But there he is, on the inside. If she doubts, she could put her hand under the sheaf of hair she's looking at, lift it, feel its weight.

So maybe I just dreamed he was gone?

That makes sense-sort of-but as she goes back into the bathroom and sits down on the toilet, she thinks again: He wasn't there. When I got up, the smucking bed was empty.

She puts the ring up after she's finished, because if he gets up in the night, he'll be too asleep to do it. Then she goes back to bed. She's in a doze by the time she gets there. He's beside her now, and that's what matters. Surely that's what matters.

20.

The second time she doesn't wake up on her own.

"Lisey."

It's Scott, shaking her.

"Lisey, little Lisey."

She fights it, she put in a hard day-h.e.l.l, a hard week-but he's persistent.

"Lisey, wake up!"

She expects morning light to lance her eyes, but it's still dark.

"Scott. Hizzit?"

She wants to ask if he's bleeding again, or if the bandage she put on has slipped, but these ideas seem too big and complicated for her fogged-out mind. Hizzit will have to do.

His face is looming over hers, completely awake. He looks excited, but not dismayed or in pain. He says, "We can't go on living like this."

That wakes her up most of the way, because it scares her. What is he saying? That he wants to break up?

"Scott?" She fumbles on the floor, comes up with her Timex, squints at it. "It's quarter past four in the morning!" Sounding put-out, sounding exasperated, and she is those things, but she is also frightened.

"Lisey, we should get a real house. Buy it." He shakes his head. "Nah, that's backwards. I think we ought to get married."

Relief floods her and she slumps back. The watch falls from her relaxing fingers and clatters to the floor. That's all right; Timexes take a licking and keep on ticking. Relief is followed by amazement; she has just been proposed to, like a lady in a romance novel. And relief is followed by a little red caboose of terror. The guy doing the proposing (at quarter past four in the morning, mind you) is the same guy who stood her up last night, tore the s.h.i.t out of his hand when she yelled at him about it (and a few other things, yeah, okay, true), then came up the lawn holding the wounded hand out to her like some kind of smucking Christmas present. This is the man with the dead brother she only found out about tonight, and the dead mother that he supposedly killed because he-how did the hotshot writer put it?-growed too big.

"Lisey?"

"Shut up, Scott, I'm thinking." Oh but it's hard to think when the moon is down and the hour is none, no matter what your trusty Timex may say.

"I love you," he says mildly.

"I know. I love you, too. That's not the point."

"It might be," he says. "That you love me, I mean. That might be exactly the point. No one's loved me since Paul." A long pause. "And Daddy, I guess."

She gets up on her elbow. "Scott, lots of people love you. When you read from your last book-and the one you're writing now-" She wrinkles her nose. The new one is called Empty Devils, and what she's read of it and heard him read from it she doesn't like. "When you read, nearly five hundred people showed up! They had to move you from the Maine Lounge into Hauck Auditorium! When you were done, they gave you a standing O!"

"That's not love," he says, "that's curiosity. And just between me and thee, it's freakshow stuff. When you publish your first novel at twenty-one, you find out all about freakshow stuff, even if the d.a.m.n thing only sells to libraries and there's no paperback. But you don't care about the child-prodigy stuff, Lisey-"

"Yes I do-" Wholly awake now, or almost.

"Yes, but...cigarette me, babyluv." His cigarettes are on the floor, in the turtle ashtray she keeps for him. She hands him the ashtray, puts a cigarette in his mouth, and lights it for him. He resumes. "But you also care about whether or not I brush my teeth-"

"Well yeah-"

"And if the shampoo I'm using is getting rid of my dandruff or just causing more of it-"

That reminds her of something. "I bought a bottle of that Tegrin stuff I told you about. It's in the shower. I want you to try it."

He bursts out laughing. "See? See? A perfect example. You take the holistic approach."

"I don't know that word," she says, frowning.

He stubs out the cigarette a quarter smoked. "It means that when you look at me you see me top to bottom and side to side and to you everything weighs the same."

She thinks about it, then nods. "I suppose, sure."

"You don't know what that's like. I put in a childhood when I was only...when I was one thing. The last six years, I've been another. It's a better thing, but still, to most people around here and back at Pitt, Scott Landon is nothing but a...a holy jukebox. Put in a couple of bucks and out comes a smucking story." He doesn't sound angry, but she senses he could become angry. In time. If he doesn't have a place to go and be safe, be right-sized. And yes, she could be that person. She could make that place. He would help her do it. To some extent they have done it already.

"You're different, Lisey. I knew it the first time I met you, on Blues Night in the Maine Lounge-do you remember?"

