"Would it be all right if I watched some of this? I found it with the rest of Scott's tapes. Most of them look pretty junky, but I always meant to see this one and never got around to it. Maybe it'll take my mind off things."

"Fine by me," Lisey said, "but I should warn you, I'm pretty sure there's a blank spot in the middle of it. It's an old tape."

Amanda was studying the back of the box. "Jeff Bridges looks like such a kid."

"He does, doesn't he?" Lisey said wanly.

"And Ben Johnson's dead, of course..." She stopped. "Maybe I better not. We might not hear your boyf...we might not hear Dooley, if he comes."

Lisey pushed the top off the s...o...b..x, took out the Pathfinder, and pointed it at the stairs leading down to the barn. "I locked the door to the outside stairs," she said, "so that's the only way up here. And I'm watching it."

"He could start a fire down there in the barn," Amanda said nervously.

"He doesn't want me cooked-what fun would that be?" Also, Lisey thought, there's a place I can go. As long as my mouth tastes as sweet as it does right now, there's a place I can go, and I don't think I'd have any trouble taking you with me, Manda. Not even two helpings of Hamburger Helper and two gla.s.ses of cherry Kool-Aid had taken away that lovely sweet taste in her mouth.

"Well, if you're sure it won't be bothering you..."

"Do I look like I'm studying for finals? Go ahead."

Amanda went back into the alcove. "Sure hope this VCR still works." She sounded like a woman who has discovered a wind-up gramophone and a stack of ancient acetate records.

Lisey looked at the many drawers of Dumbo's Big Jumbo, but going through them seemed like make-work now...and probably was. She had an idea that there was very little of actual interest up here. Not in the drawers, not in the filing cabinets, not hiding on the computer hard drives. Oh, maybe a little treasure for the more rabid Incunks, the collectors and the academics who maintained their positions in large part by examining the literary equivalent of navel-lint in each other's abstruse journals; ambitious, overeducated goofs who had lost touch with what books and reading were actually about and could be content to go on spinning straw into footnoted fool's gold for decades on end. But all the real horses were out of the barn. The Scott Landon stuff that had pleased regular readers-people stuck on airplanes between L.A. and Sydney, people stuck in hospital waiting rooms, people idling their way through long, rainy summer vacation days, taking turns between the novel of the week and the jigsaw puzzle out on the sun-porch-all that stuff had been published. The Secret Pearl, published a month after his death, had been the last.

No, Lisey, a voice whispered, and at first she thought it was Scott's, and then-how crazy-she thought it was the voice of Ole Hank. But that was crazy, because it wasn't a man's voice at all. Was that Good Ma's voice, going whisper-whisperwhisper in her head?

I think he wanted me to tell you something. Something about a story.

Not Good Ma's voice-although Good Ma's yellow afghan had figured in it somewhere-but Amanda's. They had been sitting together on those stone benches, looking out at the good ship Hollyhocks, which always rode at anchor but never quite set sail. Lisey had never realized how much alike their mother and her oldest sister sounded until this memory of the benches. And- Something about a story. Your story. Lisey's story.

Had Amanda actually said that? It was like a dream now and Lisey couldn't be completely sure, but she thought yes.

And the afghan. Only- "Only he called it an african," Lisey said in a low voice. "He called it an african, and he called it a bool. Not a boop, not a beep, a bool."

"Lisey?" Amanda called from the other room. "Did you say something?"

"Just talking to myself, Manda."

"Means you've got money in the bank," Amanda said, and then there was only the soundtrack of the movie. Lisey seemed to remember every line of it, every scratchy s.n.a.t.c.h of music. If you left me a story, Scott, where is it? Not up here in the study, I'd bet money on it. Not in the barn, either-nothing down there but false bools like Ike Comes Home.

But that wasn't quite true. There had been at least two true prizes in the barn: the silver spade and Good Ma's cedar box, tucked away under the Bremen bed. With the delight square in it. Was that what Amanda had been talking about?

Lisey didn't think so. There was a story in that box, but it was their story-Scott & Lisey: Now We Are Two. So what was her story? And where was it?

And speaking of wheres, where was the Black Prince of the Incunks?

