Lisey's Story(147)

"Scott, no!" And absurdly: "The ice! The ice is coming!"

With what must be a tremendous effort - his breath screams louder than ever - he raises his hand and strokes her cheek with one hot finger. Lisey's tears begin to fall then. She knows what she must ask him. The panicky voice that never calls her Lisey but always little Lisey, the secret-keeper down below, clamors again that she must not, but she thrusts it aside. Every long marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. Here again is the dark heart of theirs.

She leans closer, into the dying heat of him. She can smell the last palest ghost of the Foamy he shaved with yesterday morning and the Tea Tree he shampooed with. She leans in until her lips touch the burning cup of his ear. She whispers: "Go, Scott. Drag yourself to that smucking pool, if that's what it takes. If the doctor comes back and finds the bed empty I'll make something up, it doesn't matter, but get to the pool and make yourself better, do it, do it for me, goddam you!"

"Can't," he whispers, and commences a papery coughing that makes her draw back a little. She thinks it will kill him, just tear him apart, but somehow he manages to get it under control. And why? Because he means to have his say. Even here, on his deathbed, in a deserted isolation unit at one o'clock in the morning in a backwater Kentucky town, he means to have his say. "Won't...work."

"Then I'll go! Just help me!"

But he shakes his head. "Lying across the path...to the pool. It. "

She knows what he's talking about at once. She glances helplessly toward one of the waterglasses, where the piebald thing can sometimes be glimpsed. There, or in a mirror, or the corner of your eye. Always late at night. Always when one is lost, or in pain, or both. Scott's old boy. Scott's long boy.

"Slee...ping." A weird noise arises from Scott's decomposing lungs. She thinks he's choking and reaches for the call-bell, then observes the mordant shine in his feverish eyes and realizes he's either laughing or trying to. "Sleeping on...the path. Side...high... sky..." His eyes roll up to the ceiling and she's sure he's trying to say that its side is as high as the sky.

Scott plucks at the oxygen mask on his chest but can't lift it. She does it for him, placing it over his mouth and nose. Scott takes several deep breaths, then signals for her to take the mask off again. She does, and for a little while - perhaps as long as a minute - his voice is stronger.

"Went to Boo'ya Moon from the airplane," he says with a kind of wonder. "Never tried anything like that. Thought I might fall, but I came out on Sweetheart Hill, like always. Went again from a stall...airport bathroom. Last time...greenroom, just before the reading. Still there. Ole Freddy. Still right there."

Christ, he even has a name for the smucking thing.

"Couldn't get to the pool, so I ate some berries...they're usually all right, but..."

He can't finish. She gives him the mask again.

"It was too late," she says as he breathes. "It was too late, wasn't it? You ate them after sundown."

He nods.

"But it was all you could think of to do."

He nods again. Motions for her to pull the mask down again.

"But you were all right at the reading!" she says. "That Professor Meade said you were smucking great! "

He's smiling. It just may be the saddest smile she's ever seen. "Dew," he says. "Licked it off the leaves. The last time, when I went...from the greenroom. Thought it might..."

"You thought it might be healing. Like the pool."

He says yes with his eyes. His eyes never leave her.

"And that made you better. For a little while?"

"Yeah. Little while. Now..." He gives a sorry little shrug and turns his head aside. This time the coughing is worse, and she observes with horror that the flow into the tubes is a thicker, richer red. He gropes out and takes her hand again. "I was lost in the dark," he whispers. "You found me."

"Scott, no - "

He nods. Yes.

"You saw me whole. Everything..." He uses his free hand to make a weak circling gesture: Everything the same. He is smiling a little now as he looks at her.

"Hang on, Scott! Just hang on!"

He nods as if she finally gets it. "Hang on...wait for the wind to change."

"No, Scott, the ice!" It's all she can think of to say. "Wait for the ice! "

He says baby. He calls her babyluv. And then the only sound is the steady hiss of oxygen from the mask around his neck. Lisey puts her hands to her face 8 and took them away dry. She was both surprised and not surprised. Certainly she was relieved; it seemed that she might finally be finished with her grieving. She guessed she still had a lot of work to do up here in Scott's office - she and Amanda had barely made a dent - but she thought she'd made some unexpected progress in cleaning up her own shit over these last two or three days. She touched her wounded breast and felt almost no pain at all. This is taking self-healing to a new level, she thought, and smiled. In the other room Amanda cried indignantly to the TV, "Oh, you dumbass! Leave that bitch alone, can't you see she's no good?" Lisey cocked an ear in that direction and deduced that Jacy was about to wheedle Sonny into marrying her. The movie was almost over.

She must have fast-forwarded through some of it, Lisey thought, but when she looked at the dark pressing against the skylight above her, she knew that wasn't so. She'd been sitting at Dumbo's Big Jumbo and reliving the past for over an hour and a half. Doing a little work on herself, as the New Agers liked to say. And what conclusions had she drawn? That her husband was dead, that was all. Dead and gone on. He wasn't waiting for her along the path in Boo'ya Moon, or sitting on one of those stone benches as she had once found him; he wasn't wrapped in one of those creepy shroud-things, either. Scott had left Boo'ya Moon behind. Like Huck, he'd lit out for the Territories. And what had caused his final illness? His death certificate claimed pneumonia, and she had no problem with that. They could have put Nibbled to death by ducks on it and he'd have been just as dead - but she couldn't help wondering. Had his death been on a flower that he had picked up and smelled, or a bug that had slipped its sipper under his skin as the sun went down red in its house of thunder? Did he get it on a quick visit to Boo'ya Moon a week or a month before his final reading in Kentucky, or had it been waiting for decades, ticking like a clock? It might have been in a single grain of dirt that got under one fingernail while he was digging his brother's grave. Just a single bad bug that lay asleep as the years passed, finally waking up at his computer one day when a reluctant word finally came to him and he snapped his fingers in satisfaction. Maybe - terrible thought, but who knew? - she had even brought it back herself from one of her own visits, a lethal mite in a tiny dot of pollen he had kissed from the tip of her nose. Oh shit, now she was crying.