She realizes she's just thought of her husband in the past tense, and a wave of coldness stiffens the hair at the nape of her neck and puts goosebumps on her arms. It's followed by a sense of lightness that is both marvelous and horrible. It's as if at any moment she'll float away like a balloon with a cut string. Float away to
(hush now little Lisey hush about that)
some other place. The moon, maybe. Lisey has to dig her fingernails deep into her palms to remain steady on her feet.
Meanwhile, Jantzen is murmuring to the Warner Bros. nurse. She listens and nods. 'You won't forget to put that in writing later, yuh?'
'Before the clock on the wall says two,' Jantzen assures her.
'And you're positive this is the way you want to go?' she persists—not being argumentative about whatever the subject is, Lisey thinks, just wanting to make sure she's got it all perfectly straight.
'I am,' he tells her, then turns to Lisey and asks if she's ready to go upstairs to Alton IU. That, he says, is where her husband is. Lisey says that would be fine. 'Well,' Jantzen says with a smile that looks tired and not very genuine, 'I hope you've got your hiking boots on. It's the fifth floor.'
As they walk back to the stairs—past YANEZ-THOMAS and VANDERVEAUX-ELIZABETH—the Warner Bros. nurse is on the phone. Later Lisey will understand that the murmured conversation was Jantzen telling the nurse to call upstairs and have them take Scott off the ventilator. If, that is, he's awake enough to recognize his wife and hear her goodbye. Perhaps even to tell his own back to her, if God gives him one more puff of wind to sail through his vocal cords. Later she will understand that taking him off the vent shortened his life from hours to minutes, but that Jantzen thought this was a fair trade, since in his opinion any hours gained could offer Scott Landon no hope of recovery whatsoever. Later she will understand that they put him in the closest thing their small community hospital has to a plague unit.
Later.
4
On their slow, steady walk up the hot stairwell to the fifth floor, she learns how little Jantzen can tell her about what's wrong with Scott—how precious little he knows. The
thoracotomy, he says, was no cure, but only to remove a buildup of fluid; the related procedure was to remove trapped air from Scott's pleural cavities.
'Which lung are we talking about, Dr. Jantzen?' she asks him, and he terrifies her by replying: 'Both.'
5
That's when he asks her how long Scott has been sick, and whether he saw a doctor 'before his current complaint escalated.' She tells him Scott hasn't had a current complaint. Scott hasn't been sick. He's had a bit of a runny nose for the last ten days, and he's done some coughing and sneezing, but that's pretty much the whole deal. He hasn't even been taking Allerest, although he thinks it's allergies, and she does, too. She has some of the same symptoms, gets them each late spring and early summer.
'No deep cough?' he asks as they near the fifth-floor landing. 'No deep, dry cough, like a morning smoker's cough? Sorry about the elevators, by the way.'
'That's all right,' she says, struggling not to puff and pant. 'He did have a cough, as I told you, but it was very light. He used to smoke, but he hasn't in years.' She thinks. 'I guess it might have been a little heavier in the last couple of days, and he woke me once in the night—'
'Last night?'
'Yes, but he took a drink of water and it stopped.' He's opening the door to another quiet hospital hall and Lisey puts a hand on his arm to stop him. 'Listen—things like this reading he did last night? There was a time when Scott would have soldiered through half a dozen of those pups even with a temperature of a hundred and four. He would have cooked up on the applause and mainlined it to keep going. But those days ended five, maybe even seven years ago. If he'd been really sick, I'm sure he would have called Professor Meade—he's head of the English Department—and canceled the smuh—the damn thing.'
'Mrs. Landon, by the time we admitted him, your husband was running a fever of a hundred and six.'
Now she can only look at Dr. Jantzen, he of the untrustworthy adolescent face, with silent horror and what is not quite disbelief. In time, however, a picture will begin to form. There's enough testimony, combined with certain memories that will not stay completely buried, to show her all she needs to see.
Scott took a charter flight from Portland to Boston, then flew United from Boston to Kentucky. A stew on the United flight who got his autograph later told a reporter that Mr. Landon had been coughing 'almost constantly' and his skin was flushed. 'When I asked if he was all right,' she told the reporter, 'he said it was just a summer cold, he'd taken a couple of aspirin and would be fine.'
Frederic Borent, the grad student who met his plane, also reported the cough, and said Scott had gotten him to swing into a Nite Owl to pick up a bottle of Nyquil. 'I think I might be getting the flu,' he told Borent. Borent said he'd really been looking forward to the reading and wondered if Scott would be able to do it. Scott said, 'You might be surprised.'
Borent was. And delighted. So was most of Scott's audience that night. According to the Bowling Green Daily News, he gave a reading that was 'little short of mesmerizing,' only stopping a few times for the politest of small coughs, which seemed easily quelled by a sip of water from the glass beside him on the podium. Speaking to Lisey hours later, Jantzen remained amazed by Scott's vitality. And it was his amazement, coupled with a message relayed by the head of the English Department during his phone call, that caused a rift in Lisey's carefully maintained curtain of repression, at least for awhile. The last thing Scott said to Meade, after the reading and just before the reception began, was 'Call my wife, would you? Tell her she may have to fly out here. Tell her I may have eaten the wrong thing after sunset. It's kind of a joke between us.'
6
Lisey blurts out her worst fear to young Dr. Jantzen without even thinking about it. 'Scott is going to die of this, isn't he?'
Jantzen hesitates, and all at once she can see that he may be young but he's no kid. 'I want you to see him,' he says after a moment that seems very long. 'And I want him to see you. He's conscious, but that may not last long. Will you come with me?'
Jantzen walks very fast. He stops at the nurses' station and the male nurse on duty looks up from the journal he's been reading—Modern Geriatrics. Jantzen speaks to him. The conversation is low-pitched, but the floor is very quiet, and Lisey hears the male nurse say four words very clearly. They terrify her.
'He's waiting for her,' the male nurse says.
At the far end of the corridor are two closed doors with this message written on them in bright orange:
ALTON ISOLATION UNIT
SEE NURSE BEFORE ENTERING
OBSERVE ALL PRECAUTIONS
FOR YOUR SAKE
FOR THEIR SAKE
MASK AND GLOVES MAY BE REQUIRED
To the left of the door is a sink where Jantzen washes his hands and instructs Lisey to do the same. On a gurney to the right are gauze masks, latex gloves in sealed packets, stretchy yellow shoe covers in a cardboard box with FITS ALL SIZES stamped on the side, and a neat stack of surgical greengowns.
'Isolation,' she says. 'Oh Jesus, you think my husband's got the smucking Andromeda Strain.'
Jantzen hedges. 'We think he may have some exotic pneumonia, possibly even the Bird Flu, but whatever it is,
