The handcuffs had been removed, and Dooley had even left her a gla.s.s of water. Lisey drank it greedily. When she tried to get to her feet, however, her legs were trembling too badly to hold her. So she had crawled out of the alcove on all fours, dripping blood and b.l.o.o.d.y sweat on Scott"s carpet as she went (ah, but she"d never cared for that oyster-white anyway, it showed every speck of dirt), hair plastered to her forehead, tears drying on her cheeks, blood drying to a crust on her nose, lips, and chin.
At first she thought she was headed for the phone, probably to call Deputy b.u.t.tercluck in spite of Dooley"s admonitions and the failure of the Castle County Sheriff"s Department to protect her on its first try. Then that line of poetry (the arguments against insanity) started to go through her head and she saw Good Ma"s cedar box lying overturned on the carpet between the stairs going down to the barn and the desk Scott had called Dumbo"s Big Jumbo. The cedar box"s contents were spilled on the carpet in an untidy litter. She understood that the box and its spilled contents had been her destination all along. She especially wanted the yellow thing she could see draped over the bent purple shape of The Antlers menu.
The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.
From one of Scott"s poems. He didn"t write many, and those he did he almost never published-he said they weren"t good, and he wrote them just for himself. But she had thought that one very good, even though she hadn"t been entirely sure what it meant, or even what it was about. She had particularly liked that first line, because sometimes you just heard things going, didn"t you? They fell down, level after level, leaving a hole you could look through. Or fall into, if you weren"t careful.
SOWISA, babyluv. You"re bound for the rabbit-hole, so strap on nice and tight.
Dooley must have brought Good Ma"s box up to the study because he thought it had to do with what he wanted. Guys like Dooley and Gerd Allen Cole, aka Blondie, aka Monsieur Ding-Dong for the Freesias, thought everything had to do with what they wanted, didn"t they? Their nightmares, their phobias, their midnight inspirations. What had Dooley thought was in the cedar box? A secret list of Scott"s ma.n.u.scripts (perhaps in code)? G.o.d knew. In any case he"d dumped it out, seen nothing but a jumble of uninteresting rickrack (uninteresting to him, at least), and then dragged the widow Landon deeper into the study, looking for a place where he could cuff her up before she regained consciousness. The pipes under the bar sink had done quite nicely.
Lisey crawled steadily toward the scattered contents of the box, her eyes fixed on the yellow knitted square. She wondered if she would have discovered it on her own. She had an idea the answer was no; she had gotten her fill of memories. Now, however- The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.
So it seemed. And if her precious purple curtain finally came down, would it make that same soft, sad sound? She wouldn"t be at all surprised. It had never been much more than spun cobwebs to begin with; look at all she"d already remembered.
No more, Lisey, you don"t dare, hush.
"Hush yourself," she croaked. Her outraged breast throbbed and burned. Scott had gotten his chest-wound; now she had hers. She thought of him coming back up her lawn that night, coming out of the shadows while Pluto barked and barked and barked next door. Scott holding up what had been a hand and was now nothing but a clot of blood with things that looked vaguely like fingers sticking out of it. Scott telling her it was a blood-bool, and it was for her. Scott later soaking that sliced-up meat in a basin filled with weak tea, telling her how it was something (Paul thought this up) his brother had shown him how to do. Telling her all the Landons were fast healers, they had to be. This memory fell through to the one beneath, the one where she and Scott were sitting under the yum-yum tree four months later. The blood fell down in a sheet, Scott told her, and Lisey asked if Paul soaked his cuts in tea afterward and Scott had said no- Hush, Lisey-he never said that. You never asked and he never said.
But she had asked. She had asked him all sorts of things, and Scott had answered. Not then, not under the yum-yum tree, but later on. That night, in bed. Their second night in The Antlers, after making love. How could she have forgotten?
Lisey lay for a moment on the oyster-white carpet, resting. "Never forgot," she said. "It was in the purple. Behind the curtain. Big difference." She fixed her eyes on the yellow square and began crawling again.
I"m pretty sure the tea-cure came later, Lisey. Yeah, I know it did.
