Lisey's Story(143)
- more exalted - but Lisey had lived with him, and she believed it. Writing a book was a bool hunt. What he'd never told her (but she supposed she'd always guessed it) was that if the string didn't break, it always led back to the beach. Back to the pool where we all go down to drink, to cast our nets, to swim, and sometimes to drown. And did he know? At the end, did he know it was the end?
She sat up a little straighter, trying to remember if Scott has discouraged her from coming along on his trip to Pratt, a small but well-regarded liberal arts school where he'd read from The Secret Pearl for the first and last time. He had collapsed halfway through the reception afterward. Ninety minutes later she had been in an airplane and one of the guests at that reception - a cardiovascular surgeon dragged to Scott's reading by his wife - had been operating in an attempt to save his life, or at least preserve it long enough to get him to a bigger hospital.
Did he know? Did he purposely try to keep me away because he knew it was coming?
She didn't exactly believe that, but when the call came from Professor Meade, hadn't she understood that Scott had known that something was coming? If not the long boy, then this? Wasn't that why their financial affairs had been in such apple-pie order, all the right papers neatly executed? Wasn't that why he had been so careful to see to Amanda's future problems?
I think it would be wise if you left as soon as you give permission for the surgery, Professor Meade had said. And she had done just that, calling the air charter company they used after speaking to an anonymous voice in Bowling Green Community Hospital's main office. To the hospital functionary she identified herself as Scott Landon's wife, Lisa, and gave a Dr. Jantzen permission to carry out a thoracotomy (a word she could hardly pronounce) and "all attendant procedures." With the charter company she'd been more assured. She wanted the fastest aircraft they had available. Was the Gulfstream faster than the Lear? Fine. Make it the Gulfstream.
In the entertainment alcove, in the black-and-white land of The Last Picture Show, where Anarene was home and where Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms would always be boys, Ole Hank was singing about that brave Indian chief, Kaw-Liga. Outside, the air had begun to redden - as it did when sunset approached in a certain mythical land once discovered by a pair of frightened boys from Pennsylvania. This all happened very suddenly, Mrs. Landon. I wish I had some answers for you, but I don't. Perhaps Dr. Jantzen will.
But he hadn't. Dr. Jantzen had performed a thoracotomy, but that had provided no answers, either.
I didn't know what that was, Lisey thought, as outside the reddening sun approached the western hills. I didn't know what a thoracotomy was, didn't know what was happening...except in spite of everything I'd hidden away behind the purple, I did. The pilots had arranged for a limo while she was still in the air. It was after eleven when the Gulfstream landed, and after midnight when she got to that little pile of cinderblocks they called a hospital, but the day had been hot and it was still hot. When the driver opened the door she remembered feeling that she could reach out her hands, twist them, and wring water right out of the air.
And there were dogs barking, of course - what sounded like every dog in Bowling Green barking at the moon - and my God, talk about your dejà vu, there was one old guy buffing the hallway floor and two old women sitting in the waiting room, identical twins by the look of them, eighty if they were a day, and straight ahead 2
Straight ahead of her are two elevators painted blue-gray. A sign on an easel in front of them reads OUT OF SERVICE. Lisey closes her eyes and puts a blind hand out to brace herself against the wall, for a moment quite sure she's going to faint. And why not? It seems she has traveled not just across miles but across time, as well. This isn't Bowling Green in 2004 but Nashville in 1988. Her husband has a lung problem, all right, but of the .22-caliber variety. A madman fed him a bullet, and would have fed him several more, if Lisey hadn't been quick with the silver spade.
She waits for someone to ask if she's all right, maybe even take hold of her and steady her on her shaky pins, but there's only the Whuzzzz of the old janitor's floor-buffer, and somewhere far away, the soft dinging of a bell that makes her think of some other bell in some other place, a bell that sometimes rings from behind the purple curtain she has carefully drawn over certain parts of her past.
She opens her eyes and sees that the main desk is deserted. There's a light on behind the window marked INFORMATION, so Lisey's pretty sure someone's supposed to be on duty there, but he or she has stepped away, maybe to use the john. The elderly twins in the waiting room are staring down at what appear to be identical waiting-room magazines. Beyond the entrance doors, her limo idles behind its yellow running lights like some exotic deep-sea fish. On this side of the doors, a small-city hospital is dozing through the first hour of a new day, and Lisey realizes that unless she starts up a-bellerin, as Dandy would say, she's on her own. The feeling this engenders isn't fear or irritation or perplexity but rather deep sorrow. Later, flying back to Maine with her husband's encoffined mortal remains below her feet, she'll think: That's when I knew he'd never be leaving that place alive. He'd come to the last of it. I had a premonition. And you know what? I think it was the sign in front of the elevators that did it. That smucking OUT OF
SERVICE sign. Yeah.
She can look for a hospital directory, or she can ask directions of the janitor buffing the floor, but Lisey does neither. She's sure she'll find Scott in this hospital's ICU if he's out of surgery, and she'll find the ICU on the third floor. This intuition is so strong she almost expects to see a homely floursack magic carpet floating at the foot of the stairs when she reaches them, a dusty square of cotton with the words PILLSBURY'S BEST