fur. At its base the ground still looked a little sunken. That was where Scott had buried the brother he had tried so hard to save. And on one side of that sunken place, she saw something with huge hollow eyes staring at her from the high grass.
For a moment she thought it was Dooley, or Dooley's corpse, somehow reanimated and come back to stalk her, but then she remembered how, after clubbing Amanda aside, he'd stripped off the useless, lensless night-vision goggles and thrown them aside. And there they were, lying beside the good brother's grave.
It's another bool hunt, she thought as she walked toward them. From the path to the tree; from the tree to the grave; from the grave to the goggles. Where next? Where now, babyluv?
The next station turned out to be the grave-marker, with the horizontal crosspiece turned askew so it was like clock-hands pointing to five past seven. The top of the vertical was stained to a depth of three inches with Dooley's blood, now dried to the maroon, not-quite-varnish color of the stains on the rug in Scott's study. She could still see PAUL printed on the crosspiece, and as she lifted it (with real reverence) out of the grass for a closer look, she saw something else as well: the length of matted yellow yarn that had been looped repeatedly around the vertical slat of the cross, then tied firmly. Tied, Lisey had absolutely no doubt, with the same sort of knot as the one that had secured Chuckie G.'s bell to the tree in the woods. The yellow yarn—which had once come spinning off Good Ma's knitting needles as she sat watching television at the farm in Lisbon—was wrapped around the vertical just above the place where the wood was stained dark with earth. And looking at it, she remembered seeing it running into the dark just before Dooley pulled the cross out of his arm and flung it away.
It's the african, the one we dropped by the big rock above the pool. He came back later, some time later, got it, and brought it here. Unraveled some of it, tied it to the cross, then paid out more. And expected me to find the rest at the end of it all.
Heart pounding hard and slow in her breast, Lisey dropped the cross and began following the yellow thread away from the path and along the edge of the Fairy Forest, paying it through her hands as the high grass whispered against her thighs and the grasshoppers jumped and the lupin gave up its sweet scent. Somewhere a locust sang its hot summer song and in the woods a crow—was it a crow? it sounded like one, a perfectly ordinary crow—called a rusty hello, but there were no cars, no airplanes, no human voices near or far. She walked through the grass, following the line of unknitted afghan, the one in which her sleepless, frightened, failing husband had swaddled on so many cold nights ten years before. Ahead of her, one sweetheart tree stood out a bit from its fellows, spreading its branches, making a pool of inviting shade. Beneath it she saw a tall metal wastebasket and a much larger pool of yellow. The color was dull now, the wool matted and shapeless, like a large yellow wig that has been left out in the rain, or perhaps the corpse of a big old tomcat, but Lisey knew it for what it was as soon as she saw it, and her chest began to hitch. In her mind she could hear The Swinging Johnsons playing 'Too Late to Turn Back Now' and feel Scott's hand as he led her out onto the floor. She followed the line of unraveled yellow yarn under the sweetheart tree and knelt beside what little remained of her mother's wedding present to her youngest daughter and her youngest daughter's husband. She picked it up—it, and whatever lay inside it. She put her face against it. It smelled damp and moldy, an old thing, a forgotten thing, a thing that smelled now more of funerals than of weddings. That was all right. That was just as it should have been. She smelled all the years it had been here, tied to Paul's grave-marker and waiting for her, something like an anchor.
11
A little time later, when her tears had stopped, she put the package (for surely that was what it was) down where it had been and looked at it, touching the place where the yellow yarn unraveled from the shrunken body of the afghan. She marveled that the line hadn't broken, either when Dooley fell on the cross, or when he tore it out of his arm, or when he flung it away—when he slang it forth. Of course it helped that Scott had tied his string to the bottom, but it was still pretty amazing, especially when you considered how long this damned thing had been out here, exposed to the elements. It was a blue-eyed miracle, so to speak.