Scott lying next to her, smoking, watching the smoke from his cigarette go up and up, to that place where it disappeared. The way the stripes on a barber-pole disappear. The way Scott himself sometimes disappeared.
I know, because by then I was doing fractions.
In school?
No, Lisey. He said this in a tone that said more, that said she should know better. Sparky Landon had never been that kind of Daddy. Me n Paul, we "us home-schooled. Daddy called public school the Donkey Corral.
But Paul"s cuts that day-the day you jumped from the bench- they were bad? Not just nicks?
A long pause while he watched the smoke rise and stack and disappear, leaving only its trail of sweetish-bitter fragrance behind. At last, flat: Daddy cut deep.
To that dry certainty there seemed no possible reply, so she had kept silent.
And then he"d said: Anyway, that"s not what you want to ask. Ask what you want, Lisey. Go ahead, I"ll tell you. But you have to ask.
She either couldn"t remember what had come next or wasn"t ready to, but now she remembered how they had left their refuge under the yum-yum tree. He had taken her in his arms beneath that white umbrella and they had been outside in the snow an instant later. And now, crawling on her hands and knees toward the overturned cedar box, memory (insanity) fell through (with a soft shirring sound) and Lisey finally allowed her mind to believe what her second heart, her secret hidden heart, had known all along. For a moment they had been neither under the yum-yum tree nor out in the snow but in another place. It had been warm and filled with hazy red light. It had been filled with the sound of distant calling birds and tropical smells. Some of these she knew-frangipani, jasmine, bougainvillea, mimosa, the moist breathing earth upon which they knelt like the lovers they most surely were-but the sweetest ones were unknown to her and she ached for their names. She remembered opening her mouth to speak, and Scott putting the side of his hand (hush) to her mouth. She remembered thinking how strange it was that they should be dressed for winter in such a tropical place, and she saw he was afraid. Then they had been outside in the snow. That crazy downpouring October snow.
How long had they been in the between-place? Three seconds? Maybe even less. But now, crawling because she was too weak and shocked to stand, Lisey was at last willing to own up to the truth of it. By the time they made it back to The Antlers that day, she"d gotten a fair distance toward convincing herself it hadn"t happened, but it had.
"Happened again, too," she said. "Happened that night."
She was so smucking thirsty. Wanted another drink of water in the worst way, but of course the bar alcove was behind her, she was going the wrong way for water and she could remember Scott singing one of Ole Hank"s songs as they drove back that Sunday, singing All day I"ve faced the barren waste, Without a single taste of water, cool water.
You"ll get your drink, babyluv.
"Will I?" Still nothing but a crow-croak. "A drink of water would surely help. This hurts so bad."
To this there was no reply, and perhaps she didn"t need one. She had finally reached the scatter of objects around the overturned cedar box. She reached out for the yellow square, plucked it off the purple menu, and closed it tight in her hand. She lay on her side-the one that didn"t hurt-and looked at it closely: the little lines of knits and purls, those tiny locks. There was blood on her fingers and it smeared on the wool, but she hardly noticed. Good Ma had knitted dozens of afghans out of squares like this, afghans of rose and gray, afghans of blue and gold, afghans of green and burnt orange. They were Good Ma"s specialty and spilled from her needles, one after the other, as she sat in front of the chattering TV at night. Lisey remembered how, as a child, she had thought such knitted blankets were called "africans." Their female cousins (Angletons, Darbys, Wiggenses, and Washburns as well as Debushers almost beyond counting) had all been gifted with africans when they married; each of the Debusher girls had gotten at least three. And with each african came one extra square in the same shade or pattern. Good Ma called these extra squares "delights." They were meant as tabledecorations, or to be framed and hung on the wall. Because the yellow african had been Good Ma"s wedding present to Lisey and Scott, and because Scott had always loved it, Lisey had saved the accompanying delight in the cedar box. Now she lay bleeding on his carpet, holding the square, and gave up trying to forget. She thought, Bool! The End!, and began to cry. She understood she was incapable of coherence, but maybe that was all right; order would come later, if it was needed.
