Kaw-Liga.
Outside, the air had begun to redden—as it did when sunset approached in a certain mythical land once discovered by a pair of frightened boys from Pennsylvania.
This all happened very suddenly, Mrs. Landon. I wish I had some answers for you, but I don't. Perhaps Dr. Jantzen will.
But he hadn't. Dr. Jantzen had performed a thoracotomy, but that had provided no answers, either.
I didn't know what that was, Lisey thought, as outside the reddening sun approached the western hills. I didn't know what a thoracotomy was, didn't know what was happening…except in spite of everything I'd hidden away behind the purple, I did.
The pilots had arranged for a limo while she was still in the air. It was after eleven when the Gulfstream landed, and after midnight when she got to that little pile of cinderblocks they called a hospital, but the day had been hot and it was still hot. When the driver opened the door she remembered feeling that she could reach out her hands, twist them, and wring water right out of the air.
And there were dogs barking, of course—what sounded like every dog in Bowling Green barking at the moon—and my God, talk about your deja vu, there was one old guy buffing the hallway floor and two old women sitting in the waiting room, identical twins by the look of them, eighty if they were a day, and straight ahead
2
Straight ahead of her are two elevators painted blue-gray. A sign on an easel in front of them reads OUT OF SERVICE. Lisey closes her eyes and puts a blind hand out to brace herself against the wall, for a moment quite sure she's going to faint. And why not? It seems she has traveled not just across miles but across time, as well. This isn't Bowling Green in 2004 but Nashville in 1988. Her husband has a lung problem, all right, but of the .22-caliber variety. A madman fed him a bullet, and would have fed him several more, if Lisey hadn't been quick with the silver spade.
She waits for someone to ask if she's all right, maybe even take hold of her and steady her on her shaky pins, but there's only the Whuzzzz of the old janitor's floor-buffer, and somewhere far away, the soft dinging of a bell that makes her think of some other bell in some other place, a bell that sometimes rings from behind the purple curtain she has carefully drawn over certain parts of her past.
She opens her eyes and sees that the main desk is deserted. There's a light on behind the window marked INFORMATION, so Lisey's pretty sure someone's supposed to be on duty there, but he or she has stepped away, maybe to use the john. The elderly twins in the waiting room are staring down at what appear to be identical waiting-room magazines. Beyond the entrance doors, her limo idles behind its yellow running lights like some exotic deep-sea fish. On this side of the doors, a small-city hospital is dozing through the first hour of a new day, and Lisey realizes that unless she starts up a bellerin, as Dandy would say, she's on her own. The feeling this engenders isn't fear or irritation or perplexity but rather deep sorrow. Later, flying back to Maine with her husband's encoffined mortal remains below her feet, she'll think: That's when I knew he'd never be leaving that place alive. He'd come to the last of it. I had a premonition. And you know what? I think it was the sign in front of the elevators that did it. That smucking OUT OF SERVICE sign. Yeah.
She can look for a hospital directory, or she can ask directions of the janitor buffing the floor, but Lisey does neither. She's sure she'll find Scott in this hospital's ICU if he's out of surgery, and she'll find the ICU on the third floor. This intuition is so strong she almost expects to see a homely floursack magic carpet floating at the foot of the stairs when she reaches them, a dusty square of cotton with the words PILLSBURY'S BEST FLOUR printed across it. There's no such thing, of course, and by the time she reaches the thirdfloor landing she's sweating and sticky and her heart is pounding hard. But the door does indeed say BGCH INTENSIVE CARE, and that sense of being in a waking dream where past and present have joined in an endless loop grows even stronger.