Jesus Mary and JoJo the Carpenter, does she remember. She had gone up to the University that night to look at the Hartgen art exhibition outside Hauck, heard the music coming from the lounge, and went in on what was little more than a whim. He came in a few minutes later, looked around at the mostly full house, and asked if the other end of the couch she was sitting on was taken. She had almost skipped the music. She could have made the eight-thirty bus back to Cleaves if she'd skipped it. That was how close she had come to being in bed alone tonight. The thought makes her feel the way looking down from a high window makes her feel.

She says none of this, only nods.

"To me you're like..." Scott pauses, then smiles. His smile is divine, crooked teeth and all. "You're like the pool where we all go down to drink. Have I told you about the pool?"

She nods again, smiling herself. He hasn't-not directly-but she's heard him talk about it at his readings, and during the lectures she's audited at his enthusiastic invitation, sitting way at the back of Board-man 101 or Little 112. When he talks about the pool he always reaches out, as if he'd put his hands in it if he could, or pull things-language-fishies, maybe-out of it. She finds it an endearing, boyish gesture. Sometimes he calls it the myth-pool; sometimes the word-pool. He says that every time you call someone a good egg or a bad apple you're drinking from the pool or catching tadpoles at its edge; that every time you send a child off to war and danger of death because you love the flag and have taught the child to love it, too, you are swimming in that pool...out deep, where the big ones with the hungry teeth also swim.

"I come to you and you see me whole," he says. "You love me all the way around the equator and not just for some story I wrote. When your door closes and the world's outside, we're eye to eye."

"You're a lot taller than me, Scott."

"You know what I'm saying."

She supposes she does. And she's too moved by it to agree in the dead of night to something she might regret in the morning. "We'll talk about it tomorrow," she says. She takes his smoking gear and puts it on the floor again. "Ask me then, if you still want to."

"Oh, I'll want to," he says with perfect confidence.

"We'll see. For now, go back to sleep."

He turns on his side. He's lying almost straight now, but as he begins to drift he'll begin to bend. His knees will come up toward his narrow chest and his forehead, behind which all the exotic storyfish swim, will go to the wall.

I know him. Am beginning to know him, at least.

At this she feels another wave of love for him, and has to close her lips against dangerous words. The kind that are hard to take back once they have been spoken. Maybe impossible. She settles for pressing her b.r.e.a.s.t.s to his back and her stomach to his naked bottom. A few late crickets sing outside the window and Pluto goes on barking his way through another night shift. She begins to drift away again.

"Lisey?" His voice is almost coming from another world.

"Hmmmm?"

"I know you don't like Devils-"

"Haydit," she manages, which is as close as she can come to a critical appraisal in her current state; she is drifting, drifting, drifting away.

"Yeah, and you won't be the only one. But my editor loves it. He says the folks at Sayler House have decided it's a horror novel. That's fine by me. What's the old saying? 'Call me anything you want, just don't call me late to dinner.'"

Drifting. His voice coming down a long dark corridor.

"I don't need Carson Foray or my agent to tell me Empty Devils is gonna buy a lot of groceries. I'm done s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around, Lisey. I'm on my way, but I don't want to go alone. I want you to come with me."

"Shup, Ska. Go-slee."

She doesn't know if he goes to sleep or not, but for a wonder (for a blue-eyed wonder), Scott Landon does indeed shut up.

21.

Lisey Debusher awakens on Sat.u.r.day morning at the impossibly luxurious hour of nine o'clock, and to the smell of frying bacon. Sunshine lies across the floor and the bed in a brilliant stripe. She goes out to the kitchen. He's frying bacon in his underpants, and she's horrified to see that he's removed the bandage she so carefully applied. When she remonstrates, Scott tells her simply that it itched.

"Besides," he says, holding his hand out to her (this reminds her so much of how he came walking out of the shadows last night that she has to repress a shiver), "it doesn't look so bad in the light of day, does it?"

She takes his hand, bends over it as if she means to read his palm, and looks until he pulls away, saying if he doesn't turn the bacon it will burn. She isn't astounded, isn't amazed; those are emotions perhaps reserved for dark nights and shadowy rooms, not for sunshiny weekend mornings with the Philco in the window playing that low-rider song she's never understood but always liked. Not astounded, not amazed...but she is perplexed. All she can think is that she must have believed the cuts were a h.e.l.l of a lot worse than they actually turned out to be. That she panicked. Because these wounds, while not exactly scratches, are far from as serious as she thought. They've not only clotted over; they've started scabbing over. If she'd taken him to the Derry Home ER, they probably would have told her to get lost.

All the Landons are fast healers. We had to be.