And, of course, if there was a later.
The gomers and the bad-gunky. For the Landons and the Landreaus before them, it"s always been one or the other. And it always comes out.
It was really no surprise Scott had recognized Amanda for what she was-he"d known about cutting behavior firsthand. How many times had he cut himself? She didn"t know. You couldn"t read his scars the way you could read Amanda"s, because...well, because. The one incidence of self-multilation she knew about for sure-the night of the greenhouse-had been spectacular, however. And he had learned about cutting from his father, who only turned his knife on his boys when his own body would not suffice to let the bad-gunky out.
Gomers and bad-gunky. Always one or the other. It always comes out.
And if Scott had missed the worst of the bad-gunky, what did that leave?
In December of 1995, the weather had turned rottenly cold. And something started going wrong with Scott. He had a number of speaking gigs planned after the turn of the year at schools in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona (what he referred to as The Scott Landon 1996 Western Yahoo Tour), but called his literary agent and had him cancel the whole deal. The booking agency screamed blue murder (no surprise there, that was three hundred thousand dollars" worth of speaking dates he was talking about flushing down the commode), but Scott held firm. He said the tour was impossible, said he was sick. He was sick, all right; as that winter sank its claws in deeper, Scott Landon had been a sick man, indeed. Lisey knew as early as November that something 2.
She knows something"s wrong with him, and it isn"t bronchitis, as he"s been claiming. He has no cough, and his skin"s cool to the touch, so even though he won"t let her take histemperature, won"t even let her put one of those fever-strip thingies on his forehead, she"s pretty sure he"s not running a fever. The problem seems to be mental rather than physical, and that scares the h.e.l.l out of her. The one time she gets up enough courage to suggest he go see Dr. Bjorn, he just about tears her head off, accuses her of being a doctor-junkie "like the rest of your nut-box sisters."
And how is she supposed to respond to that? What, exactly, are the symptoms he"s displaying? Would any doctor-even a sympathetic one like Rick Bjorn-take them seriously? He"s stopped listening to music when he writes, that"s one thing. And he"s not writing much, that"s another, much bigger, thing. Forward progress on his new novel-which Lisey Landon, admittedly no great book critic, happens to love-has slowed from his usual all-out sprint to a labored crawl. Bigger still...dear Christ, where"s his sense of humor? That boisterous sense of good humor can be wearing, but its sudden absence as fall gives way to cold weather is downright spooky; it"s like the moment in one of those old jungle movies where the native drums suddenly fall silent. He"s drinking more, too, and later into the night. She has always gone to bed earlier than he does-usually much earlier-but she almost always knows when he turns in and what she smells on his breath when he does. She also knows what she sees in his trashcans up in his study, and as her worries grow, she makes a special point to look every two or three days. She"s used to seeing beer cans, sometimes a great lot of them, Scott has always liked his beer, but in December of 1995 and early January of 1996 she also begins to see Jim Beam bottles. And Scott is suffering hangovers. For some reason this bothers her more than all the rest. Sometimes he wanders the house-pale, silent, ill-until the middle of the afternoon before finally perking up. On several occasions she has heard him vomiting behind the closed bathroom door, and she knows by the speed with which the aspirin is disappearing that he"s suffering bad headaches. Nothing unusual in that, you might say; drink a case of beer or a bottle of Beam between nine and midnight, you"re gonna pay the price, Patrick. And maybe that"s all it is, but Scott has been a heavy drinker since the night she met him in that University lounge, when he had a bottle squirreled away in his jacket pocket (he shared it with her), and he"s never suffered more than the mildest of hangovers. Now when she sees the empties in his wastebasket and that only a page or two has been added to the Outlaw"s Honeymoon ma.n.u.script on his big desk (some days there are no new pages at all), she wonders just how much more he"s drinking than what she knows about.
