summer.
—Please, he says in his most placating voice. Please, Daddy.
For a moment Scott is quite sure that his father is going to rush across the cellar to where his surviving son stands, with his tripled shadow racing beside him on the rock walls, and backhand him—perhaps knock him spang into his big brother's dead lap. He's been backhanded plenty of times and usually even the thought of it makes him cringe, but now he stands straight between Paul's splayed legs, looking into his father's eyes. It's hard to do that, but he manages. Because they have survived a terrible passage together, and will have to keep it between themselves forever: Shhhhhh. So he deserves to ask, and he deserves to look in Daddy's eyes while he waits for his answer.
Daddy doesn't come at him. Instead he takes a deep breath, blows it out, and turns around.—You'll be tellin me when to warsh the floors and scrub out the tawlit next, I guess, he grumbles. I'll give you a count of thirty, Scoot
21
'I'll give you a count of thirty and then I'm turning around again,' Scott tells her. 'I'm pretty sure that's how he finished it, but I never heard because by then I was gone off the face of the earth. Paul too, right out of his chains. I took him with me as easy as ever once he was dead; maybe easier. I bet Daddy never finished counting to thirty. Hell, I bet he never even got started before he heard the clink of chains or maybe the sound of air rushing in to fill the place where we'd been and he turned around and he saw he had the cellar all to himself.' Scott has relaxed against her; the sweat on his face and arms and body is drying. He has told it, gotten the worst of it out of him, sicked it up.
'The sound,' she says. 'I wondered about that, you know. If there was a sound under the willow tree when we… you know…came back out.'
'When we boomed.'
'Yes, when we…that.'
'When we boomed, Lisey. Say it.'
'When we boomed.' Wondering if she's crazy. Wondering if he is, and if it's catching.
Now he does light another cigarette, and in the matchglow his face is honestly curious. 'What did you see, Lisey? Do you remember?'
Doubtfully, she says: 'There was a lot of purple, slanting down a hill…and I had a sense of shade, like there were trees right behind us, but it was all so quick…no more than a second or two…'
He laughs and gives her a one-armed hug. 'That's Sweetheart Hill you're talking about.'
'Sweetheart—?'
'Paul named it that. There's dirt all around those trees—soft, deep, I don't think it's ever winter there—and that's where I buried him. That's where I buried my brother.' He looks at her solemnly and says, 'Do you want to go see, Lisey?'
22
Lisey had been asleep on the study floor in spite of the pain—
No. She hadn't been asleep, because you couldn't sleep with pain like this. Not without medical help. So what had she been?
Mesmerized.
She tried the word on for size and decided it fit just about perfectly. She had slid into a kind of doubled (maybe even trebled) recall. Total recall. But beyond this point her memories of the cold guest bedroom where she'd found him catatonic and those of the two of them in the creaky secondfloor bed at The Antlers (these memories seventeen years older but even clearer) were blotted out. Do you want to go see, Lisey? he had asked her—yes, yes—but whatever had come next was drowned in brilliant purple light, hidden behind that curtain, and when she tried to reach for it, authority-voices from childhood (Good Ma's, Dandy's, all her big sisters') clamored in alarm. No, Lisey! That's far enough, Lisey! Stop there, Lisey!
Her breath caught. (Had it caught as she lay there with her love?)
Her eyes opened. (They had been wide as he took her in his arms, of that she was sure.)
Bright morning Junelight—twenty-first-century Junelight— replaced the staring, glaring purple of a billion lupin. The pain of her lacerated breast flooded back in with the light. But before Lisey could react to either the light or the panicky voices commanding her to go no farther, someone called to her from the barn below, startling her so badly that she came within a thread of screaming. If the voice had stopped short at Missus, she would have.
'Mrs. Landon?' A brief pause. 'Are you up there?'
No trace of border South in that voice, only a flat Yankee drawl that turned the words into Aaa you up theah, and Lisey knew who was down theah: Deputy Alston. He'd told her he'd keep checking back, and here he was, as promised. This was her chance to tell him hell yes, she was up here, she was lying on the floor bleeding because the Black Prince of the Incunks had hurt her, Alston had to take her to No Soapa with the flashers and the siren going, she needed stitches in her breast, a lot of them, and she needed protection, needed it around the clock—
No, Lisey.
It was her own mind that sent the thought up (of this she was positive) like a flare into a dark sky (well…almost positive), but it came to her in Scott's voice. As if it would gain authority that way.
And it must have worked, because 'Yes, I'm here, Deputy!' was all she called back.
'Everything fi'-by? Okay, I mean?'
'Five-by, that's affirmative,' she said, amazed to find she actually sounded five-by-five. Especially for a woman whose blouse was soaked in blood and whose left breast was throbbing like a…well, there was really no accurate simile. It was just throbbing.
Down below—at the very foot of the stairs, Lisey calculated— Deputy Alston laughed appreciatively. 'I just stopped on my way over to Cash Corners. They got a little house-fire over there.' House-fiah. 'Arson suspected.' Aaason. 'You be all right on your own for a couple-three hours?'
'Fine.'
'Got your cell phone?'
She did indeed have her cell phone and wished she were on it right now. If she had to keep shouting down to him, she was probably going to pass out. 'Rah-cheer!' she called back.
'Ayuh?' A little dubious. God, what if he came up and saw her? He'd be plenty dubious then, dubious to the nth power. But when he spoke again the voice was moving away. She could hardly believe she was glad, but she was. Now that this was begun, she wanted to finish it. 'Well, you call if you need anything. And I'll be checking back later on. If you go out, leave a note so I'll know you're all right and when to expect you back, okay?'
And Lisey, who now began to see—vaguely—a course of events ahead of her, called back 'Check!' She'd have to begin by returning to the house. But first, before anything else, a drink of water. If she didn't get some more water, and soon, her throat might catch fiah like that house over to Cash Corners.
'I'll be coming by Patel's on my way back, Mrs. Landon, would you like me to pick anything up?'
Yes! A six-pack of ice-cold Coke and a carton of Salem Lights!
'No thanks, Deputy.' If she had to talk much more, her voice would give out. Even if it didn't, he'd hear something wrong in it.
