her husband on so many sleepless nights—the thing the Woodbodys of the world would never know about, not if she had her way. Something with an endless mottled side, something seen best by cancer patients looking into tumblers from which all the painkiller had been emptied; there will be no more until morning.
It's very close, honey. I can't see it, but I hear it taking its meal.
Shut up, Scott, I don't know what you're talking about.
'Lisey?' Amanda asked. 'Did you say something?'
'Just muttering under my breath.' She tried to smile.
'Were you talking to Scott?'
Lisey gave up trying to smile. 'Yes, I guess I was. Sometimes I still do. Crazy, huh?'
'I don't think so. Not if it works. I think crazy is what doesn't work. And I ought to know. I've had some experience. Right?'
'Manda—'
But Amanda had turned to look at the heaps of journals and annuals and student magazines. When she returned her gaze to Lisey, she was smiling uncertainly. 'Did I do right, Lisey? I only wanted to do my part…'
Lisey took one of Amanda's hands and squeezed it lightly. 'You did. What do you say we get out of here? I'll flip you for the first shower.'
4
I was lost in the dark and you found me. I was hot—so hot—and you gave me ice.
Scott's voice.
Lisey opened her eyes, thinking she had drifted away from some daytime task or moment and had had a brief but amazingly detailed dream in which Scott was dead and she was engaged in the Herculean job of cleaning out his writing stables. With them open she immediately understood that Scott indeed was dead; she was asleep in her own bed after delivering Manda home, and this was her dream.
She seemed to be floating in moonlight. She could smell exotic flowers. A fine-grained summer wind combed her hair back from her temples, the kind of wind that blows long after midnight in some secret place far from home. Yet it was home, had to be home, because ahead of her was the barn which housed Scott's writing suite, object of so much Incunk interest. And now, thanks to Amanda, she knew it held all those pictures of her and her late husband. All that buried treasure, that emotional loot.
It might be better not to look at those pictures, the wind whispered in her ears.
Oh, of that she had no doubt. But she would look. Was helpless not to, now that she knew they were there.
She was delighted to see she was floating on a vast, moongilded piece of cloth with the words PILLSBURY'S BEST FLOUR printed across it again and again; the corners had been knotted like hankies. She was charmed by the whimsy of it; it was like floating on a cloud.
Scott. She tried to say his name aloud and could not. The dream wouldn't let her. The driveway leading to the barn was gone, she saw. So was the yard between it and the house. Where they had been was a vast field of purple flowers, dreaming in haunted moonlight. Scott, I loved you, I saved you, I
5
Then she was awake and could hear herself in the dark, saying it over and over like a mantra: 'I loved you, I saved you, I got you ice. I loved you, I saved you, I got you ice. I loved you, I saved you, I got you ice.'
She lay there a long time, remembering a hot August day in Nashville and thinking—not for the first time—that being single after being double so long was strange shite, indeed. She would have thought two years was enough time for the strangeness to rub off, but it wasn't; time apparently did nothing but blunt grief's sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced. Because everything was not the same. Not outside, not inside, not for her. Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.
II. Lisey and The Madman
(Darkness Loves Him)
1
The next morning Lisey sat tailor-fashion on the floor of Scott's memory nook, looking across at the heaps and stacks and piles of magazines, alumni reports, English Department bulletins, and University 'journals' that ran along the study's south wall. It had occurred to her that maybe looking would be enough to dispel the stealthy hold all those as-yetunseen pictures had taken on her imagination. Now that she was actually here, she knew that had been a vain hope. Nor would she need Manda's limp little notebook with all the numbers in it. That was lying discarded on the floor nearby, and Lisey put it in the back pocket of her jeans. She didn't like the look of it, the treasured artifact of a not-quite-right mind.
She once again measured that long stack of books and magazines against the south wall, a dusty booksnake four feet high and easily thirty feet long. If not for Amanda, she probably would have packed every last one of them away in liquor-store boxes without ever looking at them or wondering what Scott meant by keeping so many of them.
My mind just doesn't run that way, she told herself. I'm really not much of a thinker at all.
Maybe not, but you always remembered like a champ.
That was Scott at his most teasing, charming, and hard to resist, but the truth was she'd been better at forgetting. As had he, and both of them had had their reasons. And yet, as if to prove his point, she heard a ghostly snatch of
conversation. One speaker—Scott—was familiar. The other voice had a little southern glide to it. A pretentious little southern glide, maybe.
—Tony here will be writing it up for the [thingummy, rum-tumtummy, whatever]. Would you like to see a copy, Mr. Landon? —Hmmmm? Sure, you bet!
Muttering voices all around them. Scott barely hearing the thing about Tony writing it up, he'd had what was almost a politician's knack for turning himself outward to those who'd come to see him when he was in public, Scott was listening to the voices of the swelling crowd and already thinking about finding the plug-in point, that pleasurable moment when the electricity flowed from him to them and then back to him again doubled or even tripled, he loved the current but Lisey was convinced he had loved that instant of plugging in even more. Still, he'd taken time to respond.
—You can send photos, campus newspaper articles or reviews, departmental write-ups, anything like that. Please. I like to see everything. The Study, RFD #2, Sugar Top Hill Road, Castle Rock, Maine. Lisey knows the zip. I always forget.
Nothing else about her, just Lisey knows the zip. How Manda would have howled to hear it! But she had wanted to be forgotten on those trips, both there and not there. She liked to watch.
Like the fellow in the porno movie? Scott had asked her once, and she'd returned the thin moon-smile that told him he was treading near the edge. If you say so, dear, she had replied.