For a little while she"s able to forget her worries in the round of year-end holiday visiting and the jostle of Christmas shopping. Scott has never been much of a shopper even when things are slow and the stores are empty, but this season he throws himself into it with hectic good cheer. He"s out with her every smucking day, doing battle at either the Auburn Mall or the Main Street shops in Castle Rock. He"s recognized often but cheerfully refuses the frequent autograph requests from people who smell the chance for a one-of-a-kind gift, telling them that if he doesn"t stick with his wife, he probably won"t see her again until Easter. He may have lost his sense of humor but she never sees him lose his temper, not even when some of the folks who want autographs get pushy, and so for awhile there he seems sort of all right, sort of himself in spite of the drinking, the canceled tour, and his slow progress on the new book.
Christmas itself is a happy day, with lots of presents exchanged and an energetic midday tumble in the sack. Christmas dinner is at Canty and Rich"s, and over dessert Rich asks Scott when he"s going to produce one of the movies made from his novels. "That"s where the big money is," Rich says, seemingly ignorant of the fact that of four film adaptations so far, three have bombed. Only the movie version of Empty Devils (which Lisey has never seen) made money.
On the way home, Scott"s sense of humor swoops back in like a big old B-1 bomber and he does a killer imitation of Rich that has Lisey laughing until her belly cramps up. And when they arrive back at Sugar Top Hill, they proceed upstairs for a second tumble in the sack. In the afterglow Lisey finds herself thinking that if Scott is sick, maybe more people should catch what he has, the world would be a better place.
She wakes around two AM on Boxing Day, needing to use the bathroom, and-talk about deja vu all over again-he"s not in bed. But this time not gone. She has come to know the difference without even letting herself know what she means when she thinks (gone) about that thing he sometimes does, that place he sometimes goes.
She urinates with her eyes shut, listening to the wind outside the house. It sounds cold, that wind, but she doesn"t know what cold is. Not yet. Let another couple of weeks pa.s.s and she will. Let another couple of weeks pa.s.s and she"ll know all sorts of things.
When she"s done with the toilet, she peeks out the bathroom window. This looks toward the barn and Scott"s study in the converted hayloft. If he was up there-and when he gets restless in the middle of the night, that is where he usually goes-she"d see the lights, perhaps even hear the happy carnival sounds of his rock-and-roll music, very faint. Tonight the barn is dark, and the only music she hears is the pitchpipe of the wind. This makes her a little uneasy; hatches thoughts in the back of her brain (heart attack stroke) that are too unpleasant to completely consider, yet a little too strong, given how...how off he"s been lately...to completely dismiss. So instead of sleepwalking back to the bedroom, she goes to the bathroom"s other door, the one that gives on the upstairs hall. She calls his name and gets no answer, but she sees a slim gold bar of light shining beneath the closed door at the far end. And now, very faint, she hears the sound of music coming from down there. Not rock and roll but country. It"s Hank Williams. Ole Hank is singing "Kaw-Liga."
"Scott?" she calls again, and when there"s no answer she goes down there brushing the hair out of her eyes, bare feet whispering on a carpet that will later wind up in the attic, frightened for no reason she can articulate, except it has something to do with (gone) things that are either finished or should be. All done and b.u.t.toned up, Dad Debusher might have said; that was one old Dandy caught from the pool, the one where we all go down to drink, the one where we cast our nets.
"Scott?"
She stands before the guest-room door for a moment and a horrible premonition comes to her: he"s sitting dead in the rocking chair in front of the television, dead by his own hand, why has she not seen this coming, haven"t all the symptoms been on display for a month or more? He has held out until Christmas, held out for her sake, but now- "Scott?"
She turns the k.n.o.b and pushes the door open and he"s in the rocking chair just as she has imagined him, but very much alive, swaddled in his favorite Good Ma african, the yellow one. On the television, the sound turned low, is his favorite movie: The Last Picture Show. His eyes don"t move from it to her.
"Scott? Are you okay?"
His eyes don"t move, don"t blink. She begins to be very afraid then, and in the back of her mind one of Scott"s strange words (gomer) pops off a haunted a.s.sembly line, and she swats it back into her subconscious with a barely articulated (Smuck it!) curse. She steps into the room and speaks his name again. This time he does blink-thank G.o.d-and turns his head to look at her, and smiles. It"s the Scott Landon smile she fell in love with the first time she saw it. Mostly the way it makes his eyes turn up at the corners.
