Lisey's Story

by Stephen King

She lay there a long time, remembering a hot August day in Nashville and thinking—not for the first time—that being single after being double so long was strange shite, indeed.

She lay there a long time, remembering a hot August day in Nashville and thinking—not for the first time—that being single after being double so long was strange shite, indeed.

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

He opens his eyes. He looks at me. He says, “I was lost in the dark and you found me.

outside—that was the other Scott; one went north, one went south, and oh dear, she had loved them both the same, everything the same.

Find the silver shovel and all this crap will blow away . . . like the smell of the mill when the wind swung around and blew from the south. Remember?

For awhile wait for the wind to change had become part of their marriage’s interior language, like strap it on and SOWISA and smuck for fuck.

wait for the wind to change, meaning hang on in there, baby. Meaning don’t give up yet.

“If you want to look for that shovel, just go do it! Do you?” Before she could answer this completely rhetorical question, Scott’s voice came again—the clear one at the top of her mind. I left you a note, babyluv.

Smuck that, babyluv, Scott said. You know what to do. Sure she did. In a situation like this you either strapped it on or you didn’t.

She’d always been the calm one, or the one who put on that face; the one who said things like Hold on and Maybe it’s not that bad. Wasn’t that supposed to be the oldest child’s job? Well, maybe not if the oldest child turned out to be a smucking mental case.

She thought: This was no movie, this is our life. And Scott said: Baby, are you strapped? She thought: Why am I in love with such a

He’s such a fool, she’s thinking. He’s a fool and I’m another for bothering with him.

Lisey was pretty sure she loved him and knew things that could hurt him. That he loved her too? Was that one of them?

“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.”

“Come on, babyluv, pack it up and strap it on.” “And when babyluv asked where we were going—” she murmured. —and when Lisey asks where they’re going he says “We’ll know when we get there.” And they do.

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.

“Too Late to Turn Back Now,” by Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose.

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. It’s a secret, Lisey thought, and it should be, because who would ever want to get close to another person if they knew how hard the letting-go part was? In your heart they only die a little at a time, don’t they?

Amanda flipped this motorist—almost certainly a man, probably wearing a baseball cap and needing a shave—a double bird, raising her fists to shoulder height and pumping the middle fingers briskly without looking around.

Amanda sat looking straight ahead at the unrolling road with her arms folded under her scant bosom. At last she said, almost to herself, “You always were the steel in his spine.”

“My darling Charles, I cannot let another moment pass, without asking you to come over here and kiss my fuckin ass.”

“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!”

The last was true, she reflected, only if you didn’t know how two brothers had survived their crazy father and what happened to one of them and how the other couldn’t save him. The story only seemed to start in the middle if you didn’t know about gomers and goners and the bad-gunky. It only started in the middle if you didn’t know that

That kind of love is a kind of doom,

think my time is short, but such time as I had (and it was very good time) is all down to you.

Babyluv: If you need an anchor to hold your place in the world—not Boo’ya Moon but the one we shared, use the african. You know how to get it back. Kisses—at least a thousand,

P.S. Everything the same. I love you.