Not on the answering machine at Amanda's; not on the answering machine here, either. Lisey had found only one message, on the recorder in the house. It had been from Deputy Alston.

"Mrs. Landon, this storm has done quite a lot of damage in town, particularly at the south end. Someone-I hope me or Dan Boeckman-is gonna check back on you as soon as possible, but in the meantime I want to remind you to keep your doors locked and don't let anyone in you can't identify. That means gettin em to take off their hats or push back the hoods of their slickers even if it's pourin down cats n dogs, okay? And keep that cell phone with you at all times. Remember, in an emergency all you have to do is. .h.i.t SPEED-DIAL and the 1-key. The call will go right through to the Sheriff's."

"Great," Amanda had commented. "Our blood'll still be runny instead of clotted when they get here. Probably speed up their DNA tests."

Lisey hadn't bothered replying. She had no intention of letting the Castle County Sheriff's Department handle Jim Dooley. As far as she was concerned, Jim Dooley might as well have cut his own throat with her Oxo can opener.

The light on the answering machine in her barn office had been flashing, the number 1 showing in the MESSAGES RECEIVED window, but when Lisey hit the PLAY b.u.t.ton, there had been only three seconds of silence, one soft, indrawn breath, and a hang-up. It could have been a wrong number, people dialed wrong numbers and hung up all the time, but she knew it hadn't been.

No. It had been Dooley.

Lisey sat back in the office chair, ran a finger down the rubber grip of the .22, then picked it up and swung open the cylinder. It was easy enough to do, once you'd done it a couple of times. She loaded the chambers, then swung the cylinder closed again. It made a small but final click.

In the other room, Amanda laughed at something in the movie. Lisey smiled a little herself. She didn't believe Scott had exactly planned all this; he didn't even plan his books, as complex as some of them were. Plotting them, he said, would take out all the fun. He claimed that for him, writing a book was like finding a brilliantly colored string in the gra.s.s and following it to see where it might lead. Sometimes the string broke and left you with nothing. But sometimes-if you were lucky, if you were brave, if you persevered-it brought you to a treasure. And the treasure was never the money you got for the book; the treasure was the book. Lisey supposed the Roger Dashmiels of the world didn't believe it and the Joseph Woodbodys thought it had to be something grander-more exalted- but Lisey had lived with him, and she believed it. Writing a book was a bool hunt. What he'd never told her (but she supposed she'd always guessed it) was that if the string didn't break, it always led back to the beach. Back to the pool where we all go down to drink, to cast our nets, to swim, and sometimes to drown.

And did he know? At the end, did he know it was the end?

She sat up a little straighter, trying to remember if Scott has discouraged her from coming along on his trip to Pratt, a small but well-regarded liberal arts school where he'd read from The Secret Pearl for the first and last time. He had collapsed halfway through the reception afterward. Ninety minutes later she had been in an airplane and one of the guests at that reception-a cardiovascular surgeon dragged to Scott's reading by his wife-had been operating in an attempt to save his life, or at least preserve it long enough to get him to a bigger hospital.

Did he know? Did he purposely try to keep me away because he knew it was coming?

She didn't exactly believe that, but when the call came from Professor Meade, hadn't she understood that Scott had known that something was coming? If not the long boy, then this? Wasn't that why their financial affairs had been in such apple-pie order, all the right papers neatly executed? Wasn't that why he had been so careful to see to Amanda's future problems?

I think it would be wise if you left as soon as you give permission for the surgery, Professor Meade had said. And she had done just that, calling the air charter company they used after speaking to an anonymous voice in Bowling Green Community Hospital's main office. To the hospital functionary she identified herself as Scott Landon's wife, Lisa, and gave a Dr. Jantzen permission to carry out a thoracotomy (a word she could hardly p.r.o.nounce) and "all attendant procedures." With the charter company she'd been more a.s.sured. She wanted the fastest aircraft they had available. Was the Gulfstream faster than the Lear? Fine. Make it the Gulfstream.

In the entertainment alcove, in the black-and-white land of The Last Picture Show, where Anarene was home and where Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms would always be boys, Ole Hank was singing about that brave Indian chief, Kaw-Liga.