"Hey, Lisey," he says. "What"re you doing up?"
"I could ask you the same question," she says. She looks for booze-a can of beer, maybe a half-finished bottle of Beam-and doesn"t see any. That"s good. "It"s late, don"t you know, late."
There is a long pause during which he seems to think this over very carefully. Then he says, "The wind woke me. It was rattling one of the gutters against the side of the house and I couldn"t go back to sleep."
She starts to speak, then doesn"t. When you"ve been married a long time-she supposes how long varies from marriage to marriage, with them it took about fifteen years-a kind of telepathy sets in. Right now it"s telling her he has something more to say. So she stays quiet, waiting to see if she"s right. At first it seems she is. He opens his mouth. Then the wind gusts outside and she hears it-a low quick rattling like the chatter of metal teeth. He c.o.c.ks his head toward it...smiles a little...not a nice smile...the smile of someone who has a secret...and closes his mouth again. Instead of saying whatever it was he meant to say, he looks back at the TV screen, where Jeff Bridges-a very young Jeff Bridges-and his best friend are now driving to Mexico. When they get back, Sam the Lion will be dead.
"Do you think you could go to sleep now?" she asks him, and when he doesn"t respond, she begins to feel afraid again. "Scott!" she says, a little more sharply than she intended, and when he returns his eyes to her (reluctantly, Lisey fancies, although he has seen this movie at least two dozen times), she repeats her question more quietly. "Do you think you could go back to sleep now?"
"Maybe," he allows, and she sees something that is both terrible and sad: he is afraid. "If you sleep spoons with me."
"As cold as it is tonight? Are you kidding? Come on, turn off the TV and come back to bed."
He does, and she lies there listening to the wind and luxuriating in the man-driven warmth of him.
She begins to see her b.u.t.terflies. This is what almost always happens to her when she begins to drift into sleep. She sees great red and black b.u.t.terflies opening their wings in the dark. It has occurred to her that she will see them when her dying-time comes around. The thought scares her, but only a little.
"Lisey?" It"s Scott, from far away. He"s drifting, too. She senses that.
"Hmmmm?"
"It doesn"t like me to talk."
"What doesn"t?"
"I don"t know." Very faint and far. "Maybe it"s the wind. The cold north wind. The one that comes down from..."
The last word might be Canada, probably is, but there"s no way to tell for sure because by then she"s lost in the land of sleep and he is too, and when they go there they never go together, and she is afraid that is also a preview of death, a place where there may be dreams but never love, never home, never a hand to hold yours when squadrons of birds flock across the burnt-orange sun at the close of the day.
3.
There"s a period of time-two weeks, maybe-when she goes on trying to believe that things are getting better. Later she"ll ask herself how she could be so stupid, so willfully blind, how she could mistake his frantic struggle to hold onto the world (and her!) for any kind of improvement, but of course when straws are all you have, you grasp them.
There are some fat ones to grasp at. During the opening days of 1996 his drinking seems to stop entirely, except for a gla.s.s of wine with dinner on a couple of occasions, and he trundles out to his study every day. It will only be later- later, later, percolator, they used to chant when they were little kids building their first word-castles in the sand at the edge of the pool-that she"ll realize he hasn"t added a single page to the ma.n.u.script of his novel during those days, has done nothing but drink secret whiskey and eat Certs and write disjointed notes to himself. Tucked beneath the keyboard of the Mac he"s currently using, she"ll find one piece of paper-a sheet of stationery, actually, with FROM THE DESK OF SCOTT LANDON printed across the top-upon which he has scrawled Tractor-chain say youre too late Scoot you old scoot, even now. It"s only when that cold wind, the one all the way down from Yellowknife, is booming around the house, that she"ll finally see the deep crescent-moon cuts in the palms of his hands. Cuts he could only have made with his own fingernails as he struggled to hold onto his life and sanity like a mountain-climber trying to hold onto a smucking ledge in a sleet-storm. It"s only later that she"ll find his cache of empty Beam bottles, better than a dozen in all, and on that one at least she"s able to give herself a pa.s.s, because those empties were well-hidden.
