Lisey's Story

by Stephen King

She would have thought two years was enough time for the strangeness to rub off, but it wasn’t; time apparently did nothing but blunt grief’s sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced.

(How many years does it take, she’ll wonder two nights later, lying in bed alone in her substandard motel room and listening to dogs bark beneath a hot orange moon, before the simple stupid weight of accumulating days finally sucks all the wow out of a marriage? How lucky do you have to be for your love to outrace your time?)

Each marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. This is the dark heart of theirs, the one mad true secret.

And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.

She awoke in the deepest ditch of the night, when the moon is down and the hour is none.

The exhausted mind is obsession’s easiest prey, and after half an hour of fruitless searching in the attic, where the air was hot and still, the light was poor, and the shadows seemed slyly determined to hide every nook she wanted to investigate, Lisey gave way to obsession without even realizing it.

You’re good for the ones you love. You want to be good for the ones you love, because you know that your time with them will end up being too short, no matter how long it is.

There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.

“You are the call and I am the answer, You are the wish, and I the fulfillment, You are the night, and I the day. What else? It is perfect enough. It is perfectly complete, You and I, What more—? Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!” —D. H. Lawrence “Bei Hennef”

Some things just have to be true, Scott said, because they have no other choice.