Lisey's Story(113)

"I yelled at him, too." Lisey actually smiled. "Told him if he wanted to come home he had to take me to where he was...and I always thought he did..."

Bullshit, little Lisey, you never thought about it at all. Did you? Not until today, when you almost literally got your tit in the wringer and had to. So if you're thinking about it, really think about it. Did he pull you to him that night? Did he?

She was on the verge of concluding it was one of those questions, like the chicken-oregg thing, to which there was no satisfactory answer, when she remembered his saying Lisey, you're a champ at this!

Say she had done it by herself in 1996. Even so, Scott had been alive, and that squeeze of his hand, feeble as it had been, was enough to tell her he was there on the other side, making a conduit for her -

"It's still there," she said. She was gripping the handle of the shovel again. "That way through is still there, it must be, because he prepared for all of this. Left me a smucking bool hunt to get me ready. Then, yesterday morning, in bed with Amanda...that was you, Scott, I know it was. You said I had a blood-bool coming...and a prize...a drink, you said...and you called me babyluv. So where are you now? Where are you when I need you to get me over?"

No answer but the ticking of the clock on the wall.

Close your eyes. He'd said that, too. Visualize. See as well as you can. It will help. Lisey, you're a champ at this.

"I better be," she told the empty, sunny, Scottless bedroom. "Oh honey, I just better be."

If Scott Landon had had a fatal flaw, it might have been thinking too much, but that had never been her problem. If she had stopped to consider the situation on that hot day in Nashville, Scott almost certainly would have died. Instead she had simply acted, and saved his life with the shovel she now held.

I trite to come here with Daddy's shovel from the shed, but it wouldn't go. Would the silver spade from Nashville go?

Chapter 18

Lisey thought yes. And that was good. She wanted to keep it with her. "Friends to the end," she whispered, and closed her eyes.

She was summoning her memories of Boo'ya Moon, now vivid indeed, when a disturbing question broke her deepening concentration: another troublesome thought to divert her.

What time is it there, little Lisey? Oh, not the hour, I don't mean that, but is it daytime or nighttime? Scott always knew - he said he did, anyway - but you're not Scott. No, but she remembered one of his favorite rock 'n roll tunes: "Night Time Is the Right Time." In Boo'ya Moon, nighttime was the wrong time, when smells turned rotten and food could poison you. Nighttime was when the laughers came out - things that ran on all fours but sometimes stood up like people and looked around. And there were other things, worse things.

Things like Scott's long boy.

It's very close, honey. That's what he told her as he lay under the hot Nashville sun on the day when she had been sure he was dying. I hear it taking its meal. She had tried to tell him she didn't know what he was talking about; he had pinched her and told her not to insult his intelligence. Or her own.

Because I'd been there. Because I'd heard the laughers and believed him when he said there were worse things waiting. And there were. I saw the thing he was talking about. I saw it in 1996, when I went to Boo'ya Moon to bring him home. Just its side, but that was enough.

"It was endless," Lisey muttered, and was horrified to realize she really believed this to be the truth. It had been night in 1996. Night when she had gone to Scott's other world from the cold guest room. She had gone down the path, into the woods, into the Fairy Forest, and -

A motor exploded into life nearby. Lisey's eyes flew open and she nearly screamed. Then she relaxed again, little by little. It was only Herb Galloway, or maybe the Luttrell kid Herb sometimes hired, cutting the grass next door. This was entirely different from the bitterly cold night in January of '96 when she'd discovered Scott in the guest room, there and still breathing but gone in every other way that mattered. She thought: Even if I could do it, I can't do it like this - it's too noisy. She thought: The world is too much with us.

She thought: Who wrote that? And, as happened so frequently, that thought came trailing its painful little red caboose: Scott would know.

Yes, Scott would know. She thought of him in all the motel rooms, bent over a portable typewriter (SCOTT AND LISEY, THE EARLY YEARS!) and then later, with his face lit by the glow of his laptop. Sometimes with a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray beside him, sometimes with a drink, always with the curl of hair falling forgotten across his forehead. She thought of him lying on top of her in this bed, of chasing her full-tilt through that awful house in Bremen (SCOTT AND LISEY IN GERMANY!), both of them naked and laughing, horny but not really happy, while trucks and cars rumbled around and around the traffic-circle up the street. She thought of his arms around her, all the times his arms had been around her, and the smell of him, and the sandpaper rasp his cheek made against hers, and she thought she would sell her soul, yes, her immortal smucking soul, for no more than the sound of him down the hall slamming the door and then yelling Hey, Lisey, I'm home - everything the same?

Hush and close your eyes.

That was her voice, but it was almost his, a very good imitation, so Lisey closed her eyes and felt the first warm tears, almost comforting, slip out through the screen of lashes. There was a lot they didn't tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart. It's a secret, Lisey thought, and it should be, because who would ever want to get close to another person if they knew how hard the letting-go part was? In your heart they only die a little at a time, don't they? Like a plant when you go away on a trip and forget to ask a neighbor to poke in once in awhile with the old watering-can, and it's so sad -