4.
The first couple of days of 1996 are unseasonably warm; it is what the oldtimers call the January Thaw. But as early as January third, the weather forecasters begin warning of a big change, an awesome cold wave rolling down from the white wastes of central Canada. Mainers are told to make sure their fuel-oil tanks are topped up, that their waterpipes are insulated, and that they have plenty of "warm s.p.a.ce" for their animals. Temperatures are going to drop to twenty-five degrees below zero, but the temperatures are going to be the very least of it. They"re going to be accompanied by gale-force winds that will drive the chill-factor to sixty or seventy below.
Lisey is frightened enough to call their general contractor after failing to raise any real concern in Scott. Gary a.s.sures her that the Landons have got the tightest house in Castle View, tells her he"ll keep a close eye on Lisey"s kinfolk (especially on Amanda, it almost goes without saying), and reminds her that cold weather is just a part of living in Maine. A few three-dog nights and we"ll be on the way to spring, he says.
But when the subzero cold and screaming winds finally roll in on the fifth of January, it"s worse than anything Lisey can remember, even casting her mind back to childhood, when every thunderbuster she rode out gleefully as a child seemed magnified into a great tempest and every snow flurry was a blizzard. She keeps all the thermostats in the house turned up to seventy-five and the new furnace runs constantly, but between the sixth and ninth, the temperature inside never rises above sixty-two. The wind doesn"t just hoot around the eaves, it screams like a woman being gutted an inch at a time by a madman: one with a dull knife. The snow left on the ground by the January thaw is lifted by those forty-mile-an- hour winds (the gusts kick up to sixty-five, high enough to knock down half a dozen radio towers in central Maine and New Hampshire) and blown across the fields like dancing ghosts. When they hit the storm windows, the granular particles rattle like hail.
On the second night of this extravagant Canadian cold, Lisey wakes up at two in the morning and Scott is gone from their bed once more. She finds him in the guest room, again bundled up in Good Ma"s yellow african, once more watching The Last Picture Show. Hank Williams warbles "Kaw-Liga"; Sam the Lion is dead. She has difficulty rousing him, but at last Lisey manages. She asks him if he"s all right and Scott says yeah he is. He tells her to look out the window, tells her it"s beautiful but to be careful, not to look too long. "My Daddy said it would burn your eyes when it"s that bright," he advises.
She gasps for the beauty of it. There are great drifting theater curtains in the sky, and they change color as she watches: green goes to purple, purple to vermilion, vermilion to a queer b.l.o.o.d.y shade of red she cannot name. Russet perhaps comes close, but that isn"t it, exactly; she thinks no one has ever named the shade she"s seeing. When Scott twitches the back of her nightgown and tells her that"s enough, she ought to stop, she"s stunned to look at the digital clock built into the VCR and discover that she"s been looking out the frostframed window at the northern lights for ten minutes. "Don"t look anymore," he says, in the nagging, dragging tones of one who speaks in his sleep. "Come back to bed with me, little Lisey."
She"s glad enough to go, glad enough to kill that somehow awful movie, to get him out of the rocker and the chilly back room. But as she leads him up the hall by the hand, he says something that makes her skin p.r.i.c.kle. "The wind sounds like the tractor-chain and the tractor-chain sounds like my Daddy," he says. "What if he"s not dead?"
"Scott, that"s bulls.h.i.t," she replies, but things like that don"t sound like bulls.h.i.t in the middle of the night, do they? Especially when the wind screams and the sky is so full of colors it seems to be screaming back.
When she wakes up the following night the wind is still howling and this time when she goes down to the guest room the TV isn"t on but he"s in there watching it anyway. He"s in the rocking chair and bundled up in the african, Good Ma"s yellow african, but he won"t answer her, won"t even look at her. Scott is there, but Scott is also gone.
He"s gone gomer.
5.