Outside, the air had begun to redden-as it did when sunset approached in a certain mythical land once discovered by a pair of frightened boys from Pennsylvania.

This all happened very suddenly, Mrs. Landon. I wish I had some answers for you, but I don't. Perhaps Dr. Jantzen will.

But he hadn't. Dr. Jantzen had performed a thoracotomy, but that had provided no answers, either.

I didn't know what that was, Lisey thought, as outside the reddening sun approached the western hills. I didn't know what a thoracotomy was, didn't know what was happening...except in spite of everything I'd hidden away behind the purple, I did.

The pilots had arranged for a limo while she was still in the air. It was after eleven when the Gulfstream landed, and after midnight when she got to that little pile of cinderblocks they called a hospital, but the day had been hot and it was still hot. When the driver opened the door she remembered feeling that she could reach out her hands, twist them, and wring water right out of the air.

And there were dogs barking, of course-what sounded like every dog in Bowling Green barking at the moon-and my G.o.d, talk about your deja vu, there was one old guy buffing the hallway floor and two old women sitting in the waiting room, identical twins by the look of them, eighty if they were a day, and straight ahead 2.

Straight ahead of her are two elevators painted blue-gray. A sign on an easel in front of them reads OUT OF SERVICE. Lisey closes her eyes and puts a blind hand out to brace herself against the wall, for a moment quite sure she's going to faint. And why not? It seems she has traveled not just across miles but across time, as well. This isn't Bowling Green in 2004 but Nashville in 1988. Her husband has a lung problem, all right, but of the .22-caliber variety. A madman fed him a bullet, and would have fed him several more, if Lisey hadn't been quick with the silver spade.

She waits for someone to ask if she's all right, maybe even take hold of her and steady her on her shaky pins, but there's only the Whuzzzz of the old janitor's floor-buffer, and somewhere far away, the soft dinging of a bell that makes her think of some other bell in some other place, a bell that sometimes rings from behind the purple curtain she has carefully drawn over certain parts of her past.

She opens her eyes and sees that the main desk is deserted. There's a light on behind the window marked INFORMATION, so Lisey's pretty sure someone's supposed to be on duty there, but he or she has stepped away, maybe to use the john. The elderly twins in the waiting room are staring down at what appear to be identical waiting-room magazines. Beyond the entrance doors, her limo idles behind its yellow running lights like some exotic deep-sea fish. On this side of the doors, a small-city hospital is dozing through the first hour of a new day, and Lisey realizes that unless she starts up a bellerin, as Dandy would say, she's on her own. The feeling this engenders isn't fear or irritation or perplexity but rather deep sorrow. Later, flying back to Maine with her husband's encoffined mortal remains below her feet, she'll think: That's when I knew he'd never be leaving that place alive. He'd come to the last of it. I had a premonition. And you know what? I think it was the sign in front of the elevators that did it. That smucking OUT OF SERVICE sign. Yeah.

She can look for a hospital directory, or she can ask directions of the janitor buffing the floor, but Lisey does neither. She's sure she'll find Scott in this hospital's ICU if he's out of surgery, and she'll find the ICU on the third floor. This intuition is so strong she almost expects to see a homely floursack magic carpet floating at the foot of the stairs when she reaches them, a dusty square of cotton with the words PILLSBURY'S BEST FLOUR printed across it. There's no such thing, of course, and by the time she reaches the thirdfloor landing she's sweating and sticky and her heart is pounding hard. But the door does indeed say BGCH INTENSIVE CARE, and that sense of being in a waking dream where past and present have joined in an endless loop grows even stronger.

He's in room 319, Lisey thinks. She's sure of it even though she can see there have been a great many changes since the last time she came to her husband lying hurt in a hospital. The most obvious one is the television monitors outside each room; they show all sorts of red and green readouts. The only ones Lisey is completely sure of are pulse and blood-pressure. Oh, and the names, she can read those. COLVETTE-JOHN, DUMBARTON-ADRIAN, TOWSON-RICHARD, VANDERVEAUX-ELIZABETH (Lizzie Vanderveaux, now there's a mouthful, she thinks), DRAYTON-FRANKLIN. She's approaching 319 now, and thinks The nurse is going to come out with Scott's tray in her hands and her back to me; I won't mean to startle her but of course I will. She'll drop the tray. The plates and the coffee cup will be all right, they're tough old cafeteria birds, but that juice gla.s.s is going to break into a million pieces.

