"And sometimes you want to. Don't you?"
He doesn't deny it, and outside the wind howls a long cold note along the eaves. Yet here under the blankets in front of the kitchen stove, it's warm. It's warm with him.
"Stay with me, Scott," she says.
"I will," he tells her. "I will as long as
16
"I will as long as I can," Lisey said.
She realized several things at the same time. One was that she had returned to her bedroom and her bed. Another was that the bed would have to be changed, because she had come back soaking wet, and her damp feet were coated with beach sand from another world. A third was that she was shivering even though the room wasn't particularly cold. A fourth was that she no longer had the silver spade; she had left it behind. The last was that if the seated shape had indeed been her husband, she had almost certainly seen him for the last time; her husband was now one of the shrouded things, an unburied corpse. Lying on her wet bed in her soaking shorts, Lisey burst into tears. She had a great deal to do now, and had come back with most of the steps clear in her mind - she thought that might also have been part of her prize at the end of Scott's last bool hunt - but first she needed to finish grieving for her husband. She put an arm over her eyes and lay so for the next five minutes, sobbing until her eyes were swollen nearly shut and her throat ached. She had never thought she would want him so much or miss him so badly. It was a shock. Yet at the same time, and although there was also still some pain in her damaged breast, Lisey thought she had never felt so well, so glad to be alive, or so ready to kick ass and take down names.
As the saying was.
Part XII. Lisey at Greenlawn
(The Hollyhocks)
1
She glanced at the clock on the nightstand as she peeled off her soaked shorts and smiled, not because there was anything intrinsically funny about ten minutes to twelve on a morning in June, but because one of Scrooge's lines from A Christmas Carol had occurred to her: "The spirits have done it all in one night." It seemed to Lisey that something had accomplished a great deal in her own life in a very short period of time, most of it in the last few hours.
But you have to remember that I've been living in the past, and that takes up a surprising amount of a person's time, she thought...and after a moment's consideration let out a great, larruping laugh that probably would have sounded insane to anyone listening down the hall.
That's okay, keep laughin, babyluv, ain't nobody here but us chickadees, she thought, going into the bathroom. That big, loose laugh started to come out of her again, then stopped suddenly when it occurred to her that Dooley might be here. He could be holed up in the root cellar or one of this big house's many closets; he might be sweating it out this late morning in the attic, right over her head. She didn't know much about him and would be the first to admit it, but the idea that he had gone to ground here in the house fit what she did know. He'd already proved he was a bold sonofabitch. Don't worry about him now. Worry about Darla and Canty.
Good idea. Lisey could get to Greenlawn ahead of her older sisters, that wouldn't be much of a horse-race, but she couldn't afford to dawdle, either. Keep your string a- drawing, she thought.
But she couldn't deny herself a moment in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door, standing with her hands at her sides, looking levelly and without prejudice at her slender, unremarkable, middle-aged body - and at her face, which Scott had once described as that of a fox in summer. It was a little puffy, nothing more. She looked like she'd slept exceptionally hard (maybe after a drink or three too many), and her lips still turned out a little, giving them a strangely sensual quality that made her feel both uneasy and a tiny bit gleeful. She hesitated, not sure what to do about that, and then found a tube of Revlon Hothouse Pink at the back of her lipstick drawer. She touched some on and nodded, a little doubtfully. If people were going to look at her lips - and she thought they might - she'd do better giving them something to look at than trying to cover up what couldn't be hidden.
The breast Dooley had operated on with such lunatic absorption was marked with an ugly scarlet ditch that circled up from beneath her armpit before petering out above her ribcage. It looked like a fairly bad cut that might have happened two or three weeks ago and was now healing well. The two shallower wounds looked like no more than the sort of red marks that resulted from wearing too-tight elastic garments. Or perhaps - if you had a lively imagination - rope burns. The difference between this and the horror she had observed upon regaining consciousness was amazing.
"All the Landons are fast healers, you sonofabitch," Lisey said, and stepped into the shower.