Lisey's Story(73)

No, there are crickets outside.

Lisey collapses to the littered carpet, sobbing weakly, all in. And does she call him back somehow? Does she call him back into her life by the very force of her angry delayed grief? Has he come like water through a long-empty pipe? She thinks the answer to that is 4

"No," Lisey murmured. Because - crazy as it seemed - Scott seemed to have been at work placing the stations of this bool hunt for her long before he died. Getting in touch with Dr. Alberness, for instance, who happened to have been such a puffickly huh-yooge fan. Somehow laying hands on Amanda's medical records and bringing them to lunch, for heaven's sake. And then the kicker: Mr. Landon said if I ever met you, I should ask you about how he fooled the nurse that time in Nashville.

And...when had he put Good Ma's cedar box under the Bremen bed out in the barn?

Because surely it had been Scott, she knew she had never put it there. 1996?

( hush)

In the winter of 1996, when Scott's mind had broken and she had

( YOU HUSH NOW LISEY! )

All right...all right, she would hush about the winter of '96 - for now - but that felt about right. And...

A bool hunt. But why? To what purpose? To allow her to face in stages something she couldn't face all at once? Maybe. Probably. Scott would know about such things, would surely sympathize with a mind that would want to hide its most terrible memories behind curtains or squirrel them away in sweet-smelling boxes.

A good bool.

Oh Scott, what's good about this? What's good about all this pain and sorrow?

A short bool.

If so, the cedar box was either the end or close to the end, and she had an idea that if she looked much further, there would be no going back.

Baby, he sighed...but only in her head. There were no ghosts. Only memory. Only the voice of her dead husband. She believed that; she knew it. She could close the box. She could draw the curtain. She could let the past be past.

Babyluv.

He would always have his say. Even dead, he would have his say.

She sighed - it was a wretched, lonely sound to her own ears - and decided to go on. To play Pandora after all.

5

The only other thing she'd squirreled away in here from their cut-rate, non-religious (but it had held for all that, had held very well) wedding day was a photograph taken at the reception, which had been held at The Rock - Cleaves Mills's raunchiest, rowdiest, low-down-and-dirtiest rock-and-roll bar. It showed her and Scott out on the floor as they began the first dance. She was in her white lace dress, Scott in a plain black suit -  My undertaker's suit, he'd called it - which he'd bought special for the occasion (and had worn again and again on the Empty Devils book-tour that winter). In the background she could see Jodotha and Amanda, both of them impossibly young and pretty, their hair up, their hands frozen in mid-clap. She was looking at Scott and he was smiling down at her, his hands on her waist, and oh God, look how long his hair had been, almost brushing his shoulders, she had forgotten that.

Lisey brushed the surface of the photograph with the tips of her fingers, slipping them across the people they'd been back at SCOTT AND LISEY, THE BEGINNING! and found she could even remember the name of the band from Boston (The Swinging Johnsons, pretty funny) and the song to which they had danced in front of their friends: a cover of "Too Late to Turn Back Now," by Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose.

"Oh Scott," she said. Another tear slipped down her cheek and she wiped it away absently. Then she put the photo on the sunny kitchen table and prospected deeper. Here was a thin stack of menus, bar-napkins, and matchbooks from motels in the Midwest, also a program from Indiana University in Bloomington, announcing a reading from Empty Devils, by Scott Linden. She remembered saving that one for the misprint, telling him it would be worth a fortune someday, and Scott replying Don't hold your breath, babyluv. The date on the program was March 19th, 1980...so where were her souvenirs from The Antlers? Had she taken nothing? In those days she almost always took something, it was a kind of hobby, and she could have sworn -

She lifted out the "Scott Linden" program and there beneath it was a dark purple menu with The Antlers and Rome, New Hampshire stamped on it in gold. And she could hear Scott as clearly as if he were speaking in her ear: When in Rome, do as the Romans do. He'd said it that night in the dining room (empty except for them and a single waitress), ordering the Chef's Special for both of them. And again, later, in bed, as he covered her naked body with his own.

"I offered to pay for this," she murmured, holding the menu up to her sunny, empty kitchen, "and the guy said I could just take it. Because we were their only guests. And because of the snowstorm."

That weird October snowstorm. They had stayed two nights instead of just the one that had been in the plan, and on the second she had remained awake long after Scott had gone to sleep. Already the cold front that had brought the unusual snow was moving out and she could hear it melting, dripping from the eaves. She had lain there in that strange bed (the first of so many strange beds she'd shared with Scott), thinking about Andrew

"Sparky" Landon, and Paul Landon, and Scott Landon - Scott the survivor. Thinking about bools. Good bools and blood-bools.

Thinking about the purple. Thinking about that, too.

At some point the clouds had broken open and the room had been flooded with windy moonlight. In that light she had at last fallen asleep. The next day, a Sunday, they had driven through countryside that was reverting back from winter to fall, and less than a month later they had been dancing to The Swinging Johnsons: "Too Late to Turn Back Now."