But it's the middle of the night instead of morning, there are no fans paddling the air overhead, and the name on the monitor above the door of room 319 is YANEZ-THOMAS. Yet still her sense of deja vu is enough to make her peek in and see a huge beached whale of a man-Thomas Yanez-in the single bed. Then there's a sense of awakening such as sleepwalkers may experience; she looks around with growing fright and bewilderment, thinking What am I doing here? I'm apt to catch h.e.l.l for being up here on my own. Then she thinks,THORACOTOMY. She thinks AS SOON AS YOU GIVE PERMISSION FOR THE SURGERY, and she can almost see the word SURGERY pulsing in drippy blood-red letters, and instead of leaving she continues quickly down to the brighter light at the center of the corridor, where the nurses' station must be. A terrible thought begins to surface in her mind (what if he's already) and she shoves it away, shoves it back down.

At the central station, a nurse dressed in a uniform upon which Warner Bros. cartoon characters caper crazily is making notes on a number of charts spread out before her. Another is speaking sotto voce into a tiny mike pinned to the lapel of her more traditional white rayon top, apparently reading numbers off a monitor. Behind them, a lanky redhead sprawls in a folding chair with his chin on the chest of his white dress shirt. Hanging over the back of his chair is a dark suit-coat that matches his pants. His shoes are off and so is his tie- Lisey can see the end of it peeking from one pocket of his jacket. His hands are clasped loosely in his lap. She may have had a premonition that Scott won't be leaving Bowling Green Community Hospital alive, but she doesn't have the slightest inkling that she's looking at the doctor who operated on him, prolonging his life enough so they can say goodbye after their twenty-five mostly good-h.e.l.l, mostly fine-years together; she puts the age of the sleeping male at about seventeen, and thinks he might be the son of one of the ICU nurses.

"Pardon me," Lisey says. Both nurses jump in their chairs. This time Lisey has managed to startle two nurses instead of just one. The nurse with the little mike will have an "Oh!" on her tape. Lisey couldn't care less. "My name is Lisa Landon, and I understand that my husband, Scott-"

"Mrs. Landon, yes. Of course." It's the nurse with Bugs Bunny on one breast and Elmer Fudd pointing a shotgun at him from the other while Daffy Duck looks up from the valley below. "Dr. Jantzen has been waiting to talk to you. He administered first aid at the reception."

Lisey still can't get the sense of this, perhaps in part because there was no time to look up thoracotomy in the PDR. "Scott...what, he fainted? Pa.s.sed out?"

"Dr. Jantzen can give you the details, I'm sure. You know he performed a parietal pleurectomy as well as a thoracotomy?"

Pleuro-what? It seems easier to just say yes. Meanwhile, the nurse who was dictating puts out a hand and shakes the sleeping redhead. When his eyes flutter open, Lisey can see she was wrong about his age, he's probably old enough to buy a drink in a bar, but surely no one's going to tell her he was the one who cut into her husband's chest. Are they?

"The operation," Lisey says, with no idea which one of the trio she's speaking to. She has a clear note of desperation in her voice, doesn't like it, can do nothing about it. "Was it a success?"

The Warner Bros. nurse hesitates for just a moment, and Lisey reads everything she fears in the eyes that suddenly slip away from hers. Then they come back and the nurse says, "This is Dr. Jantzen. He's been waiting for you."

3.

After that initial blank flutter, Jantzen comes around fast. Lisey thinks it must be a doctor thing-probably also a policeman and fireman thing. It was certainly never a writer thing. You couldn't even talk to him until he'd had his second cup of coffee.

She realizes she's just thought of her husband in the past tense, and a wave of coldness stiffens the hair at the nape of her neck and puts gooseb.u.mps on her arms. It's followed by a sense of lightness that is both marvelous and horrible. It's as if at any moment she'll float away like a balloon with a cut string. Float away to (hush now little Lisey hush about that) some other place. The moon, maybe. Lisey has to dig her fingernails deep into her palms to remain steady on her feet.

