loading dock 'as soon as you give her the high sign.' She would have gone already, but Scott has been restless for the last hour. Sattherwaite said he'd be out at least until midnight, but Sattherwaite doesn't know Scott the way she does, and Lisey isn't much surprised when he begins surfacing for brief intervals as sunset approaches. Twice he has recognized her, twice he has asked her what happened, and twice she has told him that a mentally deranged person shot him. The second time he said, 'Hi-yosmuckin-Silver' before closing his eyes again, and that actually made her laugh. Now she wants him to come back one more time so she can tell him she's not going back to Maine, only to the motel, and that she'll see him in the morning.
All this 2006-Lisey knows. Remembers. Intuits. Whatever. From where she sits on her PILLSBURY'S BEST magic carpet, she thinks: He opens his eyes. He looks at me. He says, 'I was lost in the dark and you found me. I was hot—so hot—and you gave me ice.'
But is that really what he said? Is it really what happened? Or was that later? And if she's hiding things—hiding them from herself—why is she hiding them?
In the bed, in the red light, Scott opens his eyes. Looks at his wife as she reads her book. His breath doesn't scream now, but there's still a windy sound as he pulls air in as deeply as he can and half-whispers, half-croaks her name. 1988-Lisey puts down her book and looks at him.
'Hey, you're awake again,' she says. 'So here's your pop quiz. Do you remember what happened to you?'
'Shot,' he whispers. 'Kid. Tube. Back. Hurts.'
'You can have something for the pain in a little while,' she says. 'For now, would you like—'
He squeezes her hand, telling her she can stop. Now he'll tell me he was lost in the dark and I gave him ice, 2006-Lisey thinks.
But what he says to his wife—who earlier that day saved his life by braining a madman with a silver shovel—is only this: 'Hot, wasn't it?' His tone casual. No special look; just making conversation. Just passing the time while the red light deepens and the machines queep and bleep, and from her hoverpoint in the doorway, 2006-Lisey sees the shudder—subtle but there—run through her younger self; sees the first finger of her younger self's left hand lose its place in her paperback copy of Savages.
I'm thinking 'Either he doesn't remember or he's pretending not to remember what he said when he was down—about how he could call it if he wanted to, how he could call the long boy if I wanted to be done with him—and what I said back, about how he should shut up and leave it alone…that if he just shut the smuck up it would go away. I'm wondering if this is a real case of forgetting—the way he forgot that he'd been shot—or if it's more of our special forgetting, which is more like sweeping the bad shit into a box and then locking it up tight. I'm wondering if it even matters, as long as he remembers how to get better.'
As she lay on her bed (and as she rides the magic carpet in the eternal present of her dream), Lisey stirred and tried to cry out to her younger self, tried to yell that it did matter, it did. Don't let him get away with it! she tried to yell. You can't forget forever! But another saying from the past occurred to her, this one from their endless games of Hearts and Whist at Sabbath Day Lake in the summertime, always yelled out when some player wanted to look at discards more than a single trick deep: Leave that alone! You can't unbury the dead!
You can't unbury the dead.
Still, she tries one more time. With all her considerable force of mind and will, 2006-Lisey leans forward on her magic carpet and sends He's faking! SCOTT REMEMBERS EVERYTHING! at her younger self.
And for a wild moment she thinks she's getting through…knows she's getting through. 1988-Lisey twitches in her chair and her book actually slides out of her hand and hits the floor with a flat clap. But before that version of herself can look around, Scott Landon stares directly at the woman hovering in the doorway, the version of his wife who will live to be his widow. He purses his lips again, but instead of making the nasty chuffing sound, he blows. It's not much of a puff; how could it be, considering what he's been through? But it's enough to send the PILLSBURY'S BEST magic carpet flying backward, dipping and diving like a milkweed pod in a hurricane. Lisey hangs on for dear life as the hospital walls rock past, but the damned thing tilts and she's falling and
9
Lisey awoke sitting bolt-upright on the bed with sweat drying on her forehead and underneath her arms. It was relatively cool in here, thanks to the overhead fan, but still she was as hot as a…
Well, as hot as a suck-oven.
'Whatever that is,' she said, and laughed shakily.
The dream was already fading to rags and tatters—the only thing she could recall with any clarity was the otherworldly red light of some setting sun—but she had awakened with a crazy certainty planted in the forefront of her mind, a crazy imperative: she had to find that smucking shovel. That silver spade.
'Why?' she asked the empty room. She picked the clock off the nightstand and held it close to her face, sure it would tell her an hour had gone by, maybe even two. She was astounded to see she had been asleep for exactly twelve minutes. She put the clock back on the nightstand and wiped her hands on the front of her blouse as if she had picked up something dirty and crawling with germs. 'Why that thing?'
Never mind. It was Scott's voice, not her own. She rarely heard it with such clarity these days, but oboy, was she ever hearing it now. Loud and clear. That's none of your business. Just find it and put it where…well, you know.
Of course she did.
'Where I can strap it on,' she murmured, and rubbed her face with her hands, and gave a little laugh.
That's right, babyluv, her dead husband agreed. Whenever it seems appropriate.
III. Lisey and The Silver Spade
(Wait for the Wind to Change)
1
Her vivid dream did nothing at all to free Lisey from her memories of Nashville, and from one memory in particular: Gerd Allen Cole turning the gun from the lung-shot, which Scott might be able to survive, to the heart- shot, which he most certainly would not. By then the whole world had slowed down, and what she kept returning to—as the tongue keeps returning to the surface of a badly chipped tooth—was how utterly smooth that movement had been, as if the gun had been mounted on a gimbal.
Lisey vacuumed the parlor, which didn't need vacuuming, then did a wash that didn't half-fill the machine; the laundry basket filled so slowly now that it was just her. Two years and she still couldn't get used to it. Finally she pulled on her old tank suit and did laps in the pool out back: five, then ten, then fifteen, then seventeen and winded. She clung to the lip at the shallow end with her legs trailing out behind her, panting, her dark hair clinging to her cheeks, brow, and neck like a shiny helmet, and still she saw the pale, long-fingered hand swiveling, saw the Ladysmith (it was impossible to think of it as just a gun once you knew its lethal cuntish name) swiveling, saw the little black hole with Scott's death tucked inside it moving left, and the silver shovel was so heavy. It seemed impossible that she could be in time, that she could outrace Cole's insanity.
She kicked her feet slowly, making little splashes. Scott had loved the pool, but actually swam in it only on rare occasions; he had been a book, beer, and inner-tube sort of guy. When he wasn't on the road, that was. Or in his study, writing with the music cranked. Or sitting up in the guestroom rocker in the broken heart of a winter night, bundled to the chin in one of Good Ma Debusher's afghans, two in the morning and his eyes wide-wide-wide as a terrible wind, one all the way down from Yellowknife, boomed outside—that was the other Scott; one went north,
