"All the Landons are fast healers," she says, and then goes in to see her husband. 15
He's lying there with his eyes closed and his head turned to one side, a very white man in a very white bed - that much is certainly true - but it's impossible to miss that mop of shoulder-length dark hair. The chair she sat in last night is where she left it, and she resumes her position beside his bed. She takes out her book - Savages, by Shirley Conran. She's removing the matchbook cover that marks her place when she feels Scott's eyes on her and looks up.
"How are you this morning, dear one?" she asks him.
He says nothing for a long time. His breath is wheezing, but no longer screaming as it did while he lay in the parking lot begging for ice. He really is better, she thinks. Then, with some effort, he moves his hand until it's over hers. He squeezes. His lips (which look dreadfully dry, she'll get a Chap Stick or Carmex for them later) part in a smile.
"Lisey," he says. "Little Lisey."
He goes back to sleep with his hand still covering hers, and that's perfectly okay with Lisey. She can turn the pages of her book with one hand.
16
Lisey stirred like a woman awaking from a doze, looked out the driver's-side window of her BMW, and saw the shadow of her car had grown noticeably longer on Mr. Patel's clean black pavement. There was not one butt in her ashtray, or two, but three. She looked out through the windshield and saw a face looking back at her from one of the small windows at the rear of the Market, in what had to be the storage area. It was gone before she could tell if it was Mr. Patel's wife or one of his two teenage daughters, but she had time to mark the expression: curiosity or concern. Either way it was time to move on. Lisey backed out of her space, glad she had at least butted her cigarettes in her own ashtray instead of tossing them out onto that weirdly clean asphalt, and once again turned for home.
Remembering that day in the hospital - and what the nurse said - that was another station of the bool.
Yes? Yes.
Something had been in bed with her this morning, and for now she would go on believing it had been Scott. He had for some reason sent her on a bool hunt, just like the ones his big brother Paul had made for him when they were a pair of unhappy boys growing up in rural Pennsylvania. Only instead of little riddles leading her from one station to the next, she was being led...
"You're leading me into the past," she said in a low voice. "But why would you do that? Why, when that's where the bad-gunky is?"
The one you're on is a good bool. It goes behind the purple.
"Scott, I don't want to go behind the purple." Approaching the house now. "I'll be smucked if I want to go behind the purple."
But I don't think I have any choice.
If that was true, and if the next station of the bool meant reliving their weekend visit to The Antlers - Scott's frontloaded honeymoon - then she wanted Good Ma's cedar box. It was all she had of her mother now that the ( africans) afghans were gone, and Lisey supposed it was her more humble version of the memory nook in Scott's office. It was a place where she'd stored all sorts of mementos from (SCOTT AND LISEY! THE EARLY YEARS!) the first decade of their marriage: photos, postcards, napkins, matchbooks, menus, drink-coasters, stupid stuff like that. How long had she collected those things? Ten years?