Meanwhile, Jantzen is murmuring to the Warner Bros. nurse. She listens and nods. "You won't forget to put that in writing later, yuh?"

"Before the clock on the wall says two," Jantzen a.s.sures her.

"And you're positive this is the way you want to go?" she persists-not being argumentative about whatever the subject is, Lisey thinks, just wanting to make sure she's got it all perfectly straight.

"I am," he tells her, then turns to Lisey and asks if she's ready to go upstairs to Alton IU. That, he says, is where her husband is. Lisey says that would be fine. "Well," Jantzen says with a smile that looks tired and not very genuine, "I hope you've got your hiking boots on. It's the fifth floor."

As they walk back to the stairs-past YANEZ-THOMAS and VANDERVEAUX-ELIZABETH-the Warner Bros. nurse is on the phone. Later Lisey will understand that the murmured conversation was Jantzen telling the nurse to call upstairs and have them take Scott off the ventilator. If, that is, he's awake enough to recognize his wife and hear her goodbye. Perhaps even to tell his own back to her, if G.o.d gives him one more puff of wind to sail through his vocal cords. Later she will understand that taking him off the vent shortened his life from hours to minutes, but that Jantzen thought this was a fair trade, since in his opinion any hours gained could offer Scott Landon no hope of recovery whatsoever. Later she will understand that they put him in the closest thing their small community hospital has to a plague unit.

Later.

4.

On their slow, steady walk up the hot stairwell to the fifth floor, she learns how little Jantzen can tell her about what's wrong with Scott-how precious little he knows. Thethoracotomy, he says, was no cure, but only to remove a buildup of fluid; the related procedure was to remove trapped air from Scott's pleural cavities."Which lung are we talking about, Dr. Jantzen?" she asks him, and he terrifies her by replying: "Both."

5.

That's when he asks her how long Scott has been sick, and whether he saw a doctor "before his current complaint escalated." She tells him Scott hasn't had a current complaint. Scott hasn't been sick. He's had a bit of a runny nose for the last ten days, and he's done some coughing and sneezing, but that's pretty much the whole deal. He hasn't even been taking Allerest, although he thinks it's allergies, and she does, too. She has some of the same symptoms, gets them each late spring and early summer.

"No deep cough?" he asks as they near the fifth-floor landing. "No deep, dry cough, like a morning smoker's cough? Sorry about the elevators, by the way."

"That's all right," she says, struggling not to puff and pant. "He did have a cough, as I told you, but it was very light. He used to smoke, but he hasn't in years." She thinks. "I guess it might have been a little heavier in the last couple of days, and he woke me once in the night-"

"Last night?"

"Yes, but he took a drink of water and it stopped." He's opening the door to another quiet hospital hall and Lisey puts a hand on his arm to stop him. "Listen-things like this reading he did last night? There was a time when Scott would have soldiered through half a dozen of those pups even with a temperature of a hundred and four. He would have cooked up on the applause and mainlined it to keep going. But those days ended five, maybe even seven years ago. If he'd been really sick, I'm sure he would have called Professor Meade-he's head of the English Department-and canceled the smuh-the d.a.m.n thing."

"Mrs. Landon, by the time we admitted him, your husband was running a fever of a hundred and six."

Now she can only look at Dr. Jantzen, he of the untrustworthy adolescent face, with silent horror and what is not quite disbelief. In time, however, a picture will begin to form. There's enough testimony, combined with certain memories that will not stay completely buried, to show her all she needs to see.

Scott took a charter flight from Portland to Boston, then flew United from Boston to Kentucky. A stew on the United flight who got his autograph later told a reporter that Mr. Landon had been coughing "almost constantly" and his skin was flushed. "When I asked if he was all right," she told the reporter, "he said it was just a summer cold, he'd taken a couple of aspirin and would be fine."

