Things like Scott's long boy.
It's very close, honey. That's what he told her as he lay under the hot Nashville sun on the day when she had been sure he was dying. I hear it taking its meal. She had tried to tell him she didn't know what he was talking about; he had pinched her and told her not to insult his intelligence. Or her own.
Because I'd been there. Because I'd heard the laughers and believed him when he said there were worse things waiting. And there were. I saw the thing he was talking about. I saw it in 1996, when I went to Boo'ya Moon to bring him home. Just its side, but that was enough.
"It was endless," Lisey muttered, and was horrified to realize she really believed this to be the truth. It had been night in 1996. Night when she had gone to Scott's other world from the cold guest room. She had gone down the path, into the woods, into the Fairy Forest, and -
A motor exploded into life nearby. Lisey's eyes flew open and she nearly screamed. Then she relaxed again, little by little. It was only Herb Galloway, or maybe the Luttrell kid Herb sometimes hired, cutting the grass next door. This was entirely different from the bitterly cold night in January of '96 when she'd discovered Scott in the guest room, there and still breathing but gone in every other way that mattered. She thought: Even if I could do it, I can't do it like this - it's too noisy. She thought: The world is too much with us.
She thought: Who wrote that? And, as happened so frequently, that thought came trailing its painful little red caboose: Scott would know.
Yes, Scott would know. She thought of him in all the motel rooms, bent over a portable typewriter (SCOTT AND LISEY, THE EARLY YEARS!) and then later, with his face lit by the glow of his laptop. Sometimes with a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray beside him, sometimes with a drink, always with the curl of hair falling forgotten across his forehead. She thought of him lying on top of her in this bed, of chasing her full-tilt through that awful house in Bremen (SCOTT AND LISEY IN GERMANY!), both of them naked and laughing, horny but not really happy, while trucks and cars rumbled around and around the traffic-circle up the street. She thought of his arms around her, all the times his arms had been around her, and the smell of him, and the sandpaper rasp his cheek made against hers, and she thought she would sell her soul, yes, her immortal smucking soul, for no more than the sound of him down the hall slamming the door and then yelling Hey, Lisey, I'm home - everything the same?
Hush and close your eyes.
That was her voice, but it was almost his, a very good imitation, so Lisey closed her eyes and felt the first warm tears, almost comforting, slip out through the screen of lashes. There was a lot they didn't tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart. It's a secret, Lisey thought, and it should be, because who would ever want to get close to another person if they knew how hard the letting-go part was? In your heart they only die a little at a time, don't they? Like a plant when you go away on a trip and forget to ask a neighbor to poke in once in awhile with the old watering-can, and it's so sad -
She didn't want to think about that sadness, nor did she want to think about her hurt breast, where the pain had begun to creep back. She turned her thoughts to Boo'ya Moon again, instead. She recalled how utterly amazing and wonderful it had been to go from the bitter subzero Maine night to that tropical place in the wink of a maiden's eye. The somehow sad texture of the air, and the silky aromas of frangipani and bougainvillea. She remembered the tremendous light of the setting sun and the rising moon and how, far off, that bell was ringing. That same bell.
Lisey realized that the sound of the riding mower in the Galloways' yard now seemed oddly distant. So was the blat of a passing motorcycle. Something was happening, she was almost sure of it. A spring was winding, a well was filling, a wheel was turning. Maybe the world was not too much with her, after all.
But what if you get over there and it's night? Assuming that what you feel isn't just a combination of narcotics and wishful thinking, what if you get over there and it's night, when the bad things come out? Things like Scott's long boy?
Then I'll come back here.
If you have time, you mean.
Yes, that's what I mean, if there's t -
Suddenly, shockingly, the light shining through the lids of her closed eyes changed from red to a dim purple that was almost black. It was as if a shade had been pulled. But a shade wouldn't account for the glorious mixture of smells that suddenly filled her nose: the mixed perfume of all those flowers. Nor could it account for the grass she now felt pricking her calves and naked back.
She'd made it. Gotten over. Come through.