10
Now you must be still, she thought, as she had in January of 1996. All was as it had been then, only now she saw it a little better because she had come a little earlier; the shadows in the stone valley that cupped the pool were only beginning to gather. The water had the shape, almost, of a woman's hips. At the beach end, where the hips would nip into the waist, was an arrowhead of fine white sand. Upon it, standing far apart from one another, were four people, two men and two women, staring raptly at the pool. In the water were half a dozen more. No one was swimming. Most were in no deeper than their calves; one man was in up to his waist. Lisey wished she could have read the expression on this man's face, but she was still too far away. Behind the waders and the people standing on the beach - those who hadn't yet found enough courage to get wet, Lisey was convinced - was the sloping headland that had been carved into dozens or maybe hundreds of stone benches. Upon them, widely scattered, sat as many as two hundred people. She seemed to remember only fifty or sixty, but this evening there were definitely more. Yet for every person she could see, there had to be at least four in those horrible ( cerements) wrappings.
There's a graveyard, too. Do you remember?
"Yes," Lisey whispered. Her breast was hurting badly again, but she looked at the pool and remembered Scott's sliced-up hand. She also remembered how quickly he had recovered from being shot in the lung by the madman - oh, the doctors had been amazed. There was better medicine than Vicodin for her, and not far away.
"Yes," she said again, and began making her way along the downsloping path, this time with only one unhappy difference: there was no Scott Landon sitting on a bench down there.
Just before the path ended at the beach, she saw another path splitting off to her left and away from the pool. Lisey was once more all but overwhelmed by memory as she saw the moon
11
She sees the moon rising through a kind of slot in the massive granite outcropping that cups the pool. That moon is bloated and gigantic, just as it was when her husband-to-be brought her to Boo'ya Moon from their bedroom at The Antlers, but in the widening clearing to which that slot leads, its infected red-orange face is broken into jagged segments by the silhouettes of trees and crosses. So many crosses. Lisey is looking into what might almost be a rustic country graveyard. Like the cross Scott made for his brother Paul, these appear to be made of wood, and although some are quite large and a few are ornate, they all look handmade and many are the worse for wear. There are rounded markers as well, and some of these might be made of stone, but in the gathering gloom, Lisey cannot tell for sure. The light of the rising moon hinders rather than helps, because everything in the graveyard is backlit.
If there's a graveyard here, why did he bury Paul back there? Was it because he died with the bad-gunky?
She doesn't know or care. What she cares about is Scott. He's sitting on one of those benches like a spectator at a badly attended sporting event, and if she intends to do something, she'd better get busy. "Keep your string a-drawing," Good Ma would have said - that was one she caught from the pool.
Lisey leaves the graveyard and its rude crosses behind. She walks along the beach toward the stone benches where her husband sits. The sand is firm and somehow tingly. Feeling it against her soles and heels makes her realize that her feet are bare. She's still wearing her nightgown and layers of underthings, but her slippers didn't travel. The feel of the sand is dismaying and pleasant at the same time. It's also strangely familiar, and as she reaches the first of the stone benches, Lisey makes the connection. As a kid she had a recurring dream in which she'd go zooming around the house on a magic carpet, invisible to everyone else. She'd awaken from those dreams exhilarated, terrified, and sweatsoaked to the roots of her hair. This sand has the same magic-carpet feel...as if she were to bend her knees and then shoot upward, she might fly instead of jump. I'd swoop over that pool like a dragonfly, maybe dragging my toes in the water...swoop around to the place where it outflows in a brook...along to where the brook fattens into a river...swooping low...smelling the damp rising up from the water, breaking through the little rising mists like scarves until I finally reached the sea...and then on...yes, on and on and on...