, and 1988-Lisey is swinging the silver spade, but this time the smucking air in Lisey-time is too thick, she"s going to be just an instant too late, she will see all of the second flame-corsage instead of just a portion, and a black hole will also open on Scott"s left lapel as his sportcoat becomes his deathcoat- "Quit it!" Lisey growled, and slung her towel in the basket. "Give it a rest!"
She marched back to the house nude, with her clothes under her arm-that"s what the high board fence all the way around the backyard was for.
2.
She was hungry after her swim-famished, actually-and although it was not quite five o"clock, she decided on a big skillet meal. What Darla, second-oldest of the Debusher girls, would have called comfort-food, and what Scott-with great relish- would have called eatin nasty. There was a pound of ground beef in the fridge and, lurking on a back shelf in the pantry, a wonderfully nasty selection: the Cheeseburger Pie version of Hamburger Helper. Lisey threw it together in a skillet with the ground beef. While it was simmering, she mixed herself a pitcher of lime Kool-Aid with double sugar. By five-twenty, the smells from the skillet had filled the kitchen, and all thoughts of Gerd Allen Cole had left her head, at least for the time being. She could think of nothing but food. She had two large helpings of the Hamburger Helper ca.s.serole, and two big gla.s.ses of Kool-Aid. When the second helping and the second gla.s.s were gone (all except for the white dregs of sugar in the bottom of the gla.s.s), she burped resoundingly and said: "I wish I had a G.o.ddam smucking cigarette."
It was true; she had rarely wanted one so badly. A Salem Light. Scott had been a smoker when they had met at the University of Maine, where he had been both a grad student and what he called The World"s Youngest Writer in Residence. She was a part-time student (that didn"t last long) and a fulltime waitress at Pat"s Cafe downtown, slinging pizzas and burgers. She"d picked up the smoking habit from Scott, who"d been strictly a Herbert Tareyton man. They"d given up the b.u.t.ts together, rallying each other along. That had been in "87, the year before Gerd Allen Cole had resoundingly demonstrated that cigarettes weren"t the only problem a person could have with his lungs. In the years since, Lisey went for days without thinking of them, then would fall into horrible pits of craving. Yet in a way, thinking about cigarettes was an improvement. It beat thinking about (I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias, says Gerd Allen Cole with perfect fretful clarity and turns his wrist slightly) Blondie (smoothly) and Nashville (so that the smoking barrel of the Ladysmith points at the left side of Scott"s chest) and smuck, here she went, doing it again.
There was store-bought poundcake for dessert, and Cool Whip- perhaps the apex of eatin nasty-to put on top of it, but Lisey was too full to consider it yet. And she was distressed to find these rotten old memories returning even after she"d taken on a gutful of hot, high-calorie food. She supposed that now she had an idea of what war veterans had to deal with. That had been her only battle, but (no, Lisey) "Quit it," she whispered, and pushed her plate (no, babyluv) violently away from her. Christ, but she wanted (you know better) a cigarette. And even more than a ciggy, she wanted all these old memories to go aw- Lisey!
That was Scott"s voice, on top of her mind for a change and so clear she answered out loud over the kitchen table and with no self-consciousness at all: "What, hon?"
Find the silver shovel and all this c.r.a.p will blow away...like the smell of the mill when the wind swung around and blew from the south. Remember?
Of course she did. Her apartment had been in the little town of Cleaves Mills, just one town east of Orono. There weren"t any actual mills in Cleaves by the time Lisey lived there, but there had still been plenty in Oldtown, and when the wind blew from the north-especially if the day happened to be overcast and damp-the stench was atrocious. Then, if the wind changed...G.o.d! You could smell the ocean, and it was like being born again. For awhile wait for the wind to change had become part of their marriage"s interior language, like strap it on and SOWISA and smuck for f.u.c.k. Then it had fallen out of favor somewhere along the way, and she hadn"t thought of it for years: wait for the wind to change, meaning hang on in there, baby. Meaning don"t give up yet. Maybe it had been the sort of sweetly optimistic att.i.tude only a young marriage can sustain. She didn"t know. Scott might have been able to offer an informed opinion; he"d kept a journal even back then, in their (EARLY YEARS!).
scuffling days, writing in it for fifteen minutes each evening while she watched sitcoms or did the household accounts. And sometimes instead of watching TV or writing checks, she watched him. She liked the way the lamplight shone in his hair and made deep triangular shadows on his cheeks as he sat there with his head bent over his looseleaf notebook. His hair had been both longer and darker in those days, unmarked by the gray that had begun to show up toward the end of his life. She liked his stories, but she liked how his hair looked in the spill of the lamplight just as much. She thought his hair in the lamplight was its own story, he just didn"t know it. She liked how his skin felt under her hand, too. Forehead or foreskin, both were good. She would not have traded one for the other. What worked for her was the whole package.
Lisey! Find the shovel!
She cleared the table, then stored the remaining Cheeseburger Pie in a Tupperware dish. She was certain she"d never eat it now that her madness had pa.s.sed, but there was too much to sc.r.a.pe down the sink-pig; how the Good Ma Debusher who still kept house in her head would scream at waste like that! Better by far to hide it in the fridge behind the asparagus and the yogurt, where it would age quietly. And as she did these simple ch.o.r.es, she wondered how in the name of Jesus, Mary, and JoJo the Carpenter finding that silly ceremonial shovel could do anything for her peace of mind. Something about the magical properties of silver, maybe? She remembered watching some movie on the Late Show with Darla and Cantata, some supposedly scary thing about a werewolf...only Lisey hadn"t been much frightened, if at all. She"d thought the werewolf more sad than scary, and besides-you could tell the movie-making people were changing his face by stopping the camera every now and then to put on more makeup and then running it again. You had to give them high marks for effort, but the finished product wasn"t all that believable, at least in her humble opinion. The story was sort of interesting, though. The first part took place in an English pub, and one of the old geezers drinking there said you could only kill a werewolf with a silver bullet. And had not Gerd Allen Cole been a kind of werewolf?
"Come on, kid," she said, rinsing off her plate and sticking it in the almost empty dishwasher, "maybe Scott could float that downriver in one of his books, but tall stories were never your department. Were they?" She closed the dishwasher with a thump. At the rate it was filling, she"d be ready to run the current load around July Fourth. "If you want to look for that shovel, just go do it! Do you?"