Lisey rolled over on her back in Scott"s study and looked up at the skylight directly overhead. Her breast throbbed. Without thinking about it, she pressed the yellow knitted square against it. At first the pain was even worse...but then there was a small measure of comfort. She looked into the skylight, panting. She could smell the sour brew of sweat, tears, and blood in which her skin was marinating. She moaned. All the Landons are fast healers, we had to be. If it was true-and she had reason to believe it was-then she had never so much wanted to be a Landon as she did now. No more Lisa Debusher from Lisbon Falls, Mama and Daddy"s afterthought, Li"l Tag-Along.
You are who you are, Scott"s voice responded patiently. You"re Lisey Landon. My little Lisey. But it was hot and she hurt so much, now she was the one who wanted ice, and voice or no voice, Scott Landon had never seemed so smucking dead.
SOWISA, babyluv, he insisted, but that voice was far.
Far.
Even the phone on Dumbo"s Big Jumbo, from which she could theoretically summon help, seemed far. And what seemed close? A question. A simple one, actually. How could she have found her own sister like that and not have remembered finding her husband like that during the cold-wave of 1996?
I did remember, her mind whispered to her mind as she lay looking up at the skylight with the yellow knitted square turning red against her breast. I did. But to remember Scott in the rocker was to remember The Antlers; to remember The Antlers was to remember what happened when we went from under the yum-yum tree out into the snow; to remember that was to face the truth about his brother Paul; to face the true memory of Paul meant doubling back to that cold guest room with the northern lights filling the sky as the wind boomed down from Canada, from Manitoba, all the way from Yellowknife. Don"t you see, Lisey? It was all connected, it always has been, and once you allowed yourself to make the first connection, to push over the first domino- "I would have gone crazy," she whimpered. "Like them. Like the Landons and the Landreaus and whoever else knows about this. No wonder they went nuts, to know there"s a world right next door to this one...and the wall between is so thin..."
But not even that was the worst. The worst was the thing that had so haunted him, the mottled thing with the endless piebald side- "No!" she shrieked at the empty study. She shrieked even though it hurt her all the way down. "Oh, no! Stop! Make it stop! Make these things STOP!"
But it was too late. And too true to deny any longer, no matter how great the risk of madness. There really was a place where food turned bad, sometimes outright poisonous, after dark and where that piebald thing, Scott"s long boy (I"ll make how it sounds when it looks around) might be real.
"Oh, it"s real, all right," Lisey whispered. "I saw it."
In the empty, haunted air of the dead man"s study, she began to weep. Even now she didn"t know for sure if this was true, and exactly when she had seen it if it was...but it felt true. The kind of hope-ending thing cancer patients glimpse in their bleary bedside watergla.s.ses when all the medicine is taken and the morphine pump reads 0 and the hour is none and the pain is still in there, eating its steady way deeper into your wakeful bones. And alive. Alive, malevolent, and hungry. The kind of thing she was sure her husband had tried, and failed, to drink away. And laugh away. And write away. The thing she had almost seen in his empty eyes as he sat in the chilly guest room with the TV this time blank and silent. He sat in 6.He sits in the rocking chair, wrapped to his staring eyes in Good Ma"s h.e.l.laciously cheery yellow african. He looks both at her and through her. He doesn"t respond to her increasingly frantic repet.i.tions of his name and she doesn"t know what to do.
Call someone, she thinks, that"s what, and hurries back down the hall to their bedroom. Canty and Rich are in Florida and will be until the middle of February, but Darla and Matt are just down the road and it"s Darla"s number she intends to dial, she"s far past worrying about waking them up in the middle of the night, she needs to talk to someone, she needs help.
She doesn"t get it. The bitter gale, the one that"s making her cold even in her flannel nightgown with a sweater thrown on top for good measure, the one that"s making the furnace in the cellar run constantly as the house creaks and groans and sometimes even crrracks alarmingly, that big cold wind down from Canada, has torn a line down somewhere on the View and all she hears when she picks up the phone is an idiot mmmmm. She diddles the phone"s cutoff b.u.t.ton a couple of times with the tip of her finger anyway, because that"s what you do, but she knows it will do no good, and it doesn"t. She"s alone in this big old converted Victorian house on Sugar Top Hill as the skies bloom with crazy-jane curtains of color and the temperatures drop to regions of cold best left unimagined. If she tries going next door to the Galloways, she knows the chances are good she"ll lose an earlobe or a finger-maybe a couple-to frostbite. She might actually freeze to death on their stoop before she can rouse them. This is the kind of cold you absolutely do not fool with.
