"It's all in the past but none of it's done! " she cried irritably. "That's the smucking trouble! "
To that there was no answer, but here, at long last, was the master bedroom and its adjacent bathroom - what Scott, never known for his delicacy, had been wont to call Il Grande Poopatorium. She set down the basin, dumped out the toothglass (still two brushes, now both of them hers, alas), and filled the tumbler to the brim with cold water. This she drank off greedily, then she did take a moment to look at herself. At her face, anyway.
What she saw was not encouraging. Her eyes were glittering blue sparks peering out of dark caves. The skin beneath them had gone a dark blackish brown. Her nose was canted to the left. Lisey didn't think it was broken, but who knew? At least she could breathe through it. Below her nose was a great crust of dried blood that had broken both right and left around her mouth, giving her a grotesque Fu Manchu mustache. Look, Ma, I'm a biker, she tried to say, but the words wouldn't quite come out. It was a shitty joke, anyway.
Her lips were so severely swollen they actually turned out from the inside, giving her battered face a grotesquely exaggerated come-and-kiss-me pout.
Was I thinking of going up to Greenlawn, home of the famous Hugh Alberness, in this condish? Was I really? Pretty funny - they'd get one look and then call for an ambulance to take me to a real hospital, the kind where they've got an ICU. That isn't what you were thinking. What you were thinking -
But she closed that off, remembering something Scott used to say: Ninety-eight percent of what goes on in people's heads is none of their smucking business. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't, but for the time being she'd do well to take this as she had the stairs: head down and one step at a time.
Lisey had another bad moment when she couldn't find the Vicodin. She almost gave up, thinking one of the three spring-cleaning girls might have walked away with the bottle, before finding it hiding behind Scott's multi-vitamins. And, wonder of wonders, the expiration on these babies was this very month.
"Waste not, want not," Lisey said, and washed down three of them. Then she filled the plastic basin with lukewarm water and threw in a handful of teabags. She watched the clear water begin to stain amber for a moment or two, then shrugged and dumped in the rest of the teabags. They settled to the bottom of the darkening water and she thought of a young man saying It stings a little but it works really really good. In another life, that had been. Now she would see for herself.
She took a clean washcloth from the rod beside the sink, dropped it into the basin, and wrung it out gently. What are you doing, Lisey? she asked herself...but the answer was obvious, wasn't it? She was still following the trail her dead husband had left her. The one that led into the past.
She let the tatters of her blouse slip to the bathroom floor, and, with a grimace of anticipation, applied the tea-soaked washcloth to her breast. It did hurt, but compared to the nettlesome sting of her own sweat, it was almost pleasant, in an astringent mouthwash-on-the-canker kind of way.
It works. It really really works, Lisey.
Once she had believed that - sort of - but once she had been twenty-two and willing to believe lots of things. What she believed in now was Scott. And Boo'ya Moon? Yes, she guessed she believed in that, too. A world that was waiting right next door, and behind the purple curtain in her mind. The question was whether or not it might be in reach for the celebrated writer's gal pal now that he was dead and she was on her own. Lisey wrung blood and tea out of the washcloth, dipped it again, replaced it on her wounded breast. This time the sting was even less. But it's no cure, she thought. Just another marker on the road into the past. Out loud she said, "Another bool."
Holding the washcloth gently against her and taking the bloody square of african -
Good Ma's delight - in the hand folded beneath her breast, Lisey went slowly into the bedroom and sat down on the bed, looking at the silver spade with COMMENCEMENT, SHIP-MAN LIBRARY incised on the scoop. Yes, she really could see a small dent where she'd connected first with Blondie's gun and then with Blondie's face. She had the spade, and although the yellow african in which Scott had wrapped himself on those cold nights in 1996 was long gone, she did have this remnant, this delight.
Bool, the end.
"I wish it was the end," Lisey said, and lay back with the washcloth still on her breast. The pain was funneling away, but that was just Amanda's Vicodin taking hold, doing what neither Paul's tea-cure nor Scott's out-of-date aspirin could. When the Vicodin wore off, the pain would be back. So would Jim Dooley, author of the pain. The question was, what was she going to do in the meantime? Could she do something?