But of course sometimes lost dogs came home; sometimes old strings held and led you to the prize at the end of the bool hunt. She started to unwrap the faded, matted remains of the afghan, then looked into the wastebasket, instead. What she saw made her laugh ruefully. It was nearly full of liquor bottles. One or two looked relatively new, and she was sure the one on the very top was, because there had been no such thing as Mike's Hard Lemonade ten years ago. But most of the bottles were old. This was where he'd come to do his drinking in '96, but even blind drunk he'd had too much respect for Boo'ya Moon to litter it up with empty bottles. And would she find other caches if she took the time to look? Maybe. Probably. But this was the only cache that mattered to her. It told her that this was where he'd come to do the last of his life's work.
She thought she had all the answers now except for the big ones, the ones she'd actually come for—how she was supposed to live with the long boy, and how she was supposed to keep from slipping over here to where it lived, especially when it was thinking of her. Perhaps Scott had left her some answers. Even if he hadn't, he'd left her something…and it was very beautiful under this tree.
Lisey picked up the african again and felt it the way she'd once felt her Christmas presents as a girl. There was a box inside, but it didn't feel a bit like Good Ma's cedar box; it was softer than that, almost mushy, as if, even wrapped in the african and left under the tree, moisture had seeped in over the years…and for the first time she wondered how many years they were talking about here. The bottle of Hard Lemonade suggested not very many. And the feel of the thing suggested—
'It's a manuscript box,' she murmured. 'One of his hard cardboard manuscript boxes.' Yes. She was sure of it. Only after two years under this tree…or three…or four…it had turned into a soft cardboard box.
Lisey began to unwrap the afghan. Two turns were enough to do the job; that was all that was left. And it was a manuscript box, its light gray color darkened to slate by seeping moisture. Scott always put a sticker on the front of his boxes and wrote the title there. The sticker on this one had pulled loose on both sides and curled upward. She pushed it back with her fingers and saw a single word in Scott's strong, dark printing: LISEY. She opened the box. The pages inside were lined sheets torn from a notebook. There were perhaps thirty in all, packed tight with quick, dark strokes from one of his felt-tip pens. She wasn't surprised to see that Scott had written in the present tense, that what he had written seemed couched in occasionally childish prose, and that the story seemed to start in the middle. The last was true, she reflected, only if you didn't know how two brothers had survived their crazy father and what happened to one of them and how the other couldn't save him. The story only seemed to start in the middle if you didn't know about gomers and goners and the bad-gunky. It only started in the middle if you didn't know that
12
In February he starts looking at me funny, out of the corners of his eyes. I keep expecting him to yell at me or even whip out his old pocketknife and carve on me. He hasn't done anything like that in a long time but I think it would almost be a relief. It wouldn't let the bad-gunky out of me because there isn't any—I saw the real bad-gunky when Paul was chained up in the cellar, not Daddy's fantasies of it—and there's nothing like that in me. But there's something bad in him, and cutting doesn't let it out. Not this time, although he's tried plenty. I know. I've seen the bloody shirts and underpants in the wash. In the trash, too. If cutting me would help him, I'd let him, because I still love him. More than ever since it's just the two of us. More than ever since what we went through with Paul. That kind of love is a kind of doom, like the badgunky. 'Bad-gunky's strong,' he said.
But he won't cut.
One day I'm coming back from the shed where I sat for a little while to think about Paul—to think about all the good times we had rolling around this old place—and Daddy grabs me and he shakes. 'You went over there!' he shouts in my face. And I can see that however sick I thought he was, it's worse. He's never been as bad as this. 'Why do you go over there? What do you do over there? Who do you talk to? What are you planning?'
All the time shaking me and shaking me, the world tipping up and down. Then my head hits the side of the door and I see stars and I fall down there in the doorway with the heat of the kitchen on my front and the cold of the dooryard on my back.
'No, Daddy,' I say, 'I didn't go anywhere, I was just—'
He bends over me, his hands on his knees, his face down in my face, his skin pale except for two balls of color high up on his cheeks and I see the way his eyes are going back and forth, back and forth, and I know that he and
