Lisey's Story(54)

a tree, a special tree, and he lit a cigarette and said there was something he had to tell her, something hard, and if it changed her mind about marrying him he'd be sorry...hell, he'd be broken-smucking- hearted, but -

Lisey swerved abruptly over to the side of Route 17 and stopped, scrunching up a cloud of dust behind her. The light was still bright, but its quality was changing, edging toward the silky extravagant dream-light that is the exclusive property of June evenings in New England, the summerglow adults born north of Massachusetts remember most clearly from their childhoods.

I don't want to go back to The Antlers and that weekend. Not to the snow we thought was so magical, not under the yum-yum tree where we ate the sandwiches and drank the wine, not to the bed we shared that night and the stories he told - benches and bools and lunatic fathers. I'm so afraid that all I can reach will lead me to all I dare not see. Please, no more.

Lisey became aware that she was saying this out loud in a low voice, over and over:

"No more. No more. No more."

But she was on a bool hunt, and maybe it was already too late to say no more. According to the thing in bed with her this morning, she'd already found the first three stations. A few more and she could claim her prize. Sometimes a candybar! Sometimes a drink, a Coke or an RC! Always a card reading BOOL! The End!

I left you a bool, the thing in Amanda's nightgown had said...and now that the sun was going down, she was once more finding it hard to believe that thing had really been Amanda. Or only Amanda.

You have a blood-bool coming.

"But first a good bool," Lisey murmured. "A few more stations and I get my prize. A drink. I'd like a double whiskey, please." She laughed, rather wildly. "But if the stations go behind the purple, how the hell can it be good? I don't want to go behind the purple."

Were her memories stations of the bool? If so, she could count three vivid ones in the last twenty-four hours: cold-cocking the madman, kneeling with Scott on the broiling pavement, and seeing him come out of the dark with his bloody hand held out to her like an offering...which was exactly what he'd meant it to be.

It's a bool, Lisey! And not just any bool, it's a blood-bool!

Lying on the pavement, he'd told her his long boy - the thing with the endless piebald side - was very close. I can't see it, but I hear it taking its meal, he'd said.

"I don't want to think about this stuff anymore!" she heard herself almost scream, but her voice seemed to come from a terrible distance, across an awful gulf; suddenly the real world felt thin, like ice. Or a mirror into which one dared not look for more than a second or two.

I could call it that way. It would come.

Sitting behind the wheel of her BMW, Lisey thought of how her husband had begged for ice and how it had come - a kind of miracle - and put her hands over her face.

Invention at short notice had been Scott's forte, not Lisey's, but when Dr. Alberness had asked about the nurse in Nashville, Lisey had done her best, making up something about Scott holding his breath and opening his eyes - playing dead, in other words - and Alberness had laughed as though it were the funniest thing he'd ever heard. It didn't make Lisey envy the staff under the guy's command, but at least it had gotten her out of Greenlawn and eventually here, parked at the side of a country highway with old memories barking around her heels like hungry dogs and nipping at her purple curtain...

her hateful, precious purple curtain.

"Boy, am I lost," she said, and dropped her hands. She managed a weak laugh. "Lost in the deepest, darkest smucking woods."

No, I think the deepest darkest woods are still ahead - where the trees are thick and their smell is sweet and the past is still happening. Always happening. Do you remember how you followed him that day? How you followed him through the strange October snow and into the woods?

Of course she did. He broke trail and she followed, trying to clap her snowshoes into her perplexing young man's tracks. And this was very like that, wasn't it? Only if she was going to do it, there was something else she needed first. Another piece of the past. Lisey dropped the gearshift into Drive, looked into her rearview mirror for oncoming traffic, then turned around and drove back the way she had come, making her BMW really scat.

12

Naresh Patel, owner of Patel's Market, was himself on duty when Lisey came in at just past five o'clock on that long, long Thursday. He was sitting behind the cash register in a lawn chair, eating a curry and watching Shania Twain gyrate on Country Music Television. He put his curry aside and actually stood up for Lisey. His tee-shirt read I DARK SCORE LAKE.

"I'd like a pack of Salem Lights, please," Lisey said. "Actually, you better make that two."

Mr. Patel had been keeping store - first as an employee in his father's New Jersey market, then as owner of his own - for nearly forty years, and he knew better than to comment on apparent teetotalers who suddenly began buying booze or apparent nonsmokers who suddenly began buying cigarettes. He simply found this lady's particular poison in his well-stocked racks of the stuff, put it on the counter, and commented on the beauty of the day. He affected not to notice Mrs. Landon's expression of near shock at the price of her poison. It only showed how long her pause had been between cessation and resumption. At least this one could afford her poison; Mr. Patel had customers who took food out of their children's mouths to buy this stuff.