Frederic Borent, the grad student who met his plane, also reported the cough, and said Scott had gotten him to swing into a Nite Owl to pick up a bottle of Nyquil. "I think I might be getting the flu," he told Borent. Borent said he'd really been looking forward to the reading and wondered if Scott would be able to do it. Scott said, "You might be surprised."

Borent was. And delighted. So was most of Scott's audience that night. According to the Bowling Green Daily News, he gave a reading that was "little short of mesmerizing," only stopping a few times for the politest of small coughs, which seemed easily quelled by a sip of water from the gla.s.s beside him on the podium. Speaking to Lisey hours later, Jantzen remained amazed by Scott's vitality. And it was his amazement, coupled with a message relayed by the head of the English Department during his phone call, that caused a rift in Lisey's carefully maintained curtain of repression, at least for awhile. The last thing Scott said to Meade, after the reading and just before the reception began, was "Call my wife, would you? Tell her she may have to fly out here. Tell her I may have eaten the wrong thing after sunset. It's kind of a joke between us."

6.

Lisey blurts out her worst fear to young Dr. Jantzen without even thinking about it. "Scott is going to die of this, isn't he?"

Jantzen hesitates, and all at once she can see that he may be young but he's no kid. "I want you to see him," he says after a moment that seems very long. "And I want him to see you. He's conscious, but that may not last long. Will you come with me?"

Jantzen walks very fast. He stops at the nurses' station and the male nurse on duty looks up from the journal he's been reading-Modern Geriatrics. Jantzen speaks to him. The conversation is low-pitched, but the floor is very quiet, and Lisey hears the male nurse say four words very clearly. They terrify her.

"He's waiting for her," the male nurse says.

At the far end of the corridor are two closed doors with this message written on them in bright orange: ALTON ISOLATION UNIT.

SEE NURSE BEFORE ENTERING.

OBSERVE ALL PRECAUTIONS.

FOR YOUR SAKE.

FOR THEIR SAKE.

MASK AND GLOVES MAY BE REQUIRED.

To the left of the door is a sink where Jantzen washes his hands and instructs Lisey to do the same. On a gurney to the right are gauze masks, latex gloves in sealed packets, stretchy yellow shoe covers in a cardboard box with FITS ALL SIZES stamped on the side, and a neat stack of surgical greengowns.

"Isolation," she says. "Oh Jesus, you think my husband's got the smucking Andromeda Strain."

Jantzen hedges. "We think he may have some exotic pneumonia, possibly even the Bird Flu, but whatever it is, we haven't been able to identify it, and it's..."

He doesn't finish, doesn't seem to know how, so Lisey helps him. "It's really doing a number on him. As the saying is."

"Just a mask should be enough, Mrs. Landon, unless you have cuts. I didn't notice while you were-"

"I don't think I have to worry about cuts and I won't need a mask." She pushes open the lefthand door before he can object. "If it was communicable, I'd already have it."

Jantzen follows her into the Alton IU, slipping one of the green cloth masks over his own mouth and nose.

7.There are only four rooms at the end of the fifth-floor hallway, and only one of the TV monitors is lit; only one of the rooms is producing the beeping sounds of hospital machinery and the soft, steady rush of flowing oxygen. The name on the monitor beneath the dreadfully fast pulse-178-and the dreadfully low blood-pressure-79 over 44-is LANDON-SCOTT.

The door stands half-open. On it is a sign that shows an orange flame-shape with an X drawn across it. Below, in bright red letters, is this message: NO LIGHT, NO SPARK. She's no writer, certainly no poet, but in those words she reads all she needs to know about how things end; it is the line drawn under her marriage the way you draw a line under numbers that need adding up. No light, no spark.

Scott, who left her with his usual impudent cry of "Seeya later, Lisey-gator!" and a blast of Flamin' Groovies retrorock from the CD player of his old Ford, now lies looking at her from a face as pale as milk-water. Only his eyes are fully alive, and they're too hot. They burn like the eyes of an owl trapped in a chimney. He's on his side. The ventilator has been pushed away from the bed, but she can see the slime of phlegm on its tube and knows (hush little Lisey) that there are germs or microbes or both in that green c.r.a.p that no one will ever be able to identify, not even with the world's best electron microscope and every database under the eye of heaven.