He's in room 319, Lisey thinks. She's sure of it even though she can see there have been a great many changes since the last time she came to her husband lying hurt in a hospital. The most obvious one is the television monitors outside each room; they show all sorts of red and green readouts. The only ones Lisey is completely sure of are pulse and blood-pressure. Oh, and the names, she can read those. COLVETTE-JOHN, DUMBARTON-ADRIAN, TOWSON-RICHARD, VANDERVEAUX-ELIZABETH (Lizzie Vanderveaux, now there's a mouthful, she thinks), DRAYTON-FRANKLIN. She's approaching 319 now, and thinks The nurse is going to come out with Scott's tray in her hands and her back to me; I won't mean to startle her but of course I will. She'll drop the tray. The plates and the coffee cup will be all right, they're tough old cafeteria birds, but that juice glass is going to break into a million pieces.
But it's the middle of the night instead of morning, there are no fans paddling the air overhead, and the name on the monitor above the door of room 319 is YANEZ-THOMAS. Yet still her sense of deja vu is enough to make her peek in and see a huge beached whale of a man—Thomas Yanez—in the single bed. Then there's a sense of awakening such as sleepwalkers may experience; she looks around with growing fright and bewilderment, thinking What am I doing here? I'm apt to catch hell for being up here on my own. Then she thinks,
THORACOTOMY. She thinks AS SOON AS YOU GIVE PERMISSION FOR THE SURGERY, and she can almost see the word SURGERY pulsing in drippy blood-red letters, and instead of leaving she continues quickly down to the brighter light at the center of the corridor, where the nurses' station must be. A terrible thought begins to surface in her mind
(what if he's already)
and she shoves it away, shoves it back down.
At the central station, a nurse dressed in a uniform upon which Warner Bros. cartoon characters caper crazily is making notes on a number of charts spread out before her. Another is speaking sotto voce into a tiny mike pinned to the lapel of her more traditional white rayon top, apparently reading numbers off a monitor. Behind them, a lanky redhead sprawls in a folding chair with his chin on the chest of his white dress shirt. Hanging over the back of his chair is a dark suit-coat that matches his pants. His shoes are off and so is his tie— Lisey can see the end of it peeking from one pocket of his jacket. His hands are clasped loosely in his lap. She may have had a premonition that Scott won't be leaving Bowling Green Community Hospital alive, but she doesn't have the slightest inkling that she's looking at the doctor who operated on him, prolonging his life enough so they can say goodbye after their twenty-five mostly good—hell, mostly fine—years together; she puts the age of the sleeping male at about seventeen, and thinks he might be the son of one of the ICU nurses.
'Pardon me,' Lisey says. Both nurses jump in their chairs. This time Lisey has managed to startle two nurses instead of just one. The nurse with the little mike will have an 'Oh!' on her tape. Lisey couldn't care less. 'My name is Lisa Landon, and I understand that my husband, Scott—'
'Mrs. Landon, yes. Of course.' It's the nurse with Bugs Bunny on one breast and Elmer Fudd pointing a shotgun at him from the other while Daffy Duck looks up from the valley below. 'Dr. Jantzen has been waiting to talk to you. He administered first aid at the reception.'
Lisey still can't get the sense of this, perhaps in part because there was no time to look up thoracotomy in the PDR. 'Scott…what, he fainted? Passed out?'
'Dr. Jantzen can give you the details, I'm sure. You know he performed a parietal pleurectomy as well as a thoracotomy?'
Pleuro-what? It seems easier to just say yes. Meanwhile, the nurse who was dictating puts out a hand and shakes the sleeping redhead. When his eyes flutter open, Lisey can see she was wrong about his age, he's probably old enough to buy a drink in a bar, but surely no one's going to tell her he was the one who cut into her husband's chest. Are they?
'The operation,' Lisey says, with no idea which one of the trio she's speaking to. She has a clear note of desperation in her voice, doesn't like it, can do nothing about it. 'Was it a success?'
The Warner Bros. nurse hesitates for just a moment, and Lisey reads everything she fears in the eyes that suddenly slip away from hers. Then they come back and the nurse says, 'This is Dr. Jantzen. He's been waiting for you.'
3
After that initial blank flutter, Jantzen comes around fast. Lisey thinks it must be a doctor thing—probably also a policeman and fireman thing. It was certainly never a writer thing. You couldn't even talk to him until he'd had his second cup of coffee.
