Lisey said it out loud this time, and although it was warm in the empty study, she shivered. She still didn't know what it meant, but she was pretty sure she remembered when Scott had told her that Daddy's prize was a kiss, that she had been his first, and nobody ever got enough safety: just before they were married. She had given him all the safety she knew how to give, but it hadn't been enough. In the end Scott's thing had come back for him, anyway - that thing he had sometimes glimpsed in mirrors and waterglasses, the thing with the vast piebald side. The long boy.
Lisey looked around the study fearfully for just a moment, and wondered if it was watching her now.
2
SHE OPENED THE U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review. The spine's crack was like a pistol-shot. It made her cry out in surprise and drop the book. Then she laughed (a little shakily, it was true). "Lisey, you nit."
This time a folded piece of newsprint fell out, yellowing and brittle to the touch. What she unfolded was a grainy photograph, caption included, starring a fellow of perhaps twenty-three who looked much younger thanks to his expression of dazed shock. In his right hand he held a short-handled shovel with a silver scoop. Said scoop had been engraved with words that were unreadable in the photo, but Lisey remembered what they were: COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY.
The young man was sort of . . . well . . . peering at this shovel, and Lisey knew not just by his face but by the whole awkward this-way-'n-that jut of his lanky body that he didn't have any idea what he was seeing. It could have been an artillery shell, a bonsai tree, a radiation detector, or a china pig with a slot in its back for spare silver; it could have been a whang-dang-doodle, a phylactery testifying to the pompetus of love, or a cloche hat made out of coyote skin. It could have been the penis of the poet Pindar. This guy was too far gone to know. Nor, she was willing to bet, was he aware that grasping his left hand, also frozen forever in swarms of black photodots, was a man in what looked like a costumeball Motor Highway Patrolman's uniform: no gun, but a Sam Browne belt running across the chest and what Scott, laughing and making big eyes, might have called "a puffickly huh-yooge batch of orifice". He also had a puffickly huh-yooge grin on his face, the kind of relieved oh-thank-you-God grin that said Son, you'll never have to buy yourself another drink in another bar where I happen to be, as long as I've got one dollar to rub against another 'un . In the background she could see Dashmiel, the little prig-southerner who had run away. Roger C. Dashmiel, it came to her, the big C stands for chickenshit.
Had she, little Lisey Landon, seen the happy campus security cop shaking the dazed young man's hand? No, but . . . say . . .
Saa-aaaay, chillums . . . looky-here . . . do you want a true-life image to equal such fairytale visions as Alice falling down her rabbit-hole or a toad in a top-hat driving a motorcar? Then check this out, over on the right side of the picture.
Lisey bent down until her nose was almost touching the yellowed photo from the Nashville American. There was a magnifying glass in the wide centre drawer of Scott's main desk. She had seen it on many occasions, its place preserved between the world's oldest unopened package of Herbert Tareyton cigarettes and the world's oldest book of unredeemed S & H Green Stamps. She could have gotten it but didn't bother. Didn't need any magnification to confirm what she was seeing: half a brown loafer. Half a cordovan loafer, actually, with a slightly built-up heel. She remembered those loafers very well. How comfortable they'd been. And she'd certainly moved in them that day, hadn't she? She hadn't seen the happy cop, or the dazed young man (Tony, she was sure, of Toneh heah well be rahtin it up fame), nor had she noticed Dashmiel, the southern-fried chickenshit, once the cheese hit the grater. All of them had ceased to matter to her, the whole smucking bunch of them. By then she had only one thing on her mind, and that had been Scott. He was surely no more than ten feet away, but she had known that if she didn't get to him at once, the crowd around him would keep her out . . . and if she were kept out, the crowd might kill him. Kill him with its dangerous love and voracious concern. And what the smuck, Violet, he might have been dying, anyway. If he was, she'd meant to be there when he stepped out. When he Went, as the folks of her mother and father's generation would have said.
"I was sure he'd die," Lisey said to the silent sunwashed room, to the dusty winding bulk of the booksnake.
So she'd run to her fallen husband, and the news photographer - who'd been there only to snap the obligatory picture of college dignitaries and a famous visiting author gathered for the groundbreaking with the silver spade, the ritual First Shovelful of Earth where the new library would eventually stand - had ended up snapping a much more dynamic photograph, hadn't he? This was a front-page photo, maybe even a hall of fame photo, the kind that made you pause with a spoonful of breakfast cereal halfway between the bowl and your mouth, dripping on the classifieds, like the photo of Oswald with his hands to his belly and his mouth open in a final dying yawp, the kind of frozen image you never forgot. Only Lisey herself would ever realize that the writer's wife was also in the photo. Exactly one built-up heel of her.