Lisey's Story(122)

He shakes his head. "I'm all right - it's past for awhile."

She looks at him with hope and doubt. "Is that something you know, or just something you're saying to soothe the little wife?"

"Which do you think?"

She thinks this isn't the ghost-Scott she's been living with since November, but it's still hard for her to believe in such miraculous changes. "You seem better, but I'm leery of my own wishful thinking."

In the stove, a knot of wood explodes and she jumps. He holds her closer. She snuggles against him almost fiercely. It's warm under the covers; warm in his arms. He is all she has ever wanted in the dark.

He says, "This...this thing that has troubled my family...it comes and goes. When it passes, it's like a cramp letting go."

"But it will come back?"

"Lisey, it might not." The strength and surety in his voice so surprises her that she looks up to check his face. She sees no duplicity there, even of the kindly sort meant to ease a troubled wife's heart. "And if it does, it might never come back as strongly as it did this time."

"Did your father tell you that?"

"My father didn't know much about the gone part. I've felt this tug toward...the place where you found me...twice before. Once the year before I met you. That time booze and rock music got me through. The second time - "

"Germany," she says flatly.

"Yes," he says. "Germany. That time you pulled me through, Lisey."

"How close, Scott? How close was it in Bremen?"

"Close," he says simply, and it makes her cold. If she had lost him in Germany, she would have lost him for good. Mein gott. "But that was a breeze compared to this. This was a hurricane."

There are other things she wants to ask him, but mostly she only wants to hold him and believe him when he says that maybe things will be okay. The way you want to believe the doctor, she supposes, when he says the cancer is in remission and may never come back.

"And you're okay." She needs to hear him say it one more time. Needs to.

"Yes. Good to go, as the saying is."

"And... it? " She doesn't need to be more specific. Scott knows what she's talking about.

"It's had my scent for a long time, and it knows the shape of my thoughts. After all these years, we're practically old friends. It could probably take me if it wanted to, but it would be an effort, and that fella's pretty lazy. Also...something watches out for me. Something on the bright side of the equation. There is a bright side, you know. You must know, because you're a part of it."

"Once you told me you could call it, if you wanted to." She says this very low.

"Yes."

"And sometimes you want to. Don't you?"

He doesn't deny it, and outside the wind howls a long cold note along the eaves. Yet here under the blankets in front of the kitchen stove, it's warm. It's warm with him.

"Stay with me, Scott," she says.

"I will," he tells her. "I will as long as

16

"I will as long as I can," Lisey said.

She realized several things at the same time. One was that she had returned to her bedroom and her bed. Another was that the bed would have to be changed, because she had come back soaking wet, and her damp feet were coated with beach sand from another world. A third was that she was shivering even though the room wasn't particularly cold. A fourth was that she no longer had the silver spade; she had left it behind. The last was that if the seated shape had indeed been her husband, she had almost certainly seen him for the last time; her husband was now one of the shrouded things, an unburied corpse. Lying on her wet bed in her soaking shorts, Lisey burst into tears. She had a great deal to do now, and had come back with most of the steps clear in her mind - she thought that might also have been part of her prize at the end of Scott's last bool hunt - but first she needed to finish grieving for her husband. She put an arm over her eyes and lay so for the next five minutes, sobbing until her eyes were swollen nearly shut and her throat ached. She had never thought she would want him so much or miss him so badly. It was a shock. Yet at the same time, and although there was also still some pain in her damaged breast, Lisey thought she had never felt so well, so glad to be alive, or so ready to kick ass and take down names.

As the saying was.

Part XII. Lisey at Greenlawn

(The Hollyhocks)

1

She glanced at the clock on the nightstand as she peeled off her soaked shorts and smiled, not because there was anything intrinsically funny about ten minutes to twelve on a morning in June, but because one of Scrooge's lines from A Christmas Carol had occurred to her: "The spirits have done it all in one night." It seemed to Lisey that something had accomplished a great deal in her own life in a very short period of time, most of it in the last few hours.

But you have to remember that I've been living in the past, and that takes up a surprising amount of a person's time, she thought...and after a moment's consideration let out a great, larruping laugh that probably would have sounded insane to anyone listening down the hall.

That's okay, keep laughin, babyluv, ain't nobody here but us chickadees, she thought, going into the bathroom. That big, loose laugh started to come out of her again, then stopped suddenly when it occurred to her that Dooley might be here. He could be holed up in the root cellar or one of this big house's many closets; he might be sweating it out this late morning in the attic, right over her head. She didn't know much about him and would be the first to admit it, but the idea that he had gone to ground here in the house fit what she did know. He'd already proved he was a bold sonofabitch. Don't worry about him now. Worry about Darla and Canty.