"Are you okay?"
Darla began to nod, then shook her head. "New luggage!" she cried. "What a joke! Do you think she's ever going to need new luggage? You heard him - no response to the snap test, no response to the clap test, no response to the pin test! I know what the nurses call people like her, they call em gorks, and I don't give a shit what he says about therapy and wonder drugs, if she ever comes back it'll be a blue-eyed miracle!"
As the saying is, Lisey thought, and smiled...but only inside, where it was safe to smile. She led her tired, slightly weepy sister down the short, steep flight of attic steps and below the worst of the heat. Then, instead of telling her that where there was life there was hope, or to let a smile be her umbrella, or that it was always darkest just before the dawn, or anything else that had just lately fallen out of the dog's ass, she simply held her. Because sometimes only holding was best. That was one of the things she had taught the man whose last name she had taken for her own - that sometimes it was best to be quiet; sometimes it was best to just shut your everlasting mouth and hang on, hang on, hang on. 10
Lisey asked again if Darla didn't want company on the ride back to Greenlawn, and Darla shook her head. She had an old Michael Noonan novel on cassette tapes, she said, and this would be a good chance to dig into it. By then she had washed her face in Amanda's bathroom, re-applied her makeup, and tied her hair back. She looked good, and in Lisey's experience, a woman who looked good usually felt that way. So she gave Darla's hand a little squeeze, told her to drive carefully, and watched her out of sight. Then she made a slow tour of Amanda's house, first inside and then out, making sure everything was locked up: windows, doors, cellar bulkhead, garage. She left two of the garage windows a quarter-inch open to keep the heat from building up. This was a thing Scott had taught her, a thing he'd learned from his father, the redoubtable Sparky Landon...along with how to read (at the precocious age of two), how to sum on the little blackboard that was kept beside the stove in the kitchen, how to jump from the bench in the front hall with a cry of Geronimo! ...and about blood-bools, of course.
"Stations of the bool - like stations of the cross, I guess."
He says this and then he laughs. It's a nervous laugh, an I'm-looking-over-my-shoulder laugh. A child's laugh at a dirty joke.
"Yeah, exactly like that," Lisey murmured, and shivered in spite of the late afternoon heat. The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time's great tower, everything was still happening.
That's a bad way to think, thinking that way will get you in the bad-gunky.
"I don't doubt it," Lisey said, and gave her own nervous laugh. She headed for her car with Amanda's key-ring - surprisingly heavy, heavier than her own, although Lisey's house was far bigger - hung over the forefinger of her right hand. She had a feeling she was already in the bad-gunky. Amanda in the nutbarn was just the beginning. There was also "Zack McCool" and that detestable Incunk, Professor Woodbody. The events of the day had driven the latter two out of her mind, but that didn't mean they'd ceased to exist. She felt too tired and dispirited to take on Woodbody this evening, too tired and dispirited even to track him to his lair...but she thought she'd better do it just the same, if only because her phone-pal "Zack" had sounded as though he could really be dangerous. She got into her car, put big sissa Manda-Bunny's keys into the glove compartment, and backed down the driveway. As she did, the lowering sun cast a bright net of reflections off something behind her and up onto the roof. Startled, Lisey pressed the brake, looked over her shoulder - and saw the silver spade. COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY. Lisey reached back, touched the wooden handle, and felt her mind calm a bit. She looked in both directions along the blacktop, saw nothing coming, and turned toward home. Mrs. Jones was sitting on her front stoop, and raised her hand in a wave. Lisey raised hers in return. Then she reached between the BMW's bucket seats again, so she could grasp the shaft of the spade.
11
If she was honest with herself, she thought as she began her short ride home, then she had to admit she was more frightened by these returning memories - by the sense that they were happening again, happening now - than she was by what might or might not have happened in bed just before sunrise. That she could dismiss (well...almost) as the half-waking dream of an anxious mind. But she hadn't thought of Gerd Allen Cole for ever so long, and if asked for the name of Scott's father or where he had worked, she would have said she honestly didn't remember.