Lisey's Story(20)

"Freesias," Lisey says, and the faded cloth with the knotted corners obediently drops three feet from its hoverpoint below the hospital ceiling. She looks in the open door and sees Scott, now maybe five hours post-op, lying in a narrow but surprisingly pretty bed with a gracefully curved head and foot. Monitors that sound like answering machines queep and bleep. Two bags of something transparent hang on a pole between him and the wall. He appears to be asleep. Across the bed from him, 1988-Lisey sits in a straight-backed chair with her husband's hand folded into one of her own. In 1988-Lisey's other hand is the paperback novel she brought to Tennessee with her - she never expected to get through so much of it.

Scott reads people like Borges, Pynchon, Tyler, and Atwood; Lisey reads Maeve Binchy, Colleen McCullough, Jean Auel (although she is growing a bit impatient with Ms. Auel's randy cave people), Joyce Carol Oates, and, just lately, Shirley Conran. What she has in room 319 is Savages, the newest novel by the latter, and Lisey likes it a lot. She has come to the part where the women stranded in the jungle learn to use their bras as slingshots. All that Lycra. Lisey doesn't know if the romance-readers of America are ready for this latest from Ms.

Conran, but she herself thinks it's brave and rather beautiful, in its way. Isn't bravery always sort of beautiful? The last light of day pours through the room's window in a flood of red and gold. It's ominous and lovely. 1988-Lisey is very tired: emotionally, physically, and of being in the South. She thinks if one more person calls her y'all she'll scream. The good part? She doesn't think she's going to be here as long as they do, because...well...she has reason to know Scott's a fast healer, leave it at that.

Soon she'll go back to the motel and try to rent the same room they had earlier in the day (Scott almost always rents them a hideout, even if the gig is just what he calls "the old inout"). She has an idea she won't be able to do it - they treat you a lot different when you're with a man, whether he's famous or not - but the place is fairly handy to the hospital as well as to the college, and as long as she gets something there, she doesn't give a smuck. Dr. Sattherwaite, who's in charge of Scott's case, has promised her she can dodge reporters by going out the back tonight and for the next few days. He says Mrs. McKinney in Reception will have a cab waiting back by the cafeteria loading dock "as soon as you give her the high sign." She would have gone already, but Scott has been restless for the last hour. Sattherwaite said he'd be out at least until midnight, but Sattherwaite doesn't know Scott the way she does, and Lisey isn't much surprised when he begins surfacing for brief intervals as sunset approaches. Twice he has recognized her, twice he has asked her what happened, and twice she has told him that a mentally deranged person shot him. The second time he said, "Hi-yosmuckin-Silver" before closing his eyes again, and that actually made her laugh. Now she wants him to come back one more time so she can tell him she's not going back to Maine, only to the motel, and that she'll see him in the morning.

All this 2006-Lisey knows. Remembers. Intuits. Whatever. From where she sits on her PILLSBURY'S BEST magic carpet, she thinks: He opens his eyes. He looks at me. He says, "I was lost in the dark and you found me. I was hot - so hot - and you gave me ice."

But is that really what he said? Is it really what happened? Or was that later? And if she's hiding things - hiding them from herself - why is she hiding them?

In the bed, in the red light, Scott opens his eyes. Looks at his wife as she reads her book. His breath doesn't scream now, but there's still a windy sound as he pulls air in as deeply as he can and half-whispers, half-croaks her name. 1988-Lisey puts down her book and looks at him.

"Hey, you're awake again," she says. "So here's your pop quiz. Do you remember what happened to you?"

"Shot," he whispers. "Kid. Tube. Back. Hurts."

"You can have something for the pain in a little while," she says. "For now, would you like - "

He squeezes her hand, telling her she can stop. Now he'll tell me he was lost in the dark and I gave him ice, 2006-Lisey thinks.

But what he says to his wife - who earlier that day saved his life by braining a madman with a silver shovel - is only this: "Hot, wasn't it?" His tone casual. No special look; just making conversation. Just passing the time while the red light deepens and the machines queep and bleep, and from her hoverpoint in the doorway, 2006-Lisey sees the shudder - subtle but there - run through her younger self; sees the first finger of her younger self's left hand lose its place in her paperback copy of Savages.

I'm thinking "Either he doesn't remember or he's pretending not to remember what he said when he was down - about how he could call it if he wanted to, how he could call the long boy if I wanted to be done with him - and what I said back, about how he should shut up and leave it alone...that if he just shut the smuck up it would go away. I'm wondering if this is a real case of forgetting - the way he forgot that he'd been shot - or if it's more of our special forgetting, which is more like sweeping the bad shit into a box and then locking it up tight. I'm wondering if it even matters, as long as he remembers how to get better."

As she lay on her bed (and as she rides the magic carpet in the eternal present of her dream), Lisey stirred and tried to cry out to her younger self, tried to yell that it did matter, it did. Don't let him get away with it! she tried to yell. You can't forget forever! But another saying from the past occurred to her, this one from their endless games of Hearts and Whist at Sabbath Day Lake in the summertime, always yelled out when some player wanted to look at discards more than a single trick deep: Leave that alone! You can't unbury the dead!