Lisey's Story(44)

"Lisey?" His voice is almost coming from another world.

"Hmmmm?"

"I know you don't like Devils - "

"Haydit," she manages, which is as close as she can come to a critical appraisal in her current state; she is drifting, drifting, drifting away.

"Yeah, and you won't be the only one. But my editor loves it. He says the folks at Sayler House have decided it's a horror novel. That's fine by me. What's the old saying?

'Call me anything you want, just don't call me late to dinner.'"

Drifting. His voice coming down a long dark corridor.

"I don't need Carson Foray or my agent to tell me Empty Devils is gonna buy a lot of groceries. I'm done screwing around, Lisey. I'm on my way, but I don't want to go alone. I want you to come with me."

"Shup, Ska. Go-slee."

She doesn't know if he goes to sleep or not, but for a wonder (for a blue-eyed wonder), Scott Landon does indeed shut up.

21

Lisey Debusher awakens on Saturday morning at the impossibly luxurious hour of nine o'clock, and to the smell of frying bacon. Sunshine lies across the floor and the bed in a brilliant stripe. She goes out to the kitchen. He's frying bacon in his underpants, and she's horrified to see that he's removed the bandage she so carefully applied. When she remonstrates, Scott tells her simply that it itched.

"Besides," he says, holding his hand out to her (this reminds her so much of how he came walking out of the shadows last night that she has to repress a shiver), "it doesn't look so bad in the light of day, does it?"

She takes his hand, bends over it as if she means to read his palm, and looks until he pulls away, saying if he doesn't turn the bacon it will burn. She isn't astounded, isn't amazed; those are emotions perhaps reserved for dark nights and shadowy rooms, not for sunshiny weekend mornings with the Philco in the window playing that low-rider song she's never understood but always liked. Not astounded, not amazed...but she is perplexed. All she can think is that she must have believed the cuts were a hell of a lot worse than they actually turned out to be. That she panicked. Because these wounds, while not exactly scratches, are far from as serious as she thought. They've not only clotted over; they've started scabbing over. If she'd taken him to the Derry Home ER, they probably would have told her to get lost.

All the Landons are fast healers. We had to be.

Meanwhile, Scott's forking crisp bacon out of the pan and onto a double fold of paper towels. As far as Lisey's concerned, he may be a good writer, but he's a great fry cook. At least when he really sets his mind to it. He needs new underwear, though; the seat of this pair sags rather comically, and the elastic waistband is on life-support. She'll see what she can do about getting him to buy new ones when the royalty check he's been promised comes in, and of course underwear isn't what's on her mind, not actually; her mind wants to compare what she saw last night - those deep and sickening gills, pink shading to liverish red - with what's on offer this morning. It's the difference between mere cuts and gashes, and does she really think anyone heals that fast, outside of a Bible story? Does she really? It wasn't a window-pane he stuck his hand through, after all, it was a pane of greenhouse glass, which reminds her, they'll have to do something about that, Scott will have to -

"Lisey."

She's jerked out of her reverie to find herself sitting at the kitchen table, nervously knitting her tee-shirt together between her thighs. "What?"

"One egg or two?"

She considers it. "Two. I guess."

"Over easy or want em lookin atcha?"

"Over," she says.

"Will we marry?" he asks in exactly the same tone, cracking both eggs in his good right hand and dropping them into the pan, kerplunk.

She smiles a little, not at his matter-of-fact tone but at the faintly archaic turn of phrase, and realizes she's not surprised at all. She has expected this...this what-do-you-call-it, this resumption; must have been turning his proposal over in some deep part of her mind even as she slept.

"Are you sure?" she asks.

"Sure shot," he says. "What do you think, babyluv?"

"Babyluv thinks that sounds like a plan."

"Good," he says. "That's good." He pauses. Then: "Thank you."

For a minute or two neither of them says anything. On the windowsill, the old cracked Philco plays the sort of music Dad Debusher never listened to. In the pan, the eggs snap. She's hungry. And she's happy.

"In the fall," she says.

He nods, reaching for a plate. "Good. October?"

"Maybe too soon. Say right around Thanksgiving. Are there any eggs left for you?"

"There be one, and one be all I want."

She says, "I won't marry you if you don't buy some new underwear."

He doesn't laugh. "Then I'll make it a priority."

He puts the plate in front of her. Bacon and eggs. She is so hungry. She starts in and he cracks the last egg into the pan.

"Lisa Landon," he says. "What do you think?"

"I think it's a keeper. It's...what do you call it when all the words start with the same sound?"

"Alliteration."