She starts to speak, then doesn't. When you've been married a long time - she supposes how long varies from marriage to marriage, with them it took about fifteen years - a kind of telepathy sets in. Right now it's telling her he has something more to say. So she stays quiet, waiting to see if she's right. At first it seems she is. He opens his mouth. Then the wind gusts outside and she hears it - a low quick rattling like the chatter of metal teeth. He cocks his head toward it...smiles a little...not a nice smile...the smile of someone who has a secret...and closes his mouth again. Instead of saying whatever it was he meant to say, he looks back at the TV screen, where Jeff Bridges - a very young Jeff Bridges - and his best friend are now driving to Mexico. When they get back, Sam the Lion will be dead.
"Do you think you could go to sleep now?" she asks him, and when he doesn't respond, she begins to feel afraid again. "Scott!" she says, a little more sharply than she intended, and when he returns his eyes to her (reluctantly, Lisey fancies, although he has seen this movie at least two dozen times), she repeats her question more quietly. "Do you think you could go back to sleep now?"
"Maybe," he allows, and she sees something that is both terrible and sad: he is afraid.
"If you sleep spoons with me."
"As cold as it is tonight? Are you kidding? Come on, turn off the TV and come back to bed."
He does, and she lies there listening to the wind and luxuriating in the man-driven warmth of him.
She begins to see her butterflies. This is what almost always happens to her when she begins to drift into sleep. She sees great red and black butterflies opening their wings in the dark. It has occurred to her that she will see them when her dying-time comes around. The thought scares her, but only a little.
"Lisey?" It's Scott, from far away. He's drifting, too. She senses that.
"Hmmmm?"
"It doesn't like me to talk."
"What doesn't?"
"I don't know." Very faint and far. "Maybe it's the wind. The cold north wind. The one that comes down from..."
The last word might be Canada, probably is, but there's no way to tell for sure because by then she's lost in the land of sleep and he is too, and when they go there they never go together, and she is afraid that is also a preview of death, a place where there may be dreams but never love, never home, never a hand to hold yours when squadrons of birds flock across the burnt-orange sun at the close of the day.
3
There's a period of time - two weeks, maybe - when she goes on trying to believe that things are getting better. Later she'll ask herself how she could be so stupid, so willfully blind, how she could mistake his frantic struggle to hold onto the world (and her!) for any kind of improvement, but of course when straws are all you have, you grasp them. There are some fat ones to grasp at. During the opening days of 1996 his drinking seems to stop entirely, except for a glass of wine with dinner on a couple of occasions, and he trundles out to his study every day. It will only be later - later, later, percolator, they used to chant when they were little kids building their first word-castles in the sand at the edge of the pool - that she'll realize he hasn't added a single page to the manuscript of his novel during those days, has done nothing but drink secret whiskey and eat Certs and write disjointed notes to himself. Tucked beneath the keyboard of the Mac he's currently using, she'll find one piece of paper - a sheet of stationery, actually, with FROM THE DESK OF SCOTT LANDON printed across the top - upon which he has scrawled Tractor-chain say youre too late Scoot you old scoot, even now. It's only when that cold wind, the one all the way down from Yellowknife, is booming around the house, that she'll finally see the deep crescent-moon cuts in the palms of his hands. Cuts he could only have made with his own fingernails as he struggled to hold onto his life and sanity like a mountain-climber trying to hold onto a smucking ledge in a sleet-storm. It's only later that she'll find his cache of empty Beam bottles, better than a dozen in all, and on that one at least she's able to give herself a pass, because those empties were wellhidden. 4