He always introduced her when they arrived and again here and there, to other people, when it became necessary, but it rarely did. Outside of their own fields, academics were oddly lacking in curiosity. Most of them were just delighted to have the author of The Coaster's Daughter (National Book Award) and Relics (the Pulitzer) among them. Also, there had been a period of about ten years when Scott had somehow gotten larger than life—to others, and sometimes to himself. (Not to Lisey; she was the one who had to fetch him a fresh roll of toilet paper if he ran out while he was on the john.) Nobody exactly charged the stage when he stood there with the microphone in his hand, but even Lisey felt the connection he made with his audience. Those volts. It was hardwired, and it had little to do with his work as a writer. Maybe nothing. It had to do with the Scottness of him, somehow. That sounded crazy, but it was true. And it never seemed to change him much, or hurt him, at least until—
Her eyes stopped moving, fixed on a hardcover spine and gold leaf letters reading U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review.
1988, the year of the rockabilly novel. The one he'd never written.
1988, the year of the madman.
—Tony here will be writing it up
'No,' Lisey said. 'Wrong. He didn't say Tony, he said—'
—Toneh
Yes, that was right, he said Toneh, he said
—Toneh heah well be rahtin it up
'—writin it up for the U-Tenn '88 Year in Review,' Lisey said. 'He said…'
—Ah could Express Mail it
Only she was damned if the little Tennessee Williams wannabe hadn't almost said Spress Mail it. That was the voice, all right, that was the southern-fried chickenshit. Dashmore? Dashman? The man had dashed, all right, had dashed like a smucking track-star, but that wasn't it. It had been— 'Dashmiel!' Lisey murmured to the empty rooms, and clenched her fists. She stared at the book with the gold-stamped spine as if it might disappear the second she took her eyes away. 'Little prig-southerner's name was Dashmiel, and HE RAN LIKE A RABBIT!'
Scott would have turned down the offer of Express Mail or Federal Express; believed such things to be a needless expense. About correspondence there was never any hurry—when it came floating downstream, he plucked it out. When it came to reviews of his novels he had been a lot less Come Back To De Raft, Huck Honey and a lot more What Makes Scotty Run, but for write-ups following public appearances, regular mail did him just fine. Since The Study had its own address, Lisey realized she would have been very unlikely to see these things when they came in. And once they were here…well, these airy, well-lighted rooms had been Scott's creative playground, not hers, a mostly benign one-boy clubhouse where he'd written his stories and listened to his music as loud as he wanted in the soundproofed area he called My Padded Cell. There'd never been a KEEP OUT sign on the door, she'd been up here lots of times when he was alive and Scott was always glad to see her, but it had taken Amanda to see what was in the belly of the booksnake sleeping against the south wall. Quick-to-offense Amanda, suspicious Amanda, OCD Amanda who had somehow become convinced that her house would burn flat if she didn't load the kitchen stove with exactly three maple chunks at a time, no more or less. Amanda whose unalterable habit was to turn around three times on her stoop if she had to go back into the house for something she'd forgotten. Look at stuff like that (or listen to her counting strokes as she brushed her teeth) and you could easily write Manda off as just another gonzo-bonkie old maid, somebody write that lady a prescription for Zoloft or Prozac. But without Manda, does little Lisey ever realize there are hundreds of pictures of her dead husband up here, just waiting for her to look at them? Hundreds of memories waiting to be called forth? And most of them surely more pleasant than the memory of Dashmiel, that southern-fried chickenshit coward…
'Stop it,' she murmured. 'Just stop it now. Lisa Debusher Landon, you open your hand and let that go.'
But she was apparently not ready to do that, because she got up, crossed the room, and knelt before the books. Her right hand floated out ahead of her like a magician's trick and grasped the volume marked U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review. Her heart was pounding hard, not with excitement but with fear. The head could tell the heart all that was eighteen years over, but in matters of emotion the heart had its own brilliant vocabulary. The madman's hair had been so blond it was almost white. He had been a graduate student madman, spouting what was not quite gibberish. A day after the shooting—when Scott's condition was upgraded from critical to fair—she had asked Scott if the madman grad student had had it strapped on, and Scott had whispered that he didn't know if a crazy person could strap anything on. Strapping it on was a heroic act, an act of will, and crazy people didn't have much in the way of will…or did she think otherwise?
—I don't know, Scott. I'll think about it.
Not meaning to. Wanting to never think about it again, if she could help it. As far as Lisey was concerned, the smucking looneytune with the little gun could join the other things she'd successfully forgotten since meeting Scott.
—Hot, wasn't it?
Lying in bed. Still pale, far too pale, but starting to get a little of his color back. Casual, no special look, just making conversation. And Lisey Now, Lisey Alone, the widow Landon, shivered.
'He didn't remember,' she murmured.
She was almost positive he didn't. Nothing about when he'd been down on the pavement and they'd both been sure he would never get back up. That he was dying and whatever passed between them then was all there would ever be, they who had found so much to say to each other. The neurologist she plucked up courage enough to speak to said that forgetting around the time of a traumatic event was par for the course, that people recovering from such events often discovered that a spot had been burned black in the film of their memories. That spot might stretch over five minutes, five hours, or five days. Sometimes disconnected fragments and images would surface years or even decades later. The neurologist called it a defense mechanism.
It made sense to Lisey.
From the hospital she'd gone back to the motel where she was staying. It wasn't a very good room—in back, with nothing to look at but a board fence and nothing to listen to except a hundred or so barking dogs—but she was far past caring about such things. Certainly she wanted nothing to do with the campus where her husband had been shot. And as she kicked off her shoes and lay down on the hard double bed, she thought: Darkness loves him.
Was that true?
How could she say, when she didn't even know what it meant?
You know. Daddy's prize was a kiss.
Lisey had turned her head so swiftly on the pillow she might have been slapped by an invisible hand. Shut up about that!
No answer…no answer…and then, slyly: Darkness loves him. He dances with it like a lover and the moon comes up over the purple hill and what was sweet smells sour. Smells like poison.
She had turned her head back the other way. And outside the motel room the dogs—every smucking dog in Nashville, it sounded like—had barked as the sun went down in orange August smoke, making a hole for the night. As a child she had been told by her mother there was nothing to fear in the dark, and she had believed it to be true. She had been downright gleeful in the dark, even when it was lit by lightning and ripped by thunder. While her years-older sister Manda cowered under her covers, little Lisey sat atop her own bed, sucking her thumb and demanding that someone bring the flashlight and read her a story. She had told this to Scott once and he had taken her hands and said, 'You be my light, then. Be my light, Lisey.' And she had tried, but—
'I was in a dark place,' Lisey murmured as she sat in his deserted study with the U-Tenn Nashville Review in her hands. 'Did you say that, Scott? You did, didn't you?'
—I was in a dark place and you found me. You saved me.
Maybe in Nashville that had been true. Not in the end.