Meanwhile, Scott's forking crisp bacon out of the pan and onto a double fold of paper towels. As far as Lisey's concerned, he may be a good writer, but he's a great fry cook. At least when he really sets his mind to it. He needs new underwear, though; the seat of this pair sags rather comically, and the elastic waistband is on life-support. She'll see what she can do about getting him to buy new ones when the royalty check he's been promised comes in, and of course underwear isn't what's on her mind, not actually; her mind wants to compare what she saw last night-those deep and sickening gills, pink shading to liverish red-with what's on offer this morning. It's the difference between mere cuts and gashes, and does she really think anyone heals that fast, outside of a Bible story? Does she really? It wasn't a window-pane he stuck his hand through, after all, it was a pane of greenhouse gla.s.s, which reminds her, they'll have to do something about that, Scott will have to- "Lisey."

She's jerked out of her reverie to find herself sitting at the kitchen table, nervously knitting her tee-shirt together between her thighs. "What?"

"One egg or two?"

She considers it. "Two. I guess."

"Over easy or want em lookin atcha?"

"Over," she says.

"Will we marry?" he asks in exactly the same tone, cracking both eggs in his good right hand and dropping them into the pan, kerplunk.

She smiles a little, not at his matter-of-fact tone but at the faintly archaic turn of phrase, and realizes she's not surprised at all. She has expected this...this what-do-you-callit, this resumption; must have been turning his proposal over in some deep part of her mind even as she slept.

"Are you sure?" she asks.

"Sure shot," he says. "What do you think, babyluv?"

"Babyluv thinks that sounds like a plan."

"Good," he says. "That's good." He pauses. Then: "Thank you."

For a minute or two neither of them says anything. On the windowsill, the old cracked Philco plays the sort of music Dad Debusher never listened to. In the pan, the eggs snap. She's hungry. And she's happy.

"In the fall," she says.

He nods, reaching for a plate. "Good. October?"

"Maybe too soon. Say right around Thanksgiving. Are there any eggs left for you?"

"There be one, and one be all I want."

She says, "I won't marry you if you don't buy some new underwear."

He doesn't laugh. "Then I'll make it a priority."

He puts the plate in front of her. Bacon and eggs. She is so hungry. She starts in and he cracks the last egg into the pan.

"Lisa Landon," he says. "What do you think?"

"I think it's a keeper. It's...what do you call it when all the words start with the same sound?"

"Alliteration."

"Yeah, that." Now she says it. "Lisa Landon." Like the eggs, it tastes good.

"Little Lisey Landon," he says, and flips his egg in the air. It turns over twice and lands square in the bacon-grease, splat.

"Do you, Scott Landon, promise to strap it on and keep the mothersmucker strapped?" she asks.

"Strapped in sickness, strapped in health," he agrees, and they begin laughing like mad b.a.s.t.a.r.ds while the radio plays in the sunshine.

22.

With Scott, she always laughed a lot. And a week later the cuts on his hand, even the one on his forearm, were pretty much healed.

They didn't even scar.

23.

When Lisey wakes again, she no longer knew when she was-then or now. But enough of morning's first light had crept into the room so she can see the cool blue wallpaper and the seascape on the wall. So it was Amanda's bedroom, and that seemed right, but it also seems wrong; it seems to her that this is a dream of the future she's having in her narrow apartment bed, the one she still shares with Scott on most nights, and will until the wedding in November.

What wakened her?

Amanda was turned away from her and Lisey was still fitted against her like a spoon, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against Manda's back, her belly against Manda's scant bottom, and just what has wakened her? She doesn't need to pee...not badly, anyway, so what...?

Amanda, did you say something? Do you want something? Drink of water, maybe? Piece of greenhouse gla.s.s to slit your wrists with?

These things pa.s.sed through her mind, but Lisey didn't really want to say anything, because an odd idea has come to her. The idea is that, although she can see the rapidly graying mop of Amanda's hair and the frill around the neck of Amanda's nightgown, she was actually in bed with Scott. Yes! That at some point in the night Scott has...what? Crept through the lens of Lisey's memories and into Amanda's body? Something like that. It's a funny idea, all right, and yet she doesn't want to say anything, because she's afraid that if she did, Amanda might answer in Scott's voice. And what would she do then? Would she scream? Would she scream to wake the dead, as the saying is? Surely the idea is absurd, but- But look at her. Look how she's sleeping, with her knees pulled up and her head bent. If there was a wall, her forehead would be touching it. No wonder you think- And then, in that pre-dawn ditch of five o'clock, with her face turned away so Lisey cannot see it, Amanda spoke.