He has kicked the bucket, as the saying is. (Do you like it?) He has popped off. (Do you love it?)
He is eating a dirt sandwich. (It's a big one I caught in the pool where we all go down to drink and fish.)
And when you boil it down, what's left? Why, he has jilted her. Done a runner. Put an egg in his shoe and beat it, hit the road, Jack, took the Midnight Special out of town. He lit out for the Territories. He left the woman who loved him with every cell in her body and every brain in her not-so-smart head, and all she has is this shitty...smucking... shell. She breaks. Lisey breaks. As she bolts forward into his stupid smucking memory nook she seems to hear him saying SOWISA, babyluv - Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate, and then that is gone and she begins tearing his plaques and pictures and framed citations from the walls. She picks up the bust of Lovecraft the World Fantasy Award judges gave him for Empty Devils, that hateful book, and throws it the length of the study, screaming "Fuck you, Scott, f**k you! " It's one of the few times she's used the word in its unvarnished form since the night he put his hand through the greenhouse glass, the night of the blood-bool. She was angry with him then but never in her life has she been so angry with him as she is now; if he were here, she might kill him all over again. She's on a full-bore rampage, tearing all that useless vanity crap off the walls until they are bare (few of the things she throws down break on the floor because of the deeppile carpet - lucky for her, she'll think later on, when sanity returns). As she whirls around and around, a tornado now for sure, she screams his name again and again, screams Scott and Scott and Scott, crying for grief, crying for loss, crying for rage; crying for him to explain how he could leave her so, crying for him to come back, oh to come back. Never mind everything the same, nothing is the same without him, she hates him, she misses him, there's a hole in her, a wind even colder than the one that blew all the way down from Yellowknife now blows through her, the world is so empty and so loveless when there's no one in it to holler your name and holler you home. At the end she seizes the monitor of the computer that sits in the memory nook and something in her back gives a warning creak as she lifts it but smuck her back, the bare walls mock her and she is raging. She spins awkwardly with the monitor in her arms and heaves it against the wall. There is a hollow shattering noise - POOMP!, it sounds like - and then silence again.
No, there are crickets outside.
Lisey collapses to the littered carpet, sobbing weakly, all in. And does she call him back somehow? Does she call him back into her life by the very force of her angry delayed grief? Has he come like water through a long-empty pipe? She thinks the answer to that is 4
"No," Lisey murmured. Because - crazy as it seemed - Scott seemed to have been at work placing the stations of this bool hunt for her long before he died. Getting in touch with Dr. Alberness, for instance, who happened to have been such a puffickly huh-yooge fan. Somehow laying hands on Amanda's medical records and bringing them to lunch, for heaven's sake. And then the kicker: Mr. Landon said if I ever met you, I should ask you about how he fooled the nurse that time in Nashville.
And...when had he put Good Ma's cedar box under the Bremen bed out in the barn?
Because surely it had been Scott, she knew she had never put it there. 1996?
( hush)
In the winter of 1996, when Scott's mind had broken and she had
( YOU HUSH NOW LISEY! )
All right...all right, she would hush about the winter of '96 - for now - but that felt about right. And...
A bool hunt. But why? To what purpose? To allow her to face in stages something she couldn't face all at once? Maybe. Probably. Scott would know about such things, would surely sympathize with a mind that would want to hide its most terrible memories behind curtains or squirrel them away in sweet-smelling boxes.
A good bool.
Oh Scott, what's good about this? What's good about all this pain and sorrow?
A short bool.
If so, the cedar box was either the end or close to the end, and she had an idea that if she looked much further, there would be no going back.
Baby, he sighed...but only in her head. There were no ghosts. Only memory. Only the voice of her dead husband. She believed that; she knew it. She could close the box. She could draw the curtain. She could let the past be past.
Babyluv.
He would always have his say. Even dead, he would have his say.
She sighed - it was a wretched, lonely sound to her own ears - and decided to go on. To play Pandora after all.