She returns the useless phone to its cradle and hurries back down the hall to him, her slippers whispering. He is as she left him. The whining "50s-vintage country-music soundtrack of The Last Picture Show in the middle of the night was bad but the silence is worse, worse, worst. And just before a giant gust of wind seizes the house and threatens to push it off its foundations (she can hardly believe they haven"t lost the electric, surely they will before much longer), she realizes why even the big wind is a relief: she can"t hear him breathing. He doesn"t look dead, there"s even some color in his cheeks, but how does she know he"s not?
"Honey?" she murmurs, going to him. "Hon, can you talk to me? Can you look at me?"
He says nothing, and he doesn"t look at her, but when she puts her chilly fingers against his neck, she finds that the skin there is warm and she feels the beat of his heart in the big vein or artery that lies just beneath the skin. And something else. She can feel him reaching out to her. In daylight, even cold daylight, windy daylight (like the kind that seems to pervade all the exteriors in The Last Picture Show, now that she thinks of it), she"s sure she would scoff at that, but not now. Now she knows what she knows. He needs help, just as much as he did on that day in Nashville, first when the madman shot him and then as he lay shivering on the hot pavement, begging for ice.
"How do I help you?" she murmurs. "How do I help you now?"
It"s Darla who answers, Darla as she was as a teenager-"Full of young t.i.ts n mean," Good Ma had once said, anuncharacteristic vulgarity for her, so she must have been exasperated out of all measure.You aren"t gonna help him, why are you talkin about helpin him? Darla asks, and that voice is so real Lisey can almost smell the Coty face-powder Darla was allowed to use (because of her blemishes) and hear the pop of her Dubble Bubble. And say! She"s been down to the pool, and cast her net, and brought back quite a catch! He"s off his rocker, Lisey, popped his cork, lost his marbles, he"s riding the rubber tricycle, and the only way you can help him is to call for the men in the white coats as soon as the phone"s working again. Lisey hears Darla"s laugh-that laugh of perfect teenage contempt- deep in the center of her head as she looks down at her wideeyed husband sitting in the rocker. Help him! Darla snorts. HELP him? Cheezus pleezus.
And yet Lisey thinks she can. Lisey thinks there"s a way.
The trouble is that the way to help is possibly dangerous and not at all sure. She"s honest enough to recognize that she has made some of the problems herself. She has stowed away certain memories, such as their amazing exit from beneath the yum-yum tree, and hidden unbearable truths-the truth about Paul the Saintly Brother, for instance-behind a sort of curtain in her mind. There"s a certain sound (the chuffing, dear G.o.d that low nasty grunting) behind there, and certain sights (the crosses the graveyard the crosses in the bloodlight) as well. She wonders sometimes if everyone has a curtain like that in their minds, one with a don"t-think zone behind it. They should. It"s handy. Saves a lot of sleepless nights. There"s all sorts of dusty old c.r.a.pola behind hers; stuff like-a dis, stuff like-a dat, stuff like-a d"other t"ing. All in all, it"s quite a maze. Oh leedle Leezy, how you amazenzee me, mein gott...and what do the kids say?
"Don"t goinzee there," Lisey mutters, but she thinks she will; she thinks if she is to have any chance of saving Scott, of bringing him back, she must goinzee there...wherever there is.
Oh, but it"s right next door.
That"s the horror of it.
"You know, don"t you?" she says, beginning to weep, but it isn"t Scott she"s asking, Scott has gone to where the gomers go. Once upon a time, under the yum-yum tree where they sat protected from the world by the strange October snow, he had referred to his job of writing stories as a kind of madness. She had protested-she, practical Lisey, to whom everything was the same-and he had said, You don"t understand the gone part. I hope you stay lucky that way, little Lisey.