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 passed. 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 storage
cubbies…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 passage. 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 damn 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 damn 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 shit-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
